[fic] Their Mouths Always Lie 5/9
CHAPTER FIVE - crossroads
Charles greeted the morning lightheaded and oddly happy. His back still hurt and his mouth felt tender (thankfully it didn’t show too much on his naturally red lips), but the small discomforts couldn’t compete with the elation he felt whenever his thoughts strayed onto Erik. The feeling stayed with him throughout his morning routine and well into his work day, buoying his spirits. True, the station greeted him with a little less enthusiasm than he did it, but Erik was already there, waiting for him with a cup of tea and a grin one could only describe as lascivious, which made the morning infinitely better. Charles felt the blush spread across his face, in a way the he knew highlighted every last one of his freckles and that in turn only made Erik grin broader.
“Thank you,” Charles said, taking the cup and running for the hills.
His luck was holding. No new corpse had been reported so he had ample time to catch up with the materials generated for the cases he had open - a mugging gone wrong, the culprit will turn up in a matter of days, wrecked by nightmares; a hit and run, which would have been tricky but for the flecks of paint embedded in the victim’s skin; a domestic, reported by overzealous neighbors, even though the injuries had all the marks of an accident. These were the days Charles enjoyed most: he could tuck himself into a quiet corner and read to his heart’s content. Granted, he would generally prefer a different content to his reading material, but even the lab reports had a charm to them; it was the closest he got to legitimate science these days. Closest to truth, really.
Hank was a meticulous young man and the police were lucky to have him. Unfortunately, even he couldn’t do much with no evidence to speak of. The few grains of gravel were also found on the victim’s own shoes, the single cohesive DNA sample that did not belong to the victim was not only useless without anything to compare it to, it was also completely useless as a piece of evidence, as it was found on the carpet. Even if Mr. Zhang was the only one to visit his bedroom in a while, there was no end to places where a man could get a foreign hair stuck to his person and had it carried into his home.
In other words, there was nothing. Two bodies, not yet cold, and there was not even a ghost to chase after.
“Charles?”
Charles blinked. Erik was standing in the door, one hand on the light switch. “Don’t bother, the overhead light doesn’t work,” Charles said, when Erik frowned at the singed plastic square when the click failed to produce an onslaught of photons. Disappointing, perhaps, but Charles was long used to the questionable reading conditions - he was reading under the desk lamp he’d bought for this express purpose a while back. No one ever came to the laboratory - it was far too bleak a place, with the fire damage and still charred equipment no one had the heart to throw out.
Erik’s face betrayed distaste and suspicion. Charles looked around, letting a reality filter slip over his eyes so that he could perceive the space as Erik was seeing it - a ruined workspace, cluttered with debris and charred edges, fit for housing nothing but rats, and Charles himself in the middle, bent over the tiled work table with a spread of papers before him, reading by the light of a cheap, plastic lamp, whose cord extended far enough from the table to create yet another hazard.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Erik asked, picking up a shard of glass which might have been a beaker before the fire. He toyed with the edge for a few moments, before dropping it into the sink, where it shattered against its brethren.
Charles flexed his shoulders, drawing them back as far as he could without assistance, letting the motion stretch the burning sensation, whose causes no doubt could be traced to a wooden floor on the sixth floor of an unassuming city building. As it were, the burning flared and the flare set fire to the narrow line which curled around his spine and dug into his hips, stirring heat in its wake. Charles was shaking his head before he even had the chance to fully form the thought. “It’s quieter in here. It helps me concentrate.”
“It’s that bad?”
Charles smiled. There was a promise in Erik’s voice to quiet the bullpen for good, should he ask for it. It made his heart pulse with excitement, even as he spoke, “Not really. I can tune the noise out, but I have trouble knowing what to tune out, so it ends up being all or nothing. People don’t react well to finding I’ve gone catatonic over reports. I’ve had an ambulance called on me once.” Wasn’t that a fun day, he recalled grimly: he began to study the autopsy report for a hit and run, followed by the forensics of the car, and seventy-eight minutes later he looked up to Sean’s freckled face, to an equally speckled hand on his shoulder, shaking him hard enough to send the back of his head careening into the flimsy cubicle wall.
He’d solved the case, naturally.
Erik likely would have raised a brow even if he had been privy to the memory. “Evidently it’s a boring report, if you noticed me in the door.”
Charles rewound the past two minutes in his head pushing aside the past and running down the vivid lines of now. “Dear lord,” he said, numb with the thrill of discovery. “I did hear you.”
“Congratulations, you have working ears.”
“No, I mean - I heard you, when I was reading. That’s… that’s good.” His hands shook, all of sudden, as he tried to gather the papers into a coherent pile, with little luck. An effort doomed to failure, when Erik was looking at him like he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or frown. Charles found he wasn’t so sure himself. Erik was important now. The only other person his brain didn’t automatically tune out was Raven. This could either be very good, or very bad. It was too early to tell.
“I don’t follow,” Erik said, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Does that mean I should stay away while you read? For fear of interrupting?”
“Never mind.” Charles aligned the photos in the folder with the middle line and closed it. “Did you want something?”
“Marvin brought coffee. I’m here to check if you want any.”
“Yes, please.” Charles left the papers on the worktable. He had been reading for a while - he could afford a short break. He looked up at Erik’s flickering eyes and frowned. “How many coffees have you had today already?”
“Can’t you tell?” The fingers of Erik’s right hand brushed Charles’ wrist, turning it outward, so that he could press his thumb to the pulse point, just below the cuff of his shirt.
“Three,” Charles answered promptly, turning his hand into the caress. “You shouldn’t drink so much, excess of caffeine it’s not good for the system.” His argument suffered for the fact that he was already achieving the elevated heart-rate, just by feeling the pressure against his radial artery. Of course, this presented a conundrum: he would eventually need his hand back, but he was certain he would rather part with his arm than voluntarily take it back.
“We’re going to need it,” Erik said, as though oblivious to Charles’ crisis. “We have mountains of papers to search through.”
“It will be of no use if either of us drops of a heart attack,” Charles pointed out reasonably, oh so reasonably, while his heart thundered on, sending waves and waves of blood through the narrow artery. He could feel his fingertips thrumming.
“How likely do you think I am to have a heart attack, Charles?” Erik shook his head, no doubt recalling the many, many physicals which proclaimed his health to be a hairsbreadth away from Superman. “Over coffee, no less. It’s far more probable I will be run over by a reindeer.”
“Ridiculous. These don’t start happening until mid-December.” The stairs which would take them out of the basement loomed into view and, with one final caress, Erik let go of his hand. Charles saw his fingers curl around his thumb, even as he shoved the hand into his slacks, in a transparent attempt at preserving the feel of skin. Somehow, that did not do wonders for his newly discovered heart problems.
Marvin was waiting for them upstairs, a huge grin on his round face and a giant tray of paper coffee cups in his hands. “Good afternoon, detective!” he chirped, swaying to compensate for the momentum caused by his sudden turn.
“Hello Marvin,” Charles said, grateful for a distraction on which he could focus and settle around. “You seem energetic.”
“I know, it is something of an experience for me.” He put down the tray on a handy desk, rubbed his hands and looked at Charles hopefully. “Coffee?”
“Mocha?” Charles asked, because he could only rarely resist the pull of chain-store mocha. Somehow, Raven’s concoction wasn’t the same, for all the creamy goodness and real chocolate she melted to perfection and blended with hot milk. He was an ungrateful sod, Charles thought mournfully as the steam trembled over the forest of white caps.
Marvin, on the other hand, beamed as though this was the best news he’d had all day. “Caramel of straight?”
“You really didn’t have to,” Charles told him when two cups were lifted into the air and proffered in his direction. “Straight, thank you.”
Marvin straightened and beamed again when Charles took the beverage. “It’s no trouble.”
“How is your work coming along?” Erik asked, helping himself to a double-shot cinnamon cappuccino, if Charles was interpreting the exuberant letters on the side correctly.
“I’m extremely busy,” Marvin said. He raised a hand for emphasis than caught himself before he could do more than flicker his fingers. Charles smiled into the coffee. Marvin was on a date last night. She was a little shy, but they were going out again, soon, and he couldn’t wait. He’d gone shopping, because the suit was new and so was the cologne. Erik’s stunt managed to break him out of his seasonal cycle. Charles refrained from commenting the relationship had no future, as Marvin was currently too excited about the whole notion of dating to remember her name properly, but it was certainly heartening to see him so energetic. There was enough good spirit there to see him through the break-up, and likely well into the next relationship.
“How’s the investigation going?” Marvin asked meanwhile, turning to Charles, who started. Some of the coffee spilled onto the plastic cover, immediately filling the lettering there.
“You heard?” he asked, slurping the mess off, not even trying to pretend the slurping wasn’t for Erik’s benefit. Of all the complaints leveled his way in the course of courtship or intercourse, his enthusiasm for oral sex of any variety received nothing but high praise, and Charles was not above advertising the fact.
Marvin shrugged and crossed his arms, then uncrossed them again and started fiddling with his watch. “I knew Chen. I mean, not that well, but we’ve met a couple of times. It’s horrible, what happened to him.”
“It could have been worse,” Erik said with a shrug which communicated his disdain for empathy and feelings. He couldn’t quite conceal the tense line of his shoulders as he did so. “How is your job going?”
“Ah, found some really weird columns in the quarterly, a while back. Took me a while to sort those out, they were for a daughter company that does - I’m not sure. I don’t know why I ever went into business in the first place. It makes little sense to me.” Marvin toyed with a cup before brightening up and handing it to a passing officer, who took it in lieu of his early morning shot of cola, which he failed to drink on account of being hideously late.
“You’ve been doing okay so far,” Charles said, patting his shoulder. “Daughter companies are rarely straightforward, that’s the whole point. Did you review their tax returns?”
“No, would that help?”
Poor Marvin, Charles thought. But accounting was not a job for the weak-minded. “That’s the most obvious place to start looking for irregularities. As soon as something starts going wrong, every company will start by submitting the most straightforward tax returns possible, the kind that no company employing human beings can manage to plausibly create by any means other than lying about it. On the bright side, that makes them easy to spot. I have an excellent accountant who might be able to help you with those. I can give you the number.”
“Oh, would you? Thanks so much!” Marvin handed over his phone (brand new model, only came out a few days ago, already scuffed with a film of grime across the keys - it saw some serious use over the past couple of days and not merely for the sake of games) and Charles keyed in the number.
“Her name is Kitty Pryde. Tell her I gave you the number and make sure you have an estimate of the size of files you want reviewed, she is very busy.”
“Thank you.” Marvin took a phone, clicked the heels of his expensive shoes and bowed. “Thanks, Detective Lehnsherr.”
“Thanks for the coffee,” Erik said, raising his cup.
Marvin left the station with a spring in his step and a huge grin on his face. Charles wondered how soon he would get a call from the man’s coworkers, claiming Marvin was on drugs. It was certain to happen - no one in this city could possibly be this happy all the time, save for those enjoying the chemical stimulation of the nervous system.
“Is there a reason he’s not on top of our list of suspects?” Erik asked meanwhile, sipping his coffee and staring at the door with a very thoughtful look on his face.
