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Six eights are forty-eight and that cancels out with the sixteen, but she can't for the life of her remember what to do when something in a pair of brackets is raised to the power of one-third --
"The answer's three," says Charles.
Raven reaches across the table and pokes the back of his hand with her pencil. "Stop it," she says. "How am I supposed to learn otherwise?"
"You keep having trouble with the indices," he says. Here, does this help?
A packet of thoughts that feels too large for the size of her brain slides in and up and to the front of her thinking, and a quick ache ignites behind her eyes. Raven stares at the paper and it's suddenly crystal-clear what she's been doing wrong and how simply the index translates into a root function. It only lasts for a moment, then the headache takes over and the knowledge is fading away.
Charles winces. "I honestly thought that would work," he says. "Sorry. I'll work on it."
"You can't be there in every test I'm ever going to take, you know."
"I know." He smiles at her. "It's just hard, when I know the answer, to not say it."
Raven raises one eyebrow at him. She only learned to do this yesterday. "Then stop looking," she says.
"That's even harder!" Charles laughs. "I'm going to get us some lemonade."
Which means Cara will suddenly take it into her head to bring them some lemonade, as a treat. As a surprise.
Raven is still small enough that her feet don't touch the polished floor when the two of them sit at the table to do their homework. Furniture makes her feel itchy after a while, so she usually ends up on the floor, stretched out on her stomach, listening to her brother blurt answers into her mind and making other people's faces at herself in the reflective surface of the window.
~
The sound of waves is in the background, the first time Charles takes control of her body. It's a sunny day, not hot, but warm, and the beach is full of people on vacation. Charles has been reading about the effect of UV radiation on DNA for a school project, and is newly paranoid about cancer. He produces a bottle of sunblock and they rub it into each other's backs; Raven endures the coolness of the cream, stretching out her legs on the scratchy surface of the sand, and she thinks: this isn't even my real skin. Surely I can tan it if I want to.
The UV damage would be the same, Charles says. No matter what you look like at the time. His hand pauses between her shoulderblades and she feels his fingers spread out. Hold still a moment, he says.
Raven reaches to the side and picks up a bottle of water. Her body wants to jerk in surprise, because she hadn't intended to do anything of the sort, but it can't. It won't.
Charles?
I -- I did it!
Her body is her own again, and she sets the water down.
Do you have to touch someone for this to work?
I think so, at the moment. But I'm going to practice.
He pulls his hand away and she turns around to face him. There's something about Charles in the grip of a new discovery, be it a scientific concept or a untasted variety of cake; his whole body becomes a canvas for excitement, until you can't help but feel drawn in.
"Why didn't you do this before?" she asks. "It seems like it would be easier than planting an idea in people's minds, and you've been doing that forever."
He shrugs. There's a smear of imperfectly rubbed sunblock on his shoulder. "Minds are one thing. Minds controlling bodies is tricky."
Raven hugs her sandy knees up to her chest and grins. "You like tricky."
"I do." Charles grins back.
He also likes experiments, which is how Raven ends up in the cellars of their house, cavernous spaces that smell like cold concrete and old glass, while Charles finds the highest place he can possibly access without crawling onto the roof. They experiment with walls in between. With distance. Charles learns to separate the four arms of his power: reading, communicating, influencing thought and influencing action. Communication is Raven's favourite; she loves it when Charles starts conversations with her over a silent dinner table and they try to make one another laugh around mouthfuls of Sunday roast, peas wobbling off Raven's fork as she presses her lips together and shakes with amusement.
"It's like having our very own telephones that we can take everywhere," says Charles. "Or two-way radios."
"But they aren't two-way," Raven points out. They're sitting under a tree on the grounds, out of sight of the house. "You get to talk to me whenever you like, but I have to wait for you to speak first."
They try Raven thinking really hard in Charles's direction, which is a complete failure; it's not surprising, Charles says. She's not a telepath so her thoughts can't be projected, they can only be read.
"How about something easier," she says, and holds up one hand with her thumb and forefinger making a circle. "This is me pressing the button on my radio, and it means I want to talk. It'll only work if you can see me, but it's better than nothing."
"Perfect," he says. "Let's give it a try."
Raven picks up a leaf and twirls it, pretending to be very interested in the pattern of the veins. With her other hand she forms the circle.
Hello, Xavier residence, says Charles, an imperfect but hilarious impression of his stepfather. His stepfather, not theirs; Raven picks and chooses the people she'll consider family, and so far only Charles has made the cut. She doesn't feel any loyalty to these well-dressed adults who believe that the idea to adopt her was their own. She doesn't kid herself that they wouldn't kick her onto the street, or have her locked away, if they knew what she is.
"I'm surprised they don’t know about you."
Charles looks away. "They used to," he says. "I -- I've tried to show them, a few times, but it never works out."
"So you make them forget."
He nods.
Not long after that Raven wakes in the middle of the night to find Charles shaking her shoulder. "I want to show you something new."
She closes her eyes again. "Can't it wait until morning?"
No.
That wakes her up. She slides out of bed and Charles turns his back while she blearily locates her robe; he's old enough now that he's starting to worry about stupid things like modesty. He leads her from the wing of the house that holds their bedrooms to the lower one where his parents sleep. Raven can barely see herself in the glass surfaces that they pass; she's just a pair of golden eyes shining out of the darkness, bobbing along after the pale gleam of Charles's hands and face.
You have to watch carefully, he says when they're standing next to the huge bed, looking at the sleeping couple.
Raven's breaths seem too loud. Watch what?
Charles puts two fingers to one temple, which seems to give his powers greater focus for no reason that either of them can determine. It's lucky that his stepfather is a restless sleeper, because Raven can see the exact moment that his feet go still and his hand halts its slow slide beneath the pillow. Even Charles's mother seems to have a different quality to her sleep.
They're --
Frozen, Charles says, their whole bodies. They can't move -- you can touch them, go on.
Raven does. She touches the motionless man beneath the angle of his jaw, holding her fingertips against the warm, stubbled skin until she feels the steady push of his pulse.
Charles works out what she's doing. I keep the heart going, and the diaphragm. I can't do it on people while they're awake yet, there's too much to control.
What's it like? she asks, stepping back from the bed. Reading a mind that's asleep.
He hesitates. If they're not dreaming, it's like a blank page. Nothing to read.
And if they are?
Charles looks at his mother. The dim light in the room makes him look grave and immovable, like the little porcelain boy in the sitting room who gazes endlessly down at the basket in his porcelain hands.
Dreams are strange, he says. They make sense when you're the one having them. But when you're trying to read them they're just nonsense stories.
The echo of the pulse against Raven's fingertips is what makes her realise, for the first time, that Charles could kill anyone he wanted, without much effort.
~
At first it was exciting, choosing her disguise. She'd only ever copied entire people before. The face she uses for everyday wear is what Charles calls a pastiche, but there does come a day when she looks in the mirror and can't separate the features from the whole: this is her face now, she's worn it comfortable at the edges. She still sleeps in her own blue skin, but more and more she puts on her face each morning and takes it off at night, just like any teenage girl.
All teenagers want to be normal. All teenagers want to fit in. Some days Raven wants it so hard she thinks she might bleed with the effort.
There are mitigating factors, of course. Not every teenage girl can sit in the park eating ice cream with her brother and playing a game that pits her powers of observation against his powers of telepathy.
