Sponge Away the Writing, part 4
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Once Charles had an idea where to look for Erik and his companions, it was surprisingly easy, given how the question had tormented him for the past year. Erik still had that damned helmet, Frost would know it was Charles the minute his mind touched hers, and Charles still held himself bound by his promise to Raven, but he had made no such promises to Angel, Azazel, or Quested, and they had no sort of shielding to prevent him from pinpointing their location to a small town fifty miles outside of Chicago in a house owned by Emma Frost.
Moira had been quite keen on going, but they ultimately decided that it was best not to risk the safety of any of their human friends and particularly not Moira, seeing as how Erik might still hold a grudge against her. They weren't flying anywhere in the south and Charles had, as Sean so quaintly put it, "a shitload of money," so, despite the odd looks they got in the airport and the incredible hassle it was getting on the plane, the group ended up being Armando, Charles, and Sean. Sean remarked that the three of them seemed like the beginning of a joke: "A Mick, a Negro, and a cripple walk into an airport...." Armando pointed out that the joke could have also gone "Three mutants walk into an airport," and he and Sean shared a laugh. Charles might have had a better sense of humor about it if the stewardesses would have stopped talking over his head to address Sean. It was halfway through the bloody flight before either he or Armando could get a drink.
They flew into Midway and rented a car. The portable wheelchair Hank had designed wasn't nearly as comfortable as his regular chair, but it was miles better than the flimsy chair the airport insisted on rolling him about in, and it was fantastically easy to get himself from its seat to the back of the sedan they'd rented. Charles thought there was great possibility in this "self-elevating seat" business that Hank had come up with.
The drive was enjoyable, but the tension began to mount as they approached the Brotherhood's safe house. Charles feared that Emma Frost might keep an eye on the sanctity of her colleagues' minds, so he avoided focusing on them in particular; instead, he cast his mind far and wide, casually monitoring Quested and Azazel with the psychic equivalent of peripheral vision. It left him unfocused, but not so very unfocused that he couldn't see how nervous Sean and Armando were.
"You ever had an idea that sounded real good in theory but didn't look so good in real life?" asked Sean, fidgeting with the radio. We should have listened to Old Charles, Charles heard. He's been around. He knows more than we do.
"Sure," said Armando calmly. As usual, the doubts he hid were not about his own safety, but about that of others. Don't think they'd hurt the professor, but it's not like he can fight, not with the wheelchair and the helmet/hope Sean doesn't do anything stupid, we should just let Charles do the talking/What are they even doing? What are Raven and Erik and Angel even thinking? "But you never figure out whether it's gonna work or not if you don't try it, right?"
They were driving through farm country now, minds scattered few and far between. It was extremely difficult to ignore his traveling companions' thoughts. "Armando's right," said Charles, trying to sound confident. "Let's not write off the plan before we've even given it a try, hmm?"
Sean's efforts at banishing his fears mostly consisted of him thinking about Frank Sinatra singing "I've Got You Under My Skin," very, very loudly. "Sure, Professor," he said in a reedy voice. It wasn't terribly reassuring.
I don't suppose you've got any words of wisdom to contribute? Charles asked on the off-chance that Old Charles was around. No answer. He sighed and focused on shielding them from Emma Frost's telepathy. He'd never actually tried this before, but it ought to work in theory, and the element of surprise was one of the few advantages they had. He wasn't about to give it up.
They pulled up outside the safe house at about 4:30. It was late enough in the year and they were far enough north that the sun was already setting. The place was desolate--nothing but bare cornfields for miles about, only the distant feel of loud minds in the distance hinting at the existence of Chicago and Gary.
"Wow. This sure looks promising," muttered Sean. They'd rolled down the windows, despite the cold, and Armando had stuck his head out the window, gazing at the barren landscape with a dubious expression on his face.