“You don’t like competition?” Charles said absently, before the statement could revisit his skull with an urgent tapping noise. “Oh! I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“You meant it, and you were correct.” Erik offered him a crooked smile and an eyebrow curved over his supraorbital ridge, indicating in no uncertain terms that no harm was done and in fact he was amused by the quip. Charles thought the relief might floor him. He had a sense of humor, despite all claims to the contrary, unfortunately, it often manifested as an unpredictable streak of acerbic, inflammatory comments. Considering the rest of his disposition, it was no wonder he had no friends to speak of. “What I meant was, beside me.”
“He’s incapable of hurting another human being.” Charles twisted the cap on his coffee with a fond little smile.
“No human being is incapable of that,” Erik said with the certainty of a man who had been on the business-end of the self-preservation instinct. He wasn’t wrong, either. If cornered, Marvin would absolutely try and fight back, but it wouldn’t come easily, and more importantly it wouldn’t come unannounced. Certainly if Marvin decided to resolve his ennui problems with murder he wouldn’t waltz into the station with an armful of coffee to gloat about it.
Charles capitulated in the face of overwhelming evidence. “He does have a solid alibi for the first night. None of his accounts was credited with more than a thousand dollars at time, amounting to a total of nine thousand seven hundred thirty-two dollars over the past three months, which is consistent with his finances for the past seven years and puts him on the upper-middle end of the spending spectrum, not inconsistent with his paygrade and corresponding status.”
The officer standing behind him took a step back, and continued on his way. Charles preferred to think it was an involuntary action. Erik remained unmoved, but there was a faint smile on his face.
“I’m actually surprised, for a change. Do you monitor the finances of everyone you know?”
“It did cross my mind. Marvin is not wholly stable,” as evidenced by his quarterly suicide attempts, but then again Charles himself was quoted as the dictionary definition of unstable. Charles found it a bit odd, as every last one of his actions was predictable to a fault. “He might not be capable of murder - I honestly don’t believe he is - but the killer might have been paid.”
“There was no evidence a second person was present.”
“There was no evidence a first person was present, unfortunately. Anyone could have been there during the murder.”
“So you suspected Marvin, enough to look into his finances.” Erik paused and dragged his tongue across his lips slow enough to make sure it couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than a sexual invitation. “I wonder what mine revealed.”
“Nothing incriminating,” Charles admitted dutifully, awaiting the inevitable disapproval, but none was evident.
“Should I look into yours, or were you considerate enough to do that, too?” Erik was smiling wider. The smile was a curiously powerful thing - it scoped the station like the lantern of a lighthouse, leaving trembling hearts and panicked souls wherever Erik turned his shining white teeth. This time, when a fellow officer gave them a wide berth it wasn’t because of Charles.
“I review the state of my finances regularly, but you are more than welcome to double check. I could call my bank and schedule a meeting with the assistant, if you’d like. I’d give you full access to my statements.” It was an argument which often came up in fights, particularly when Raven was younger: how would you feel if someone investigated your personal life? It was one of many Charles couldn’t quite understand. His life was perfectly transparent - should anyone care to, he would gladly supply all the relevant documentation to whomever asked.
“I was joking. The last time I’ve seen the inside of a bank, I was blowing it up.” Then Erik lowered his voice. “I didn’t think it was fully legal, though.”
Charles took a sip of his mocha letting the corporate America assassinate his trouble with factory-manufactured cocoa and coffee. Of course Charles did a cursory sweep of the accounts of his work colleagues. Corruption within the force was best prevented before it saw the light of day and catching a murderer was more important than abiding by court orders. Evidence was only a matter of looking, and the murderer was almost certainly aware of police procedures, which didn’t necessarily imply it was one of their own, but it didn’t disqualify them either. The problem with working this angle, however, was that obtaining some information was not permitted without solid evidence such information might pertain to the investigation, and such a permission required for a detective to be in possession of said information. Such a conundrum, when one had to choose between justice and the justice system, he thought with a weary sigh. “I’ll be in the lab,” he told Erik.
He felt eyes on his back until he reached the staircase.
*****
Raven whistled as she got out of work around ten in the evening. She enjoyed waiting tables. She let her mind drift then; she would solve problems, fill out coursework she’d later type out, no direct input from the brain required. Mind the food arriving at various times, on various plates, to various physical locations required concentration, but left a substantial part of her mind free to get on with other work. It allowed her to breeze through college with pocket money she didn’t have to ask Charles for (not that Charles would ever refuse her money she asked for, but there was something utterly humiliating about having even the most beloved brother legally manage her finances). Once she was done with college she became terribly bored with it, but persevered, mostly because Joe swore up and down he couldn’t find a good enough replacement, the cheap lying bastard.
“Hi Raven,” Charles called when she walked through the door to their shared apartment, some odd seconds before the warmth and smell of food started bouncing up and down in her skull. “Did you have a good day?”
“Joe still swears he can’t find anyone, but I’m calling bullshit. He doesn’t want to let me go, ‘cause I don’t go round asking for raises,” she yelled back, uncoiling the scarf from her neck and dumping it, along with her coat, on the shelf she had reserved for this specific purpose.
“Which is a mistake on your part, I say.” Charles’ voice drifted from the kitchen on the heavenly wings of garlic smell. “You’ve been doing stellar work. I wouldn’t be surprised if your presence didn’t get him customers.”
No shit, she liked her short skirts and flaunted her enjoyment. Even so, Raven scowled. “Tough for him, I don’t want to be a waitress all my life.” She adjusted the hemline of her panties, where they rode up to peek over her belt, and toed off her socks. She moved into the kitchen, dropping more of the personal knick-knacks and random pieces of clothing as she went, until she was down to her skirt and T-shirt - Charles liked to keep their place warm - tapping on the screen of her phone.
“I’m surprised you’ve held out as long as you have,” he said, reaching for a jar of thyme.
“I did find it fun.”
“It looked like fun,” Charles said absently. He was stirring the contents of a wok. Raven peeked over his shoulder - they were having prawn paella tonight. Good. Then she looked up from the food and to his face, only to find it so completely out of focus she was surprised she could even make out his features. The fuck?
“How was your day?” she asked cautiously, trying not to look like she was about to panic. The last time he’d been that unfocussed he had been in the hospital, drugged to the gills, with a butcher’s knife sticking out of his chest. Raven felt justified in checking his pulse.
Fortunately, he looked up when she touched his neck and smiled, in the here and now, haziness forgotten. “Oh, I wish I could report progress, I do. I talked to the doormen again. They both lived on the same street, but that’s as far as the connection went.” He hesitated and sought inspiration in the garlicky depths of the paella. “We’re on square one.”
Raven gaped, recomputed, then gaped again. It wasn’t often that one and one added together to flowerpot, instead of the requisite one-oh. “Square one? What the hell, Charles? You’re usually done with solving a crime five minutes after setting foot on the crime scene!” Which wasn’t wholly true, but there was enough truth in it to justify the dramatic delivery. Shut up, brain, Raven thought viciously, I like dramatic delivery.
Charles, meanwhile, adopted his gentle scolding face and tapped her nose with the spatula, no doubt leaving a trail of oil and a flake of onion in its wake. “That’s not wholly true, luv. Most crimes are indeed obvious, but this one is unusual. We’ve been able to ascertain no motive, no one who stood to gain from the deaths, and, more importantly, no hard evidence.”
“Holy shit,” Raven said. Then, because she watched three seasons of Dexter over the past month, she asked, “Are you sure you’re not the murderer? Because you could totally pull it off. It would be so weird, if it was you. I could write a book and everyone would die to read it. My Brother the Serial Killer: a Personal Account - All That and Paella!”
Charles’ face took on a strange look. “I know,” he said slowly, as though he was drawing and quartering the comment into a string of bits. One-oh, one-oh, one, one, oh, one. “Isn’t it shocking?” Round and round went the spatula, overturning the prawns and shoveling rice onto them. Charles stared into its depths like his whole future was written there.
“You must be overjoyed.” Raven hopped onto the counter, kicking the cupboard with her bare heels.
This stirred Charles out of his divination. “Excuse me?”
“It’s a riddle, isn’t it? You love riddles.”
“That’s just the thing,” he said, with a touch more emotion than the statement justly deserved, dropping the spatula into the wok. “It’s not a riddle. It lacks a mystery. It lacks sense. It’s just things happening for no reason!” He was glaring at the wall over the stove and Raven, after checking that there was nothing there, allowed the vague pang of unease to knock her on the shoulder.
“I don’t follow,” she said slowly. “You have no suspects, right? A murder in a locked room, no entry or exit and no evidence. How’s that for a mystery?”
“Yes, yes, but that’s not important.” Charles picked the spatula back up and scraped the bits of onions and pepper which stuck to the pan over the rice level. “The murder is dry, there’s no emotion in it. It has all the marks of being a serial killer’s work, but they make no sense as the work of a serial killer. I don’t understand these murders.”
“It would be a cold day in hell before you understood a murderer, Charlie,” Raven said, pressing a kiss to his cheek, gratified to draw a slow smile. “When are we eating? I’m starved!”
“A few more minutes.” Then, “Raven?”
“Yes?”
“I heard Erik today.” He hesitated. “I was reading the work files and he came in the lab and I heard him when he called.”
Sometimes Raven couldn’t help but understand motherhood. Charles had a way of admitting things in a way that hunched his shoulder, curled his toes and wrung his hands, so that, with a touch of miniaturization and a little blurring, he looked all of five, reporting a tentative success on a matter which had previously been a resounding failure. When he did that, looking up at her (which in itself never failed to make her feel like gathering him up to his chest and squeezing), she invariably felt a smothering of pride and tearful loss, because this growing up business took people places other people couldn’t go. Or something.
“That’s… That’s wonderful!” She wrapped her arms around his middle and laid her head on his shoulder. Erik, of all people. Well, Charles wasn’t wholly sane, so why the hell not? “He’s a cool guy, isn’t he? Slight crazy non-withstanding, he is pretty awesome.”
“True.” Charles was smiling; she could feel that in her hair. She gave him one last squeeze and skipped to her room, grabbing her bag along the way, to return it to its nesting place on her sprawling bed. She checked her email, then her Blackberry, then the email again. Two messages were waiting: one from Joe, begging her to reconsider her resignation, the other from Angel, confirming they were having drinks on Friday.
Excellent.
“Food on the table!” Charles called from the kitchen.
Raven whirled on the balls of her feet and went to eat.
After dinner they settled in front of the TV with tea and cookies Raven wheedled out of Joe on her way out. She waited until Charles finished his first cup, as that usually put him in a slightly better mood, before sitting up.
“Charles,” she started, trying to phrase her next words - which were going to be extremely flammable - in the least incendiary way. Huh. Hey, Charles, you know the Crazy Focused Personality With No Reality Filters Disorder that you have? Yeah, dude, work on that, it’s not fetching. No, that wouldn’t do. Better to just be upfront and business-like. Charles is going to appreciate business-like. “I’ve applied to the PD. I had my medical yesterday. Next week I’m going in for character investigation.”
That went well, except she didn’t think Charles could get quite so pale. Move over Robert Pattison.
“What?” he asked, making next to no sound.
Raven scoffed. “I know you heard me. You always hear.” She didn’t mean to sound quite so accusing, but the tone took on a life of its own, nonetheless.