"She's angrier than she's letting on." Gesturing with her waffle cone towards one half of a couple talking under a tree. Vanilla drips down onto her thumb and she sucks it off.
"Angry about what?" Charles has one arm stretched along the back of the bench, looking up at the glitter of sun through the trees. Raven makes a rude sound and shoves at his shoulder.
"I'm right?"
He grins; still at the trees, but wide and proud. "I don't know how you do it."
"Of course you don't," Raven says, pointing her cone at him.
When she was younger she watched people carefully in order to become them, but it was like memorising a song in another language: the imitation was perfect but she never bothered to learn what it meant. Now she can translate, because Charles will tell her the answers. All she has to do is build up a vocabulary of patterns.
The external aspects of Charles are the easiest for her to understand, after so many years, and for a long time she tells herself that it's enough to make up for his powers, but there comes a day when it isn't. A day when she glances sideways and sees in his face the faint concern for whatever he's skimmed off the top of her thoughts today, and she's had enough. Enough.
His face changes. "You mean it?"
"Yes. We can still talk, and I'll still do your experiments with you, you know I don't mind that. But no more looking just to look. If you want to know what I'm thinking, you ask. Promise," she says.
Charles looks at her. She's reassured by the amount of time it takes for him to nod. "I promise."
For the first time in her life Raven has the normal, human experience of being able to lie to her brother. She doesn't, often. Just sometimes. Just to prove she can, she tells herself; not to see if he's still listening.
The last experiment they do together has to do with the perception of time, something that Charles is excited about.
"Freezing someone's body is one thing, but unless they're asleep they can tell you're doing it, so there's no point. I was thinking about it in terms of pausing their thoughts in time, but that's the wrong way to go about it. It's easier to convince the brain to simply erase the memory of each subsequent moment as it happens."
"So when you unfreeze them, they don't know they were ever frozen."
"Exactly."
She frowns. "What use would that be?"
Charles shrugs. "Cheating in exams?"
"Charles." She pretends shock.
"Oh, not that I would. What would be the point in winning, if you knew you'd cheated?"
That's Charles all over. Incredible powers developed purely for the game of it, the science of it.
"All right," she says. "Let's give it a try."
Charles gazes into her eyes, but he only holds his fingers to his temple for a few brief seconds before dropping them again.
"It didn't work?"
"Oh, it did." He smiles.
~
The funeral is held two days after Charles gets the news about Oxford. Raven holds his hand and wonders numbly if the fact of the two coffins being lowered with tedious, agonising ceremony into the ground will change anything, anything at all.
Charles inherits everything; he managed to slide Raven into their minds and into their lives, but not into their legal documents. The house, their house, Charles's house, is even bigger and colder when she tries to imagine herself in it alone.
"You could stay," Charles says. "We -- we can afford to keep on some of the staff, if you want."
She presses her lips together for a moment, close to real tears. "As if I would let you skip the country without me, you idiot."
Thank you. He's always sounded more genuine like this. Raven. Thank you. You'll finish school in England, and then --
"And then we'll see," Raven says. Charles loves to plan, but if Raven knows anything about plans it's that they can disappoint you when they fall through.
The night they arrive she looks around her new townhouse and feels like crying. It's comfortable, of course, but deathly quiet. Charles couldn't exactly take her to Balliol with him, and he has to live in his college for a year at least. Here she is, not fitting in. Again.
"I'll talk to you every night," he said, when he hugged her goodbye. "And we'll go to dinner. And we'll explore, on the weekends; you can push me out of a boat and into the river, how's that?"
"They're called punts, even I know that," Raven said.
She's read enough Dorothy Sayers that the town isn't entirely foreign, but it takes a while for it to stop feeling like she's slipped between the pages of a book. Oxford is a beautiful place, divided invisibly into those associated with the university and -- well, the support staff, really. Those people whose lives are necessary for the existence of Oxford, but lie outside of it. It's a lot better after the first year, when Charles moves in with her and their life together is a new kind of normal. Raven attends school with the children of professors, and heads towards graduation without fuss or acclaim, and Charles tells her that he's been offered a place in the genetics department to work towards his DPhil.
"I've been thinking," he adds, "I know you don't like the idea of the exams, but --"
She laughs. "I told you, I'm not going to the University."
"Then where?"
"Some people have these things called 'jobs'," she says. "I know the concept is foreign to you lofty academic types, but they're considered quite normal in the real world."
"Promise me you'll at least think about it."
"That's not my life, Charles," she says. "It's yours."
"I worry about you," he says.
"Well, don't." She nudges his shoulder with her own. "Come on, let's go out. I want pizza."
Leaving school behind is a relief, and she was telling the truth: she hates the idea of more regimented study. She learns best when she can set her own agenda, read the books she wants to read and absorb knowledge at her own pace. But she can't make up her mind what her life is, if it isn't this. She can do amazing things, but her powers have to be hidden. She feels as though she's waiting for something, a role that life hasn't seen fit to offer her yet, and while she waits at least she has her best friend to keep her company.
The parties they attend are held in small houses shared by groups of students, most of whom share Charles's weird gleeful attitude towards learning. There's music that nobody can be bothered to turn down, and alcohol everywhere; if Raven thought that university parties would be of a magically higher calibre here in Oxford, she was mistaken. She drinks cheap wine and a few shots of something that turns out to be a very expensive birthday present from someone's Scottish grandfather. Charles is off arguing bioethics with a classmate in a corner, or flirting with predictable success with a succession of loud, well-educated girls; Raven takes her latest drink and heads upstairs where the music is quieter. She'll sit down for a bit and then she'll go and dance.
One of the people living in the house has the entire works of Agatha Christie on their bookshelf. Raven has drained her glass and is flicking with vague nostalgia through Death on the Nile, not quite focusing on the individual words, when she realises someone is standing nearby. She looks up and the guy smiles.
"I like a woman of mystery," he says.
Raven giggles because the line's bad, but it's still funny.
He takes that as encouragement, and steps close so he can kiss her. Raven's still amused, to begin with, but his tongue is heavy and she isn't really in the mood. She's never been this drunk before and she's discovered a turning point on the edge of the nice feelings, a point where parts of her are starting to feel not quite so good about the whole thing, and what she'd really like to do would be to lie down quietly with her head in Charles's lap and have him tell her about purines and pyrimidines while he strokes her hair.
"No, thanks," she says, with a gentle push.
The push isn't enough; she tries a more forceful one, but he's a lot stronger than she is, and suddenly the lack of people upstairs is a problem. She turns her head to the side -- "I said no," and realises that he closed the door behind him when he entered the room. Through the cloudiness, Raven starts gathering breath to scream in his face.
How's the party? Charles's voice feels rough against her soft, fuzzed brain, but Raven's never been so happy to hear it.
Need a little help, no time, just have a look, and she slams her eyes as wide open as they'll go so that Charles can use them.
Now she just has to buy time, and in a stroke of what feels like genius, she shifts entirely into her own body. It works; the man makes a shocked, wordless noise and jerks away.
"Bloody -- alien cunt," he growls, the terror on his face not quite enough to displace the anger. He's moving in to trap her again, one hand raised, when the door handle gives a frantic rattle and the door slams open.
