The door opened, and the X-Men filed in.
Xavier entered first, of course. The old parasite liked theatre almost as much as he liked pretending to be principled. He rolled his chair to the opposite side of the table and stopped there with the calm posture of a man who thought the room would behave because he had arrived. Summers took the seat on his left. Ororo sat on his right with the kind of careless grace only beautiful women seemed to get away with. Jean and Shadowcat took the other seats. Wolverine ignored the furniture and stayed standing near the wall.
Lucius remained where he was, leaning back with his fingertips pressed together, watching the spandex BDSM delegation arrange itself.
Summers still had the most punchable face in the room, which was saying a lot because Xavier was in it, too. Jean Grey looked exactly the way this world used to draw female beauty. Red hair, green eyes, an attractive face, clean lines, and enough polish to make a camera feel honoured to capture it. Ororo was a different kind of problem. The weather forecast goddess had all the right curves in all the right places, and she knew it. Shadowcat was built on smaller settings. Exxxtrasmall producers would have appreciated the proportions. After the idiotic butchery that modern audiences would cheer for, Falcon Studios would still have found a use for her... him... it. Yeah, let's go with it.
In the end, it got a bright future behind. Before or after the woke edits.
Then there was Wolverine in the skin of Hugh Jackman. He was the hero this world got and never deserved.
Lucius lifted a cigar from the lacquered box on the sideboard with telekinesis. The cutter followed. He clipped the end neatly and floated the cigar across the room.
Logan caught it one-handed, sniffed it, then gave a short nod.
"Thanks, bub."
Lucius returned the nod.
That was the only courtesy anyone in the room would receive.
He shifted his gaze to Xavier before the bald fraud could start packaging his latest violation as wisdom.
"A civilised person," Lucius began, "understands other people's limits. If someone does not want to meet you, you leave him alone. If he does not want his room called while he is relaxing, you do not crawl into a receptionist's head, use her like a meat puppet, and brush half the lobby on your way in just so you can force your way to a room and start preaching."
Nobody spoke.
Lucius let the silence sit a moment, then continued in the same cold tone.
"But you, Charles Xavier, are a wonderfully smooth hypocrite. You tell young homo superiors to use their gifts responsibly, to be better, gentler, more careful, then you hop from mind to mind like a monkey in heat whenever the answer is not convenient enough for you. Boundaries and privacy mean nothing when they are in your way. Other people's autonomy is only sacred until it stops being useful."
Scott's jaw clenched. Jean's face cooled. Ororo stayed very still.
Lucius carried on.
"I do wonder if you show this same flexibility when homo superiors are strapped to stretchers and carved up. When they are experimented on. When they are butchered by agencies, governments, laboratories, and every other kind of licensed scavenger.
Bolivar Trask was left breathing thanks to you and yours, and what did the little halfling do with the favour? He kept making better mutant hunters."
His lip curled.
"And that word too. Mutant, your lot embraced it as if stamping a wrong label on people would somehow make them easier to defend. The word itself is derogatory. All it did was hand everyone else a neat little slur in a lab coat. Even that says enough about your rot, but let us not waste the whole afternoon on my neutral opinion of you."
His eyes settled on Xavier's face.
"So now that you have raped the minds of innocent bystanders to get your meeting, what exactly do you want, old man?"
Scott was up before the last word finished landing.
The chair scraped back sharply. He jabbed a finger across the table, voice already tight with righteous stupidity.
"You will show the Professor some respect. He has done more for the mutant kind than you ever will. You sell potions, make money, and sit in hotels. He shelters mutants and protects them. Even you benefit from what he built."
Lucius did not stand; he opened one hand.
Scott's words cut off. An invisible force clamped around his throat and lifted him clear off the floor. His chair toppled over backwards. His boots kicked once, then again. He clawed at his neck and made ugly choking noises behind the visor.
Jean shot up. Shadowcat rose with her. Ororo stood slower, but the change in the room came with her. Logan stayed where he was, cigar between his fingers, one shoulder leaning against the wall, watching. Xavier's hands came off his chair.
Lucius looked up at the dangling idiot.
"What little rights homo superiors still possess in this country are not there because this crippled fraud asked nicely for them." His voice stayed calm, which made the words worse. "They are there because politicians are afraid to even breathe in Magneto's direction unless they absolutely must. They know Erik Lehnsherr and his Brotherhood are not a group you soothe with statements, committees, and photographs. They keep Xavier around because he is the tame option. The flexible option. The one who bends over, bargains, apologises, and lets them pretend they are civilised while they keep butchering homo superiors."
Scott kicked helplessly in the air.
Lucius's stare never left him.
"They spare a little dignity for homo superiors through your bald mascot because he is useful to them, not because he has won anything worth a damn. Diplomacy, without a force to support it, means nothing. Try getting that through your thick skull."