Charles’ features pinched together, painting him into a very neat Snow White - red-lipped and pale as death. “No. I don’t allow it. You will withdraw the application,” he said with the authoritarian cadence of the Evil Queen.
For a change Raven would not be cowed. Not on this. “No. I am applying. I will get in. You know I can handle it.”
“You can’t handle it,” Charles said, still quiet, still calm, on the verge of breaking. “You have no idea what a police job entails in this city. You will not go through with this.”
Luckily, this was one thing Raven was ready for so when she replied she was calm and self-assured. She had rehearsed this, after all. “You can’t tell me what I will and won’t do. You don’t have the right.”
“You’re a child, Raven! You have no concept of what goes on in the department, you have no concept of what we have to deal with!” Charles’ hands shook and the cookie he was eating drops to the plate in his lap. “It’s not all clean murder and parking tickets.”
“I’m twenty three and I can handle myself! I attended autopsies, I know what corpses look like, at all stages of decomp! It was your idea to put me into combat training. It’s your fault I react to being surprised by throwing people over my shoulder. Why the hell shouldn’t I use it to do something?”
“You trained for your own security! Self-defense gives you an edge over this city. There’s no reason to go looking for more trouble, when you get into enough just walking out the door.”
For someone whose brain operated in the binary system, Charles sometimes managed to see reason as this foreign, exotic creature, which needed to be studied and poked until it folded and conformed to his mental picture of a common cow. Raven scowled at him, finding the scowl matched by his glare. “I can fight. I can shoot. I’m clever. You taught me to be clever and you can’t tell me you failed there. I know I’m good. You can’t keep me locked up in this place forever. Why the hell do you even try?”
“Because it’s dangerous! People die on the job, every day. We chase after murderers, after rapists and psychopaths. We stick our noses into places no one sane goes. That’s not sane, that’s not normal, that is not a job for you.” He picked up the cookie again, biting into it like it was supposed to symbolize Raven’s resolve.
Fuck you, Charles, she thought. “It’s my life. I will do whatever I want.”
“No, you won’t.”
“They will hire me, Charles. I am in excellent shape. I have more than enough uni credits. I kick ass for fun and I’ve a psyche so stable you could level walls with it. I have letters from the resident pathologist at the Sacred Heart. There’s no way they’re gonna blow me off.”
Charles reached for his phone. “They won’t hire you,” he said to the device. “I will see to it that they don’t. You will find yourself another job, something you can excel at, something safe.” Bless the modern cells, with their enormous screens and easy to read fonts, Raven thought, though when the blue highlight stopped at a name she recognized she stopped blessing and began cursing. For a second Raven thought her whole world had turned red. Before she could even think what she was doing, she scrambled up to her knees and closed her palms around his.
“If you make that phone call,” she hissed, “I will never forgive you. I swear to god, for as long as I live. I want this, Charles, I want to become a police officer. Why the hell is that so difficult for you to get?”
“I can’t see you hurt,” he told his phone rather than her. She rolled her eyes.
“Grow up. People get hurt all the time.” Raven dug her chin into the top of his head and brought her other arm up around his shoulders. “You can’t save everyone.”
Charles looked at the phone, at their joined hands. Then he looked at her. “I’m sorry. I’d rather you hated me.”
The next moment the phone flew from his hands and Raven had him pinned to the floor, with his right arm twisted behind his back and his face in the thick carpet.
“I don’t need your protection anymore,” she hissed into his ear, digging a knee into his thigh to make a point. “I’m not a child. I can handle myself. It’s not like it was before, okay? Besides, I am an adult. You can’t stop me. You think I didn’t expect you to do this? Of course I have. I told the commissioner you’re my brother. I told her everything, about Kurt and about Cain. I said you might call. She promised she wouldn’t listen to you.”
Charles shook underneath her hands. “Raven, don’t. Please. You can’t do this.”
“Name one reason why I shouldn’t.”
“Kurt would have wanted you to. He is dead, you don’t need his approval anymore.”
As if she ever wanted his approval. Fat chance. “Kurt can go to hell, if he’s not already there. I want this.” Raven let go and stood up, straightening up her skirt with the ease of a women half of whose wardrobe could be mistaken for really wide belts. “I’m thinking you should quit, though. It’s not doing you any favors.”
“What makes you think you can handle it, exactly?” Charles lifted himself off the floor slowly, as if each move caused him pain, but his head was turned towards her and the anger - bona fide anger - was directed at her, too. “Do you honestly think being able to not breathe through the nose for a few hours teaches you everything you need to know about death? You know nothing. Corpses in the mortuary are at peace. Those you would find on the job are a thousand times worse, because they still move, they talk and breathe and beg for their lives!” Charles took a breath and pushed himself to his feet. “Can you handle looking a man in the eye, pointing a gun at him and firing? Can you handle looking down the barrel of a gun at people on a regular basis? I saw you in the shooting range, when Erik stepped in front of you, and you were panicking. You burst into tears. You can’t handle hurting another human being, any more than you can hurt me.”
“Say one more word and I will conclusively prove I can hurt you.” In that moment she was certain she could, too.
“You won’t. Because you can’t hurt me, you are not capable of hurting me, even when I stand in your way. What makes you think it will be any different with other people?”
“Erik surprised me! We were in the shooting range, I didn’t expect anyone to be stupid enough to try. It won’t happen again, because next time I will be ready. The next time I point a gun at someone I will have pointed it there.” She folded her arms and shrugged. “And it’s not like he doesn’t think it’s a good idea, for me to join, anyway.”
“You’ve spoken with him about it?” Charles’ mouth fell open. “When?”
Raven shrugged again. “In the shooting range.”
She expected Charles to call her bluff immediately. He could always tell when she was lying, or skirting the truth, or even skewing the facts in her favor. This time he lowered his head and stared at the floor, while his hands clenched and unclenched rhythmically.
“Erik’s advice is not something you should follow,” he said in the end.
“At least his is not hypocritical. Christ, Charles, you don’t even want to be a detective and you stick by the goddamned job like it’s your fucking salvation! Why? Kurt is dead; he’s not there to make you do anything. You don’t owe him shit, if you ever did.”
Charles hunched in on himself. “I don’t have a choice.”
“Fuck you. You have every choice in the book. You can go back to school, you could be a teacher in a year of two, for god’s sake, but you get up every morning and wallow in the misery that’s the police department. How stupid do you think I am? Be honest for once, and apply a human scale, the one not including you. You’re only happy there when Hank lets you play with his chemistry set, and at no other time.”
His hands tighten and stay taut, to the point of trembling. “I enjoy solving the cases,” he whispers.
“But you hate the people there. You stay because every time you try to leave Moira looks at you with those doe eyes and for a few seconds you don’t feel like a complete freak. You feel like she really likes you as a person, like she doesn’t think you’re the creepiest fuck she’s ever met, murderers included, and you know this! Everybody in the station thinks so! There’s a betting pool on when you’ll finally snap and murder everybody and okay, Moira isn’t in it, but that’s because she has a giant fucking stick up her ass. You know all this because you know everything about everybody and you still get up and show up every morning, like a masochistic moron.” God, that hurt to say, but was it awesome to finally get out, or what?
Except now that it was out Raven had no choice but to square her shoulders and soldier on. “I’m not asking for your permission, Charles. I’m asking you to look at me. Look at me properly and tell me I’m weak, that I can’t handle police work. Look at me and tell me I’m a child.”
She kept her gaze locked on him, until he looked up and looked back. Her heart constricted at the expression on his face, but she held his gaze. She was not weak. She was not.
“I’d rather have you hate me then join,” he said. There was defeat in his voice and that was how Raven knew that he saw, perhaps for the first time, that she was no longer the little girl who needed protecting from the world.
“I will never hate you,” she said. “I love you. But I will do this.”
Charles smiled and only then did Raven notice the phone in his hand. “Mrs. Hightower, this is Charles Xavier. My apologies, I know it’s late, but this is important. My sister has filed an application for the department. I need you to reject it.”
Raven heard a female voice on the other end of the line, but couldn’t make out the words. It may have been due to the roar of furious elephants thundering down the middle of her soul.
“I understand. Thank you. I appreciate it. Good evening to you.” Charles disconnected and let the phone fall to the couch.
Raven burned. She, the elephants, the roar and the savannah they needed to gallop, along, very possibly, with sense.
“How dare you?” she asked in a voice which would have been a scream but for the volume. “You’re my brother! You’re supposed to want me to be happy!”
“I’m supposed to protect you.”
“You’re just like Kurt.”
Charles’ face went whiter.
“You’re gonna deny, but you’re just like him. You want me to be your little puppet, always doing what you say. You think you’re doing it for me, but it’s bullshit! Like you know what’s best for me, you know jack shit. I’m a person and you don’t get a say in how I live my life.” She took a deep breath. “Fuck you, Charles.”
In under a minute she was in her room, dragging yesterday’s leggings up her legs, shrugging on a sweater and grabbing her bag. Before another minute passed, she was out the door and running into the night. Charles didn’t even call her name.
*****
Erik had fallen into a light sleep halfway through The Master and Margarita. He woke a few minutes past twelve. It was dark outside, and the few stars bright enough to fight their way through the light pollution were flickering weakly in the bruise-colored sky. Erik switched the lamp on and smiled. It was a private smile, one he never let anyone see. The sight of his unevenly purple walls, made all the more wriggly with the uneven lighting, never failed to bring it out.
He grabbed his phone off the floor to confirm what he already knew about the hour and found a text waiting for him.
Just let me know shes safe, he read. What the hell, Charles? A missing apostrophe in a text message? What is this strange alternative universe?
Then someone knocked on the door.
Erik was certain he knew who it was; he would have known even if he couldn’t hear the clicking of heels which should be high, but weren’t confusing the feet they were adorning. He opened the door with the gun at his side even so.
“Hi. Can I come in?” Raven Xavier said. There were tears in her eyes and an angry, locked, expression on her face, somewhat at odds with the rapid breathing, a result of a long run, no doubt.
Erik moved out of the way without a word. Already he was punching in a reply to Charles. Just walked in fine.
“Thank you.” Raven strode in, took the bag off her shoulder, toed off her sneakers - why the hell was she wearing sneakers in the first place, wasn’t that a social suicide these days? - and looked around. “This is it? This is where you live?”
“So the evidence would suggest.”
The locks must have loosened because half her muscles twitched. “The purple is an eyesore.”
“Blame your brother.”
“Charles painted your apartment?”
“It used to be white, then he invited himself in.”
“Okay, maybe it’s an improvement over white, but purple? What the hell? You should have picked green, or blue - oh, turquoise. Pale turquoise with uneven electric blue accents. I bet it would be awesome.”
Raven was Charles’ sister, absolutely, Erik thought as he put the gun away, into the closet. She was already calculating the area of the walls and spacing the accents, all with a glance. “What are you doing here, Raven?”
She didn’t answer for a long time, choosing instead to scuff a bare toe against the floor. “I fought with Charles.”
No fucking shit, girl. “Is this all you’re going to do today, state the obvious?”
“Fuck you. You’re just like him, with the mind-reading.” Her bag landed on the floor and Raven kicked it into the corner. “I’ve had just about enough of the mind-reading.”
“It doesn’t take Charles to notice you’ve been crying and you haven’t fled to him for comfort. What I want to know is why you came here. I barely know you.” Not that it was going to be a night of making sense, he could tell.