The image of Charles with one hand focusing his powers and the other locked white-knuckled around a bottle of beer is one that Raven is going to laugh about later, but right now all she cares about is that the man has frozen in his tracks. There's a soft flutter of his racing pulse at the base of his neck, an almost imperceptible rise and fall of his ribs.
Even in the midst of tipsy relief, Raven takes a moment to marvel at the amount of control it must have taken for Charles to selectively immobilise so many muscles, but leave the man breathing; leave him living. And that isn't even counting what he's done to the conscious mind itself.
"Can he see us? Or have you done the time thing?"
Charles ignores the question and throws his beer bottle onto the bed, then crosses the room to her side. "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine. It was just -- hard to get away." Raven blinks as Charles gently lifts her forearm and shows her her own hand, which is shaking.
"I'm sorry I couldn't get here sooner," he says. Next to his hard anger, that of the frozen man seems -- what's a nice word. What's a word Charles would use. Paltry. Charles focuses one more time and the man's eyes close; he falls in a sudden sagging and lands on the floor.
"He blacked out," says Charles, flatly. "Tomorrow, he won't remember most of this party. And he definitely won't remember assaulting a girl who turned blue."
"Thanks," she says, and suddenly he's hugging her, holding her tight, his cheek against the roughness of hers.
~
The next day they agree on two things. The first -- Raven's idea -- is that she will take some self-defence classes. The second -- Charles's idea -- is that she won't be drinking alcohol in public any more, just at home.
Raven's head aches and her throat feels sour, so she's inclined to agree, but she has to argue with her brother when she has the chance; it's good for him. "Some asshole puts his hands all over me and I have to stop drinking? Really?"
"It's not that," says Charles. "I know it wasn't your fault, and if it was just that then I wouldn't be insisting. But you changed, Raven. You showed him what you are. I can wipe one person's memory, but what if it had been bigger? What if you'd been in the middle of a crowded room?"
"You're powerful enough to wipe a lot of memories, Charles," she says, and already knows what he'll say next.
"But I don't want to have to." He puts a hand on her shoulder. "Please, Raven. Don't put me in that position. We have good lives here, we musn't jeopardize them."
"Sure," she says, plucking at her black shirt. "Our lives are so-oo wonderful. Speaking of which, I should go to work."
Raven thinks of herself as a decent person, but waitressing is a bird flying a short distance and back again, hammering away in tiny but maddening strokes at the rock of her faith in humanity. She could have withstood a couple of months of it, probably, but by now she's peppered with holes. And yet Charles, who sees people, who must know how shitty people are as a general rule -- nothing can erode him. Raven is closer to him than anyone and she still hasn't decided if it's his basic nature or a special sort of self-defence.
Today the untiring bird comes in the shape of a married couple, late thirties, who decide that 'American waitress' equates to 'moron' and make a show of speaking to Raven as though she's mentally deficient, loudly enough to draw looks from the other tables.
How are things? Charles says, when she's grimly organising glasses and gathering the strength to remain polite the next time she's insulted to her face.
Have a look, she suggests.
Bastards, Charles says after a moment, with warm dismissal. If it cheers you at all, my day isn't much better, and for a second she can see a sharp, clear picture of his desk, littered with half-filled sheets of paper and the tiny white scraps that mean he's been sitting there methodically tearing something into pieces. He does that when he's stuck.
The man -- whose name, Raven has learned through normal human eavesdropping, is Paul -- wipes his mouth on his napkin and honest-to-God clicks his fingers for her, like she's a dog.
Got to go.
Spit in something, Charles suggests. He's joking, but it gives her an idea.
When the odious couple finally leave, Raven excuses herself for a bathroom break. She slips out the back door and turns herself into a small brunette with reddened eyes and a worried expression. Halfway across the parking lot, she strikes.
"Paul!" She runs up to them as the man turns. "I saw your car, I'm sorry, I had to -- Paul, I'm pregnant." She filters the last word through a gentle crack in her voice.
"Who the hell are you?" demands Paul, predictably.
Raven lets her eyes appear to fill with tears. "What? Why would you say that? You, you said you loved me! When I finished school, you said…" For the first time she turns her pleading look on Paul's wife, who is beginning to look as though she's smelled something bad.
Paul finally realises that he's paying attention to the wrong woman. "Darling, I swear --" but his wife doesn't let him finish before she starts walking away.
Raven gets a scolding for disappearing during her break, and slices the side of her hand open helping to clear up some dropped glasses, but nothing can spoil her mood for the rest of the afternoon.
~
Her life changes with whiplash speed, and all because Charles meets yet another clever girl in a pub. They're flown back to America by the CIA, of all the ridiculous things, and Charles makes a satisfying scene in the glass-walled foyer when a man in a suit tries to stop Raven from coming to the meeting.
"A matter of security..."
Charles, who is not tall, puts his hands in his pockets and fixes the man with a clear, superior look. "Certainly," he says. "You may wish to call the Director, just let him know that his special expert won't be attending the meeting, there's a good chap."
The man frowns. "What?"
"Oh, do forgive me. I'll spell it out for you." Charles smiles his wonderful smile, with more teeth than usual. "She goes where I go."
Agent McTaggart makes a small sound that could be a cough, but probably isn't.
Raven runs a strand of her hair through her fingers and leans against Charles's side. "So if you'll just show us the way?" she says sweetly.
She won't be any use during the raid on Shaw's boat, she knows, but she still falls into a sulking fit that she recovers from about ten minutes into exploring the hotel room that the Agency has paid for. There are three types of bubble bath, and soft white robes in the closet. She orders too much food from room service, and a single glass of white wine, and lies on the ludicrous bed reading magazines.
And then Charles brings a half-drowned German home.
"This is Erik Lehnsherr," he says, his voice exploring the name. "I just saw him try to lift a submarine out of the water."
Erik's hair is drying in awkward clumps and there's a towel draped over his shoulders; he keeps glancing at Charles as though he's expecting him to disappear, and Charles keeps glancing back.
"Erik, this is my sister, the one I told you about."
"Raven," she says, extending a hand, which Erik takes.
"And what can you do, Raven?" he says.
When her hand changes in his, Erik doesn't pull away. He waits until the transformation is complete, and then he smiles; it transforms him, in turn, from someone that Raven might avoid on the street to someone she wants to know better.
"Extraordinary," he says.
"You sound exactly like Charles," she tells him.
Erik's mouth twitches. "I'm flattered." His eyes are lit up with a sincerity that warms her all the way through, and Raven feels a surge of happiness so fierce that she throws her arms around him. Erik tenses immediately, and then she feels him relax as though he's given himself permission.
"It's wonderful to meet you, Erik Lehnsherr," she says, resting her chin on his shoulder. "We're on your side, now."
What's even more extraordinary than that is the fact that he's on their side. For so long it's just been the two of them; her and Charles, the first and only person who wasn't afraid of her real form. Erik is the second.
She makes the decision to be on Hank McCoy's side almost as quickly, because while Charles's outing of his powers probably comes at the best possible time… she can see it, that familiar flash of wariness, as Hank realises that his brilliant mind full of brilliant secrets is no longer his to guard.
"Charles," she says, later, wrapping her arms around his neck from behind as he sits reading. "You shouldn't get into the habit of reading them as soon as you look at them, you know. It's not fair."
One of his hands clasps her forearm, loosely, and he closes his book with a finger crooked in to keep his place. "You've never objected to it before."
