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OKAY I WAS GOING TO DO MORE WITH THIS FIC, but then I didn't, so now I might as well post it here for archival purposes, I guess. My apologies to Rubynye for the weird numbering on the kinkmeme. :'D
Title: this lens, which polarized
Author:possibly_thrice
Pairing: Erik/Raven
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Mimicry and memory and baseless speculation about how shapeshifting even works, when Raven does it.
In the early days, with November still settling in, they haunt an abandoned warehouse, bed rolls laid out in the shadowy spaces between support columns because they may be allies but that does not always mean they can stand to see the ugly softness in one another’s sleeping faces. And it is haunting: Emma sits by the door, left leg crossed over right knee, her hands laced on her shin, the neat curves of her calf visible through the complex facets of her wrist, and rips from every curious passer-by all but a faint impression of something gone wrong, in the quality of the silence, the density of the dark.
Raven watches her, sometimes. It’s not actually an easy task in the absence of a strong light source. Where the others have their silhouettes, Emma is reduced to a network of gleams, an echo less of stars than cities as she shifts. Stretches against the ancient wall.
Once, a little past midnight, on Erik’s suggestion, Raven tries to mimic her. She finds, to her surprise (or make that shock, and a blossoming of fear) that it’s an imperfect capture- her fingers opaquely frosted, netted with cracks, and showing a strange core of blue.
“Hmm,” says Erik.
Emma turns her head, the movement strangely level, and smiles a bright, ironic smile.
“This has never happened before,” Raven says, slowly.
“No,” says Erik. “I didn’t think it had.”
“I don’t,” she begins.
Her voice is neither Emma’s nor her own, wetly skating a rim of glass.
Keep to surfaces, honey, Emma thinks, the imagined sound of it high and clear and incredibly irritating in Raven’s head, and, if Raven knows Emma, everyone else’s heads, too. Clarity is an entirely separate kind of gift.
Raven lets the form slide off her, and stands, not caring that the movement strips the blanket from Erik’s bare legs. It isn’t as if he’s ashamed, she thinks, unfairly and with some vehemence. And he doesn’t move to drag it back into place, choosing instead to raise himself off his elbow and look thoughtfully up at her.
She stalks out.
On the sidewalk, she calms down a little, and shifts through several shapes, faces she’s picked up in the past month like so many dropped coins. Her scalp tautens and sags and she does not stay in any one skin long enough to acclimate to the feel of it, preferring, right now, the sharp awareness of every limb’s articulation.
(It wasn’t until she went with Erik that she learned that she could change back into former- well- forms without a visual aid, by remembering the sense of being inside a given person, and how it had felt to use musculature that was the infrastructure of a wholly different life.)
She smooths the grease-heavy hair of a bus driver out of his eyes, but by the time the bus driver’s long hand has slid off his forehead it belongs to a blind woman who had smiled sightlessly at Raven in a bar, and scratched behind her dog’s ears with huge, lovely fingers, fat smoothing the curl of her knuckles into a gentler arc. The flare of scales takes a little longer to settle in her shoulders; there is more volume to fill.
And maybe it’s the thought of someone living without one sense that makes Raven, a moment later, become the girl Charles and she had built together, when they were children and clever as all hell. It remains the only face she’s ever made from scratch, more or less, filling sketchbooks and doing clumsy watercolors and, in the end, making a leap of faith. Believing that, somewhere in those pages of poses and angled shots and close-ups of individual features, there was a whole person, who was hers, and only hers, who she could be and, being, would be safe.
Weird, she thinks; how something that started out as a breakthrough could so quickly turn into another wall.
Less like not seeing than not breathing, she thinks.
She misses Charles so violently that she worries she’ll split this last, first shell, ruin it past repairing, and considers relaxing into blue. It’s the first time she’s- looked this way- since the night Erik kissed her. It’s the first time she’s let herself.
