Archive of Our Own ^beta

David had never told either of his parents about who he dated.

From his mother, he had failed to mention Harriet (a mistake) and Katie (fun, but they hadn’t been in love). From his father he had concealed Doug (nice, but too nice) and, currently, Ruth (wonderful).

He’d just never felt ready to admit to dating people. He’d never been ready to see how either of his parents would react to seeing that side of him.

So when his phone alarm went off, signalling approximately ten minutes before his father would arrive home, he and Ruth stopped making out, David pulled his shirt back on, and Ruth picked up her bag, climbed out of the window, walked through the garden, and telekinetically lifted herself up over the fence and away.

Ruth sometimes accused him of being overly dramatic, but given that Ruth could have just as easily walked out the front door and away down the street, David thought she had her own theatrical side too. It made him like her all the more.

David watched her go.

Then he opened his bedroom door and stepped into the spacious hallway.

He had mixed feelings about the large, modern bungalow where his father lived. The rooms were high-ceilinged and airy, but it just felt so expensive. He had never found out what his father had paid for it, and he didn’t want to know. David was still adjusting to the fact that he was, technically, a rich kid.

He glanced at the doormat, then picked up the post lying there.

Most of it was uninteresting, but there were two unusual envelopes of thick cardstock. One was addressed to his father, the other to him.

David dropped the rest of the post on the side table in the hallway, then opened the card addressed to him.

It was an invitation to lunch – or ‘luncheon’ to use the exact word on the invitation.

An invitation from ‘your grandmother, Sharon Marko’.

“What the fuck.”

The second Charles wheeled through the door, he sensed something wrong.

David was angry. The quiet kind of anger which Charles had only felt from him a few times, but which Charles privately found almost intimidating. Especially since David wasn’t shielding his anger from Charles’ telepathy: he wanted his father to know that he was angry.

David stood in the kitchen, leaning back against he counter. His shirt was crumpled and his long black hair was messier than usual.

He flicked an envelope over to Charles, making it hover in the air with his telekinesis.

“Open. It. I want to see your reaction.”

Charles could have guessed what was inside. He recognised the handwriting on the envelope.

But he took it out of the air and opened it anyway, and quickly read the invitation on the fine cardstock inside.

“So I have a grandmother,” said David. “A grandmother you never mentioned. I’ve been here a year.”

Charles looked up at David apologetically. “I’m sorry. I was going to, but… my mother is complicated.”

“And I’m not?”

He sighed. “It’s more than that. She wouldn’t approve of you.”

“So you were ashamed.”

Charles caught the clench of David’s jaw and knew he had to rectify the situation before it became a full-blown argument. “I just meant that she’d judge you. She’s very old money. She wouldn’t like you, she wouldn’t be polite to you, and I don’t think you’d like her.”

“You still should have told me,” said David quietly. “After mum, you’re the only family I have.” He held up his own invitation, the name ‘David Haller’ written in fine, looping script in black ink. “Or you were.”

Charles knocked on David’s bedroom door, waited a few seconds, then let himself in.

David was hovering a few feet in the air, sitting cross-legged. The antigravity made his black hair ripple in an unnatural wind. His eyes glowed white, then faded to their normal green and blue. “Yes?”

“Look, we can go if you want. If it means that much to see your grandmother.” David’s other set of grandparents had died in Bergen-Belsen. There weren’t even graves to visit, just a memorial to the murdered thousands. Charles wouldn’t deprive him of a relationship with Sharon: he just didn’t think one was viable.

“But your grandmother is difficult. She was better when I was a boy, but then father died and she remarried to his lab partner, Kurt. Kurt came with a son, who became my stepbrother, and they were both awful. I have no idea where my stepbrother ended up after he moved out, but Kurt eventually died in a lab fire. The point is… my mother started drinking after they moved in, and she didn’t stop. She stopped being there for me, stopped caring about anything other than appearances, really. I moved out of the house as soon as it was feasible and while I did write home, I never looked back.”

“Okay,” said David quietly, “So she sucks. I still want to meet her, even if I end up hating her. She sent me this invite and I want to know why.”

“You didn’t tell me it was huge,” said David, looking up at the mansion, shutting the door of his father’s black Bentley behind him.

“I didn’t want to spoil the surprise,” said Charles, transferring to his wheelchair from the car seat.

His father wore a pale grey suit with a matching tie. David’s suit was dark blue, and it was the only one he owned, left over from when his mother took him to the occasional political dinner. He still wasn’t used to wearing a tie, and it felt wrong, the way it sat around his neck.