The thought seats itself in her mind: they were never our equals, before.
And despite the fact that the physical contact would make it as easy as breathing for him, Charles is not in her mind. She can tell because he would have reacted, if he'd heard that thought; he would have turned around and argued.
~
Hank leads the way up the stairs and Raven watches his hand on the railing, steady and sure. She noticed it last night, that his hands belie his otherwise nervous exterior; even when she leaned in close, even when their lips were almost touching, the needle barely budged in her arm. There's a bruise there today, of course, because leaning forward wasn't exactly the smartest thing to do, but Raven doesn't regret it. Normal, she tells herself, in time with her footsteps on the metal. Normal, normal, normal. If Hank can do it she'll drag him into bed by the lapels of his lab coat, no matter how much he blushes.
She likes him. He has some of Charles's sweetness and cleverness, but none of the arrogance; he's clearly never thought well of himself, despite his accomplishments. Raven wants to take him by the shoulders and shake some sense into him, to tell him that she knows he's worth so much more. She has some sympathy for the twitches of Charles's hands, when his thoughtful glances linger on Erik, that mean exactly the same thing.
She smiles at her feet at the idea of anyone shaking Erik and not risking their hands in the process, and then light shines overhead and they step up into the installation.
There's an energy in the air that captures all of them: the idea of community. Growing up Charles and Raven used to talk about other mutants, where they might be, what they might be able to do, and part of why Charles has clung to the habit of reading strangers is that he's never, ever given up hope that someday he'll stumble across another one.
Cerebro isn't exactly stumbling. Cerebro is a promise.
"I've been a lab rat," Erik says, "I know one when I see one," and Charles inhales, his face luminous under the lights.
Later Raven will decide on that moment as the one when the CIA lost all chance they might have had of controlling Charles Xavier. Erik isn't the sort of person one can plan for.
It's probably not as obvious to anyone else. Raven's the only one who really knows Charles, and she wonders if the Erik they're all seeing is a man changed from his former self in similar ways; if he's more vivid, more present and alive, acting as though everything he does is in some way a performance. Look what I can do. Look what we are.
Hank's machine churns out numbers, every one representing someone who might be hiding, someone they can set free. Raven leaves Erik watching her brother and hovers over the list, wishing, wondering.
"Erik and I will recruit in person," Charles says.
"You're taking Erik?" Hank says, and promptly closes his mouth and looks at his toes.
Erik, leaning against the wall, lets the silence twang for a moment, then produces one of his sharp rocksalt smiles. "I can be friendly," he says.
Charles gives a completely undignified laugh.
Angel probably isn't a milestone in anyone else's mind, but Raven's heart does a stupid leaping thing when she first walks in the door, clutching a large bag to her chest and looking wary but fierce.
"Hey! I'm Raven." She hurries forward, smiling. "You have no idea how great it is to see another girl around here."
Angel's eyes are fast, and untrusting, but after sweeping down Raven and back up again they relax around the edges. "Yeah, no kidding," she says. "I thought it was going to be all suits and leather jackets."
Sensing an opening, Raven shifts instantly into her version of Erik; the body language is still off, but that doesn't matter. She just folds her arms and looks over-the-top stoic, and Angel gives an approving snort, and then they're friends.
One by one they trickle in, the hard-won misfits from all across the country -- fewer than Raven knows they were hoping for, but the right ones, in her opinion. She wouldn't know how to relate to people who are comfortable enough in their own lives that they wouldn't think of leaving them behind for something larger. Before this group of awkwardly incredible young people she's never had a chance at fitting in, even though she's more of a chameleon than Darwin. Adapt to survive. She's too damn adaptable, that's her problem, and she can never seem to win: even when she lets herself relax for the first time in what seems like months, dissolving herself in the party spirit, all of them heady and young and powerful and newborn -- the evening still ends with Charles looking pained.
She knocks on his door ten minutes later, too buzzed with laughter to sleep, and too annoyed to let it go.
"Raven --"
"You expected better?" she says acidly, and Charles sighs and lets her in.
"I'm sorry," he says as soon as the door's shut, which pulls her up short. He doesn't apologise nearly as often as he should, but it's always sincere when he does. "I know you're all cooped up in here and there's nothing to do. I'm going to talk to Moira about it. It's just -- we need to make a good impression, now, while we're just starting to be visible."
"The people here were scared of us already," she says. "If anything I think we just made ourselves look more normal."
"There's nothing normal about your dancing," Charles says, but he's smiling. "What was your nickname, by the way?"
She grins. "Mystique. Go on, tell me it's groovy."
"Little bit dramatic, don't you think?"
"You know I've always liked a good mystery, Professor."
Charles makes a face. "I'm still not sure I like that. It does make me sound rather old."
"That's the point," says Raven. "I thought it might help."
"You're responsible for this?"
She laughs. "Sean -- Banshee wanted to call you Telepatho. So you and Erik could be a matched set."
"Ah, then I should thank you for intervening."
"You're not that much older than they are, Charles," she says. "If it helps them think of you as an authority figure, then that's a good thing."
Charles gives her a long, slow look that doesn't have anything to do with telepathy. He leans in and hugs her, a gesture that's as familiar and comforting to Raven as the feel of her true skin, and as he pulls back he kisses her at the side of her mouth.
"I don't know what I'd do without you," he says.
~
Moira whisks Erik and Charles off to Russia, or possibly the other way around, before anything can be done about their boredom levels. Hank doesn't seem to notice: he's got his lab and his occasional requests for more of Raven's blood, and spends a lot of time staring earnestly down microscopes. Raven makes sure to drag him into the living area after meals, though, because Alex and Sean talk enough shit about him as it is; better that they say it to his face.
She can entertain the whole group for almost an hour by feeding them stories about Charles -- "He knows all of our secrets," Sean points out, "so it's only fair."
He's firmly Professor X in their minds now, so Raven has no qualms about covering some of the high and low points of his Oxford days, failed attempts at coxing and drunken poetry recitals in pubs and all. The last story ends with Raven standing atop the low table, doing her best version of a decade-younger Charles, inventing badly-rhyming verses while Angel laughs until she's hiccupping.
"What about Magneto?" Alex asks.
Raven hops down from the table, blonde again, and shrugs. "We haven't known him much longer than you guys."
"Jesus," says Darwin. "I woudn't have picked it. He and the Professor act just like my parents did."
"Ten bucks says Mile High Club, right now," says Angel, and everyone groans. "What, it's not like they're not obvious."
Personally Raven's not convinced that anything's happened, because Charles has always worn that kind of happiness openly. And even Erik, she suspects, has become expert at keeping his pain and anger out of sight until they're needed, but hasn't had to learn to do the same with his joys.
"But -- aren't we trying to be accepted?" Hank says. "Isn't that the point here? I mean, I like them as much as you guys do, I respect them, but it does seem like they're just adding fuel to a fire that really doesn't need any more fuel."
"We’re already freaks," Darwin says, quietly. "We're already feared. Magneto can bend a car in half and the Professor can read their minds -- who they're sleeping with doesn't seem that big, in the scheme of things, does it?"
He knocks his foot casually against Alex's and Raven thinks, ah.
"People have an enormous capacity for hate," she says, but then she steers the conversation elsewhere. Alex stands anyway and beckons Darwin over to watch him show off at pinball.
