Title: Memory
Fandom: X-Men First Class
Length: 400
Content notes: no warnings apply; mention of non-consensual and consensual mind-alteration
Characters: Charles, Logan, Erik
Author note: Part of my noir AU, Patterns of Light
Summary: Charles is twelve years old when he realizes that the voices in his head are other people’s thoughts, fifteen when he realizes he can change them.





Charles is twelve years old when he realizes that the voices in his head are other people’s thoughts, fifteen when he realizes he can change them.

The first time he wipes someone’s memory, his freshman year at college, he’s out drinking illegally with Logan in a bar on the edge of town when the Dean walks in. Charles and Logan scramble out of the men’s room window, laughing and swearing, and run until they reach the safety of the dorms.

“We’ll still be expelled,” Logan says, in between wheezes.

“We won’t,” says Charles. “He’s already forgotten we were there.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” Charles says, reddening slightly. “I – ah, may have done that.”

It was an accident, as he tries to explain, but Logan’s not buying it.

“Fuck you, Xavier, you can’t go round messing with people’s minds just to save your miserable skin.”

“I saved your miserable skin too,” Charles says indignantly. “Or do you want to prove your moral superiority by turning yourself in?”

Logan doesn’t want to do that, but he delivers a lecture on the ethics of telepathy that leaves Charles feeling distinctly bruised and hard done by.

He’s more careful with his powers after that, and learns other ways of getting out of trouble, most of which don’t involve telepathic interference. He doesn’t get any better at keeping out of trouble in the first place, and he still spends a lot of time in bars he shouldn’t be drinking in, mostly in the West Village, but there are no more accidents.

Locking memories away without obliterating them was something he’d never attempted before he did it to Erik, and Charles doesn’t know what happens now. Discovering the photobooth pictures of the two of them may have blasted the lock off that door in Erik’s mind, but there’s no way of telling whether his memories will come back all at once, or in scraps and snatches, or not at all.

Would Erik even want to remember? Charles can imagine him angrily choosing to go on in oblivion, and that hurts, but to think of Erik wanting to know everything about their affair hurts even more. All the details nobody else ever knew, that only Charles knows now; his throat is tight with remembering them. He pushes those thoughts away firmly: if there’s going to be a future he needs to think of the present, not the past.