If there had been any doubt that they were in the right place, however, those doubts were dispelled when Azazel popped into existence right in front of their car. His face, which had been twisted into a threatening snarl, slackened in surprise, and he vanished with a cloud of smoke, gone as quickly as he had come. It seemed Charles's shielding had worked, at least.
"Holy shit," said Armando, and Sean nodded, too alarmed to speak.
Before Charles could assure them that this was actually a positive sign, and that things were going according to plan--before he could even send them a burst of mental reassurance--the door of the house flew open, screaming on its hinges, and Erik swept out, Raven and Emma Frost at his heels. "Charles?" he said incredulously. "What the hell are you doing here?"
*Oh, God,* breathed Old Charles in a corner of Charles's mind. For once, Charles found himself in utter agreement and sympathy with his future self. Erik. Still wearing his damned helmet, dressed in some sort of hideous red outfit that didn't suit him at all, with dark circles under his eyes, but Erik nonetheless, in all his glory. And Raven! Charles found he couldn't look her full in the face, for fear of what he'd see there, but she looked well enough. Healthy. Completely naked. Lord, why was she completely naked? No. No, Erik had asked him a question.
"Oh, um, Erik!" he said, as if they'd run into each other in the grocery store. God, he was an idiot. He needed to get out of the car--impossible to have a conversation like this, Erik on the front porch and Charles in the back seat of the rental car. Could you help me with the chair? he asked Sean and Armando.
"Sure," said Sean, glad to have something to do. He got out and pulled the chair out of the trunk, unfolded it, and held it steady while Charles transferred himself into it. Raven made a little choked-off noise; Charles busied himself with straightening his trousers so that he wouldn't have to see her or Erik's faces. His mental shields were so rigid it was as if he'd stuck his head in a lead box.
Once Charles was sure that everyone, including himself, had had time to school their expressions into something like calm, he looked up and gave Erik his best polite smile. "As I was saying, we've actually got something of a business proposition for you."
Erik, who had probably mastered the art of chilly calm while Charles was still studying Cary Grant films to learn how to flirt, raised one eyebrow and said simply, "Oh? And who is 'we'?"
"Oh, well. The Xavier Institute." He gestured towards Sean, and then Armando, who was still sitting in the driver's seat. "You remember Sean Cassidy and Armando Muñoz, I bel--"
"Darwin? " Armando barely had time to get out of the car before he found himself with an armful of naked blue shapeshifter. "Oh my God, Darwin, you're alive! Angel, get out here, it's Darwin!" Ah. Yes. It should probably have occurred to Charles that they would find this surprising.
Armando, taken aback and no little bit confused, put a tentative hand on Raven's shoulder. "Oh, uh, yeah. I kind of...turned into energy? Hank or the Professor could probably explain it better than me." He turned his head to look over the car at Charles, his mind a non-verbal question. Charles shrugged, trying not to feel jealous that it was Armando and not him Raven had seen fit to hug. It wasn't as if he wanted a close-up view of her breasts, anyway.
Angel appeared in the doorway, wearing a backless top of some sort that allowed her obviously well-healed wings to flit about freely. Sean gave her a weak smile, which she ignored in favor of staring at Armando as if she was looking at a ghost. Which, Charles supposed, from her perspective, she was.
Erik's eyes went sharp and then soft. He turned to Charles. "Energy?" he asked.
Charles nodded. "Energy. Albert Einstein, eat your heart out." They shared a grin, and for a moment it might have been a year ago. Charles and Erik against the world. Then Erik seemed to remember that he wasn't--that they weren't--that they had gone their separate ways, and he looked away, leaving Charles feeling vaguely cold.
Emma Frost rolled her eyes, looking excessively long-suffering. "What a touching little reunion." She focused her sharp eyes on Charles and said, "I didn't feel you coming."
"That was the idea, Miss Frost," Charles said, resuscitating his grin for her. There was something satisfying about having outdone her in at least one respect; from what he could understand, she was quite a skilled telepath, even leaving out the sort of crystalline shapeshifting business.