She wishes she hadn't said it, later; she's not superstitious, but the atmosphere in the room is generally one of anger after Hank shuts the curtains against the assholes outside. And when people start falling from the sky and being stabbed to death in front of them, Raven has the brief, hysterical thought: did we do this, somehow, without meaning to?
The thought after that, of course, is: and will anyone believe us if we didn't?
She can't find the breath to calm herself down; she wishes she could, she'd always hoped she would be level-headed in a crisis, but she isn't -- she's terrified and every organ in her body feels sick and sour with panic. The sounds of men dying are everywhere, no matter where they run, and things are exploding and nothing is safe and Raven realises that she'd thought this was all going to be fun -- the CIA's mutant division, freaks on holiday, enjoying the adventure without actually thinking about the implications. She hadn't prepared herself for anything like this.
It takes so long for the adrenalin to stop clouding her mind that Shaw is halfway through his speech when his identity clicks. Not the part about the missiles. The part where Erik has been trying to kill this man for years, and he's right there, and they're shaking like children in a corner while he tells them that they're special; that they should join him. The dissonance rocks Raven on her feet. Charles would be talking right back at Shaw, if he were here, he'd know exactly what to say in that calm intense voice he uses to talk people into the ground, and all of them would be steady.
Angel would be steady.
"We don't belong here," Angel says, and Raven almost says, I know.
But that's it, it seems. They're leaving. Everything will be all right -- except for the dozens of mutilated bodies now scattered around the complex, which someone else can fucking deal with -- everything will be fine. Fine.
She's halfway to convincing herself when Darwin crosses the room to Shaw and Alex doesn't say a word. Every alarm that Raven has begins to blare beneath her skin, and she's a heartbeat away from shifting blue, but she forces herself to walk calmly and humanly out of the living area before the chaos breaks.
"What --" says Sean at the familiar sound of Alex turning Havoc, but Raven grabs his arm and twists him against the wall before he can go back through the doorway.
"No," she snaps. "Wait."
What would be useful right now would be the ability to blend in with the painted walls of the building, but she's only ever been able to do people, not décor. She gives Sean another pointed thump on the shoulders and crouches down to beneath eye level, then peeks around the frame of the door.
Later she'll have exactly three nightmares about what Shaw does next. She probably makes a sound. She isn't aware of it at the time.
"Raven," Hank says, his face almost ashen, and he grabs her and pulls her away and upright. Her own hands are pressed so hard over her mouth that they're crushing her nose. "Breathe," he says awkwardly.
She inhales the air that smells of something burning, the stink of what Shaw just did, killed Darwin with Alex's own power, in front of him. At the thought of it her stomach churns, but something else inside of her hardens irrevocably. No matter where the missiles are, this is their enemy. This is their fight, and next time she intends to be ready.
~
One of the many science experiments that Charles did with her when they were young, coaching her understanding without invading her head in order to do it, involved iron filings. She remembers his small white hands levelling the paper, her own blue ones sprinkling the coarse grey dust from a pepper shaker appropriated for the purpose.
"Ready?" Charles said, eyes bright.
She nodded.
Charles held a magnet beneath the paper and a pattern drifted into life, rough curves and tendrils, as the iron was pulled into place by a power greater than its own insignificant mass.
This is why she remembers: because somewhere between the attack and the return to Westchester, she realises how it feels to be in a room with Charles and to have Erik enter it. Or vice versa. The centre of the room is suddenly between them, and all attention is pulled and shaped by their polarity.
Despite the apt metaphor, it's got nothing to do with Erik's power. It could be Charles, but he's never had a problem with keeping himself contained.
It's just them, Raven thinks. Just them, aligning around her until she can't name north.
Being back in the house after so long is odd. Raven herself is bigger, but she's lived in a smaller house for years. It's empty of servants, but now contains a scattering of mutants. She relearns the corridors and revisits memories and the place seems to expand and contract around her like she's Alice in Wonderland. They leave a lot of the rooms closed and white-sheeted, but spend an entire day cleaning and reviving the sitting rooms and studies and a handful of bedrooms. Moira protests that the CIA could have had someone do this for them, to save time, but Charles rests his hand against a door handle and shakes his head.
"They can choose their own rooms this way," he says, which is a true statement, but not really the truth. They've found a home ground, now, and the CIA must put up with being their guests for a change.
Raven goes back to her old room and finds that everything good about it is still there: the view across the grounds where the trees are thickest and she can catch the edge of the sunset, the red paint on the windowframes, the furniture made of heavy wood so dark it's almost black.
There's a rap of knuckles on the door and she turns around and sees Erik. "Training," he says. "Come on."
Going back downstairs with him is to become aware, for the first time, of just how much metal is built into this house. Locks and fixtures and ornaments, handles and lights and frames and statues. Raven's power -- like most of their powers, in fact -- has nothing to do with her environment, but walking next to Erik, she tries to imagine how it might feel to be surrounded by potential. And how it might feel if that potential were removed.
She would stick to cities, if she were Erik.
Most of the others are training to increase either the scope of their abilities or the amount of control they have over them. There's not much use for a shapeshifter as blunt instrument -- if she's honest, she's more suited to Erik's style of making war on people, quiet and cruel and unglorious -- but Raven will take on this fight with her fists if need be. Her self-defence lessons, a while ago now, have left patterns of memory in muscles that aren't as toned as they should be. So while Alex incinerates their basement, and Sean apologises about the top-floor windows, and Hank clears new paths of flattened grass around the house, Raven lifts weights and goes for more pedestrian jogs.
"Can you handle yourself in a fight?" Erik asks her. There's no insult in his tone, just the question, like he's ticking her off a checklist.
She's always had the urge to impress him, but there's no point in lying. "Depends on the fight," she says. "Mostly I know how to get away fast."
So now she lifts weights and jogs and Erik knocks her methodically to the ground, or holds her in grips she can't escape from, and teaches her how to do the same to him. She's gaining a collection of bruises that only show up on her real skin, unless she deliberately creates them in the morning.
"That's an asset," Erik says. "Keep them invisible and I won't know where you're weak."
Charles spends most of his time encouraging the others, but sometimes he appears in the doorway and watches them. With his hand wrapped around a cup of tea and his relentlessly staid clothes he looks harmless, set against the deadly line of Erik's arms and the ringing in Raven's ears from being slammed into the wall. But his reflexes are superb. The first and only time that Erik manouevres their fight to within striking distance and then lashes out at Charles, with a feinting speed that has Raven ducking away from a fist that isn't even headed in her direction any more, Erik's hand makes it to within a foot of Charles's shoulder and then stops.
Erik isn't frozen entirely. He takes a gulp of air and lets it out on a laugh, looking at his motionless limbs.
"Charles," he says. "I'm impressed."
Charles takes a consciously dramatic sip of his tea, looking pleased. Raven, whose aching shoulders are crying out for revenge, tries to look nonchalant as she sweeps Erik's legs out from underneath him with one hard kick.
"Raven!" says Charles.
Erik looks briefly outraged, sprawled on the floor, but he has a small, unexpected capacity to laugh at himself. He looks up at the two of them and his mouth quirks, then he accepts Raven's hand and hauls himself to his feet.
"Not bad," he says. "Let's see you do it again."
By the end of every day she's exhausted, and hurting in creative ways, but she knows that she's improving.