This is the body that remembers her brother best: its shoulders know the weight of his arm over them, and its forehead has leaned on his. She thinks perhaps even the sharpness of memories evoked by certain smells, certain slants of light, would be sharper with this unridged nose, these too-small-irised eyes.
She thinks it’s probably also the body he misses most.
That thought- knowledge- should help. That should drag the pain back down into the secret middle of her, the part of her that apparently won’t fucking turn transparent at any cost. It doesn’t. Raven liked being his almost human sister, once, moving freely with him through a world that would never know them, would never even see them, and smiled at them anyway. Even when she learned how much she hated it, she liked it.
Invisible, she thinks, but not transparent.
It’s kind of funny. In a way.
She hears the warehouse doors open, and hears Erik’s footsteps.
He’s put pants on, but not, unusually, his helmet, although here at the curb they are probably still inside Emma’s generalized block. His hair is sticking up in small soft spikes that the wiry whiskers clinging to her skull itch to imitate; but she takes a deep breath and keeps her ringlets.
There was a period, in the first couple of weeks, when she would probably have been ashamed to be caught like this, but those kinds of feelings faded faster than she expected and now, meeting his gaze, there’s nothing more than a twinge, embarrassment matched drop for drop by resentment.
“Emma was incorrect to talk about surfaces,” he says, mildly enough. “We both know that.”
A month ago, Raven considers, she would have blushed.
“The changes run deep,” he continues. “Not all the way through, obviously, but deep.”
“Nicely put.”
The bare hint of a smile tugs at his mouth and Raven is reminded, again, of his helmet, resting discarded beside his blanket. Generally she doesn’t see his grin reach the corners of his shadowed eyes, but here in the circle of the streetlamp’s yellow light she can see everything.
He claims she’s more sensitive than a human would be to the nuances of expression, and mostly she believes him. Sometimes, though, she has to wonder if it isn’t just that he’s less.
“So,” he says, “I’d like you to try again. This time, though, instead of trying to actually recreate her structure, I want you to simply make your interior look like refracted… concrete, in this case.”
“Right,” said Raven. “Good thing I’m an expert on the effects of freaky organic diamond on light.”
He smiles more widely. “Just try it.”
She stares at him for a moment, and then does.
It’s… strange, the feeling of imitation laced with improvisation, the cold uncertainty of her gut as it waits for the wave function to collapse, which is what Charles used to call it, in his more poetic (drunker) moods, and she tries to figure out what it is, exactly, that she should be creating.
She settles on a latticework of silver edges and yellow flickers and triangles of the dark, unhappily aware that she is painting in the kind of broad strokes that the intricacy of a prism doesn’t really allow for. She does it anyway. And Emma wasn’t wrong, she knows, even as she sees Erik nod, approving, marking progress with a look; there are surfaces and surfaces. Emma was only wrong to suggest that surfaces had an end.
She wonders if her brother could read her like this.
Wonders if he would try.
“Well?”
Erik says, dryly,
“Tomorrow we raid a university bookstore for textbooks about optics.”
He sounds so much like Charles that when she laughs it’s with a catch in her night-lined throat.
“Go to bed, Mystique,” he tells her.
She hesitates. She raises her hand to her cheek, and before changing back… riffles through her old Raven Xavier self, as quickly as she used to pass through Raven; just a flicker of pink on the underside of her unsettled scales, and a soft, brief warmth where she has two fingers pressed against her cheekbone, like a kiss. Like the end of a thousand bedtime stories whispered right through the flesh and into the brain. The brush of plushy human skin: replaced a heartbeat later by the raised hard whorls of truth, but lingering, anyway, passed from nerve on to strange nerve.
Erik watches her, something unusually soft in his expression. Or maybe it’s not unusual, and the helmet just makes it impossible to tell, most of the time, when his jaw curves in that way, and he cants his head at that angle against the unresisting air.
He is terribly simple against the backdrop of the quiet street, his shadow cartoonish and stark and, she thinks, ending somewhere on the other side of the road, although the light does not stretch far enough to reveal exactly when.