She nodded once, shortly. "Nice trick."
He nodded back in acknowledgement. Erik, apparently frustrated, looked from Emma to Charles and said brusquely, "You mentioned a business proposition?"
It wasn't exactly, Oh, Charles, I missed you, sorry for leaving you to bleed to death on the northwestern shore of Cuba, what a dashing new wheelchair you seem to have acquired. Charles still managed to keep the smile on his face as he said, "I did, yes. Perhaps you'd like to come out and discuss it?"
A slight frown wrinkled the spot between Erik's eyebrows. "Why not go inside?"
Charles gestured at the rickety wooden stairs leading up to the porch, then at his wheelchair. Erik looked down for a minute, the slightest hint of a flush staining his cheeks. Embarrassment, perhaps? Charles had never known Erik to get embarrassed.
"Ah," Erik said. "I see." Raven broke away from Armando, and she and Erik exchanged a look before Erik said, "I could always...." Instead of finishing the sentence, he curled two fingers up, and Charles could feel the spokes of his wheels shaking before the whole chair was lifted a whole inch off of the ground.
Distrust like alarm bells went off in Sean's head, but Erik could have no conceivable reason to harm Charles at this point, and his control already seemed miles better than when they'd trained at the mansion together, so Charles nodded and said, "If you would, it'd be much appreciated."
The inside of the house, like the outside, was what Charles imagined to be a rather typical Illinois farmhouse. Emma in her white furs, Quested in his impeccable suits, Raven and her...nudity...they all looked wildly out of place. Miss Frost caught the thought, and a reply as hard and sharp as a polished blade appeared in Charles's mind: It's a bit quaint, but it serves its purpose. Charles looked up to meet her eyes; she stared at him with assumed innocence. It keeps you out, doesn't it? She pictured the porch steps with mocking satisfaction.
Charles pictured thick stone walls around his mind and thought, perhaps more viciously than the jab had merited, I bet she poked dogs with sticks as a child.
*Hardly,* said Old Charles, and Charles blinked, hoping his surprise hadn't shown itself in either his face or a weakening of his shields.
What, are Miss Frost and I friends in the future? Do we sit about comparing childhoods?
Old Charles laughed in an avuncular way that made Charles want to take a hammer to his skull. *Friends might be overstating the case a bit. But yes, we know each other. We've actually got quite a lot in common.* Miss Frost frowned at Charles as if she were trying to figure him out, and Charles felt an exploratory tendril of thought trying to poke its way past his shields. Charles simply thickened said shields and smiled sweetly at her; she narrowed her eyes at him. Old Charles laughed again. *Believe it or not,* he said, *Miss Frost also takes an interest in mutant education. Some years down the line--in my timeline, anyway--she starts another school for mutant children.*
The image of Miss Frost, dressed in her Bond girl outfit and teaching children about the glories of nuclear war, was simply too absurd to be contemplated for long, and Charles banished it from his mind as he rolled up to the small kitchen table. Armando and Sean took a seat on either side of him while Erik and his associates ranged themselves on the other side of the table, Azazel and Quested standing as if to reinforce the point that they outnumbered Charles's people two to one.
"So," said Erik. "Your business proposition."
Charles reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope Hank and Yasuo had put together. "Some preliminary design notes on Cerebro," he said plainly. "We're thinking of rebuilding it."
Half of the other party simply looked confused at this revelation, but Raven bit her lip, Emma Frost exhaled loudly, and Erik blinked. "You're recruiting," he said. "For what?"
"As I said earlier, the Xavier Institute." Charles looked at his hands and wished he had a drink or something with which to busy them. "After...all that business in Cuba, I decided that my career with the CIA was probably at an end."
Erik snorted. "I should say so," he said, a thin, unamused smile quirking one corner of his lips.
