#91110

and Charles? Darling? What are you doing?

Good – the thoughts careened through Charles’ mind, good – wonderful. No abuse at that monster’s hands; no real problems with memory, since he didn’t count a fluke in the Finder; steps forward with his tokens and his own powers – his raven, flying everywhere … the only downside was the new and visceral antagonism between Alex and Sean. Odd, how children’s conflicts could spiral out of all control.

--

Dafuq? CHARLES, HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT?!

You changed Sean's memories and then you're like "kids being kids hehehe"

nine eleven ten is high literature because when you read it for the first time you're like oh okay beauty and the beast au and then you read it the second time and realise Charles goes from "ugh how am I supposed to plan out my suicide missions to steal nuclear warheads if you don't let me use six year old shapeshifters to infiltrate terrorist organisations to create diversions" to "these 10-14 yr olds are CHILDREN how DARE you deploy them!!!!" within a span of 36 hours and realise. oh he is totally insane actually. he is a ruthless war hardened military general lying to himself about being an innocent abducted professor because if he takes away his agency he doesn't have to face his actions or realise his country lied to him, actually. he has a completely fractured sense of reality because of trauma and propaganda and his idea of himself has absolutely no overlap with the reality of himself and this is a masterpiece in unreliable narration, Actually

so basically erik, emma, and shaw start ww3 and destroy the world. erik kills shaw and wants to be ruler. emma scrambles his brains to retain power, which is a continuous process of her slowly destroying his mind.

meanwhile (before, during, and after annihilation) they establish ebs—an empire of mutants—and after nuclear annihiliation the usa becomes the free west, a tyrannical, conservative anti-mutant empire run by Stryker and they enter war. the EBS fixes the gulf stream to somewhat normalise the global temperature and leverages that and other resources against the UK and other countries to give them the right to recruit whatever powerful mutants that live within their borders for their own army.

somewhere in this process emma also rapes erik to impregnate herself with jean.

erik's mind is essentially destroyed. he's very rarely lucid, doesn't remember anything that happened to him, and has extremely severe PTSD from the holocaust and shaw and Emma's abuse but cannot even rember his trauma. he realises he loves charles and doesn't really know what to do with it. he DOES have moments of lucidity but it's nothing compared to the man he used to be—and charles thinks of him as a thing because his shattered mind reads borderline inhuman to his telepathy, run entirely by instinct.

Charles also manipulates the fuck out of him and his love and mindrapes him multiple times so.