She has rarely loved him more.
Mystique goes to bed, the kiss burning on her cheek.
Title: this lens, which polarized
Author:possibly_thrice
Pairing: Erik/Raven
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Mimicry and memory and baseless speculation about how shapeshifting even works, when Raven does it.
In the early days, with November still settling in, they haunt an abandoned warehouse, bed rolls laid out in the shadowy spaces between support columns because they may be allies but that does not always mean they can stand to see the ugly softness in one another’s sleeping faces. And it is haunting: Emma sits by the door, left leg crossed over right knee, her hands laced on her shin, the neat curves of her calf visible through the complex facets of her wrist, and rips from every curious passer-by all but a faint impression of something gone wrong, in the quality of the silence, the density of the dark.
Raven watches her, sometimes. It’s not actually an easy task in the absence of a strong light source. Where the others have their silhouettes, Emma is reduced to a network of gleams, an echo less of stars than cities as she shifts. Stretches against the ancient wall.
Once, a little past midnight, on Erik’s suggestion, Raven tries to mimic her. She finds, to her surprise (or make that shock, and a blossoming of fear) that it’s an imperfect capture- her fingers opaquely frosted, netted with cracks, and showing a strange core of blue.
“Hmm,” says Erik.
Emma turns her head, the movement strangely level, and smiles a bright, ironic smile.
“This has never happened before,” Raven says, slowly.
“No,” says Erik. “I didn’t think it had.”
“I don’t,” she begins.
Her voice is neither Emma’s nor her own, wetly skating a rim of glass.
Keep to surfaces, honey, Emma thinks, the imagined sound of it high and clear and incredibly irritating in Raven’s head, and, if Raven knows Emma, everyone else’s heads, too. Clarity is an entirely separate kind of gift.
Raven lets the form slide off her, and stands, not caring that the movement strips the blanket from Erik’s bare legs. It isn’t as if he’s ashamed, she thinks, unfairly and with some vehemence. And he doesn’t move to drag it back into place, choosing instead to raise himself off his elbow and look thoughtfully up at her.
She stalks out.
On the sidewalk, she calms down a little, and shifts through several shapes, faces she’s picked up in the past month like so many dropped coins. Her scalp tautens and sags and she does not stay in any one skin long enough to acclimate to the feel of it, preferring, right now, the sharp awareness of every limb’s articulation.
(It wasn’t until she went with Erik that she learned that she could change back into former- well- forms without a visual aid, by remembering the sense of being inside a given person, and how it had felt to use musculature that was the infrastructure of a wholly different life.)
She smooths the grease-heavy hair of a bus driver out of his eyes, but by the time the bus driver’s long hand has slid off his forehead it belongs to a blind woman who had smiled sightlessly at Raven in a bar, and scratched behind her dog’s ears with huge, lovely fingers, fat smoothing the curl of her knuckles into a gentler arc. The flare of scales takes a little longer to settle in her shoulders; there is more volume to fill.
And maybe it’s the thought of someone living without one sense that makes Raven, a moment later, become the girl Charles and she had built together, when they were children and clever as all hell. It remains the only face she’s ever made from scratch, more or less, filling sketchbooks and doing clumsy watercolors and, in the end, making a leap of faith. Believing that, somewhere in those pages of poses and angled shots and close-ups of individual features, there was a whole person, who was hers, and only hers, who she could be and, being, would be safe.
Weird, she thinks; how something that started out as a breakthrough could so quickly turn into another wall.
Less like not seeing than not breathing, she thinks.
She misses Charles so violently that she worries she’ll split this last, first shell, ruin it past repairing, and considers relaxing into blue. It’s the first time she’s- looked this way- since the night Erik kissed her. It’s the first time she’s let herself.
This is the body that remembers her brother best: its shoulders know the weight of his arm over them, and its forehead has leaned on his. She thinks perhaps even the sharpness of memories evoked by certain smells, certain slants of light, would be sharper with this unridged nose, these too-small-irised eyes.