"Indeed," Charles continued, trying not to think too hard about what that smirk meant. "At any rate, after I got out of the hospital and rehabilitation and all that--" He didn't mean to look at Raven as he said this, but it would be rude to look at his hands the whole time, and he couldn't help it if she was the first to meet his eyes. "--I thought I'd best put all those years to academia to use, and open a school."
Now this seemed to surprise Erik, and he leaned forward. "A school?"
Charles nodded. "For mutants. The original idea was for it to be a high school, but man plans, God laughs, as they say. We've got about half a dozen students and about that many faculty--the teacher-student ratio is obviously fantastic, but a school with only six students is quite a small school indeed, and the business of finding mutant children in need of quality schooling is actually more complicated than one might immediately think, so...." He shrugged. "Cerebro."
Erik nodded, frowning. "And what makes you think we'd be interested?"
This was the tricky bit. Charles took a deep breath. "Well," he said, "Ms. MacTaggert still has some connections in the CIA, and one of them sent her some pictures the other day of you and yours breaking into one of their Chicago facilities." The atmosphere in the room changed immediately, as if the temperature had dropped; Miss Frost assumed her crystal form, Erik's face closed off into the hard face of a stranger, and even Raven seemed to grow a few inches. Charles soldiered on. "We talked the matter over, and thought that perhaps you, too, were recruiting."
"Did you," said Erik coolly. It wasn't even a question.
"Well. Yes." Old Charles, he thought, this might be an excellent time to help.
*Oh, I never had any idea what they were up to at this point,* said Old Charles. *Not until at least '65. Too afraid to find out. I can tell you that everyone but Erik and Mystique have left this group by '78, but I don't suppose that helps you now.*
Not all that much, no.
*Christ. I'm sure you get tired of my saying this, but Erik was so young. There aren't any pictures of us from '62, you know. It's so odd to see him at this age.*
Charles did, in fact, know that. He'd actually wept a bit, in the beginning, at the thought that the only records that Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr had ever been friends would be in his own head. You're right, he said. I do get tired of your saying that. To Erik, he said, "If we're wrong, of course I apologize for speculating and won't bother you further. But if we were correct--well, the idea was that you might come to New York for a bit and help us rebuild, I'd get some figures, and we could make a few lists, as it were. I could find children interested in learning to use their abilities in a more academic setting, and you could find. You know. Adults, who are dissatisfied with things and want to take more direct action. Well, no, I'd find them and give you their names."
"I'd want to use it as well," Emma cut in, but she was silenced by a glare from Erik, who turned back to Charles.
"Why do you need my help?" he asked. "I'm no inventor. Surely between you and Hank, you could re-engineer this thing."
*The world might be a better place if, in fact, Erik were no inventor,* said Old Charles, which wasn't especially helpful. Charles ignored him.
"Perhaps," he allowed. "But do keep in mind, the thing's like a giant metal golf ball. It runs on some of the same principles as a satellite dish, and it's about as big as one. I'm afraid I'm not as much use lifting and carrying things as I used to be, so it would actually be of some use to have someone around who can move metal with his mind." And then, because he was actually trying to make some sort of alliance with all of them, he added, "I daresay a teleporter and another telepath would also be useful. The original was built by a team of CIA contractors--a couple of high school teachers aren't going to be able to recreate it on their own."
"Depends on the high school teachers," Angel muttered, and the tension in the room broke for a moment.
Even Erik almost smiled for a moment before regaining his severity and saying, "How are we to know whether this proposition is sincere or whether you mean to feed information about us to your friends in the CIA?"
It's not that I don't trust you, Charles remembered Erik saying, just before he'd put that helmet on and condemned Charles to a lonely and painful death in Sebastian Shaw's head. Right. Trust, indeed. He shrugged with a casualness he didn't feel. "Leaving aside the fact that I have no reason whatsoever to do such a thing, you have got a telepath among your number. If you don't trust my intentions...." He tapped his head in invitation. "Look at them for yourself."
Emma Frost looked quite pleased at the prospect, Erik less so. "And if you give her false thoughts?"