The door opened to reveal an honest-to-god footman, who David guessed had been peeking through the spyhole so that he could open the door for them at the right moment.

They were led through the house (wood panelling, old paintings, expensive-looking vases), until they reached a dining room that was far too large, with a table that was far too big, set for only three people, right at one end. One side of the long room was all French windows, hung with net curtains to prevent the full sun from entering the dining room.

His grandmother looked relatively young, for an old person, and David guessed she’d had some work done to her face. She gave a practised socialite smile, then glanced past her son to rest her eyes on David.

“Good lord, he’s a hippie.”

David had considered tying his hair back for this, but he didn’t like the way it felt when it was in a ponytail, and it had a tendency to snap hair ties anyway. He restrained the urge to tell her that he was a punk, not a hippie, and instead told her, “It’s part of my mutation. It grows back when it’s cut. I don’t have a choice in wearing it this length.”

“You’re off to a perfect start,” whispered Ksenia in his mind. “Little boy who needs grandmother’s approval. Pathetic.”

“Shut up,” he retorted. The last thing he needed was a dissociative episode. Not here, not now.

Sharon looked him up and down. “Well, I suppose it can’t be helped. At least he looks human. And he does have the Xavier family look… mostly.”

David guessed Sharon must mean that he had his father’s cheekbones, his father’s jawline. Maybe that made him look like his grandfather, but if there was a picture of Brian Xavier in this mansion, David hadn’t passed it yet.

And David looked a lot like his mother, too. She had given him the ink-black hair.

Since Sharon herself had only married into the Xavier family, not been born into it, David didn’t see why she would value him having the family ‘look’ so much, especially since, with her hair the kind of thing you got from expensive blonde hair dye, and her face the kind of thing you got with Botox, he did not resemble her at all.

Her eyes were blue, but a different shade to his father’s, and since David’s blue eye was the same shade as his father’s eyes, that meant not even his eyes were a match for Sharon’s.

David had no idea where his green eye came from. His mother’s eyes had been grey. Just another mutation, he supposed.

“Well, take a seat, both of you,” said Sharon, indicating the table with a manicured hand. “After lunch, perhaps a tour. The estate is entailed on the Xavier bloodline. David ought to know the history of the house he will inherit.”

At least she’d partially stopped talking about him in third person.

If the estate’s entailed, David asked his father telepathically, Then doesn’t that mean you own the house?

I allow her to live here, Charles replied. I’ll admit, when I moved out I wanted to stay away from the mansion. By the time I might have moved back in, she was entrenched here. Besides, where else would she go?

His grandmother sat at the head of the table, Charles on her right, David at her left. Charles pushed himself into the space left for his wheelchair, and his grandmother allowed one of the footmen to pull out her chair for her, then push it in again, but David moved his chair himself – with his hands. He thought it was too early for a mutant power display.

Sharon was watching him like a hawk to check he knew which cutlery to use, but Gabrielle had taught David how these things worked.

The first course was salmon on tiny circles of toasted bread, topped with caviar, delivered by waiters who filled their glasses with mineral water, and then a second set of glasses with champagne.

“David’s too young to drink,” said Charles. “He’s only seventeen.”

Sharon sipped her champagne. “One year away from eighteen, and that’s the drinking age in England. He might as well.”

“You know I don’t drink either.”

Sharon raised an eyebrow at Charles. “You used to, and I shall never understand why you stopped.”

David decided not to touch the champagne. He doubted he’d be able to feel the effects of alcohol anyway. Not with his mutant metabolism. He scraped the caviar off the salmon with his fish knife and left it on the side of his plate, but he liked the way the salmon had been cooked.

“You don’t like caviar?” asked Sharon incredulously.

“It isn’t kosher,” David replied.

Sharon turned to Charles. “You didn’t say he was Jewish.”

“You barely asked me about him at all.”

She turned to inspect David again. “Through his mother, I suppose. You ought to have married her, Charles. Children need a father and a mother figure when they are raised, otherwise they turn out warped. That’s why I married Kurt.”

“Gabrielle didn’t tell me she was pregnant,” Charles said quietly. It was still a sore point – how Gabrielle had never given him the option to be in David’s life from the start. How it had been David who reached out at the age of fifteen, emailing a man he’d only seen in his mother’s memories.

“I had a father figure,” said David. “My mother married my stepfather when I was two.”

“And what did he do?”

