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It was an awesome position they’d be born into, in all senses of the word. On one hand, their abilities were utterly fantastic, with unique attributes and strengths and weaknesses that made Charles dizzy with excitement. On the other, their abilities distanced them from the rest of society, from their families, their friends, from the ones they loved... There was a reason he’d made a point of avoiding serious relationships in favor of one-night-stands.

And yet, there was so much they could do. How many were out there, like Magda, living in fear and just waiting for the day when they could live without that fear? How many were out there, like him, holding the world at an arm’s length while simultaneously wanting to belong to it? How many were out there, like Raven, longing for the day when they could walk down the street without having to hide their appearance? Someone had to do something, anything, to help bring that day closer, and they were in a position where they could. Education, shaping young minds to be tolerant (if not accepting) of mutants, was the avenue Charles was primed to take.

“Thank you,” Magda said, accepting his condition. “I will promise to use it if I ever have a need. And if I ever meet another like us, I will not disappoint you.”

She withdrew her hand and offered him a forced, shaky smile. “I hope this is not the last meal we share in our lifetimes. And I hope the next one is one with more happy stories. And tales of adventure.”

He gave her as reassuring a smile as he could manage. “I hope so, as well. And I doubt you could ever truly disappoint me, Magda; you are so much better than you give yourself credit. There is so much goodness and kindness in you; I know, I felt it. Despite all of the pain and hardships you’ve endured, you still have within you a great capacity for care. It’s your fear that holds you back, but I sincerely hope that, even if it’s from a distance, Raven and I can help you overcome that fear.”

Fear was to be their enemy, after all.  The fear of humans and mutants alike would be the primary obstacle to peaceful cohabitation.  It had to be overcome if mutants were to know freedom.

“You took in a girl who was lost and hid from you the only way she knew how,” Magda assured, taking his hand and squeezing it. “I knew you were a good man, Charles. You probably saved her life.”

He offered her a half-smile in return. Her mind was still loud enough for him to catch bits and pieces, as much as he tried not to. She didn’t seem to have much of an opinion of herself, which made him want to dig a bit deeper into her mind because surely she wasn’t giving herself nearly enough credit. Magda returned her attention to the tea, and used her powers to turn the stove off. Charles didn’t need his mutation to recognize the effort it must have taken for her to offer him such trust. He made a note not to abuse it or render it misplaced.

“I hope you can save the rest of us, too.”

A sentiment Charles shared; it was a necessity for him. He had to believe in the best of humanity, that humans and mutants could co-exist and could do so peacefully. Too many lives hung in the balance to be a cynic.

“Do you...pray of any kind?”

“I’ve...never been drawn to religion,” he offered. “My family is traditionally Anglican; Catholic prior to 1534. Neither my mother or father were particularly devout. When my father was still alive, we went at least once a month—my mother’s insistence, keeping up the family image and whatnot.”

Religious faith had never appealed to him, the mystery and grandeur of it something quickly dispelled by his mutation. And when the Markos had become permanent fixtures at Westchester, religion and God had become something abhorrent. To believe in God meant believing that some sentient, all-powerful being had decided that certain children were meant to suffer. That they were meant to bleed and cry with no one to bandage their wounds or dry their tears, with no one capable of protecting them paying them any mind. When emotions and sensations became fully formed thoughts and opinions, belief in a higher power was no longer distasteful and became an impossibility.

“But no, I don’t pray. Never had much of a reason to, I’ll admit.”

“My people,” Magda began, and there was a struggle in her mind to say the words. Charles made sure to give her his undivided attention; whatever Magda was going to say, it was taking a lot for her to say it. “We didn’t have technology. Everything was basic. Wooden. Simple. It was years after I entered the gadjo world before I found out what I could do.”

He nodded, offering her silent encouragement. Whatever she wanted to reveal, that was fine. He wouldn’t pry, wouldn’t try to prod her into giving up anything she didn’t want to. Magda was a nice person; she deserved far more than what she’d endured.

“I was pregnant,” she continued. “The father was like us but...I never told him that things were happening to me, too. I was afraid. Some men knew of what he was. They took me and...” Flashes of memory: she was a weakness they’d planned to exploit, he’d managed to save her but not in time to save the baby. “I lost my baby,” she finished, glancing down at her arm. He resisted the urge to follow her line of vision. “I could not admit to him what I was. I loved him. I love him. So very much. But I could not, because I was afraid.”