That wouldn't actually be a bad skill to learn, but it wasn't one that had occurred to Charles to master thus far. "I don't know what to tell you, Erik," he said. "At some point you've simply got to take it on faith."
Erik made a doubtful harrumph-ing sort of noise and nodded at Emma. Almost instantly, Charles felt her cool, hard presence in his mind. He shut the doors to the places he'd rather she not go and imagined arrows pointing her towards his memories of discussing the plan with the faculty, the things he had done to keep the CIA from their doors, his genuine desire to mend the bridges between himself and Erik and Raven. He felt her poking about elsewhere, suspicious of anything that was offered her so directly, but not far and not into anything Charles wouldn't have been willing to tell her himself if necessary. She pulled out after a moment with a loud exhalation of breath, and Erik swept to his feet. His outfit may have been ugly, but it did make his every movement rather dramatic.
"We'll obviously have to discuss the matter further before we come to any decisions. In the meanwhile, it's rather late. Would you care to spend the night?"
Charles highly doubted that he'd be able to use any of the bathrooms here without assistance, and he hoped to God they had a first-floor bedroom, but at any rate, that was part of the reason Sean had come along, and they were a bit far from the city to drive back and find a hotel room now. "If you've no objections?" he said, turning to Sean and Armando.
"It's cool with me," said Armando, and Sean shrugged. Charles got the distinct impression that neither of them was planning on sleeping much that night.
He turned back to Erik. "Then, yes, and thanks very much for the hospitality."
Erik acknowledged his thanks with a nod and said, "Tempest. Show them to the guest room."
The name was unfamiliar, but Angel evidently answered to it now, pushing her chair back as if preparing to stand. Before she could, however, Raven, who was already standing, said, "No, I'll do it."
"I didn't ask you to do it," said Erik, and the two of them had an argument conducted solely through facial expressions, the sort Charles was particularly ill-equipped to interpret. At last, though, Erik conceded and said, "Fine. Mystique, get them settled and then meet us in the office."
"Aye aye, Captain," said Raven with a familiar, saucy tone. She crossed around to the other side of the table and said, "Follow me," motioning with one hand for Armando and Sean to get up. After pausing for a moment, she reached for the handles of Charles' wheelchair and pulled him from the table.
Charles felt indignation and tenderness warring in his chest and cleared his throat. "Excuse me," he said, "but if you'll just direct us towards your guest accommodations, I'm perfectly capable of following on my own."
Raven jerked her hands back from the chair as if she'd been burned. If Charles hadn't been so long accustomed to walling his mind off from hers, he thought she might have broken through his shields; even through them, he could feel her emotions pulsing, hot and confused. "Sure," she said. Without another word, she guided them down a rather dim and narrow wooden hallway behind the parlor. At one end of it was a bathroom; on either side, a small bedroom with a pair of twin beds. "Here," she said. "The one on the right's the guest room; the one on the left's Emma's. You guys can decide for yourselves who sleeps where."
"Hey, I don't want to be pushing anybody out of their beds," Armando began, but Raven waved his objections away with a gesture.
"Don't worry about it. It won't kill her to bunk with Angel and me for a night."
"If you say so," said Sean, who couldn't seem to stop himself from staring at Raven's body.
Hey, Charles said to him. That's my sister you're ogling.
Dude, Prof, I know, but, like, where am I supposed to look?
Try her face. To Raven, he gave a smile and said, "Thanks very much. I'm sure we can take it from here."
Raven chewed on her lower lip for a moment, shifting in an uncharacteristically graceless way from foot to food. "Yeah," she said, but she didn't leave, and they were all left in a tense little cluster at the end of the hall. Somewhere on the other side of the house, Charles could hear voices, but he didn't suppose his listening in would do anyone any favors, and his attention was needed in the here and now, no matter how uncomfortable it was. At long last, Raven said, "Do you have any bags in the car? I could go get them."