“He was a psychiatrist. He died when I was six.” David hoped she wouldn’t ask about the circumstances of Daniel’s death. He wasn’t sure if he could cope with going there today. “And my mother was a lawyer, when I was a kid, and then after that she was an ambassador in London.”

David could tell from his grandmother’s surface thoughts that she’d assumed Gabrielle had been a stay-at-home mother.

“She ought to have remarried again after her husband died. You were still developing. Really, she ought to have married Charles. She must have been very single-minded.”

“She was.”

“And your education?”

“I’m at university.” Two years early, even with the difficulties he’d faced for most of his childhood and all his teenage years. “Doing physics.”

“Which university?”

“Cornell. Though my first year was at UCL. I had to switch when I moved to the US.” It had taken all the strings Charles could pull to persuade Cornell to make David’s first year count towards his degree, even though it had been taken in a different university on a different continent.

“Why ever didn’t you send him to Oxford?” Sharon asked Charles.

“I thought it might be easier for him to go to university somewhere close to where he lives. Then he wouldn’t have to move out.”

“You moved away from home at about his age. There’s no need to coddle him.”

“For heaven’s sake, mother, he’d just lost Gabrielle!” This was the closest David had seen his father come to genuine anger, aside from political debates on TV. “I wasn’t going to ask him to be on his own after that.”

Please don’t ask how she died, David silently begged his grandmother. Because then I’ll have to say that they shot her, but they were aiming at me. Aiming for the mutant.

“Well, I suppose so. But he should at least do his PhD at Oxford.”

David did plan to do a PhD. But he didn’t like something about the way Sharon made the assumption.

There was a brief break when the waiters came back in to swap out the starter for the main course. It was roast pork. David supposed he could at least eat the sides and the roast potatoes.

“And where were you educated before university?” Sharon continued.

“I had a tutor.” Because he was in a mental health clinic. Not that David was ever going to tell her that.

“Adequate, I suppose, though tutors are very hit or miss these days. If you were living in London, the least your mother could have done was send you to Eton.”

David restrained an eyeroll. If he ever stepped through Eton gates, Cyndi would start whispering in his mind to burn the whole place down. And he’d be tempted to let her. Besides, before he was released from Muir to live with his mother in London, he had been up in Scotland, hundreds of miles from the Eton boys who would loathe an autistic, Jewish, fatherless boy so much.

“Still, there are other important matters to discuss,” said Sharon, emptying her champagne glass and picking up Charles’, since by now it was clear Charles wasn’t going to touch it. “David needs to change his surname before he gets his degree or his PhD. He needs to be David Xavier on his dissertation and his doctoral thesis.”

“You want me to change my name?” David exclaimed, incredulous. Of all the things he’d anticipated for this meeting, that had not been one of them.

Sharon regarded him cooly. “But of course I do. You are the last of the Xavier line, yet you do not even bear our name. It is a prestigious name; you ought to be proud of it.”

“No.”

The silence was absolute for about three seconds, until Sharon finally found the words to react. “No? Did you not hear me say you were the last of the line? The Xavier name is an honour.”

“Your legal name is Sharon Marko.”

“I did that for Charles.”

“And I’m doing this for my mother.”

Sharon’s grip on the champagne flute was white-knuckled. “And who was she? Some demented, independent woman of the world, who got herself pregnant out of wedlock and did not even inform the father so he could do the right thing! What was her birth? Who were her parents? I never heard of a Haller before I heard of you. You owe nothing to her!”

David stood so fast his chair tipped over. One of his hands came down flat on the tablecloth, white-hot claws extending from the tips of his fingers, scoring the starched white fabric. Then he banished Ksenia from the forefront of his mind and came back to himself. That had been a close one.

But he was still angry.

David loomed over his grandmother. Fury meant that he was swiftly losing the English parts to his accent, foreign strains bleeding in, the voice of someone who’d lived in Haifa, Paris, Scotland, London. An immigrant’s voice, and he could feel how his grandmother hated it. “Let me tell you about my other grandmother. I never knew her name because I didn’t feel I could ask mum, but she and her husband were nice, hopeful people. Right until they were taken to Bergen-Belsen. Mum ended up in Dachau instead, but she was reliably informed that they died there. And who was my mother?

“She was the one who did her best to understand me even though it was so very difficult. She was the one who spent her whole career fighting for Muslim-Jewish relations, for human rights, for mutant rights. She was the one who took a bullet to the skull because someone wanted to kill her mutant son, but she decided to hug me on our doorstep before I walked to class that day, so we both moved, and the bullet hit her instead. She died because she loved me.