"Yo, Mystique," says Alex, at dinner, and points towards his own eye with his fork. Raven looks into her polished spoon and sees her upside-down face blinking yellowly back.
"I'm tired," she says. "Sometimes that means I can't hold it."
Alex shrugs. "No big deal. Just wasn’t sure if you were doing it on purpose, or what."
Raven sets down the spoon and finds Erik looking at her, right at her, with a piercing gaze that she finds unsettling. She looks back, willing her eyes back to their normal unthreatening brown, until he glances away.
~
Moira McTaggart is so very human. Bright, and strong. But human. She helps them and fights for them, and will never find out that Charles is playing a long version of his favourite game with her. He smiles and she's charmed. He reads her mind, his enthusiasms spill out between his teeth like sugar grains, and she starts to fall. Mutant and proud, he says.
So yes, she is proud for them and proud of them, and although she never says it Raven can read it in the wistful way she watches them all: Moira wonders what her own mutation might have been, if she belonged. If.
The thing is, she doesn't talk to them. She talks to Charles, only to Charles, which would be funny if it didn't speak volumes about exactly what she thinks she's doing here. Raven would be quite happy to do her part for human-mutant relations or whatever the hell they're supposed to be building, if Moira would take the first step. If Moira would address a single word to Charles's impressively, visibly mutated little sister.
But she doesn't. And so Raven doesn't tell her that she doesn't have a hope in hell with Charles, because what she is to him is a postergirl for humanity's best case scenario. Moira is the open-minded, good-hearted argument behind the hypothesis that he is building as a gift for Erik, and Charles will never love her because he already suspects that she will not be enough to stand against the horrible weight of the opposing evidence.
That evidence -- Erik's life -- is a sore tooth Raven keeps prodding at, keeps returning to despite the fact that she honestly doesn't know how to deal with what he has suffered. She only knows a few concrete details and so the war exists in her mind as a nebulous nightmare cloud, warping and shifting based on her own imagination and the way she watches Erik eat every scrap of food on his plate without appearing to taste it properly, and without talking to anyone. Raven can fumble at the memories of what it felt like to be that hungry and that untrusting, she can grit her teeth at the difficulty of trying to understand another human being on such a level without having Charles's gift, but sooner or later her attempts at comparison dissolve.
Charles found her early; saved her early. If Charles had found Erik as a child -- he wouldn't be Erik, would he? He wouldn't be this bullet of a man whistling lonely and deadly through the clear air of his life. He wouldn't have that strength and that charcoal humour and that inexorable determination to never, ever have to hide the fundamental truth of himself from the world.
Raven the great reader of exteriors can read only sparse pages in the tilt of Erik's tattooed forearm as he lifts a car and makes it dance midair, the way he smiles the widest when he's about to do something dangerous. By and large she feels helpless in the face of what happened to one small German child who was bent and forged by evil.
Yes. Evil. She and Charles might pride themselves on trying to see both sides of any argument, but both of them have uncrossable lines. Whatever happened to Erik lies on the wrong side of Raven's line. Whatever he might choose to do in revenge… she hasn't decided yet. The word justifiable sits like a dusty diamond in her mind.
Her brother's feelings on the matter are obviously complicated, and it's not the kind of conversation that's easy to begin. Luckily, Raven has certain shortcuts available to her.
She's a lot better at turning herself into Erik than she was; she can do anyone on sight, their voice after a few minutes, but it takes longer to have the gestures and the expressions down. She raps lazily on the door of Charles's study and walks in at once, as Erik does, and gives one of Erik's less obvious smiles. It lives mainly around the eyes, and involves only a small quirk of the mouth.
Charles looks up at the sound and Raven has to fight to keep one of her own smiles from taking over. There it is, the glimpse of that wondering happiness she's been expecting.
"Busy?" she says.
"Not for you, you --" Charles blinks, hard. "Raven?"
Interesting. There's no way he knew on appearance alone. Raven sheds Erik's form and pulls a frown onto her face.
"Charles," she says, sharp with reproof to keep him off balance. "You'll stay out of my head, but you won't stay out of Erik's?"
Charles surprises her: he doesn't look guilty, or sorrowful, even for a moment. Instead that volatile wonder lingers and ignites.
"Would you?" he says. "If you could see him that much more clearly, would you refuse the chance?"
She was going to call him on the way his face changed when she entered the room, but there's no point, because it's all there in his voice.
"You don't need it, with me," she reminds him. "If you care about him that much --"
"We had years, Raven." Charles sighs and rubs at the small space between his eyes. He looks older, and more tired, than he has in months. "You think I don't know that we're heading for a fight? You think I don't know how dangerous this all is?"
She sits down, pulls her chair close and slides her arm around him; presses a kiss into his hairline and murmurs something comforting, something warm; nonsense stories. Charles lays his head on her shoulder.
"I have to know him now. It might be the only time I have. The only time that we're in the one place, and safe, and alive."
She understands. This is his one shot at tying Erik to them with bonds that might last beyond whatever destruction lies ahead. He's right: she'd do the same. Lacking telepathy, though, she can only act on what Charles has begun. They knocked him to the ground, together. They can do this.
Erik's in the kitchen when she finds him, the most metal-dense room in the house, but at least he's leaving the knives and saucepans alone. Instead he's dancing a handful of spare change through the air, one hand extended, his fingers moving minutely as the coins dart and spin around one another but never touch. His own version of precision training.
This is another conversation that Raven has no hope of starting delicately, so she goes for blunt instead.
"Are you as crazy about my brother as he is about you?"
The coins drop to the table, but not suddenly. They fall in deceleration and make no more than delicate clicks as they come to rest. Erik lowers his hand almost as slowly, and looks at her.
"Aren't you a little old to be stirring up this kind of trouble?" It's the closest he's come yet to sounding like a parent figure.
"Hey, I'm just looking out for his happiness." She leans down. "Which is something he's about as bad at doing for himself as you are, I'd imagine."
"Charles is --" and Erik stops. Stills, even though he was still; it's almost like the difference between a pair of people asleep in a bed, and the way those people look when Charles has frozen them out of time.
Erik knows it's not true; he's not as foolish as that, and if he were, she'd be dissuading him right now instead of trying to prod him into action. Charles is many things. But happy, really and honestly happy? No.
"Handsome?" she suggests brightly, to cover the danger. "Brilliant?"
Erik's mouth does something that is not a smile, but is trying to be, and after a couple of seconds his eyes soften; then it succeeds. He looks up at her, chin in one hand, fingers near his temple in a way that is so ludicrously like Charles that Raven has to stifle laughter.
"So you see," she goes on, "I'm here to ascertain your intentions, like a good sister."
"I have no intentions," Erik says, a burnished gold murmur through that only-just-a-smile. Raven's arms tingle at the sound of it, feathering momentarily blue around the wrists, and before she can think it over she leans down even further and kisses his forehead.
"Well then," she says, into the silence of his surprise. "I suggest you get some."
~
There's a painting by Réne Magritte that Raven remembers from a trip to New York City, not long before the accident that killed Charles's parents. Magritte painted it while in German-occupied Brussels, during the war.
The painting is of a woman, naked, leaning against a rock and silhouetted against clouds and sky. From waist to legs, elbow to hand, the woman's skin is a pale apricot; entirely normal.
The top half of her body is blue.
