not-so-secret mutant!

[kaydeefalls]

secret_mutant authors have been revealed! Oh, man. A couple of those I totally guessed; others, I'm kind of smacking myself in the forehead for not figuring out immediately. And then, y'know, a bunch of authors I wasn't familiar with before, who now I obviously need to check out. If you like Charles/Erik and you haven't taken a look at this exchange yet, you really should. Ninety-five new fics, many excellent. Huge kudos to pocky_slash for organizing and running the damn thing.

And now I can properly thank argyleheir for her excellent gift, Practical Applications of Radioactive Material. READ IT! Erik and Charles keep running into other superheroes on their recruitment trip; I particularly adore Sue Storm in this one, but really, it's all just great fun and awesomeness. ♥

Also, I wrote some stuff?

Celestial Navigation (9470 words) by kaydeefalls - or on LJ
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Characters: Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr, N'Dare Munroe, Ororo Munroe
Summary: Not everything has to be life or death. Sometimes it snows in September, just because a little girl wills it so.

From the sign-ups, it was pretty clear that ginbitch and I have pretty damn similar tastes in terms of canon fics set in the 1960s; I definitely got my period research kink on writing it. The prompt was for snow, which to me, obviously meant bb!Ororo had to be in there somewhere, which wound up mostly involving her mother, N'Dare Munroe. I kept their family backstory as close to comics!canon as possible -- N'Dare was Kenyan, one of long line of priestess-sorceresses; she married an American photojournalist, and Ororo was born in Harlem. They move to Egypt when Ororo is very young. I couldn't find anything suggesting N'Dare was herself a mutant, so that bit's all mine. Also, it's kind of a love letter to New York City (my hometown), and it let me get inside Charles's enormous head way more than I've ever really thought about before. Telepathy is weird, guys. So that's that one.

&

I Ain't Scared of Lightning (13107 words) by kaydeefalls - or on LJ
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Characters: Erik Lehnsherr, Charles Xavier, Alex Summers, Moira MacTaggert, Armando Muñoz, Angel Salvadore, Hank McCoy, Raven Darkholme
Summary: Canon!AU. "Shaw has someone very dear to me," Charles said in a low tone. "You're not the only one playing for keeps, Erik."

Pinch hit of doom! I have no fucking clue where this came from, except that I had this image in my head of Charles on the Coast Guard ship flanked by Darwin and Angel, and Erik being like, daaaaamn. But it was kind of an intense ride for me -- most of it was written frantically over the course of last weekend, as, um, you might have noticed. I'd originally intended to include flashbacks of Charles & Raven's altered backstory, but when I realized how massive the main plotline was becoming, I cut them all out. Possibly there's another fic in there; possibly there's also another fic continuing the AU version of events through the end of the movie. Possibly I should just leave it be. My main regret with this is that I didn't have the time to fully explore the changes in Charles's outlook on the world due to losing Raven so early on -- I think he'd be much more pragmatic and less optimistic about the Shaw situation, and far less scrupulous about his own use of his powers to achieve his goals. And, on the flip side, he would actually be able to understand Erik's point of view much better -- there wouldn't be such a wide chasm of miscommunication between them, which would serve both them and the team much better in the long run. I'm not sure how well any of that came across. But it was interesting to explore. (Original prompts from confusedkayt: badassery leading to kissing, holding one another, Erik connecting with Alex. I did manage to incorporate all three!)

So...yeah. That happened. :)