"Erik is gone Hank... He's not going to come back. At least not back to me, and he's definitely not going to come back without a fight," Charles grumbled through gritted teeth with tiredly hooded eyes, maroon bags hanging like sacks beneath his drooping eyelids, framing his sharp blue eyes.
Hank nudged his glasses up the end of his nose with his finger tip and peered down the wired bifocals like a school teacher, giving Charles a stern look.
"What makes you sure?" He delivered the words with far less confidence than his pinprick eyes. He shifted on his feet uncomfortably as Charles failed to retract his unwavering stare from him.
"Because everything he's planned has fallen and crumbled to dust and Erik is more resilient than anyone I've known. He will recede into the shadows and rebuild his regime. No doubt, once he's formulated the perfect fool-proof plan to overthrow the human race he will strike again..." He grumbled, slapping a palm on the disarrayed desk in agitation, the various articles of stationery paraphernalia jiggling as the shockwave passed through the wooden surface.
Hank jerked back and his shoulders seized up at the startling sudden burst of noise and he blinked rapidly.
"And this time he might just succeed..." He murmured quietly, his head dropping and his expression sinking sullenly. "Because I can't keep up with him anymore..." He mewed pathetically, shaking his head in disappointment and running a hand through his unruly long tousled hair, running it back over his head, tugging at the unorganised knotted strands.
"Well perhaps... If you used your ability-"
"I am not using my ability!" Charles roared in agitation like a provoked dog, bursting when his equilibrium eroded away under stress. He leant forwards with the magnitude of the hoarse throaty harrowing shout, both his palms planted firmly on the desk.
Hank leant back as if the shout had nearly blow him off his feet and his eyes bloomed wide behind the lenses of his glasses and he crossed an arm over his chest to clutch at the other anxiously.
"It was just a suggestion," Hank quietly admitted, his already nervously fluttering eyes dropped to the floor and swept about the place, avoiding Charles's fiery glare, not wanting to see the frustration and anger on his usually soft features.
Charles's angrily wide eyes and stiff visage loosened and sagged, his eyes falling far more shut as the sleepiness reclaimed him again and his brows drooped.
Charles buried his face in his clammy palm and rubbed vigorously at his sore dry eyes that felt so heavy that they must have been receding into his skull, pressing his digits against his eyelids and rolling them beneath his padded fingertips. He pinched wearisomely at the tension-filled bridge of his nose and then pressed at his throbbing temple with two fingers, where his pulse was thrumming in his head.
"What do you intend to do?" Hank inquired, hesitance lacing his uneasy voice.
"I don't know..." Charles uttered inaudibly, his words muted by the hand clamped over his lips.
"Sorry..." Hank's brows knitted together in bewilderment. "You don't-"
"I said I don't know!" Charles bellowed at him, his face flushing as he shouted with such livid vitriol, visibly quaking with anger. He hung his head in shame as he saw the unsettled look on the face of his friend with an already constant nervous disposition.
Hank looked incredibly uneasy.
"Go..." Charles whined throatily like a sorrowful hound, his mewling pathetic voice cut off by a violent choking sob that rattled through his frail bony body. He flipped a hand, trying to bat him away.
"Charles-"
"Please!" He pleaded, raising his head a couple inches to reveal his distraught face. His blue eyes were glazed with tears, his bottom lip was trembling as he attempted to maintain his duplicitous composed façade, but his dignity and mask was crumbling away to reveal the truly broken man that lurked beneath. "Just go..." He begged, his voice a whisper, like a breath of air.
Charles's head wilted like a decaying flower and his shoulder started jerking violently as he cried, the first tears escaping disobediently from his pooled blue eyes, red and bloodshot from sleeplessness and grew ever-heavier.
Hank backed away knowingly, retreating out of the office and giving a respectful tiny nod as he shut the ancient creaky wooden door on its rotten rusty hinges, eaten away by time.
Through the door, there was a distinct rattling then a tremendous crashing shattering sound. Charles had swept everything off the overloaded desk and onto the solid wooden floor. He was seething in his agonised frothing rage as he glared down at the hideous sickening mess that had now covered his office floor. His already trashed office was worsened in its cluttered attire, in a shameful crowded mess.
Books hung off the bookshelves like they were trying to leap off the shelves. The window was filthy and green with withering age. The floor was scattered with shards of glass and porcelain and scattered with a thick carpet of papers. Every book case was stacked with ornaments and too many books to fit, his fireplace had burnt away and was left with only cold embers of the winter months. Every surface was crammed with junk that he cared for no more. Pictures hung askew on the walls, disregarded and no longer admired. Everything was a tyrannous cacophonous mess, the result of Charles's restless crammed mind. The room was nothing more than a reflection of his inner turmoil; strewn and laid to waste.
His red silken dressing gown dangled off his thin weak frame. He had lost yet more weight due to stress and skipping meals because he felt ill.
He fell back against the wall behind him and pressed the back of his head to it and let his eyes fall shut and tilted his head to the heavens, as if to say a silent prayer to a god he didn't believe existed.
Tears seeped out from beneath his shut eyelids, meandering down his pasty cheeks and dripping off his chin onto the varnished wooden floor, coated with dust from days past and covered with clusters of paper thrown about over due course of time.
That's when a shot of pain surged up his back from his coccyx to his nape, making him cry out and arch forwards away from the wall, and a small bout of voices echoed in his mind, rattling around like a sound being blasted into an auditorium.
"Argh!" He shrieked, his face screwing up as he threw himself off the wall and supported his failing body on the desk.
He placed a hand at the base of his spine and two words passed his lips as a whisper. "Oh no..." His eyes expanded and then another shock of pain blasted through him, burning across his skin and exploding from his lower spine discs.