What Raven remembers is standing in front of the painting and wondering which way the woman was changing. Whether she'd started out normal and the blue was washing down over her like paint, or if she'd always been blue and was now turning herself that pale flesh colour through sheer force of will. If it was the latter, it looked slow. It looked like she was concentrating on it.
Erik's teaching method has always been blunt -- let them fall until they can fly, and bruise until they can fight -- so it's unsurprising that he teaches her the most important thing of all by dropping weights onto her chest. She'd never thought about it as requiring concentration, but when has she ever done anything that uses all of her mind, before now? School didn't work, and work wasn't hard.
She learns best on her own, with her own blue hands holding the book.
Exercising in her own body is like looking up from a newpaper or walking away from an argument, and feeling your shoulders drop, and only then becoming aware that you've been holding them high and tense for a very long time. The first time she fights Erik as herself, she comes close to breaking his wrist.
"I told you," he says.
Raven laughs and rolls her toes against the floor, lifts her arms until her shoulders burn. She is stretching years of service from the muscles of her calves, discarding with the soft scale of her soles all the days she has spent dashing from table to table while Charles sends her little snippets of his day like postcards.
"You look happy," Hank says, after dinner. "I mean -- it suits you."
She's back to her pale, unbruised body, but she can feel the smile on her face. "Good day of training," she says. "How about you?"
His eyes light up behind his glasses. "Good! I think I'm close to finishing it, the serum. The results from the last few batches of cells have been highly promising."
"Well, I'd hate to think my leucocytes weren't cooperating," Raven says, but now her mood is mixed. Of course she's been hoping for this, they both have, but in the meantime she's finally found something good about looking like a freak. She's started to feel comfortable in her skin. She's been, she realises, making peace with the idea of the serum never working at all.
"I'm going back to the lab for a couple of hours," Hank says. They've converted part of what used to be the servant's quarters into a decent working space, and the CIA has installed all of his equipment. "I -- you could come too, if you like?"
A yawn answers for her; she wouldn't mind some pleasant flirting to round out the evening, but she stands a good chance of falling asleep with her face in a petri dish. "Thanks," she says. "But I think I'm going to go lie in a hot bath for a million years, and then have an early night."
The best bathroom in the house, the one with the big claw-foot tub and the lime-and-vanilla tiles, is tucked away on the second floor. Raven is on her way there, towel and robe draped over her arm, already daydreaming about how good her back is going to feel after half an hour of soaking, when she hears Erik's voice coming through the open door of Charles's study.
She sticks her head in, intending to say hello, maybe wander over and nudge one or two of their chess pieces out of position while they're distracted, but they're not playing chess. Charles is straightening up from placing a half-empty glass of whiskey on a table, cheeks flushed, and Erik is standing very close to him with a coiled, determined set to his shoulders that Raven recognises from hundreds of moments immediately before she's ended up gasping on the ground. Both of them look like it would take a lot more than a soft-footed girl in the doorway, more than an earthquake, perhaps, for them to be aware of anything in the room beyond the other person.
Raven swallows both the choke of surprise and the hiss of satisfaction that try to climb out of her mouth, and stands very still. She feels absolutely no shame about eavesdropping on Charles, and never has. Fair's fair, after all.
"I could ask you where the idea came from." Erik takes a step. The invisible polarity of their closeness is there, like a breeze tugging on Raven's fingers. He looks impossibly relaxed. "I could ask you if I actually want you."
When Charles speaks he's breathless, almost hesitant; so unlike the brother she knows, whose confidence is so vivid it bleeds into ruthlessness. "Why don't you?"
Erik steps even closer. "Because I trust you," he says, so soft now that she can barely hear him.
When Charles puts one hand on the side of Erik's face, a pair of candlesticks on the cabinet begin to shiver, clitter-clatter against the wood. When Erik kisses Charles, hard and claiming, the silver bangles around Raven's wrist turn to percussion. She slams a hand down over them, halting their aimless dance, already pulling back from the door, but neither of the men seem to have heard anything.
It's not like she can say that she's only human, but she's young and single and it's been a really long time, and maybe she has a weakness for guys with dangerous smiles who think she's extraordinary. So of course she's thought about Erik that way. Of course she's closed her eyes in the darkness and remembered the flick of his fingers -- lazy, certain -- as he moves a single coin over and under and around them.
This, what she's seeing, is better. Erik has the furrow between his brows that means he's giving something his full attention, he kisses like a near-drowned man coming down off the revelation that oxygen is free, and his thumb brushes Charles's ear, fingers splayed on his neck, as though her brother is ductile steel and Erik wants to melt him down and draw him out anew.
There's a bang as Charles's legs hit the wood of a chair; he laughs, low and startled, breathless. The sound sings in the room. He doesn't say anything aloud but he keeps his eyes fixed on Erik and Erik laughs in turn, then nods assent to something only he can hear.
Raven slips away from the door, her pulse racing, tangled up in too many feelings to name.
~
On the night of the president's address Raven sits beside the fireplace in her room, hugging her legs, staring at the syringe on the table. She'd been so sure that this was what she wanted, and then she'd started to lean the other way, and now, in the face of it, all she is is confused. She can't stop seeing the hollow doubt in Hank's eyes, the ingrained belief that stops him from hearing it when someone calls him beautiful. Maybe she should have shown him, instead, maybe if she'd taken his hand from the syringe and put it on her own waist --
No. It's not enough of a reason, especially for someone who can't return the compliment and mean it.
The serum is green, viscous, glowing with promise. She could be normal and yet still special. She could sleep in a body that she wasn't born with, and she could get drunk in a crowded room, and -- and all she'd be doing would be hiding with greater skill.
She swipes at her eyes with one hand, impatient, and then reaches out and closes the box.
Hank shouldn't have used the word cure. Raven doesn't need to be cured of anything.
Her first instinct is to go to Charles; he's never minded being talked at, and even if he still can't help leaping in with the answer instead of letting her work things out on her own, she knows when to listen and when to poke at him until he shuts up. Tonight, though, she suspects he'd just muddy the waters. She doesn't want to think any more. She wants to feel.
It takes longer than she'd expected for the chess game to finish; she ends up having plenty of time alone with her thoughts anyway, lying between Erik's sheets and looking around at the room he's appropriated in the only real home she's ever had. No personal touches, it's just one of the standard spare rooms, but his windows look out onto almost the same patch of the ground as hers, even if all she can see in them now is her own burnished reflection. She flickers blue. Then apricot-fair. Then half of each. She's her own personal piece of surrealism, shapeshifting mutant and almost proud, waiting here in the bed of a man who's probably in love with her brother.
She has a fit of silent laughter wondering what she'd do if Charles walked into the room, and so it's very easy to smile at Erik when he opens the door.
"This is a surprise," he says, and from there things start to get worse.
Raven will be anything, tonight. She can be anything. She's this close to screaming, shrinking inside her borrowed skin, and Erik stands there looking so damn untouchable, like he's never held his iron bar of an arm across her shuddering neck and laughed at her as they fought, like he's never felt Charles inside his head and kissed him anyway. It's bullshit.
But Erik surprises her, as he's been doing since he hurtled wet and incredulous into her life. He rejects her; he praises her. He tells her to get out; he tells her that she's a tiger. Next to Havoc and Banshee, and even Hank with his speed and strength, nobody's ever thought Raven might be dangerous, and it sends joy singing in a copper-wire path through her heart.