“I applied for a position in the WPD. Charles just called the chief commissioner to get them to reject my application, and don’t you dare tell me I don’t have the first clue what I’m getting into.” Raven stalked to him, stabbing him in the chest with a surprisingly sharp fingernail. “I know. I know perfectly well what I’m doing. I know it’s horrible and bad and muggers on every corner and I know about the mortality rate among officers. I’m not stupid.” She continued the stabby assault, punctuating every other word with a sharp jab, until Erik held up his hands and stepped back.
“Did I say anything?”
It was like she didn’t even notice he was in the room. “Charles thinks it’s all nice and well for him to go out and risk his life and leave me locked home, like I’m safer there. He’s an idiot.”
And back to stating the obvious it was. “He can be.”
“I just- He was looking after me all my life. I get he doesn’t want all the hard work to go to waste, but honestly, what was he expecting? He taught me to fight dirty, he taught me how to tell a mugger from a drunk, he taught me how to walk across a room full of people and not be noticed - granted, I’m better at it now than he will ever be, but he taught me the basics. He taught me how to look at a room and pick out the bits that matter. It’s like he spent most of my life teaching me to be a police officer. Why doesn’t he get that I need to do this, then?”
She was staring at him, begging for understanding. She looked nothing like Charles, yet Erik felt smothered by the affection and concern all the same. “Why did he join up?”
If the question was a ball, Raven would have swatted it out of the air. It took a moment before she started talking. “Kurt, mostly. He was, well, a controlling dickhead doesn’t even begin to describe it. His whole family was police officers, right back to the settler era, or so he claimed. Cain - his son, my half-brother - was a lowlife, though he hid it well. He got into WPD, right, but I don’t think he would have been any good, even if he didn’t go totally nuts, so Kurt got it into his head to groom me into it.
“You can imagine Charles wasn’t happy with that, so made a deal, beats me how, he sucks at talking to people. But the bottom line was that Kurt would let me do what I wanted, and Charles would join the CSI. He was studying genetics and biophysics anyway, so a few extra classes and he had all the necessary qualifications for processing crime scenes. Except, you know Charles. He showed up on his first day, one-upped every detective on the scene making himself seventeen enemies in the process, and they wouldn’t let him go. Not that it’s a shock, he is that good.” She smiled and pressed a thumb to her mouth in an effort to hide the smile. Erik waited.
“The supreme irony being, of course, that I actually do want to be a detective.” Her hair fell over her face. “I’m- I don’t want to hurt him. I really don’t. But this is something I want to do, and he always said I should do what I wanted with my life. Isn’t that a great joke?”
“It’s not very funny,” Erik said wryly.
Raven dithered, moving from one leg to the other and back, wringing her hands until finally she spoke, “Don’t you have chairs in this place? What kind of a person doesn’t even have chairs?”
“I rarely entertain visitors. Sit on the counter in the kitchen, or the floor.” On second thought, not the floor. The skirt she was wearing was very short and Erik didn’t particularly need to see whether she remembered underwear in her haste to get out the door, leggings or no.
“You’re a terrible host. You could offer me a drink.”
“I’ve got whiskey or beer.”
“No vodka?”
“Sorry.”
“Beer, then.”
Erik opened the fridge, population: beer, picked one from the back, popped the cap with the faucet and passed it to her. Raven took a professional swig, swallowed and cocked her head.
“Won’t you tell me what a horrible idea it is? How young I am, how much danger I’m gonna be in? How Darwin got shot last week, through little fault of his own?”
“No.”
Raven let the bottle drop, surprised. “Why not?”
“Safety is relative. You can get shot walking down the streets.”
“It’s more likely if I was a cop.”
“True.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Aren’t you going to agree with Charles?”
“No.”
“Why the hell not? You’re best buds now, I hear.”
“Because he is not responsible for you,” Erik said firmly. “He has to accept that. If you want to do risk your life to do what you want to do, it’s on your head, not his.”
Raven snorted into her beer. “Good luck trying to convince Charles he’s not responsible for everything that goes wrong in this state.”
“I’ve decided to start off with easier endeavors, like turning water into wine.” Erik opened another bottle and toasted the third party of this conversation. Funny, how even when Charles was absent he was still fucking there.
“It’s been done before,” Raven said.
“I’m Jewish. I have no conclusive proof.” Erik gave Raven a wry smile and she responded in kind. “You have a right to your own decisions. For what it’s worth, I think you’ll be a better officer than he is. A better team player, certainly.”
Raven sighed and looked out the window, suddenly pensive. She was toying with the bottle, smearing the condensation all over the label. “He hates it, really. He knows he scares most people more than the murderers do and it’s killing him. He’d be way happier if he was locked up in his library solving Sudoku all day.”
Erik shrugged. He couldn’t see Charles devoting more than three minutes to Sudoku as a past-time, them being so obvious a riddle thus hardly a riddle at all. “He catches killers. Saves the world one murderer at a time. I figure that’s why he stays.”
“He’s an idiot,” she said hotly and bit her lip. She was going to cry again, Erik thought, but instead she emptied half the bottle and burped like a champion.
“Everyone is allowed to be an idiot, it’s a free country.” He raised his own bottle in a mocking salute. “To idiocy.”
“Shit. I better call him,” Raven said. “He must be going nuts, if he hasn’t launched search parties already.”
“He texted me just before you got here. He knows you’re okay.”
Raven went from lip-biting wide-eyed woolen ball of empathy to a scowling grump, who rolled her eyes a lot. “I hate his mind-reading.”
“It comes in handy. Are you staying the night?” Not that Erik would throw her out in the cold at this hour, given the astronomical odds she beat just to arrive in one piece, but a request would be nice.
“Can I?” Raven gave him a look he just knew Charles taught her - a look of a devious tomcat attempting and succeeding at puppy-eyes, solely because it was a devious fuck. “I think we both need a little space.”
“And for that reason you invaded my single room. Inspired.”
Raven winced. “In my defense I thought you were living like a normal person. With chairs.”
“Chairs are overrated. You can stay, but don’t make this a regular occurrence, I’m not a hotel.”
“I’d say, with this decor.” Raven propped her hands on her hips and made a show of looking around. “Are you both blind?”
Asked the woman wearing a seatbelt for a skirt. At least Erik could dress himself and not die of exposure in the process. “I don’t mind the purple.”
“You’re a guy,” she said, torn between incredulity and condescension.
“I’m entitled to an opinion about colors.”
“Not when it’s so blatantly wrong.”
“Don’t you have things to do in the morning?” he asked.
“My shift doesn’t start until twelve.”
“I get up at six. You need to be ready to leave by eight.”
Raven huffed. “You’re no fun.”
“Ongoing murder investigation. That’s not fun.”
“Right.” Raven looked around the apartment one more time and her face indicated she was registering the implications of its emptiness. “Oh crap. Where can I sleep?”
Too bad it only occurred to Erik now, too. He sighed. “Take the mattress.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“How many nights have you slept on hardwood floor? I’m guessing not many.” He slept a few on naked rocks, which was considerably more fun, because rocks had hollows into which a spine could be poured. Vastly preferable.
“It’s not like we can’t share. It’s a double.” Raven nudged the mattress with her toe, throwing a coy look over her shoulder.
“Charles will gut me.”
Raven reacted to the off-hand comment like he set her kitten on fire and set it on her mother. “He’s not unhinged!”
“Have you seen him mad?” Erik said with a quirk of his lip, which seemed to be enough to settle the ruffled feathers. “Bathroom’s through there.”
“Thanks.”
She disappeared to wash up, and Erik contemplated the unhelpfulness of his closet. There was a fleece blanket, old as time itself, which would still be better than the floor. Not even a parka to make it bearable. Fuck his life. He spread the blanket opposite the mattress, and hopped in place for three minutes, to relax his muscles, or at least confuse them into not noticing the hardwood until after he’s fallen asleep.
He was flat on his back with his eyes closed, when Raven walked out of the bathroom.
He didn’t bother looking when she knelt by him. “I meant it about the bed,” she said.
“I meant it about Charles,” he tried to respond, but before he got halfway through with the personal pronoun her petal-soft lips were against his, moving gently with the words.
She hit the floor a fraction of a second later. To her credit, and her future career as a sexual predator, she landed on her side and was already twisting into a crouch by the time he kicked the blanket away. She wasn’t joking about the black belt - for all the stupidity required of an aspiring officer, Raven had a firm grasp on her own abilities.
“Raven, go to bed,” Erik said firmly.
“Why?” She straightened from the half-crouch, still coiled and ready for an attack. Erik couldn’t help but approve.
“Because I have no intention of sleeping with you. Thank you,” he added as an afterthought, “But no.”
She flushed a deep red, an effect thoroughly ruined by the night. Erik averted his gaze when she stood, clad only in the T-shirt she was wearing when she got in, minus a bra, and the underwear she hadn’t forgotten after all, and wrapped the duvet around herself. He wasn’t blind, for fuck’s sake.
“You don’t have to sleep on the floor,” she said. “I promise I won’t try anything.”
It was tempting. Erik eyed the unforgiving floor, which already tried to claw through his ribs, but there were so many reasons this would have been a dumb idea, not just because “I shared a bed with your extremely attractive sister. I had her tits right there, next to me, and I did nothing. You believe me, don’t you?” wasn’t a conversation he was willing to ever have with anyone, not unless he got laid for his trouble. Not that Charles wouldn’t believe him and he probably would get laid for his trouble.
Huh.
Even so. “I don’t react well to being startled. I could hurt you before I was awake.”
Raven cocked her head. “What, really? I thought that only happened in the movies.”
“Trust me. I have PTSD coming out of my ears. You don’t want to startle me.”
“Huh. Sorry.” Then, in a smaller voice, she added, “You really gonna be okay over there?”
“I’ll live, but try not to fight with Charles again. It’s not going to be comfortable.”
Raven curled on the mattress, becoming a miserable mound of unhappiness instead of a sexy woman. A cold shower by any other name, Erik thought wryly and made himself less uncomfortable on the floor.
“Charles is going to be very upset tomorrow,” Raven whispered into the sheets.
“We will sort it out.”
“Thanks,” she said, tucked in and curled on her side, when he was on the verge of sleep. What little light there was in the room reflected in her eyes and Erik would be annoyed, because it was vital the he fall asleep as soon as possible, but the warm regard obvious in her gaze made it hard to snap at her. “For liking Charles. He likes you so much, he’s so much happier since you came here - I’m really glad. He’s very lonely.”
Erik couldn’t help staring at her. She was a nice girl, and nice girls didn’t try to seduce their brother’s lovers (or whatever they could be called - there was far too little sex for that label to apply and Erik refused to be called anybody’s boyfriend), which could only mean she had no idea they were whatever the hell they were. She didn’t think Charles could be interested at all, unless this was a bizarre revenge attempt on her part.
No, Erik thought when her glowing eyes finally closed and her breathing evened. She didn’t do this to hurt Charles. He hasn’t told her and she hasn’t made the connection on her own, and while the sex itself was new, everything leading to it wasn’t. Erik wondered what that implied for their future. He had very little by way of definite plans, and Charles, being Charles, was well aware of it.