"Hank!" He whined, tears of agony spilling from his eyes. He pushed off from the desk and threw himself across the room, away from the desk and at the door. He grunted as his shoulder bashed into the solid oak.
He reached out a trembling hand, battling with the simmering pain growing in his back and starting to spread to his upper thighs. He rattled at the handle and then managed to summon the strength to yank the door open. He flung it with his hand, throwing it open and hauled himself through.
"Hank!" He screamed into the entrance hall, lugging his failing legs in, forcing himself on as pain ripped through his, raging through the receptors in his mind.
Then more voices came, the sounds of people he knew, people he recognised.
"Please! I'm not what you think! I don't mean you any harm!"
"Just a place to stay for tonight... That's all I need... I'm begging of you! I have nowhere else to go!"
"Just take it! Take the rest of the money... Just leave me alone! I don't want any trouble..."
Charles pressed a hand to his head and slapped his temple, trying to bash the noise out of his skull, trying to shut it up. "Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up!" He hissed to himself, rambling like a lunatic as the voice got louder and louder and more and more crowded his cramped mind.
He felt like his head was going to explode from the building noise. It was like thousands of voices echoing in a badly built auditorium; or the voices of a mass exodus ricocheting off the walls of a cave, rebounding and creating a discordant kafuffle of sound: building in layers, overlapping with dissonance.
"Hank! Hank!" He called up the stairs. "Ah!" He gasped, falling to the floor as a flare of pain in his thighs crippled his legs and sent him crashing to the floor. He caught himself on his frail arms, his muscles shaking under the strain of supporting his weight.
He struggled on, pulling himself on his hands, dragging his failing body across the floor.
"Hank!" He screeched like a pterodactyl, his gravelly sobbing voice not reaching far enough.
Tears poured down his cheeks as he pushed on, battling with himself, battling with the pain; trying to focus through the agony.
He pressed two fingers to the side of his head and his thumb to his jaw, digging it into the flesh and shutting his eyes to focus.
Hank... Please, get down here quick... His eyes snapped open again as the pain made focusing impossible. He forced them shut again and bared his teeth as he struggled for full control of himself. Bring the serum. He gasped aloud and collapsed, letting his chest fall to the floor at the foot of the dust coated antiquated staircase.
He sobbed in frustration, pounding his fists against the wooden floor, clouds of dust exploding into the air as he displaced it, unsettling a layer that had formed thick like a carpet in his absence of attention to the building. He contorted his neck and strained his eyes to stare up the stairs, squinting at the back window behind the staircase, letting in offensively bright light, making him press his lips together in disdain and hatred as it blinded him. He tried to shield his eyes with one of his hands, shadowing his sunken sockets and brows as he waited in painful anticipation.
"Hank!" He screeched, tearing his vocal chords to shreds with the strangled cry.
"I used to have a home once... Xavier's academy..."
"Who needs parents when you have a headmaster like a father..? Until he deserted us... Allowed us to be shipped off to war."
"He defended us... Then he let us down."
Tears rained from his eyes in a steady stream, guilt raging through him just as painfully from the pain in his spine.
"Hank..." He sobbed at the floor, tear drops plopping onto the floor with a light plinking sound.
Then footsteps, thumping, rumbling, clumsy heavy footsteps. The footfalls came rapidly and then the thudding thundered down the stairs and crashed to a halt before Charles.
"Sit up..." Hank demanded, lifting him by the elbow and levering him into a sitting position, helping him settle his back against the base of the staircase. He scrunched all of his finite features as pain swarmed his body. His eyes were woozy, clouded and hazy and distracted as he was paralysed by the pain when he looked back at Hank.
Hank was trying to make his nimble fingers work fast as he could as he assembled the syringe and inserted the dose and plunger, but however hard he tried, he could never do it fast enough.
"Please..." Charles stuggled to speak, his snivels cutting up his words into choppy staccato bursts, the word coming out as a struggled weak howl. "Make the pain stop..." He beseeched, his blue eyes burning into Hanks as they made eye contact. His whole body jiggled as he could do nothing to stop the wretched sobs coming. Everything was in pain, his mind was on fire, scorching with the voices of so many people: suffering, hurting, dying. His body was falling apart on him, his whole lower body filled with a prickly violent straining ache.
"He could never get a reign in on Erik... He's a loose cannon that's destroyed all of our hopes."
"He's given mutants a bad name! It's all Charles's fault, he couldn't control him!"
"I knew Charles shouldn't have trusted him."
"Hang on Charles..." Hank cooed angelically, his voice soft and innocent, the only harmonious noise in Charles's discordant world.
Hank flicked the needle and a droplet escaped the top: it was armed and ready to go. Without even stemming the blood flow to avoid pain, he stabbed the needle end down into Charles's vein, burying it deep in the blood vessel and slowly pushing down the plunger, releasing the painkilling potion into Charles's system, disbursing the relief through his system.
Charles's eyes rolled back in his head in relief and his head sagged against the staircase as he fell back and lay there. Once again a fog of silence descended on his crowded mind and that pain dissipated like a droplet in the ocean.
"Thank you..." He whispered through his parted pink lips as he breathed deep and easy.
A/N - I got 100 votes on 'Team Talk' so I wrote this and I hope you enjoyed it. It should be the first of multiple installments - although I have other projects on my plate: mostly 'Who Am I?' and my next upcoming project 'Budapest'. I may also upload in between if people are interest.
Fifty votes on this and I'll try and put out another chapter.
Thank you! First dedication goes to OurBoys, my American darling - chin up, ma'am! x