“You said I’m the last of the Xavier line, but I’m the last Haller too. This estate, this stupid bloody big mansion, it’ll always carry the Xavier name. But there’s nothing to hold the Haller name but me.”

David leaned back, triumphant, looking down on the woman who now meant so little to him. “I think I understand you now, grandmother. I think I know why you wanted to meet me. It wasn’t anything to do with wanting to know your only grandchild. No, this was about assessing what kind of heir I’d be to the precious family name.” He grinned. “I bet it eats you up inside, doesn’t it? The fact that there’s nothing you can do to prevent your precious estate, backed up by hundreds of years of pedigree, from passing to me. The autistic immigrant mutant freak.”

David sauntered over to the dish holding the roast potatoes. He picked one up with his bare hand and bit into it, eating it like an apple. Once he was done, he wiped his hand on the tablecloth, turned on his heel, and walked through the French windows, phasing through curtains and glass alike.

Sharon watched him and sniffed. “Finishing school would have fixed that,” she remarked. “Perhaps he didn’t mean it. Autistic children hardly ever know what they’re saying.”

“He meant it,” replied Charles darkly. “And he knew damn well what he was saying.”

“You must go to him and make him apologise.”

“No,” said Charles.

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Everything David said was right. It was true. I only came here because he wanted to meet you. You know, if you hadn’t been judging him from the minute he walked in here, you would have found out things about him that you really could like. He speaks seven languages. Plays the harp to grade eight standard, and by god you should see his oil paintings. But now he’ll never get to tell you those things, because you couldn’t keep your disdain to yourself for a scant five seconds.”

He took a shuddering breath. “And for the record, Gabrielle loved me. She really did love me. It was me who couldn’t love her back. I tried, it just didn’t happen. So I left. I wish she’d told me about David, but to be fair to her, I was already gone. And if I had known about David, I would have been there for him, but I would never have married Gabrielle.”

Charles pushed his wheelchair back from the table. “I need to check that David’s alright.”

“Spare yourself,” she snapped, “He was practically glowing. And now you prioritise your son over your mother.”

Charles shot Sharon a dark look. “I have every right to.” He clenched his jaw, then released. Touched a hand to the armrest of his wheelchair. “When this happened, you didn’t visit me in hospital. Not once. Just a discreet enquiry a few weeks later to ask if I’d still be able to have children. Because you wanted to know if my little ‘mishap’, as you put it, had been enough to end the Xavier line.”

“Of course I couldn’t visit!” cried Sharon. “I was still dealing with the mess of your little publicity stunt. Declaring yourself a mutant on live television. Do you have any idea how many of my friends called me up after that, asking if it was true? The embarrassment! I was mortified. Especially when you did not need to make yourself a spectacle like that. You look human. Nobody needed to know.”

“Every mutant who ever felt afraid and alone needed to know.” Charles turned his chair and headed towards the door. “Oh, and mother? If you ever contact David again with something that does not start with an apology, I swear to god I shall come out publicly as bisexual.”

“But you aren’t.”

“Yes I am.”

He opened the door with some difficulty: it was heavy oak, and the angle was bad for a man in a wheelchair. Then he pushed himself over the threshold.

Charles found David by the lake.

The lake was one of his favourite parts of the mansion’s grounds, and it was reassuring to find that David liked it too. The gentle movements of the water were soothing.

He didn’t try to conceal his mind from David’s detection, and with the way David’s telepathy was developing, things like that were getting steadily more difficult anyway.

Charles realised that David was holding his phone. He put it away in his jacket pocket.

“I was just texting my girlfriend,” said David. “Telling her something along the lines of how her grandmother is the coolest and mine’s the worst.”

So David had a girlfriend. Charles filed that information away for later enquiry. It wasn’t what mattered right now.

“David… is Ksenia giving you grief?” That had been what scared him: the prospect of David having a full dissociative episode in front of Sharon, and then Charles would have to explain about the dissociative identity disorder. But luckily it had been only a few seconds, and could be written off as rage by anyone who didn’t know David the way Charles did.

“She always does. But it’s nothing I can’t handle.” David paused. “You’re allowed to say I screwed up in there.”

“No, you didn’t. You were right. I’m proud of you for standing up for yourself like that.”

David went very still and Charles, cautiously, rested his hand on the small of David’s back.

David turned around and hugged him.

Charles realised that this was the first time he’d told David he was proud of him. He should have said it sooner. There were so many reasons. He hugged David back and murmured. “Come on. Let’s go home.”