PROFESSOR X

The most consequential romance of Charles Xavier’s life began in a hospital ward in India, and it began with a patient who had run out of reasons to get up. Fresh from the fight that had cost him the use of his legs, Xavier was sinking into bitterness when an American Red Cross nurse named Amelia Voght took over his rehabilitation — and, stubbornly, his morale. The flashback that revealed all of this ran in Uncanny X-Men #309 (1994), nearly three decades after the X-Men debuted: before the school, before the team, there was Amelia.

She was hiding something bigger than a bedside manner. Amelia was a mutant herself, able to dissolve solid matter — her own body included — into vapour, and when she stumbled on Xavier’s early designs for a mutant-tracking machine, she assumed the worst and attacked him. The misunderstanding cleared the moment he admitted he was a mutant too, and the two left India together, eventually settling at his Westchester mansion while he quietly prepared to gather and train young mutants.

That preparation is what killed it. Amelia believed mutants would survive only by staying hidden, and she begged him to abandon the very idea of a public team. When his first young recruit moved into the mansion, she decided to leave — and in his panic, the world’s most principled telepath did the unthinkable: he reached into her mind and tried to force her to see his side. He stopped himself almost at once, horrified, but she had felt it happen. She slapped him, walked out, and years later resurfaced in the last place he ever expected: standing in the ranks of Magneto’s Acolytes, as one of his most trusted followers.