He wondered if he started including Charles in his uncertain future yet. He wondered if Charles included him in his.
Charles greeted the morning lightheaded and oddly happy. His back still hurt and his mouth felt tender (thankfully it didn’t show too much on his naturally red lips), but the small discomforts couldn’t compete with the elation he felt whenever his thoughts strayed onto Erik. The feeling stayed with him throughout his morning routine and well into his work day, buoying his spirits. True, the station greeted him with a little less enthusiasm than he did it, but Erik was already there, waiting for him with a cup of tea and a grin one could only describe as lascivious, which made the morning infinitely better. Charles felt the blush spread across his face, in a way the he knew highlighted every last one of his freckles and that in turn only made Erik grin broader.
“Thank you,” Charles said, taking the cup and running for the hills.
His luck was holding. No new corpse had been reported so he had ample time to catch up with the materials generated for the cases he had open - a mugging gone wrong, the culprit will turn up in a matter of days, wrecked by nightmares; a hit and run, which would have been tricky but for the flecks of paint embedded in the victim’s skin; a domestic, reported by overzealous neighbors, even though the injuries had all the marks of an accident. These were the days Charles enjoyed most: he could tuck himself into a quiet corner and read to his heart’s content. Granted, he would generally prefer a different content to his reading material, but even the lab reports had a charm to them; it was the closest he got to legitimate science these days. Closest to truth, really.
Hank was a meticulous young man and the police were lucky to have him. Unfortunately, even he couldn’t do much with no evidence to speak of. The few grains of gravel were also found on the victim’s own shoes, the single cohesive DNA sample that did not belong to the victim was not only useless without anything to compare it to, it was also completely useless as a piece of evidence, as it was found on the carpet. Even if Mr. Zhang was the only one to visit his bedroom in a while, there was no end to places where a man could get a foreign hair stuck to his person and had it carried into his home.
In other words, there was nothing. Two bodies, not yet cold, and there was not even a ghost to chase after.
“Charles?”
Charles blinked. Erik was standing in the door, one hand on the light switch. “Don’t bother, the overhead light doesn’t work,” Charles said, when Erik frowned at the singed plastic square when the click failed to produce an onslaught of photons. Disappointing, perhaps, but Charles was long used to the questionable reading conditions - he was reading under the desk lamp he’d bought for this express purpose a while back. No one ever came to the laboratory - it was far too bleak a place, with the fire damage and still charred equipment no one had the heart to throw out.
Erik’s face betrayed distaste and suspicion. Charles looked around, letting a reality filter slip over his eyes so that he could perceive the space as Erik was seeing it - a ruined workspace, cluttered with debris and charred edges, fit for housing nothing but rats, and Charles himself in the middle, bent over the tiled work table with a spread of papers before him, reading by the light of a cheap, plastic lamp, whose cord extended far enough from the table to create yet another hazard.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Erik asked, picking up a shard of glass which might have been a beaker before the fire. He toyed with the edge for a few moments, before dropping it into the sink, where it shattered against its brethren.
Charles flexed his shoulders, drawing them back as far as he could without assistance, letting the motion stretch the burning sensation, whose causes no doubt could be traced to a wooden floor on the sixth floor of an unassuming city building. As it were, the burning flared and the flare set fire to the narrow line which curled around his spine and dug into his hips, stirring heat in its wake. Charles was shaking his head before he even had the chance to fully form the thought. “It’s quieter in here. It helps me concentrate.”
“It’s that bad?”
Charles smiled. There was a promise in Erik’s voice to quiet the bullpen for good, should he ask for it. It made his heart pulse with excitement, even as he spoke, “Not really. I can tune the noise out, but I have trouble knowing what to tune out, so it ends up being all or nothing. People don’t react well to finding I’ve gone catatonic over reports. I’ve had an ambulance called on me once.” Wasn’t that a fun day, he recalled grimly: he began to study the autopsy report for a hit and run, followed by the forensics of the car, and seventy-eight minutes later he looked up to Sean’s freckled face, to an equally speckled hand on his shoulder, shaking him hard enough to send the back of his head careening into the flimsy cubicle wall.
He’d solved the case, naturally.
Erik likely would have raised a brow even if he had been privy to the memory. “Evidently it’s a boring report, if you noticed me in the door.”
Charles rewound the past two minutes in his head pushing aside the past and running down the vivid lines of now. “Dear lord,” he said, numb with the thrill of discovery. “I did hear you.”
“Congratulations, you have working ears.”
“No, I mean - I heard you, when I was reading. That’s… that’s good.” His hands shook, all of sudden, as he tried to gather the papers into a coherent pile, with little luck. An effort doomed to failure, when Erik was looking at him like he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or frown. Charles found he wasn’t so sure himself. Erik was important now. The only other person his brain didn’t automatically tune out was Raven. This could either be very good, or very bad. It was too early to tell.
“I don’t follow,” Erik said, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Does that mean I should stay away while you read? For fear of interrupting?”
“Never mind.” Charles aligned the photos in the folder with the middle line and closed it. “Did you want something?”
“Marvin brought coffee. I’m here to check if you want any.”
“Yes, please.” Charles left the papers on the worktable. He had been reading for a while - he could afford a short break. He looked up at Erik’s flickering eyes and frowned. “How many coffees have you had today already?”
“Can’t you tell?” The fingers of Erik’s right hand brushed Charles’ wrist, turning it outward, so that he could press his thumb to the pulse point, just below the cuff of his shirt.
“Three,” Charles answered promptly, turning his hand into the caress. “You shouldn’t drink so much, excess of caffeine it’s not good for the system.” His argument suffered for the fact that he was already achieving the elevated heart-rate, just by feeling the pressure against his radial artery. Of course, this presented a conundrum: he would eventually need his hand back, but he was certain he would rather part with his arm than voluntarily take it back.
“We’re going to need it,” Erik said, as though oblivious to Charles’ crisis. “We have mountains of papers to search through.”
“It will be of no use if either of us drops of a heart attack,” Charles pointed out reasonably, oh so reasonably, while his heart thundered on, sending waves and waves of blood through the narrow artery. He could feel his fingertips thrumming.
“How likely do you think I am to have a heart attack, Charles?” Erik shook his head, no doubt recalling the many, many physicals which proclaimed his health to be a hairsbreadth away from Superman. “Over coffee, no less. It’s far more probable I will be run over by a reindeer.”
“Ridiculous. These don’t start happening until mid-December.” The stairs which would take them out of the basement loomed into view and, with one final caress, Erik let go of his hand. Charles saw his fingers curl around his thumb, even as he shoved the hand into his slacks, in a transparent attempt at preserving the feel of skin. Somehow, that did not do wonders for his newly discovered heart problems.
Marvin was waiting for them upstairs, a huge grin on his round face and a giant tray of paper coffee cups in his hands. “Good afternoon, detective!” he chirped, swaying to compensate for the momentum caused by his sudden turn.
“Hello Marvin,” Charles said, grateful for a distraction on which he could focus and settle around. “You seem energetic.”
“I know, it is something of an experience for me.” He put down the tray on a handy desk, rubbed his hands and looked at Charles hopefully. “Coffee?”
“Mocha?” Charles asked, because he could only rarely resist the pull of chain-store mocha. Somehow, Raven’s concoction wasn’t the same, for all the creamy goodness and real chocolate she melted to perfection and blended with hot milk. He was an ungrateful sod, Charles thought mournfully as the steam trembled over the forest of white caps.
Marvin, on the other hand, beamed as though this was the best news he’d had all day. “Caramel of straight?”
“You really didn’t have to,” Charles told him when two cups were lifted into the air and proffered in his direction. “Straight, thank you.”
Marvin straightened and beamed again when Charles took the beverage. “It’s no trouble.”
“How is your work coming along?” Erik asked, helping himself to a double-shot cinnamon cappuccino, if Charles was interpreting the exuberant letters on the side correctly.
“I’m extremely busy,” Marvin said. He raised a hand for emphasis than caught himself before he could do more than flicker his fingers. Charles smiled into the coffee. Marvin was on a date last night. She was a little shy, but they were going out again, soon, and he couldn’t wait. He’d gone shopping, because the suit was new and so was the cologne. Erik’s stunt managed to break him out of his seasonal cycle. Charles refrained from commenting the relationship had no future, as Marvin was currently too excited about the whole notion of dating to remember her name properly, but it was certainly heartening to see him so energetic. There was enough good spirit there to see him through the break-up, and likely well into the next relationship.
“How’s the investigation going?” Marvin asked meanwhile, turning to Charles, who started. Some of the coffee spilled onto the plastic cover, immediately filling the lettering there.
“You heard?” he asked, slurping the mess off, not even trying to pretend the slurping wasn’t for Erik’s benefit. Of all the complaints leveled his way in the course of courtship or intercourse, his enthusiasm for oral sex of any variety received nothing but high praise, and Charles was not above advertising the fact.
Marvin shrugged and crossed his arms, then uncrossed them again and started fiddling with his watch. “I knew Chen. I mean, not that well, but we’ve met a couple of times. It’s horrible, what happened to him.”
“It could have been worse,” Erik said with a shrug which communicated his disdain for empathy and feelings. He couldn’t quite conceal the tense line of his shoulders as he did so. “How is your job going?”
“Ah, found some really weird columns in the quarterly, a while back. Took me a while to sort those out, they were for a daughter company that does - I’m not sure. I don’t know why I ever went into business in the first place. It makes little sense to me.” Marvin toyed with a cup before brightening up and handing it to a passing officer, who took it in lieu of his early morning shot of cola, which he failed to drink on account of being hideously late.
“You’ve been doing okay so far,” Charles said, patting his shoulder. “Daughter companies are rarely straightforward, that’s the whole point. Did you review their tax returns?”
“No, would that help?”
Poor Marvin, Charles thought. But accounting was not a job for the weak-minded. “That’s the most obvious place to start looking for irregularities. As soon as something starts going wrong, every company will start by submitting the most straightforward tax returns possible, the kind that no company employing human beings can manage to plausibly create by any means other than lying about it. On the bright side, that makes them easy to spot. I have an excellent accountant who might be able to help you with those. I can give you the number.”
“Oh, would you? Thanks so much!” Marvin handed over his phone (brand new model, only came out a few days ago, already scuffed with a film of grime across the keys - it saw some serious use over the past couple of days and not merely for the sake of games) and Charles keyed in the number.
“Her name is Kitty Pryde. Tell her I gave you the number and make sure you have an estimate of the size of files you want reviewed, she is very busy.”
“Thank you.” Marvin took a phone, clicked the heels of his expensive shoes and bowed. “Thanks, Detective Lehnsherr.”
“Thanks for the coffee,” Erik said, raising his cup.
Marvin left the station with a spring in his step and a huge grin on his face. Charles wondered how soon he would get a call from the man’s coworkers, claiming Marvin was on drugs. It was certain to happen - no one in this city could possibly be this happy all the time, save for those enjoying the chemical stimulation of the nervous system.
“Is there a reason he’s not on top of our list of suspects?” Erik asked meanwhile, sipping his coffee and staring at the door with a very thoughtful look on his face.
