Archive of Our Own ^beta

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.”

Chapter Text

The conference had been interesting, but not interesting enough to make Moira feel anything. She wasn’t sure if she could feel anything much anymore.

It had taken place in London, so she’d been away from the US for a week, which meant a week away from Charles, and she’d been surprised to find that she missed their liaisons. In her quite moments she’d find herself thinking of him, wondering what he was doing, even though his life was so unvarying that she probably could’ve guessed: wandering around the mansion, drinking scotch and sleeping in late. She wasn’t going to judge him for that. Hell, if it weren’t for the fact that her work gave her something approaching a purpose in life, she might have ended up doing exactly what Charles did every day.

The day was a nice one as days in late summer went. Warm, but not too hot.

She unlocked the mansion’s front door and went to the study, which was usually where she could find Charles. If he wasn’t there, then he’d be in the library or the bedroom.

When she reached the doorway of the study she stopped in surprise. “Charles, you’re…”

He looked up at her. “Back in the wheelchair, yes.”

That wasn’t the only change. He was properly dressed, wearing a neat shirt and a dark blue sweater. His hair was still long but it was freshly washed and for once it looked neat. “What happened?”

He gave half a laugh. “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. Did you see the news from Paris and DC?”

“You know I don’t bother with the news anymore.”

He pushed himself around the desk until he was facing her. “Let’s go to the kitchen, I’ll tell you everything.”

Moira sipped the mug of tea Charles had made her. “That’s quite a story.”

“I don’t expect you to believe me…”

“Oh, I do. After what happened back in ‘sixty-two, time travel’s not that hard to wrap my head around.” Moira looked down at her mug, then back up at Charles. “So you’re going to re-start the school.”

“Yes. I never should have stopped.”

“That’s good. It’s really good.”

“Moira, I’ve been thinking about the future. Not just about the school, but about us.”

“Okay.” Was this leading to a breakup speech?

“We’ve both been through hell,” Charles said. “You were hurt, and I was hurting myself, and we both sort of… fell together. But I don’t want us to be that way anymore, I don’t want this thing between us to exist as a coping mechanism. I want to like myself again, and I want you to like yourself again, and – and I think I’d like to take you out on a date. A proper date. God knows where we’re going to find a wheelchair accessible restaurant, but I’d like to try. I know that my legs will likely make things – difficult for us, and different, but I honestly don’t want to go back to the way I was. And I’d like to try having something good with you, if that’s what you want.”

A heartbeat of space.

She kissed him, and for the first time in months it was a kiss that made her feel something. “I want to remember how to like myself too,” she told him.

He smiled at her. A real smile, a proper smile. “That’s wonderful. And I want you to know, now that I have my telepathy back, that I’d never abuse it. I’ll stay out of your mind unless you want me in there.”

“Why wouldn’t I let you read my mind?”

Charles frowned. “Well, you know – Raven always hated it. Erik too. I thought perhaps…”

Moira cupped his face in her hand. “Hey. You were a telepath before I was with you, and you were a telepath the first time I was with you, and you’re a telepath now. If we’ve agreed to try and like ourselves again, then I think that includes all of ourselves. Including your powers. I’m not afraid of you being in my mind.”

“Are you sure?”

“Come on in.”

He was shaking. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. Apparently alcohol withdrawal was like having a really, really bad cold. That and whatever the serum had done to him meant that Charles was far from at his best.

Moira slipped under the covers and said, “Come here.” Over the past week they’d mostly figured out how to work with Charles’ legs, so she tucked herself around him in a way that kept his legs in a good position.

“Sorry that I’m like this,” he said.

“We both knew something like this would happen,” she told him, “And besides, it won’t last forever.”

“I suppose I can’t feel too sorry for myself. After all, I did this to myself.”

Moira held him tighter. “We’d agreed not to blame ourselves for things. Besides, you’d probably feel better if you weren’t so intent on overworking yourself.”

“Yes dear,” said Charles, his voice playful.

“Do you ever get nightmares?” asked Moira softly. They were in bed, but it was early enough in the morning that neither of them had to get up yet.

“Sometimes,” said Charles. “About Cuba. About the things I’ve seen with my powers.”

“Me too. About Joe, above me, inside me. I wake up feeling awful, but – I’m having them less than I used to. It’s easier to wake up from them, as well. It feels good to wake up next to someone.”

She moved into the mansion properly, taking the bedroom next to Charles. Moira could have moved into Charles’ room, but the mansion would be opening as a school next year. Having a resident Nobel Prize winner would be a selling point, but less so if said scientist was conducting a love affair with the headmaster, so they settled for having a door between their rooms and plausible deniability.

And time passed and the school opened and their days got happier.

It was a spring evening when Moira came into Charles’ bedroom and closed the door behind herself, smiling with no small amount of amusement. “Jean’s trying to set us up.”

Charles set down his book on the nightstand and smiled back at her. “Oh, really?”

“‘I just think you might want to know, the professor’s fond of you’,” quoted Moira. “She was blushing quite a lot.”

Charles wheeled himself towards her. “And do you think her attempts to throw us together romantically will be successful?”

Moira leaned down and kissed him softly. “I’m not sure. I’m a scientist; I ought to collect more data before I come to any kind of conclusion.”

He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “How much data would that be?”

“We’ve got an hour and a half before dinner. That should be enough for me to record some preliminary findings.”

They were sitting together on the sofa in Charles’ rooms, Charles with his marking and Moira with a science journal, both of them making notes in the respective margins with red pen.

“Hm,” said Moira disapprovingly.

“What is it?”

Moira gestured with the journal she was reading. “Do you ever read an article that’s ninety percent right, but given that it’s in a journal, it should be better than that? Because that’s what this is. The beginning is good, but the end is sloppy. I – I’m going to write to them. They should publish a correction. That is not how the scientific method works. Or how the genome works, for that matter.”

“I love you,” said Charles.

Moira’s eyes widened.

“Sorry,” said Charles, looking shaken, “Sorry, it just slipped out. Maybe you don’t want to hear that from anyone, even me. But I know you only wanted me to say that if I meant it, and I do. Even if I didn’t plan that.”

“… I thought you didn’t remember that night.”

“I didn’t, not at first. But I do now.”

“I’m sorry,” Moira told him sincerely. “I was too harsh on you.”

“I don’t blame you for not believing me. I was far from at my best.”

Moira slipped an arm around his waist. “Better now, though.”

“I hope so.” He laughed quietly.

“I love you, too.”

“You know, I was honestly too afraid to ask if you loved me too.” He brushed his thumb across her cheekbone and pressed his forehead against hers. “And thank you.”

“For what?”

“For turning up out of nowhere after I’d spent years sinking into numbness. For being there. For making me feel something for the first time in a long time.”

“You did the same for me. I think that’s the real reason why I came to Westchester. I wanted to feel things again, and I thought I might be able to do that if I was around you.”

“All the same, I’m lucky to have you.”

Moira kissed him just once, and said, “We’ve both been lucky, in the end.”