Charles took her hand, squeezing it gently in a mirror of her own prior gestures. Her experiences left her with no reason to trust anyone, to believe in a better future. All at once, he was the little boy in the kitchen, confronted with someone he wanted desperately to help. But Magda was not a child. She wasn’t starving or cold, but she was alone, and Charles wanted so much to help her. She didn’t have to be alone; she didn’t have to be afraid. But she was an adult. He couldn’t make her decisions for her, and she had more to consider than Raven had that night so many years ago. The simplicity of childhood didn’t affect them anymore; if Magda decided to go her own way, there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

“He left me, after,” Magda added. “I was human, you see, and he was not. So, you see, I had the chance to do as you did. Only I did not.”

He wanted to point out their situations were completely different. Charles couldn’t imagine how he would have reacted if he had been through what she had. They couldn’t really compare their decisions, not when the circumstances were so drastically different.

“I cannot trust the world as you do. I cannot join you in it.” She shook her head and Charles strengthened his shields a bit from the maelstrom in her mind. “But I will light a candle every night that you make the world safer for all the children like your sister, and my daughter. They need someone to stand up for them. Someone like you, maybe, who can bring peace.”

“They need someone like you, as well, Magda,” he countered, looking her straight in the eye. “We cannot change the past, but we can change the future. You are a wonderful person, Magda, regardless of what else you may believe. What happened to you and your daughter and the man you love was a travesty. But you’ve survived. You’re still here, and you can still do something to ensure that no other young mother suffers as you have.”

He sent a tendril of assurance towards her mind, thumb rubbing small circles into the back of her hand.

“You are capable of so much more than you realize, Magda. As much I would love for you to accompany me to Oxford, to meet my sister, I cannot make that decision for you. If you choose to stay, to continue on your own, that is your choice and I will respect it. But, only on the condition that you allow me to leave you my contact information with the knowledge that you may contact me at anytime, should you ever find yourself in need of a friend or a safe place to stay.”

Because what's more fun than sharing/discussing headcanons?  Feel free to put up any headcanons you have about the X-Men universe!  They can be silly, angsty, in-depth, or whatever.  I just want to see what everyone's headcanons are!

For example:

- Charles was born with telepathic capabilities, but he didn't fully manifest until he was nine years old. 

- While he is capable of learning any living language by reaching into the minds of native speakers, Charles cannot learn a dead language.  He is absolutely hopeless with classical Greek and Latin.  Even Hebrew, which has become a revived language, is a bit tricky for him.

- If Raven had not entered Charles's life when she did, it is highly probable that he would have succumbed to his darker impulses.

- Though the bullet damaged his spine when it went in, Charles didn't actually lose feeling in his legs until Erik moved him and withdrew the bullet.  Had he not been moved, Charles may have very well retained the ability to walk. (Though he'd likely need a cane.)

- Charles needs an anchor for his telepathy to fully function.  In other words, he needs another mind to form a bond with, a fixed point he can cling to if he overexerts himself.  He's only come across two compatible minds: Raven's, and Erik's. 

“You're uh morning person, aren't ya? I’ll see ya at lunch, then,” Lana teased. “Or whenever ya get out of school.”

Charles smiled at that; he wasn’t all that much of a morning person, actually. If he could, he’d laze about in bed until noon. He’d been that way since high school, when sleep became much rarer and therefore far more precious. (Oh, but Erik had been a morning person. Up and going practically with the sun.)

Her reaction when he inquired as to any other possessions was one he had been expecting. There was a sharp prickle in her mind against pity or anything resembling it before she gestured to the room farthest from the other occupied ones. He could understand the resistance towards pity; it wasn’t an emotion he particularly cared for, either. Charles fought the urge to shift in his chair. Pity was an emotion he hadn’t cared for before, but it had become one he loathed.

“Not bad, school teacher,” she called from the room, obviously impressed with what she found. He cleared thoughts of pity from his mind and focused instead on the more positive emotions.

“I’m glad it’s to your liking,” he said with a smile.

“Yeah, you know,” she replied as she returned to the door. “Thanks for this. Whatev’.”

A wry smile spread across his face as he caught a hint of how odd it was for her to thank others, or to have anything to thank them for. What was akin to flipping a switch, her mind immediately went devious.

