Mutatis Mutandis

Summary: Five times when Charles wanted to read someone's mind, but promised not to, and one time he accidentally did.

Moira walks beside him on the grass, sunlight on her hair, and he recalls vividly the half-drunk memory of their first meeting, the strangely distant euphoria of seeing more mutants, more people like him, even just through her eyes. He's oddly glad he wasn't entirely sober during that conversation, since even then he suspects he'd have given himself away too obviously in his delight. How little he could have imagined this, even those few short weeks ago...

"You'd better not be reading my mind, Charles."

He blinks and turns to her, stopping short, surprised at her words. "Why would I be?"

One of the most interesting things about Charles Xavier in First Class is he's a mutant who's come into his powers without anyone to tell him how to use them. Since there isn't an Ethics for Telepaths handbook floating around, he has to work it all out for himself - which is one of the things this story is about. I love the different shades of reaction the other characters have to his powers, and the different ways Charles responds to them.

Five Minds Charles Never Read (And One He Did)

Summary: Kitty watches things change.

Logan pauses as he passes her. She looks at him; his eyes narrow, and he frowns. "I'd stay out of there, kid," he says, and his hand is soft and heavy where it rests above the star, before he continues walking. Kitty stares at the door for a second, then drops her hand as if she's burnt it.

"Oh," she says aloud. "Oh."

After X3, things are different around the mansion. I love the way this handles Kitty's crush on Bobby Drake and how she evolves away from it. Bonus points for Piotr painting things and calling her 'Katya.'

Slowly Creeping In

Summary: "If this is my dream, Charles thought, I can kiss him."

Charles was seated at an old wooden table with a chessboard inlaid. The gloss on the wood was scratched, presumably from decades of play. The chess set was unfamiliar to him: not one he had ever owned or played on. The pieces were angular, almost cubist.

Erik sat opposite in a heavy leather club chair. Grey flannel trousers, a spotless white shirt with round collar, eyes bright as ever.

"Is my subconscious mind so boring that all we can do is play chess even when I'm dreaming?"

After X2, Charles receives a nocturnal visitor. Mysterious and tentatively hopeful.

In Dreams Begin Responsibility

Summary: Raven isn't a child anymore. She's trying to prove it.

Raven discovered a lot of things in Paris: sex with women, smoking, eclairs, how to ride a bicycle in a flowy skirt, and the idea of a university education that had nothing to do with genetics. She liked psychology. It seemed interesting; she got inside peoples' heads already, in a way. Maybe she'd study it someday; Hank had said she might live twice as long as a normal person. What was that, 150 years? Jesus.

After First Class, Raven goes to Paris with the Brotherhood and grows up fast. A beautiful story about falling in love and coming of age, and I really like the Irene Adler in this.

Grow Up and Blow Away

Summary: One family, two answering machines, and the aftermath of a very different Alkali Lake.

For a flickering, ephemeral instant, he thought that the jet was taking off without them, that the X-Men hadn't noticed their absence in their rush to squirrel the hostages out of Stryker's compound. He pulled his too-thin jacket closer, tucked his head down, and lengthened his stride into the best sprint he could manage.

Then Rogue gasped, and he realized that the rumble he heard wasn't the thudding, grating roar of pistons and gears. It was the living scream of the sea, the sound of hundreds of thousands of gallons of water clashing against one another as they tumbled end-over-end, wild, unstoppable...

I like the way this story is told - sort of epistolary but with answering machines instead of letters. More than that, though, I like the idea. This is a universe where the events at Alkali Lake went a different direction, but not necessarily a better one. Painful and clever.

Acts of God

Summary: When someone tries to settle Stryker's score with Logan, Rogue learns a few things about the price of secrets and what it takes to survive the truth.

Five months ago, she'd barely been able to pass for nineteen; now she can walk into any liquor store in the county and sell her age as twenty-one and she knows how to get around the I.D. problem. His redheads aren't the only women in town who know how to wield a tube of lipgloss like a machete. He turns down her offer, sticking with all the stubbornness of his latent honor to the deal he made with the One Eyed Wonder not to drink in front of students. But he doesn't try to stop her; maybe he figures he doesn't have the right, maybe he just doesn't know how. He could punch through metal and walk across fire and any other grand melodrama, just to save her, but he can't even look at the scars on her wrists without flinching.

Rogue's relationship with Logan causes more than one kind of trouble after she's kidnapped. Dark and excellent.

After the Fact

Summary: "Fire gods. They always have to make trouble of one sort or another.”

Bobby Drake held two things, one tightly and one loosely, in his hands. The first was a postcard, No Rest for the Wicker printed at the bottom of a black-and-white photograph showing a long line of people snaking through a field in front of a set of wicker furniture. He had both sides memorized. The back had a twenty-three cent stamp (greenish, white profile of Washington, ponytail and all), slapped crookedly into the box in the upper right-hand corner; it had a postmark stamped half into the message on the left side, dated five days before today from Parkersburg, West Virginia. The letters were scrawled (typical), slanting up. The pen had died a few words in, and the note changed color.

Magneto called Pyro a god among insects, but if he remembered his comparative mythology he would know that fire gods always cause the most trouble. I love the use of the legends here, and the deft characterization of John as well.

The Agnihotri

All I have to say to this is: guh. Gambit certainly is pretty. I really like the detail on the hair and the glowing eyes.


Alone Time by ~Catherine-OC on deviantART

Summary: It's about time for Marie to move on.

"Life isn't fair," he said, and she could have sworn she felt a touch like a fingertip on her neck. "You and I, Erik -- we all know that. But never let me hear you complain about learning."

"Then teach me something useful," Rogue said. "I'm tired of chess."

This is two stories intertwined, one of Rogue making her way outside the school after X3, and the other of Xavier's ... unconventional attempts at therapy before she took the cure. I really like this darker take on their teacher/student relationship, and find it entirely plausible given what X3 told us about Jean's past.

Backsliding

Summary: What might have happened had X1 not ended so well.

The calendar in the box room still read October 2010, but she knew it was later than that. She had no mirror, because she'd thrown it out of the window an autumn ago, or maybe a spring ago, and judged her age by the rough and lined hands that she would stare at as they tried to grip at her fork and knife.

She asked her nurses which year it was, but they never told her.

A poignant story about what might have happened to Jean - and, by extension, to everyone else - if things hadn't gone quite so well at the Statue of Liberty. Full of beautiful details that make it sing, from the Jell-O cups to the view from her tiny window.

The Box Room