Another thing that nobody has ever done is kissed her like this before, which isn't to say that the kiss itself is somehow mindblowingly unique; the point is that nobody has kissed her, like this, before. Nobody has kissed Raven without the truest part of her being hidden away beneath the surface. But Erik thinks she's perfect. He threads his fingers through her hair and kisses her until she's molten with happiness and relief. Some kisses wind you up tight, set you on edge; this one calms her down and breathes peace along her fretful nerves.
When she pulls away, Erik brushes one thumb in a gentle arc below her eye and nods, gravely.
"You don't want to sleep with me," she says.
"Are you the telepath, now?"
Raven kisses him once more, quick and deep, and then climbs out of the bed. She holds her robe in her arms but doesn't put it on. She's tingling, warm all over. "It's all right. I wasn't here for sex either, really."
Erik raises his eyebrows. "In that case, I can only imagine what other activities you had in mind when you crawled under my sheets."
She stands in the doorway, smiling. "I wanted to feel beautiful," she says, "and you've already managed that. If all I wanted was to sleep with you, I could have done this."
All she's doing is closing the circle of mischief. To start with, her eyes become Charles's eyes, a paler and calmer blue than her skin. Then the hair. Then the rest of her. She can inhabit her brother from the inside-out; she produces one of his most careless, excited smiles.
Erik looks her over. "Do you think I wouldn't have known the difference?" he asks finally. It sounds like a genuine question.
She gives the shrug that goes with the smile: who knows, who cares? it says. She parts Charles's lips and runs one hand through Charles's hair and meets Erik's gaze, watching the way his throat moves and he shifts, ungraceful, where he's sitting.
"If anyone could, my friend," she says.
Erik closes his eyes. "Don't do that," he says.
"First a kiss and now an admission, from the great Magneto," Raven says. "Aren't I the lucky one." It's her own voice again, teasing, and by the time Erik opens his eyes she's back to normal.
Well, not normal, part of her brain insists, but she quashes it. She's fine like this. She'll say it until she believes it, and with the heat of Erik's reassurances still there, fizzing like cola on her lips, it's not difficult at all.
"Good night, Raven." The door begins to swing closed, Erik's fingertips extended in the direction of the hinges.
"Good night," she says.
Erik, she thinks, on her way to the kitchen in search of anything that might settle her into sleep, would be happy to wear his mutation on his skin, now that his life's purpose no longer involves subterfuge. He doesn't just like her best in her own form: he is jealous of it.
As for Charles, well. There's a world of difference between exquisite creature and cosmetic problem. Raven looks at the champagne he's fished out of the fridge and not offered to share with her, the way his eyes swing like a slow pendulum towards the door. Part of her wants to sit down and argue it through with him, maybe even let him read her mind and see what it is that Erik sees so clearly, but she's tired of justifications, and she decided a long time ago that Charles would either know her on her own terms or not at all.
So instead she bites at his bruises, just as invisible as hers, and watches them bloom to the surface. What she says is true but isn't all of the truth. Just the cruellest parts of it.
Understand, she says, without saying it.
She leaves before she can see if he does or not, because she refuses to go to bed tonight without hope.
~
Raven stares into the mirror. Morning light falls through the window with unforgiving clarity.
"Perfection," she says, softly.
She stands without putting on her face for the first time in ten years, picks up her jacket from the bed, and goes to stop a war.
~
The moment when Charles starts screaming is the most scared she's ever been in her life. He's inside the wreck of the plane and she can't see him, but he sounds like he's dying.
"Charles," she shrieks, the name torn out of her, Hank's weight on her shoulder a sudden shackle.
"Go," Hank says, hissing as he lifts his arm away; he finds his balance with Sean's help and Raven tries to run, but she trips on a sly hole in the sand, and by the time she's righted herself the noise has stopped. Her hands are trembling and her mouth is dry with salt air.
When Shaw's corpse comes drifting down from the submarine she has the echo of her brother's screams in her mind, but she can still find it in her to think: I'm glad the fucker suffered.
Ever since the Aral Sea exploded, she's known that this day will be marked with red in her memory, if she survives it. They've done so much, Charles has kept the peace between two nuclear powers and Erik has dragged a submarine through the fucking air; Raven wants to hold them both close and tell them that they're the best things that the world has ever given her. They've done so much that surely they can go home now, and rest.
"The real enemy is out there," Erik says, pointing at the ships.
Raven thinks: of course, he can say that now. The real enemy is dead at his feet but he doesn't know how to stop fighting. It will all be fine. They will go home.
And then Charles can't tell him that he's wrong. Charles, uneroded and despairing, standing there on the edge of the sea with his gloved fingers falling from his temple. Lines of white smoke fill the sky, that perfect blue sky worthy of a hundred Magritte paintings, and Raven tries to think, I am going to die. She can't. It's too stupid. All the things that they've accomplished today and the fear still wins. The human capacity for hate is still too enormous.
Erik extends one hand.
Raven closes her eyes but all she can hear, all any of them can hear, is Charles losing the only argument he's ever lost. She tries to care about the men on the ships and all she can feel is the fury, rising from her feet to her stomach to her eyes, that two nations have just tried to throw an arsenal at her. And her brother. And her friends.
Charles lunges at Erik and too much is happening, she can't watch them and the missiles at the same time, Erik throws out another hand and Hank flies backwards beside her; it's just Raven, now, standing there on this beautiful beach while the only two people she loves try to hurt one another, and there's no way Erik spared her by accident.
No matter where the missiles are, she thinks, no matter --
She barely has time to hear the retort of the gun before Charles hits the sand. What she hears is Erik's voice tearing in half.
If anything shows the perfectly policed one-way street that is Charles Xavier's power, it's this: pain, helplessness, fear, all over his face, and nobody else on the beach can feel any of them. Not even when his body has been hurt beyond his control will any of his thoughts leave his own head without his permission.
Erik doesn't kill Moira. Raven supposes that she'll be glad about that, later, when she can hear her heartbeat again. Right now the banshee-sound of her longing is huge and high and hers alone, knocking from one side of her skull to the other. She wants Charles to live, she wants Charles to say yes, to take what Erik is offering, because then she won't have to lose either of them; and she won't have to live with what either one of them might become, without the other.
No more stealing, Charles said.
"No more hiding," Erik says.
Her heart is the skin of a drum.
When she kneels down by Charles it's a moment of perfect indecision. If he touches her she will stay with him. If he reads her mind --
He does.
"You should go with him," he says, and it's almost enough to make her stay after all because Charles will not live after losing the both of them at once. Oh, he’ll survive. But there's a difference, and as she kisses her best friend's forehead in farewell, Raven feels it wash into her like the restless waves nearby.
When she adapted herself, she survived. That was all.
If she refuses to adapt, refuses to change -- well, then she might have a chance at actually living. Living for herself.
As Raven stands she presses her thumb and forefinger into a circle, next to her leg. She doesn't wait to see if Charles has noticed. Into the echo chamber of her mind she says, I'll look after him, Charles. I promise.
Silence on the radio. Nothing but the waves, and the murmur of feet on sand.
She takes hold of Erik's hand and he smiles at her and Charles's voice says, I love you, and she doesn't need the sudden stillness of Erik's fingers in hers to know that he's heard it too.