“You don’t like competition?” Charles said absently, before the statement could revisit his skull with an urgent tapping noise. “Oh! I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“You meant it, and you were correct.” Erik offered him a crooked smile and an eyebrow curved over his supraorbital ridge, indicating in no uncertain terms that no harm was done and in fact he was amused by the quip. Charles thought the relief might floor him. He had a sense of humor, despite all claims to the contrary, unfortunately, it often manifested as an unpredictable streak of acerbic, inflammatory comments. Considering the rest of his disposition, it was no wonder he had no friends to speak of. “What I meant was, beside me.”
“He’s incapable of hurting another human being.” Charles twisted the cap on his coffee with a fond little smile.
“No human being is incapable of that,” Erik said with the certainty of a man who had been on the business-end of the self-preservation instinct. He wasn’t wrong, either. If cornered, Marvin would absolutely try and fight back, but it wouldn’t come easily, and more importantly it wouldn’t come unannounced. Certainly if Marvin decided to resolve his ennui problems with murder he wouldn’t waltz into the station with an armful of coffee to gloat about it.
Charles capitulated in the face of overwhelming evidence. “He does have a solid alibi for the first night. None of his accounts was credited with more than a thousand dollars at time, amounting to a total of nine thousand seven hundred thirty-two dollars over the past three months, which is consistent with his finances for the past seven years and puts him on the upper-middle end of the spending spectrum, not inconsistent with his paygrade and corresponding status.”
The officer standing behind him took a step back, and continued on his way. Charles preferred to think it was an involuntary action. Erik remained unmoved, but there was a faint smile on his face.
“I’m actually surprised, for a change. Do you monitor the finances of everyone you know?”
“It did cross my mind. Marvin is not wholly stable,” as evidenced by his quarterly suicide attempts, but then again Charles himself was quoted as the dictionary definition of unstable. Charles found it a bit odd, as every last one of his actions was predictable to a fault. “He might not be capable of murder - I honestly don’t believe he is - but the killer might have been paid.”
“There was no evidence a second person was present.”
“There was no evidence a first person was present, unfortunately. Anyone could have been there during the murder.”
“So you suspected Marvin, enough to look into his finances.” Erik paused and dragged his tongue across his lips slow enough to make sure it couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than a sexual invitation. “I wonder what mine revealed.”
“Nothing incriminating,” Charles admitted dutifully, awaiting the inevitable disapproval, but none was evident.
“Should I look into yours, or were you considerate enough to do that, too?” Erik was smiling wider. The smile was a curiously powerful thing - it scoped the station like the lantern of a lighthouse, leaving trembling hearts and panicked souls wherever Erik turned his shining white teeth. This time, when a fellow officer gave them a wide berth it wasn’t because of Charles.
“I review the state of my finances regularly, but you are more than welcome to double check. I could call my bank and schedule a meeting with the assistant, if you’d like. I’d give you full access to my statements.” It was an argument which often came up in fights, particularly when Raven was younger: how would you feel if someone investigated your personal life? It was one of many Charles couldn’t quite understand. His life was perfectly transparent - should anyone care to, he would gladly supply all the relevant documentation to whomever asked.
“I was joking. The last time I’ve seen the inside of a bank, I was blowing it up.” Then Erik lowered his voice. “I didn’t think it was fully legal, though.”
Charles took a sip of his mocha letting the corporate America assassinate his trouble with factory-manufactured cocoa and coffee. Of course Charles did a cursory sweep of the accounts of his work colleagues. Corruption within the force was best prevented before it saw the light of day and catching a murderer was more important than abiding by court orders. Evidence was only a matter of looking, and the murderer was almost certainly aware of police procedures, which didn’t necessarily imply it was one of their own, but it didn’t disqualify them either. The problem with working this angle, however, was that obtaining some information was not permitted without solid evidence such information might pertain to the investigation, and such a permission required for a detective to be in possession of said information. Such a conundrum, when one had to choose between justice and the justice system, he thought with a weary sigh. “I’ll be in the lab,” he told Erik.
He felt eyes on his back until he reached the staircase.
*****
Raven whistled as she got out of work around ten in the evening. She enjoyed waiting tables. She let her mind drift then; she would solve problems, fill out coursework she’d later type out, no direct input from the brain required. Mind the food arriving at various times, on various plates, to various physical locations required concentration, but left a substantial part of her mind free to get on with other work. It allowed her to breeze through college with pocket money she didn’t have to ask Charles for (not that Charles would ever refuse her money she asked for, but there was something utterly humiliating about having even the most beloved brother legally manage her finances). Once she was done with college she became terribly bored with it, but persevered, mostly because Joe swore up and down he couldn’t find a good enough replacement, the cheap lying bastard.
“Hi Raven,” Charles called when she walked through the door to their shared apartment, some odd seconds before the warmth and smell of food started bouncing up and down in her skull. “Did you have a good day?”
“Joe still swears he can’t find anyone, but I’m calling bullshit. He doesn’t want to let me go, ‘cause I don’t go round asking for raises,” she yelled back, uncoiling the scarf from her neck and dumping it, along with her coat, on the shelf she had reserved for this specific purpose.
“Which is a mistake on your part, I say.” Charles’ voice drifted from the kitchen on the heavenly wings of garlic smell. “You’ve been doing stellar work. I wouldn’t be surprised if your presence didn’t get him customers.”
No shit, she liked her short skirts and flaunted her enjoyment. Even so, Raven scowled. “Tough for him, I don’t want to be a waitress all my life.” She adjusted the hemline of her panties, where they rode up to peek over her belt, and toed off her socks. She moved into the kitchen, dropping more of the personal knick-knacks and random pieces of clothing as she went, until she was down to her skirt and T-shirt - Charles liked to keep their place warm - tapping on the screen of her phone.
“I’m surprised you’ve held out as long as you have,” he said, reaching for a jar of thyme.
“I did find it fun.”
“It looked like fun,” Charles said absently. He was stirring the contents of a wok. Raven peeked over his shoulder - they were having prawn paella tonight. Good. Then she looked up from the food and to his face, only to find it so completely out of focus she was surprised she could even make out his features. The fuck?
“How was your day?” she asked cautiously, trying not to look like she was about to panic. The last time he’d been that unfocussed he had been in the hospital, drugged to the gills, with a butcher’s knife sticking out of his chest. Raven felt justified in checking his pulse.
Fortunately, he looked up when she touched his neck and smiled, in the here and now, haziness forgotten. “Oh, I wish I could report progress, I do. I talked to the doormen again. They both lived on the same street, but that’s as far as the connection went.” He hesitated and sought inspiration in the garlicky depths of the paella. “We’re on square one.”
Raven gaped, recomputed, then gaped again. It wasn’t often that one and one added together to flowerpot, instead of the requisite one-oh. “Square one? What the hell, Charles? You’re usually done with solving a crime five minutes after setting foot on the crime scene!” Which wasn’t wholly true, but there was enough truth in it to justify the dramatic delivery. Shut up, brain, Raven thought viciously, I like dramatic delivery.
Charles, meanwhile, adopted his gentle scolding face and tapped her nose with the spatula, no doubt leaving a trail of oil and a flake of onion in its wake. “That’s not wholly true, luv. Most crimes are indeed obvious, but this one is unusual. We’ve been able to ascertain no motive, no one who stood to gain from the deaths, and, more importantly, no hard evidence.”
“Holy shit,” Raven said. Then, because she watched three seasons of Dexter over the past month, she asked, “Are you sure you’re not the murderer? Because you could totally pull it off. It would be so weird, if it was you. I could write a book and everyone would die to read it. My Brother the Serial Killer: a Personal Account - All That and Paella!”
Charles’ face took on a strange look. “I know,” he said slowly, as though he was drawing and quartering the comment into a string of bits. One-oh, one-oh, one, one, oh, one. “Isn’t it shocking?” Round and round went the spatula, overturning the prawns and shoveling rice onto them. Charles stared into its depths like his whole future was written there.
“You must be overjoyed.” Raven hopped onto the counter, kicking the cupboard with her bare heels.
This stirred Charles out of his divination. “Excuse me?”
“It’s a riddle, isn’t it? You love riddles.”
“That’s just the thing,” he said, with a touch more emotion than the statement justly deserved, dropping the spatula into the wok. “It’s not a riddle. It lacks a mystery. It lacks sense. It’s just things happening for no reason!” He was glaring at the wall over the stove and Raven, after checking that there was nothing there, allowed the vague pang of unease to knock her on the shoulder.
“I don’t follow,” she said slowly. “You have no suspects, right? A murder in a locked room, no entry or exit and no evidence. How’s that for a mystery?”
“Yes, yes, but that’s not important.” Charles picked the spatula back up and scraped the bits of onions and pepper which stuck to the pan over the rice level. “The murder is dry, there’s no emotion in it. It has all the marks of being a serial killer’s work, but they make no sense as the work of a serial killer. I don’t understand these murders.”
“It would be a cold day in hell before you understood a murderer, Charlie,” Raven said, pressing a kiss to his cheek, gratified to draw a slow smile. “When are we eating? I’m starved!”
“A few more minutes.” Then, “Raven?”
“Yes?”
“I heard Erik today.” He hesitated. “I was reading the work files and he came in the lab and I heard him when he called.”
Sometimes Raven couldn’t help but understand motherhood. Charles had a way of admitting things in a way that hunched his shoulder, curled his toes and wrung his hands, so that, with a touch of miniaturization and a little blurring, he looked all of five, reporting a tentative success on a matter which had previously been a resounding failure. When he did that, looking up at her (which in itself never failed to make her feel like gathering him up to his chest and squeezing), she invariably felt a smothering of pride and tearful loss, because this growing up business took people places other people couldn’t go. Or something.
“That’s… That’s wonderful!” She wrapped her arms around his middle and laid her head on his shoulder. Erik, of all people. Well, Charles wasn’t wholly sane, so why the hell not? “He’s a cool guy, isn’t he? Slight crazy non-withstanding, he is pretty awesome.”
“True.” Charles was smiling; she could feel that in her hair. She gave him one last squeeze and skipped to her room, grabbing her bag along the way, to return it to its nesting place on her sprawling bed. She checked her email, then her Blackberry, then the email again. Two messages were waiting: one from Joe, begging her to reconsider her resignation, the other from Angel, confirming they were having drinks on Friday.
Excellent.
“Food on the table!” Charles called from the kitchen.
Raven whirled on the balls of her feet and went to eat.
After dinner they settled in front of the TV with tea and cookies Raven wheedled out of Joe on her way out. She waited until Charles finished his first cup, as that usually put him in a slightly better mood, before sitting up.
“Charles,” she started, trying to phrase her next words - which were going to be extremely flammable - in the least incendiary way. Huh. Hey, Charles, you know the Crazy Focused Personality With No Reality Filters Disorder that you have? Yeah, dude, work on that, it’s not fetching. No, that wouldn’t do. Better to just be upfront and business-like. Charles is going to appreciate business-like. “I’ve applied to the PD. I had my medical yesterday. Next week I’m going in for character investigation.”
That went well, except she didn’t think Charles could get quite so pale. Move over Robert Pattison.
“What?” he asked, making next to no sound.
Raven scoffed. “I know you heard me. You always hear.” She didn’t mean to sound quite so accusing, but the tone took on a life of its own, nonetheless.
Charles’ features pinched together, painting him into a very neat Snow White - red-lipped and pale as death. “No. I don’t allow it. You will withdraw the application,” he said with the authoritarian cadence of the Evil Queen.