Ever the gentleman, Armando said automatically, "Oh, don't worry about that. I'll get them." He gave them all a thin, nervous smile and edged past Charles and Raven; a moment later Charles could hear the front door shut.
Sean looked from Raven to Charles and then back again; whatever he saw in Raven's face made his eyes widen, and he said, "Uh. Yeah, I'm just gonna--" And without even finishing the sentence, he followed after Armando, leaving Charles and Raven alone.
"Well, thanks again," said Charles, at the same moment that Raven said, "How've you been?" They both had to smile at that, and Charles said, "You first."
"Oh," said Raven, digging a bare toe into the carpeting. "Um. I just wanted to know how you've been."
Charles pondered carefully how to answer that question before saying simply. "Fine. And yourself?"
"Fine. Great." She let out a loud breath of air. "I didn't know. About the wheelchair."
He supposed that meant the Brotherhood hadn't been spying on him or anything. Thank God for small blessings. It was a rather cold comfort, though, given that it also meant that the girl he'd known and loved for fifteen years hadn't even thought to look in on him. "You might have phoned," he said. He probably sounded a bit angry, but, well, he was a bit angry.
"Phones work both ways," she shot back, but she must have realized the weakness in this particular comeback as soon as Charles had, because she winced almost immediately.
"Yes, but I didn't have your number. Or your address. And then there was that bit I was in the hospital. Wasn't making a lot of phone calls there. Too busy pissing myself and trying to keep myself from going insane from all the sick and dying people around me." He hadn't realized his voice was getting so loud until the sound of the others' voices across the house fell silent.
With an irritated scowl, Raven pushed Charles into the guest room and shut the door behind her. "Keep it down," she said, in a none-too-quiet tone herself.
"Oh, sorry," said Charles, beginning to feel lightheaded and reckless. "So sorry to be such a damned bother. So inconvenient, when your friends get shot in the back and you can't be arsed to see whether they're alive or dead. Silly me."
"Oh, up yours, Charles," Raven said, crossing her arms in front of her chest and lowering her head slightly, the way she'd always done when she was angry. "You told me to leave, and now you're getting angry that I left?"
"I'm not angry you left," said Charles, taking a deep breath. If he wasn't careful, he'd broadcast his anger all over the house. "I'm angry you left me there. You couldn't have gotten your red friend to teleport me out of a damned war zone? You couldn't have bloody visited me in the hospital?"
"We were on the run from the government, you asshole!"
"Right, sure, because it wasn't as if you had a telepath with you who could make the government forget all about you." Charles wanted to kick something, he wanted to pace, he wanted to fucking stomp his feet, but he had to settle for clenching and unclenching his hand around the armrest of the chair. "Oh, but wait half a moment. You did. And oh, wait, I did that anyway from my fucking hospital bed, until you had to fuck it all up by breaking into a CIA facility."
"Oh, what, so we could go back into hiding?" Raven spat. "So I could put on my human mask and follow you around like a damn lapdog?"
"So you could bloody live without being on the government's Most Wanted list!" Charles was getting loud again, but he couldn't make himself care too much. "I would have done anything for you, and you couldn't even--"
Raven snorted. "Anything? You would have done anything for me? That's a laugh." She paced, her scales flickering from one face to the next, her head periodically jerking back around to glare at Charles. "Anything but treat me like I wasn't some hideous monster you had to keep hidden. You know what I would have done if just once, just fucking once in my life you would have told me I was pretty the way I am?"
Oh. Oh, Lord.
She picked a loose scale off of one hand with her teeth and spat it to the floor. "I was in love with you for years," she said, the anger in her voice breaking into something a great deal more vulnerable that hurt Charles as her anger hadn't. "You were the only person in my whole world. But I was never good enough for you, was I? Just some ugly freak you kept around because Mom wouldn't let you get a kitten."
"Don't say that," Charles began, his own anger quite close to being burnt out, but Raven wasn't finished.