He released him.
Scott dropped hard to one knee, coughing and dragging air into his lungs as he had just remembered it existed. Jean moved to him at once. Xavier reached out a hand he did not use. Ororo's pale hair lifted from her shoulders. Her eyes flashed electric blue. Shadowcat tried to move and failed.
Lucius had pinned her in place with telekinesis. She stood there breathing faster now, shoulders tight, realising movement had stopped being her decision.
Jean came for his mind first.
The touch was fast and strong. She had power and talent, and he knows that better than even herself. It still met his shields and shattered. Pain speared back through the contact. Jean's breath hitched. She staggered sideways and caught the edge of the table.
Xavier followed immediately, quieter and nastier about it. Less force, more intrusion. He tried slipping through the gaps she had failed to find.
That ended worse.
Lucius's mental defences did not merely block him. They answered. The backlash drove into Xavier's mind like a spike. His fingers crushed the arms of his chair. His jaw locked. For a second, the saintly mask slipped, and the strain of pain showed on his face.
Lucius scoffed.
"Try that again, and I will decorate the gates of your mansion with both your heads."
Ororo's hair floated higher. The air in the room tightened with static. Blue light filled her eyes. She still did not move first.
Wolverine did not either. He put the cigar between his teeth and watched like a man sitting through a familiar type of nonsense.
From where he stood, nobody had bled, nobody had pulled claws, and what happened to Summers was just.
Xavier raised both hands, palms outward.
"Enough."
Ororo did not like it, but some of the charge bled out of the room. Not all of it. Just enough to stop the ceiling from becoming part of the discussion.
Jean helped Scott back into a chair. He sat with one hand on his throat, breathing rough, anger still written all over him because some men really were too stupid to improve. Shadowcat remained fixed in place. Lucius kept her there for another moment because the room still needed the reminder. Then he eased the pressure for comfort without giving her the freedom to get brave.
Ororo remained standing.
Her eyes stayed on him.
Lucius noticed. Of course, he noticed. He would have needed to be blind, dead, or Xavier-level morally constipated not to notice a woman like that looking at him. He was many things. Blind was not one of them.
Logan took the cigar from his mouth and looked at the band.
"Good taste."
"Unlike your team."
The corner of Logan's mouth twitched.
Xavier let that pass. When he spoke, he had collected himself again and wrapped the rot back in silk.
"I admit using the receptionist was wrong, Mr Noctis." He folded his hands in his lap. "But it was necessary that we speak. What happened to you at the hands of SHIELD should not have happened."
Lucius looked at him without blinking.
Xavier continued.
"You have been placed in the public eye now, whether you welcome it or not. Your words carry weight. Mutants across the country are looking at you. So are humans who already fear what they do not understand. What you say next may shape what comes after."
Lucius almost laughed.
The man had mind-raped his way into the room and was already talking about what came after as if the method no longer mattered.
"If you speak to the press," Xavier went on, "and present a measured position, if you say that you understand why tensions rose so high, if you make it clear that you do not seek escalation, it could calm the protests. Even a gesture towards understanding SHIELD's position would help stop this from worsening."
Scott lifted his head a little. Jean went still. Ororo's expression did not change, but Lucius caught the tiny shift in her eyes. She was listening for the reaction now, not the argument.
Xavier kept pressing.
"This is larger than you or me. It concerns mutant rights and how humans see our kind. Diplomatic channels must remain open. If the country turns this into a full confrontation between fearful institutions and angry mutants, everyone will suffer for it."
Lucius stared at him.
It was genuinely difficult to grasp how a man could be this chronically stupid and still dress himself.
SHIELD had broken into his home, kidnapped him, collared him, drugged him, restrained him, stolen his blood, and nearly turned him into their little research project, and Xavier had rolled in here to ask for understanding. He had not come for justice or consequences, or even silence, but for understanding.
Lucius could not decide whether Xavier was the highest grade of naive fool or whether the government had something on him and an island full of PDFiles so filthy that they could tug his actions like strings.
Either way, the result was the same. The man was sitting there asking Lucius to help hose down public outrage so the institutions which had abused him could continue pretending civilisation still existed.
Lucius leaned back further in his chair and looked at Xavier the way a man might look at a failed experiment that had somehow acquired tenure.
"Let me make sure I understand you correctly." His tone had gone very dry. "You force your way into this meeting by violating a receptionist's mind, your pet cyclops jumps up to bark on command, both you and the redhead try taking a swing at my mind on the first opportunity, and after all that you want me to go to the press and publicly help SHIELD who collared me, because their feelings are under strain?"
He let out a short breath through his nose.
"That is your master plan?"
Xavier opened his mouth, but Lucius cut straight across him.
"No, the correct question is, are you genuinely this stupid, or do you simply think I am?"