For a change Raven would not be cowed. Not on this. “No. I am applying. I will get in. You know I can handle it.”
“You can’t handle it,” Charles said, still quiet, still calm, on the verge of breaking. “You have no idea what a police job entails in this city. You will not go through with this.”
Luckily, this was one thing Raven was ready for so when she replied she was calm and self-assured. She had rehearsed this, after all. “You can’t tell me what I will and won’t do. You don’t have the right.”
“You’re a child, Raven! You have no concept of what goes on in the department, you have no concept of what we have to deal with!” Charles’ hands shook and the cookie he was eating drops to the plate in his lap. “It’s not all clean murder and parking tickets.”
“I’m twenty three and I can handle myself! I attended autopsies, I know what corpses look like, at all stages of decomp! It was your idea to put me into combat training. It’s your fault I react to being surprised by throwing people over my shoulder. Why the hell shouldn’t I use it to do something?”
“You trained for your own security! Self-defense gives you an edge over this city. There’s no reason to go looking for more trouble, when you get into enough just walking out the door.”
For someone whose brain operated in the binary system, Charles sometimes managed to see reason as this foreign, exotic creature, which needed to be studied and poked until it folded and conformed to his mental picture of a common cow. Raven scowled at him, finding the scowl matched by his glare. “I can fight. I can shoot. I’m clever. You taught me to be clever and you can’t tell me you failed there. I know I’m good. You can’t keep me locked up in this place forever. Why the hell do you even try?”
“Because it’s dangerous! People die on the job, every day. We chase after murderers, after rapists and psychopaths. We stick our noses into places no one sane goes. That’s not sane, that’s not normal, that is not a job for you.” He picked up the cookie again, biting into it like it was supposed to symbolize Raven’s resolve.
Fuck you, Charles, she thought. “It’s my life. I will do whatever I want.”
“No, you won’t.”
“They will hire me, Charles. I am in excellent shape. I have more than enough uni credits. I kick ass for fun and I’ve a psyche so stable you could level walls with it. I have letters from the resident pathologist at the Sacred Heart. There’s no way they’re gonna blow me off.”
Charles reached for his phone. “They won’t hire you,” he said to the device. “I will see to it that they don’t. You will find yourself another job, something you can excel at, something safe.” Bless the modern cells, with their enormous screens and easy to read fonts, Raven thought, though when the blue highlight stopped at a name she recognized she stopped blessing and began cursing. For a second Raven thought her whole world had turned red. Before she could even think what she was doing, she scrambled up to her knees and closed her palms around his.
“If you make that phone call,” she hissed, “I will never forgive you. I swear to god, for as long as I live. I want this, Charles, I want to become a police officer. Why the hell is that so difficult for you to get?”
“I can’t see you hurt,” he told his phone rather than her. She rolled her eyes.
“Grow up. People get hurt all the time.” Raven dug her chin into the top of his head and brought her other arm up around his shoulders. “You can’t save everyone.”
Charles looked at the phone, at their joined hands. Then he looked at her. “I’m sorry. I’d rather you hated me.”
The next moment the phone flew from his hands and Raven had him pinned to the floor, with his right arm twisted behind his back and his face in the thick carpet.
“I don’t need your protection anymore,” she hissed into his ear, digging a knee into his thigh to make a point. “I’m not a child. I can handle myself. It’s not like it was before, okay? Besides, I am an adult. You can’t stop me. You think I didn’t expect you to do this? Of course I have. I told the commissioner you’re my brother. I told her everything, about Kurt and about Cain. I said you might call. She promised she wouldn’t listen to you.”
Charles shook underneath her hands. “Raven, don’t. Please. You can’t do this.”
“Name one reason why I shouldn’t.”
“Kurt would have wanted you to. He is dead, you don’t need his approval anymore.”
As if she ever wanted his approval. Fat chance. “Kurt can go to hell, if he’s not already there. I want this.” Raven let go and stood up, straightening up her skirt with the ease of a women half of whose wardrobe could be mistaken for really wide belts. “I’m thinking you should quit, though. It’s not doing you any favors.”
“What makes you think you can handle it, exactly?” Charles lifted himself off the floor slowly, as if each move caused him pain, but his head was turned towards her and the anger - bona fide anger - was directed at her, too. “Do you honestly think being able to not breathe through the nose for a few hours teaches you everything you need to know about death? You know nothing. Corpses in the mortuary are at peace. Those you would find on the job are a thousand times worse, because they still move, they talk and breathe and beg for their lives!” Charles took a breath and pushed himself to his feet. “Can you handle looking a man in the eye, pointing a gun at him and firing? Can you handle looking down the barrel of a gun at people on a regular basis? I saw you in the shooting range, when Erik stepped in front of you, and you were panicking. You burst into tears. You can’t handle hurting another human being, any more than you can hurt me.”
“Say one more word and I will conclusively prove I can hurt you.” In that moment she was certain she could, too.
“You won’t. Because you can’t hurt me, you are not capable of hurting me, even when I stand in your way. What makes you think it will be any different with other people?”
“Erik surprised me! We were in the shooting range, I didn’t expect anyone to be stupid enough to try. It won’t happen again, because next time I will be ready. The next time I point a gun at someone I will have pointed it there.” She folded her arms and shrugged. “And it’s not like he doesn’t think it’s a good idea, for me to join, anyway.”
“You’ve spoken with him about it?” Charles’ mouth fell open. “When?”
Raven shrugged again. “In the shooting range.”
She expected Charles to call her bluff immediately. He could always tell when she was lying, or skirting the truth, or even skewing the facts in her favor. This time he lowered his head and stared at the floor, while his hands clenched and unclenched rhythmically.
“Erik’s advice is not something you should follow,” he said in the end.
“At least his is not hypocritical. Christ, Charles, you don’t even want to be a detective and you stick by the goddamned job like it’s your fucking salvation! Why? Kurt is dead; he’s not there to make you do anything. You don’t owe him shit, if you ever did.”
Charles hunched in on himself. “I don’t have a choice.”
“Fuck you. You have every choice in the book. You can go back to school, you could be a teacher in a year of two, for god’s sake, but you get up every morning and wallow in the misery that’s the police department. How stupid do you think I am? Be honest for once, and apply a human scale, the one not including you. You’re only happy there when Hank lets you play with his chemistry set, and at no other time.”
His hands tighten and stay taut, to the point of trembling. “I enjoy solving the cases,” he whispers.
“But you hate the people there. You stay because every time you try to leave Moira looks at you with those doe eyes and for a few seconds you don’t feel like a complete freak. You feel like she really likes you as a person, like she doesn’t think you’re the creepiest fuck she’s ever met, murderers included, and you know this! Everybody in the station thinks so! There’s a betting pool on when you’ll finally snap and murder everybody and okay, Moira isn’t in it, but that’s because she has a giant fucking stick up her ass. You know all this because you know everything about everybody and you still get up and show up every morning, like a masochistic moron.” God, that hurt to say, but was it awesome to finally get out, or what?
Except now that it was out Raven had no choice but to square her shoulders and soldier on. “I’m not asking for your permission, Charles. I’m asking you to look at me. Look at me properly and tell me I’m weak, that I can’t handle police work. Look at me and tell me I’m a child.”
She kept her gaze locked on him, until he looked up and looked back. Her heart constricted at the expression on his face, but she held his gaze. She was not weak. She was not.
“I’d rather have you hate me then join,” he said. There was defeat in his voice and that was how Raven knew that he saw, perhaps for the first time, that she was no longer the little girl who needed protecting from the world.
“I will never hate you,” she said. “I love you. But I will do this.”
Charles smiled and only then did Raven notice the phone in his hand. “Mrs. Hightower, this is Charles Xavier. My apologies, I know it’s late, but this is important. My sister has filed an application for the department. I need you to reject it.”
Raven heard a female voice on the other end of the line, but couldn’t make out the words. It may have been due to the roar of furious elephants thundering down the middle of her soul.
“I understand. Thank you. I appreciate it. Good evening to you.” Charles disconnected and let the phone fall to the couch.
Raven burned. She, the elephants, the roar and the savannah they needed to gallop, along, very possibly, with sense.
“How dare you?” she asked in a voice which would have been a scream but for the volume. “You’re my brother! You’re supposed to want me to be happy!”
“I’m supposed to protect you.”
“You’re just like Kurt.”
Charles’ face went whiter.
“You’re gonna deny, but you’re just like him. You want me to be your little puppet, always doing what you say. You think you’re doing it for me, but it’s bullshit! Like you know what’s best for me, you know jack shit. I’m a person and you don’t get a say in how I live my life.” She took a deep breath. “Fuck you, Charles.”
In under a minute she was in her room, dragging yesterday’s leggings up her legs, shrugging on a sweater and grabbing her bag. Before another minute passed, she was out the door and running into the night. Charles didn’t even call her name.
*****
Erik had fallen into a light sleep halfway through The Master and Margarita. He woke a few minutes past twelve. It was dark outside, and the few stars bright enough to fight their way through the light pollution were flickering weakly in the bruise-colored sky. Erik switched the lamp on and smiled. It was a private smile, one he never let anyone see. The sight of his unevenly purple walls, made all the more wriggly with the uneven lighting, never failed to bring it out.
He grabbed his phone off the floor to confirm what he already knew about the hour and found a text waiting for him.
Just let me know shes safe, he read. What the hell, Charles? A missing apostrophe in a text message? What is this strange alternative universe?
Then someone knocked on the door.
Erik was certain he knew who it was; he would have known even if he couldn’t hear the clicking of heels which should be high, but weren’t confusing the feet they were adorning. He opened the door with the gun at his side even so.
“Hi. Can I come in?” Raven Xavier said. There were tears in her eyes and an angry, locked, expression on her face, somewhat at odds with the rapid breathing, a result of a long run, no doubt.
Erik moved out of the way without a word. Already he was punching in a reply to Charles. Just walked in fine.
“Thank you.” Raven strode in, took the bag off her shoulder, toed off her sneakers - why the hell was she wearing sneakers in the first place, wasn’t that a social suicide these days? - and looked around. “This is it? This is where you live?”
“So the evidence would suggest.”
The locks must have loosened because half her muscles twitched. “The purple is an eyesore.”
“Blame your brother.”
“Charles painted your apartment?”
“It used to be white, then he invited himself in.”
“Okay, maybe it’s an improvement over white, but purple? What the hell? You should have picked green, or blue - oh, turquoise. Pale turquoise with uneven electric blue accents. I bet it would be awesome.”
Raven was Charles’ sister, absolutely, Erik thought as he put the gun away, into the closet. She was already calculating the area of the walls and spacing the accents, all with a glance. “What are you doing here, Raven?”
She didn’t answer for a long time, choosing instead to scuff a bare toe against the floor. “I fought with Charles.”
No fucking shit, girl. “Is this all you’re going to do today, state the obvious?”
“Fuck you. You’re just like him, with the mind-reading.” Her bag landed on the floor and Raven kicked it into the corner. “I’ve had just about enough of the mind-reading.”
“It doesn’t take Charles to notice you’ve been crying and you haven’t fled to him for comfort. What I want to know is why you came here. I barely know you.” Not that it was going to be a night of making sense, he could tell.