She thinks it’s probably also the body he misses most.
That thought- knowledge- should help. That should drag the pain back down into the secret middle of her, the part of her that apparently won’t fucking turn transparent at any cost. It doesn’t. Raven liked being his almost human sister, once, moving freely with him through a world that would never know them, would never even see them, and smiled at them anyway. Even when she learned how much she hated it, she liked it.
Invisible, she thinks, but not transparent.
It’s kind of funny. In a way.
She hears the warehouse doors open, and hears Erik’s footsteps.
He’s put pants on, but not, unusually, his helmet, although here at the curb they are probably still inside Emma’s generalized block. His hair is sticking up in small soft spikes that the wiry whiskers clinging to her skull itch to imitate; but she takes a deep breath and keeps her ringlets.
There was a period, in the first couple of weeks, when she would probably have been ashamed to be caught like this, but those kinds of feelings faded faster than she expected and now, meeting his gaze, there’s nothing more than a twinge, embarrassment matched drop for drop by resentment.
“Emma was incorrect to talk about surfaces,” he says, mildly enough. “We both know that.”
A month ago, Raven considers, she would have blushed.
“The changes run deep,” he continues. “Not all the way through, obviously, but deep.”
“Nicely put.”
The bare hint of a smile tugs at his mouth and Raven is reminded, again, of his helmet, resting discarded beside his blanket. Generally she doesn’t see his grin reach the corners of his shadowed eyes, but here in the circle of the streetlamp’s yellow light she can see everything.
He claims she’s more sensitive than a human would be to the nuances of expression, and mostly she believes him. Sometimes, though, she has to wonder if it isn’t just that he’s less.
“So,” he says, “I’d like you to try again. This time, though, instead of trying to actually recreate her structure, I want you to simply make your interior look like refracted… concrete, in this case.”
“Right,” said Raven. “Good thing I’m an expert on the effects of freaky organic diamond on light.”
He smiles more widely. “Just try it.”
She stares at him for a moment, and then does.
It’s… strange, the feeling of imitation laced with improvisation, the cold uncertainty of her gut as it waits for the wave function to collapse, which is what Charles used to call it, in his more poetic (drunker) moods, and she tries to figure out what it is, exactly, that she should be creating.
She settles on a latticework of silver edges and yellow flickers and triangles of the dark, unhappily aware that she is painting in the kind of broad strokes that the intricacy of a prism doesn’t really allow for. She does it anyway. And Emma wasn’t wrong, she knows, even as she sees Erik nod, approving, marking progress with a look; there are surfaces and surfaces. Emma was only wrong to suggest that surfaces had an end.
She wonders if her brother could read her like this.
Wonders if he would try.
“Well?”
Erik says, dryly,
“Tomorrow we raid a university bookstore for textbooks about optics.”
He sounds so much like Charles that when she laughs it’s with a catch in her night-lined throat.
“Go to bed, Mystique,” he tells her.
She hesitates. She raises her hand to her cheek, and before changing back… riffles through her old Raven Xavier self, as quickly as she used to pass through Raven; just a flicker of pink on the underside of her unsettled scales, and a soft, brief warmth where she has two fingers pressed against her cheekbone, like a kiss. Like the end of a thousand bedtime stories whispered right through the flesh and into the brain. The brush of plushy human skin: replaced a heartbeat later by the raised hard whorls of truth, but lingering, anyway, passed from nerve on to strange nerve.
Erik watches her, something unusually soft in his expression. Or maybe it’s not unusual, and the helmet just makes it impossible to tell, most of the time, when his jaw curves in that way, and he cants his head at that angle against the unresisting air.
He is terribly simple against the backdrop of the quiet street, his shadow cartoonish and stark and, she thinks, ending somewhere on the other side of the road, although the light does not stretch far enough to reveal exactly when.
She has rarely loved him more.
Mystique goes to bed, the kiss burning on her cheek.