"I watched you flirt with every pretty girl you ever saw, and it was like you were stepping on my heart every time, but I put a smile on and put up with it, because I told myself that sooner or later you'd get it. Sooner or later you'd figure out that I was the person who made you happy, not them, and you'd figure out how I felt, and...." She made a noise like a muffled sob. "But you never did. Never even noticed. Just years of treating me like a kid and ignoring me and telling me I couldn't ever show my true face in public. So don't you play the fucking martyr to me. Why would you even care what I did?"
Her torrent of words apparently at an end, she gasped for breath. For just a second, her face flickered into the human one she'd adopted those last few years--the one she and Charles had come up with together, poring over magazines and pictures of movie stars, the one she'd come to hate so much at the end--before flickering back to her own face.
He'd come to think, a couple of years back, that those words, the secret Raven had held onto for so long, would never lie between them, said out loud for once. But Raven had always been braver than him. "I'm sorry," he choked out. "I'm so sorry. But...." It was as good a place to start as any. "I did figure it out, you know. Years ago."
He'd never seen her look more betrayed, and before she could reply, before he lost what he wanted to say in a thousand other things he wished he'd said long ago, he cut her off and said, "I didn't have to read your mind. All the, uh, lounging about in your robe, all the talk about what you looked like and whether I'd date you or not...I'm not the cleverest man in the world when it comes to that sort of thing, but I'm not an idiot either. I figured it out."
She frowned, her lip curling in indignant disbelief. "And you let me make an idiot out of myself like that?"
"I didn't know what to say," said Charles, feeling like a condemned criminal pleading for mercy. "I didn't want to hurt you--I didn't know how to tell you--"
"That you couldn't love me. I was too ugly. You wanted someone normal." She nodded, her eyes staring at some point over Charles's shoulder. "I get it."
He let out a rush of air, so frustrated he felt as if his body was incapable of containing all the things he wanted to say. "You don't get it at all," he said. "You're lovely."
"Yeah, right," said Raven with a contemptuous snort, but he shook his head.
"You are. You're unusual-looking, it's true, but that makes you all the more lovely. You're one of a kind--there's no other woman on this earth who's beautiful the way you are. I worried about your safety, but I never thought you were ugly. It isn't about that at all."
Her face was as open and defenseless as a child's. "Then what?"
"I--you're my sister," said Charles helplessly. "I mean, I know that we're not related by blood. I know you didn't see me as a brother. But I can't--I was an only child, you know, and I never counted Cain as a brother, but you were--" Damn. This had happened a lot to him as a boy. Words would fail him, and he'd end up stammering and stopping like a car with a faulty engine. "I did love you. I know you think I didn't, but--you can't imagine how happy I was when you came into the kitchen that night. I can't even think about what my life would have been if you hadn't. I loved you. I still love you. I'm sorry it's not the way you wanted me to, but I can't help it. You're family to me, you've always been. And..." He took a deep breath. "I never meant to hurt you, flirting with women like that. That was nothing to do with you, that was me being a coward."
She wiped tears from her face with one hand and blinked. "A coward? What do you mean?"
He rolled his chair forward and took her dry hand in both of his. He was so glad that she let him. "I'm going to tell you something now that I've never told anybody else. Please don't hate me."
"What is it?" she asked, staring into his face as if she could read it there.
"I'm a homosexual."
There was a long moment of silence before she scowled and grabbed her hand back. "No, you're not."
Charles had to laugh at that. "Well, I think I'd know, wouldn't I?"
"A homosexual. Like, you sleep with men." She couldn't have sounded any more dubious if he'd told her he was the wizard of Oz.
"Not recently," he said with a shrug, "with the wheelchair and the school and all. But...."
"Well, for a homosexual, you've sure fucked an awful lot of women," Raven said, her voice regaining some of its earlier hardness.