“I applied for a position in the WPD. Charles just called the chief commissioner to get them to reject my application, and don’t you dare tell me I don’t have the first clue what I’m getting into.” Raven stalked to him, stabbing him in the chest with a surprisingly sharp fingernail. “I know. I know perfectly well what I’m doing. I know it’s horrible and bad and muggers on every corner and I know about the mortality rate among officers. I’m not stupid.” She continued the stabby assault, punctuating every other word with a sharp jab, until Erik held up his hands and stepped back.
“Did I say anything?”
It was like she didn’t even notice he was in the room. “Charles thinks it’s all nice and well for him to go out and risk his life and leave me locked home, like I’m safer there. He’s an idiot.”
And back to stating the obvious it was. “He can be.”
“I just- He was looking after me all my life. I get he doesn’t want all the hard work to go to waste, but honestly, what was he expecting? He taught me to fight dirty, he taught me how to tell a mugger from a drunk, he taught me how to walk across a room full of people and not be noticed - granted, I’m better at it now than he will ever be, but he taught me the basics. He taught me how to look at a room and pick out the bits that matter. It’s like he spent most of my life teaching me to be a police officer. Why doesn’t he get that I need to do this, then?”
She was staring at him, begging for understanding. She looked nothing like Charles, yet Erik felt smothered by the affection and concern all the same. “Why did he join up?”
If the question was a ball, Raven would have swatted it out of the air. It took a moment before she started talking. “Kurt, mostly. He was, well, a controlling dickhead doesn’t even begin to describe it. His whole family was police officers, right back to the settler era, or so he claimed. Cain - his son, my half-brother - was a lowlife, though he hid it well. He got into WPD, right, but I don’t think he would have been any good, even if he didn’t go totally nuts, so Kurt got it into his head to groom me into it.
“You can imagine Charles wasn’t happy with that, so made a deal, beats me how, he sucks at talking to people. But the bottom line was that Kurt would let me do what I wanted, and Charles would join the CSI. He was studying genetics and biophysics anyway, so a few extra classes and he had all the necessary qualifications for processing crime scenes. Except, you know Charles. He showed up on his first day, one-upped every detective on the scene making himself seventeen enemies in the process, and they wouldn’t let him go. Not that it’s a shock, he is that good.” She smiled and pressed a thumb to her mouth in an effort to hide the smile. Erik waited.
“The supreme irony being, of course, that I actually do want to be a detective.” Her hair fell over her face. “I’m- I don’t want to hurt him. I really don’t. But this is something I want to do, and he always said I should do what I wanted with my life. Isn’t that a great joke?”
“It’s not very funny,” Erik said wryly.
Raven dithered, moving from one leg to the other and back, wringing her hands until finally she spoke, “Don’t you have chairs in this place? What kind of a person doesn’t even have chairs?”
“I rarely entertain visitors. Sit on the counter in the kitchen, or the floor.” On second thought, not the floor. The skirt she was wearing was very short and Erik didn’t particularly need to see whether she remembered underwear in her haste to get out the door, leggings or no.
“You’re a terrible host. You could offer me a drink.”
“I’ve got whiskey or beer.”
“No vodka?”
“Sorry.”
“Beer, then.”
Erik opened the fridge, population: beer, picked one from the back, popped the cap with the faucet and passed it to her. Raven took a professional swig, swallowed and cocked her head.
“Won’t you tell me what a horrible idea it is? How young I am, how much danger I’m gonna be in? How Darwin got shot last week, through little fault of his own?”
“No.”
Raven let the bottle drop, surprised. “Why not?”
“Safety is relative. You can get shot walking down the streets.”
“It’s more likely if I was a cop.”
“True.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Aren’t you going to agree with Charles?”
“No.”
“Why the hell not? You’re best buds now, I hear.”
“Because he is not responsible for you,” Erik said firmly. “He has to accept that. If you want to do risk your life to do what you want to do, it’s on your head, not his.”
Raven snorted into her beer. “Good luck trying to convince Charles he’s not responsible for everything that goes wrong in this state.”
“I’ve decided to start off with easier endeavors, like turning water into wine.” Erik opened another bottle and toasted the third party of this conversation. Funny, how even when Charles was absent he was still fucking there.
“It’s been done before,” Raven said.
“I’m Jewish. I have no conclusive proof.” Erik gave Raven a wry smile and she responded in kind. “You have a right to your own decisions. For what it’s worth, I think you’ll be a better officer than he is. A better team player, certainly.”
Raven sighed and looked out the window, suddenly pensive. She was toying with the bottle, smearing the condensation all over the label. “He hates it, really. He knows he scares most people more than the murderers do and it’s killing him. He’d be way happier if he was locked up in his library solving Sudoku all day.”
Erik shrugged. He couldn’t see Charles devoting more than three minutes to Sudoku as a past-time, them being so obvious a riddle thus hardly a riddle at all. “He catches killers. Saves the world one murderer at a time. I figure that’s why he stays.”
“He’s an idiot,” she said hotly and bit her lip. She was going to cry again, Erik thought, but instead she emptied half the bottle and burped like a champion.
“Everyone is allowed to be an idiot, it’s a free country.” He raised his own bottle in a mocking salute. “To idiocy.”
“Shit. I better call him,” Raven said. “He must be going nuts, if he hasn’t launched search parties already.”
“He texted me just before you got here. He knows you’re okay.”
Raven went from lip-biting wide-eyed woolen ball of empathy to a scowling grump, who rolled her eyes a lot. “I hate his mind-reading.”
“It comes in handy. Are you staying the night?” Not that Erik would throw her out in the cold at this hour, given the astronomical odds she beat just to arrive in one piece, but a request would be nice.
“Can I?” Raven gave him a look he just knew Charles taught her - a look of a devious tomcat attempting and succeeding at puppy-eyes, solely because it was a devious fuck. “I think we both need a little space.”
“And for that reason you invaded my single room. Inspired.”
Raven winced. “In my defense I thought you were living like a normal person. With chairs.”
“Chairs are overrated. You can stay, but don’t make this a regular occurrence, I’m not a hotel.”
“I’d say, with this decor.” Raven propped her hands on her hips and made a show of looking around. “Are you both blind?”
Asked the woman wearing a seatbelt for a skirt. At least Erik could dress himself and not die of exposure in the process. “I don’t mind the purple.”
“You’re a guy,” she said, torn between incredulity and condescension.
“I’m entitled to an opinion about colors.”
“Not when it’s so blatantly wrong.”
“Don’t you have things to do in the morning?” he asked.
“My shift doesn’t start until twelve.”
“I get up at six. You need to be ready to leave by eight.”
Raven huffed. “You’re no fun.”
“Ongoing murder investigation. That’s not fun.”
“Right.” Raven looked around the apartment one more time and her face indicated she was registering the implications of its emptiness. “Oh crap. Where can I sleep?”
Too bad it only occurred to Erik now, too. He sighed. “Take the mattress.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“How many nights have you slept on hardwood floor? I’m guessing not many.” He slept a few on naked rocks, which was considerably more fun, because rocks had hollows into which a spine could be poured. Vastly preferable.
“It’s not like we can’t share. It’s a double.” Raven nudged the mattress with her toe, throwing a coy look over her shoulder.
“Charles will gut me.”
Raven reacted to the off-hand comment like he set her kitten on fire and set it on her mother. “He’s not unhinged!”
“Have you seen him mad?” Erik said with a quirk of his lip, which seemed to be enough to settle the ruffled feathers. “Bathroom’s through there.”
“Thanks.”
She disappeared to wash up, and Erik contemplated the unhelpfulness of his closet. There was a fleece blanket, old as time itself, which would still be better than the floor. Not even a parka to make it bearable. Fuck his life. He spread the blanket opposite the mattress, and hopped in place for three minutes, to relax his muscles, or at least confuse them into not noticing the hardwood until after he’s fallen asleep.
He was flat on his back with his eyes closed, when Raven walked out of the bathroom.
He didn’t bother looking when she knelt by him. “I meant it about the bed,” she said.
“I meant it about Charles,” he tried to respond, but before he got halfway through with the personal pronoun her petal-soft lips were against his, moving gently with the words.
She hit the floor a fraction of a second later. To her credit, and her future career as a sexual predator, she landed on her side and was already twisting into a crouch by the time he kicked the blanket away. She wasn’t joking about the black belt - for all the stupidity required of an aspiring officer, Raven had a firm grasp on her own abilities.
“Raven, go to bed,” Erik said firmly.
“Why?” She straightened from the half-crouch, still coiled and ready for an attack. Erik couldn’t help but approve.
“Because I have no intention of sleeping with you. Thank you,” he added as an afterthought, “But no.”
She flushed a deep red, an effect thoroughly ruined by the night. Erik averted his gaze when she stood, clad only in the T-shirt she was wearing when she got in, minus a bra, and the underwear she hadn’t forgotten after all, and wrapped the duvet around herself. He wasn’t blind, for fuck’s sake.
“You don’t have to sleep on the floor,” she said. “I promise I won’t try anything.”
It was tempting. Erik eyed the unforgiving floor, which already tried to claw through his ribs, but there were so many reasons this would have been a dumb idea, not just because “I shared a bed with your extremely attractive sister. I had her tits right there, next to me, and I did nothing. You believe me, don’t you?” wasn’t a conversation he was willing to ever have with anyone, not unless he got laid for his trouble. Not that Charles wouldn’t believe him and he probably would get laid for his trouble.
Huh.
Even so. “I don’t react well to being startled. I could hurt you before I was awake.”
Raven cocked her head. “What, really? I thought that only happened in the movies.”
“Trust me. I have PTSD coming out of my ears. You don’t want to startle me.”
“Huh. Sorry.” Then, in a smaller voice, she added, “You really gonna be okay over there?”
“I’ll live, but try not to fight with Charles again. It’s not going to be comfortable.”
Raven curled on the mattress, becoming a miserable mound of unhappiness instead of a sexy woman. A cold shower by any other name, Erik thought wryly and made himself less uncomfortable on the floor.
“Charles is going to be very upset tomorrow,” Raven whispered into the sheets.
“We will sort it out.”
“Thanks,” she said, tucked in and curled on her side, when he was on the verge of sleep. What little light there was in the room reflected in her eyes and Erik would be annoyed, because it was vital the he fall asleep as soon as possible, but the warm regard obvious in her gaze made it hard to snap at her. “For liking Charles. He likes you so much, he’s so much happier since you came here - I’m really glad. He’s very lonely.”
Erik couldn’t help staring at her. She was a nice girl, and nice girls didn’t try to seduce their brother’s lovers (or whatever they could be called - there was far too little sex for that label to apply and Erik refused to be called anybody’s boyfriend), which could only mean she had no idea they were whatever the hell they were. She didn’t think Charles could be interested at all, unless this was a bizarre revenge attempt on her part.
No, Erik thought when her glowing eyes finally closed and her breathing evened. She didn’t do this to hurt Charles. He hasn’t told her and she hasn’t made the connection on her own, and while the sex itself was new, everything leading to it wasn’t. Erik wondered what that implied for their future. He had very little by way of definite plans, and Charles, being Charles, was well aware of it.
He wondered if he started including Charles in his uncertain future yet. He wondered if Charles included him in his.