Title: Purgatory
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Characters: Charles Xavier
Rating: G
Length: ~350
Warnings: None.
Summary: In the hospital, the drugs can't separate him from the reality of his loss.

The drugs make him hollow inside. His mind bleeds out, soaking into the negative space around him so that he touches everything, feels everything, but can't grasp the finer details. He can't stay in any one mind, can't speak or communicate clearly. He leaks outwards, filling the room, the hall, the building, the city with the wordless emotions that pass through the few blips of consciousness that he manages.

(There's a lingering sadness in the Florida hospital, a pall as heavy as the humid air. No one can quite work out its cause, but if they dug just a little deeper, they would realize it arrived the same time as the government agents carrying the dazed man with the injury to his lower back.)

He can't feel his body. He can't feel any other minds. It almost disguises the fact that he can't feel the minds he's missing, the ones he's been reaching for from the moment the world came down around him and he felt the true impact of his loss. They could be anywhere. They could be beside him, weeping their regrets. They could be pacing the halls in fear and frustration.

(He wants to believe that's the truth of it, that the grotesque visions will cease, the feeling will flow back into his body, he'll know who he is and where he is, and all of this will have been a twisted nightmare. Even in his delirium, though, he can see that belief is in vain.)

He thinks, in the fleeting moments of awareness, that he's wrapping the world in his pain. He thinks he's stretched so thin that he's no more than dust, than molecules, than atoms fanning out across the globe, reaching farther, touching more than he ever did before. He should be proud, but it's agony, every minute, to reach and reach and reach and never find what he's looking for, never hold on to what he wants. He's everywhere, but he's alone.

(When he wakes up, he will still be in pain, he will still be numb, and he will still be alone.)