Chapter Text
Moira wasn’t sure if going to the mansion was a good idea. The last thing she needed was to turn up and find that Charles was living a perfect life, teaching his students, maybe happily married, maybe with some children of his own.
Of course, that was very likely what she’d find at the end of the driveway, but she hadn’t turned her car around yet.
Or maybe that was what she wanted to find. Charles, happy, as proof that it was still possible to be happy in this world. Moira couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt happy. Satisfied, yes. Happy, no. Not for a while.
The front gate wasn’t properly shut, and there were weeds growing on the gravel driveway up to the house. The hedges were untrimmed and wild.
What had happened here? Was the house abandoned?
She parked the car, walked to the front door, knocked.
Hank opened the door. He looked human, which she hadn’t expected.
At first, he was speechless at the sight of her. “Moira, you – what are you doing here?”
“Just visiting,” she replied evenly.
“I… now’s not a good time.”
Moira raised an eyebrow. “How? This place isn’t exactly overrun with visitors.”
“Yes, but you see, Charles is…”
“Charles is what?”
“Now just really isn’t a good time.”
He closed the door in her face.
Really, Hank should have remembered that she used to be CIA. A shut door wasn’t enough to stop her.
Moira walked around the side of the house until she found a window that she could open and climbed inside, grateful that she’d worn trousers that day.
She wandered the halls of the mansion. They were deserted, dusty, the rooms untidy.
She found him in his study. The man she saw was Charles Xavier, but at the same time he was not Charles Xavier. His hair was longer and messy, and he was wearing a dressing gown over a t-shirt and sweatpants. And he was walking. How on earth could he be walking?
“Charles,” she said, before she lost her nerve.
He turned, nearly spilling the whisky that was clutched in one hand. “Moira? What – is this a dream?”
“I’m flattered, but no.”
“What are you doing here?”
Moira’s shoulders sagged. “I… honestly don’t know. I just…” She sighed. “Well, since I’m here, maybe you could offer me a drink and we can catch up?”
Charles picked up the bottle of whiskey that was sitting on his desk. “Sure. Why not?”
*
Moira wasn’t drunk, but the alcohol had given her a slight buzz. She and Charles were sitting too close together on the sofa in his study, but Moira didn’t bother to move back.
“So the serum takes your telepathy, but it gives you your legs back?”
“Yes,” he said. “I couldn’t – I couldn’t sleep, Moira. I kept feeling their pain, everyone’s pain, it was too much.”
Moira put her hand on his knee. “You don’t need to justify yourself to me.” It was obvious that he’d been hurt – by Erik, by the bullet, by the fact that he’d asked her to leave, by losing the school, by everything. She wasn’t about to tell him how to deal with that pain.
“And you?” Charles said. “A doctorate and a Nobel Prize. Very impressive.”
“I suppose so,” Moira sipped her drink, “Though it doesn’t feel like much right now. At least it makes applying for jobs easier. I’m working at a lab in the city. It pays.”
“Any lab would be lucky to have you,” Charles said softly.
“Charles…”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for how we left things. It was shit of me to break up with you because of my own insecurities. I just didn’t want you to feel shackled to me, like you couldn’t leave because of my – my legs, so I ended things, but I was a bloody coward.” A pause. “Though you’re probably thanking your lucky stars for it right now, I suppose. Because otherwise you’d be shackled to this.” He gestured to himself, and took another sip of whiskey.
“Not so very much, no,” said Moira softly.
*
It wasn’t quite a routine, but it happened regularly enough that it could be called a routine. The kisses were clumsy and they tasted of whiskey, and Moira didn’t even care. A couple of nights a week, Moira would turn up at the mansion and let herself in and she’d drink two fingers of whiskey with Charles and they’d go to bed together. In the morning she would leave, often before he woke up.
One morning, Moira woke beside Charles, and it was a weekend, and she honestly couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed yet, so she stayed.
After a while, she felt Charles stir beside her. He gave a low cry of pain, and his hand groped for the syringe on the bedside table. Moira didn’t interfere as he injected himself. She’s seen him without the serum often enough to know how much it hurt him.
Once the drugs were fully working through his system, Charles looked over at her and said, “I’m wearing clothes.”
Moira shrugged. “We didn’t – last night, you were too drunk. I put you to bed.”
Charles looked up at the ceiling for a moment with those beautiful, pained eyes, before looking back over at her. “Why do you do this, Moira? You could have left last night, but you didn’t. And if we’re being honest with each other, I’m not even that good at sex anymore.”
She could have brushed him off. She could have lied. She didn’t. Moira lay back on the pillows and stared at the ceiling. She couldn’t do this while making eye contact with him. “I had a fiancé,” she said. “His name was Joe. I loved him – of course I loved him, we were going to get married. I got my doctorate, and then I won my Nobel Prize. I was teaching at Edinburgh University at the time, so they offered me tenure and I accepted. When I told Joe, I thought he’d be pleased. I thought he’d be proud. He wasn’t. He said that there was no reason for me to have tenure, because once we were married I’d be looking after the children and being a politician’s wife. I told him that I had no intention of giving up the work I loved to be a housewife, and that if he wanted a woman who’d be tied to the kitchen then we should end things and he should go find someone else.”
She paused for a second, then went on. “He said no, said that I belonged to him, that I had to obey him. He raped me. Put me in hospital for a week. So after that week was over I packed my things and I had an abortion and I flew to America and I got my job at the lab, and here we are.”
The silence stretched out and out and out until Charles said, like a question, “You were pregnant?”
“After what Joe did to me? Yes.” Moira let out a long breath. “I thought about keeping it, but in the end I couldn’t face the idea of raising a child who was the result of something like that. I didn’t think I’d be able to hide how much I hated the father from the child, so I decided that there never would be a child. Joe didn’t know. Hell, he would have killed me if he knew I’d been pregnant and got rid of it.”
“So that’s why you’re doing this?” he said softly. “I am so sorry.”
Moira sighed. “It’s – I wanted to feel like my body belonged to myself again. Joe took that feeling away from me. But this – these things I do with you, it reminds me that my body is my own. I can do what I want with it, even if that’s just downing a glass of whiskey and having mediocre sex.”
Charles said, “What has the world done to us?”
“It hurt us,” Moira replied, still not looking at him. “It hurt us and it hurt us, and here we both are.”
He didn’t seem to remember what he’d said to her last night. How she’d pulled his arm across her shoulders and helped him stumble to his bedroom, and when he slumped down on the bed, he hung his head, looked up at her, and said, only slightly slurred, “I love you.”
“You’re drunk.”
“I mean it,” he’d replied plaintively, still slurring the words. He sounded wretched.
“Don’t say it,” Moira had told him, more sharply than he deserved. “Don’t say that to me. Not when you’re drunk. Not when you can’t mean it.”