“I think I’m going to have a bath. Care to join me?” She leaned forward. “Or is that against yer rules?” Does he even work down there...?

“For God’s sake, Lana, there are children nearby,” he sputtered, unable to keep a faint blush off his face. “And besides, my dear,” he continued, quickly regaining his composure, “I fear, for the moment at least, you are my student. It would be highly improper.”

He beat back to desire to inform her that he still had partial sensation from his lower back to his mid-thigh, and it was only from the mid-thigh and down that he felt nothing. Of course, he hadn’t really tried it ever since he left the hospital. (He’d been too afraid to, too afraid that he was incapable of feeling enough sensation to actually—no, he’d been too afraid of being wrong again.)

Instead, he gave her a smile. “I’ll leave you to settle in for the moment. If you require anything, please do not hesitate to ask and I will do my upmost to accommodate. Enjoy your bath, Lana.”

Lana was a proud individual—a mere brush against her mind would have told him that—and how she accepted help was indicative of that. Charles could work with that pride—it wasn’t a new concept to him, after all—and with any luck, the two of them could use that pride to help Lana’s control improve.

Her mind was a bit of chaos from it all, and Charles was left a bit breathless with the aftershocks of her myriad of emotions. Pride, amazement, a touch of fear, and the overwhelming sensation that someone actually cared about her rather than just her abilities all swirled together in a powerful, emotionally charged cocktail from which Charles took care to shield not only himself, but the nearby students.

“Lead the way, school teacher,” Lana joked after she’d righted herself. “I’m your student now.”

He chuckled a bit and hummed in agreement before pushing himself down the hallway. The empath cleared her throat before speaking again.

“So, you got rules at this school I should know about? Besides don’t hurt the little brats?”

There was no malice in her moniker of choice for the students, so Charles let it slide with a half-chastising look.

“There are a few you should adhere to, yes,” he confirmed. “Mostly those involve meal times and lights-out, and as you are beyond the age of our standard curriculum, you are not required to attend classes unless you wish to. I will work with you when I am not teaching, however.”

Thankfully, most of the students who were in their dormitories were busy with other things, ranging from homework to interacting with their new friends, and so only a few noticed as Charles led Lana down the hall. Those who did were quick to ask after her, and Charles gave them a brief explanation—She’s a new student, nothing to worry about, I assure you.

“We try to keep meals as regular as possible here, so breakfast is at seven every morning in the dining hall—I’ll show you where that is—lunch is noon, and dinner is at five p.m., both also located in the dining hall. Lights out is observed at nine p.m.”

He pulled to a stop near a handful of rooms that were currently empty and tilted his head in their direction.

“Feel free to pick a room, Lana. There are about five rooms here that are currently unoccupied, so you do have something of a selection. Oh, also, do you have any belongings in your previous location that you’d like brought here?”

There was a fleeting moment of panic as Lana learned the meaning of shielding. As he pulled back and kept the shield in place, he caught glimpses of her past: the emotions of others affecting her in her dreams, wrenching tears from her eyes, making her laugh.

A part of his mind went back to the years he spent learning to shield. How he would respond to comments not yet voiced, how he answered unspoken questions, how he would burst into tears when someone else was choking them back. He sometimes would dissolve into giggles when one of the servants thought something particularly humorous; he could feel the anger of those around him and it took such a long time to learn how to placate his own emotions. For him, finally figuring out how to shield had been such a relief that he had broken down and cried.

Lana was older, more in control of her reactions than he had been as a child. It was still a shock—a massive one, from the feel of it—but she wasn’t about to break down crying. For Charles, that was victory enough.

“Stop,” she said, softly. Stop!

The command was loud, almost too loud, but Charles immediately withdrew, taking care when he removed the shielding. Let it down too quickly, and he might cause her a bit of undue pain.

Lana braced herself against the wall, sliding down to a seated position and taking a moment to readjust to the maelstrom of emotions. Charles waited patiently, keeping a soft handle on her mind so that he could properly react if something was wrong.

“I want to stay and learn,” she said, looking back up at him. “I’ll do whatever you want of me.”

Charles nodded and offered her a smile.

“I’m glad to hear that, Lana. You have such a great deal of untapped potential, and I’m quite certain that you will prove to be nothing less than fantastic.”

He shifted in his wheelchair and leaned forward, holding out his hand.

“Now, shall we continue on and get you settled in?”

“You gonna put me a box,” she asked, her tone teasing and Charles chuckled before continuing.

“Right,” she agreed once he’d finished.

He could feel her reach out with her powers, getting a sense of their surroundings. That was probably for the best, just so she could feel the difference between living with a proper shield and going on without one. Charles let his own mind branch out a bit, feeling the minds of his students as they went about their lives.

“I’m ready,” Lana said. “Wiggle ya fingers or twitch ya nose.”

He smiled and put his fingers to his temple. "Very well, Lana; just take a deep breath and try to remain as calm as you possibly can."

Charles visualized a glass wall surrounding Lana, taking care to untangle her mind from those of his students. For as much as he called it a glass wall, he built it in the same manner one would build a brick wall: piece by piece, cementing the fragments together until they became a cohesive, viable unit.  He adjusted the transparency of the shielding so that Lana would still be able to reach out and utilize her abilities, but she wouldn't have to deal with the constant cacophony of emotions beyond her own. 

Once he finished, he withdrew, lingering only enough to sustain the wall.

Now, tell me, Lana: what do you feel?

“I cannot read people as you do,” Magda replied as she started on another part of the meal, “but even I can understand wanting to be around someone with good energy rather than bad ones.”

Charles felt a low hum of a relaxed state coming from her. It calmed him as well, giving him a stronger foundation for keeping himself in a relatively contented state. It was a great deal easier to remain calm when he didn’t have to block high-intensity emotions.

“I do not even think that is only a mutant wish, but a human one. It just...puts something in the air. When someone is happy, and passionate. Makes everything seem lighter. Better.”

He hummed in agreement. The only negative emotion he’d ever come across that was at all tolerable was anger; it was a clean emotion, one that burned in the human mind with the sort of purity that fire seemed to have. And yet, for all its cleanness, it was still a draining emotion and one that tinted the air with the psychological equivalents of ash and smoke.

“You know my passion, but I have to wonder what yours is?”

“Mine?” Charles shrugged. “Genetics would be the best answer. Oh, I could spend hours talking about it. Everything that we are is the result of genetic mutation! Every natural shade of pigment that colors our hair, our eyes, our skin—all of it the result of a mutated gene here or there. That we stand on two legs and walk, that we speak in words and sentences, our very intelligence and ability to understand any of this—every bit of it is the result of our ancestors experiencing and maintaining one mutated gene after another.”

He finished with the shrimp and turned to face her fully.

“And now, with the emergence of mutations like ours, mankind is entering the next stage of evolution. It’s breathtaking, really.”

It wasn’t just him and Raven; it was Magda, and her former lover. It was any children the four of them might one day have. It was likely hundreds of others other there, finding themselves capable of so much more than they would have ever dreamed, and their children. The next link in the human evolutionary chain, and he was part of it. If that thought wasn’t enough to get one’s heart racing, Charles had no idea what would.

"How old are you?"

Charles blinked in surprise. Well, that was a question he hadn’t honestly expected. It wasn’t exactly one he’d had to answer since his time at Harvard and then his early years in Oxford.

“I’m twenty-eight,” he replied, though he would be twenty-nine before too terribly long. Oh, he was just over a year away from thirty. That was something of a depressing thought. He’d hoped to be settled into a comfortable teaching position, preferably Columbia. Never once had he imagined he’d be in the process of setting up a school for mutant children, nor that he’d be doing so paralyzed and minus his sister.

“I will work on that,” Lana said, though he could sense that she was having something of a difficult time with how he explained shielding. “Maybe when I got less on me mind.”

“Would you perhaps care for a demonstration?”

A demonstration could be useful for giving her a better sense of what he meant. While shielding in itself was a relatively simple concept, it could be a tricky one to accurately describe. Different metaphors worked for different sorts of people and it could be difficult to apply one technique to a mind that it didn’t quite sync with. For Charles, there was no better metaphor than the glass wall. He could envision a glass wall that kept him separated from the rest of the world. It wasn’t a total separation, as he made sure he could still hear the low hum of the minds around him—honestly, he wasn’t even sure if he could manage to completely wall himself off from the world; his telepathy was such an interwoven part of him that shutting it off would likely be akin to losing a limb. However, it kept him from nursing a never-ending headache.

Well, at the very least it was worth offering.