He shook his head. "Not as many as you think," he said. "I thought I'd try--well, minds are much the same, aren't they? Men's and women's, I mean. It seemed foolish of me to--to limit myself, I suppose, in such a way that I'd have to spend my whole life hiding it, when I was already hiding so much else about myself, so I tried to make myself, well, normal, I suppose. But...." He shook his head. "I don't know, I couldn't make it work. It would have been a lie. Me and any woman. It wouldn't have been fair to me or to her, so I just...." He shrugged. "I just accepted that I wasn't going to get married and have children, and kept on flirting because, well, it got a laugh and kept people from guessing the truth. Mostly."
Raven's face softened a fraction, but when she said, "You could have told me," the hurt in her voice was more difficult to bear than the hardness had been. "You didn't trust me."
"No," said Charles, distressed. "It wasn't like that, it--I couldn't--how to explain--" In desperation, he sent a wordless plea for help from Old Charles, but the silence was deafening. Perhaps Old Charles was listening to Erik and the others talk in some corner of his subconscious, or something. "Raven, please," he said finally. "I'm no good at words, you know that. Can't I please explain my way?"
Raven had never been so firmly opposed to his speaking in her mind as to his listening to her thoughts, but it was still a great relief to see her reluctant nod. Charles tried to distill it to the essentials--the insults and threats he'd gotten from Cain, Raven's whispered comfort: Don't worry, Charles, just because you're not a caveman doesn't make you a queer--the boys at boarding school, covering up their loneliness with loudness and casual brutality, letting some of their soft hidden selves show in quiet meetings in the dark--when he got older, going to bars while Raven was home doing her homework, sleeping with men who wouldn't even look at him the next day, occasionally sending would-be assailants off with a spot of amnesia--reading in the papers about clubs being shut down and 'perverts' being thrown out of government positions. And above it all, the gnawing fear--What if Raven thinks I'm a pervert, I cannot lose Raven, what if she hates me, the frightening uncertainty that came with trying to relate to her without telepathy, the deep-seated terror that either one of them would be discovered by strangers who wouldn't understand, who would ruin their lives in a way that even Charles couldn't make them take back.
When he was done, he pulled out of her mind and replaced the shields as carefully as he could. She looked at him, her face blank, and asked, "Does everyone at your school know?"
Charles shook his head, his heart in his throat. "No," he said. "I didn't think it was any of their business."
She laughed, softly but bitterly, and said, "Always so worried about fitting in, Charles. You're never going to be normal, you know. Really, you should tell them. You could have told me." Before Charles could think of a way to defend himself--if the deepest fears of his heart, the self-recriminations he'd beaten himself with so many times weren't good enough, he didn't know what would be, but by God he'd try--Raven was crying, really crying, and she'd fallen to her knees and wrapped her arms around his legs, sobbing into his trousers.
"I'm sorry," she mumbled, the different layers of meaning in her words seeping around the edges of Charles's mental shields. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
He combed her glossy red hair back, straightening her parting with his fingers the way he'd done so many times as a boy, and said, softly, "I'm sorry, too."
They sat like that for some indeterminable period of time. Charles would have been content to remain there for longer, stroking Raven's hair as her sobs subsided and his own breath evened out again, but finally a knock on the door interrupted them. "Uh, Charles?" said Sean's voice, unsure. "Can I, um, come in? I've got your stuff. And, like, I wanted to see if you needed any help with the bathroom."
Shit, it was about that time, wasn't it? He smiled at Raven, who'd hurried to her feet the second she'd heard the knock, and said, "Sorry, I'm on something of a schedule when it comes to my washroom activities."
"Because of the wheelchair?" she asked, her voice still soft.
Charles nodded. "Because of the wheelchair. Also, aren't you missing a meeting right about now?"
She waved a hand dismissively. "Eh. It's probably mostly over by now, unless Emma's nitpicking. She's worse than you with your dissertation. Everything's gotta be perfect with her." She opened the door for Sean, who slid in awkwardly and laid Charles's travel bag on the bed nearest the door. She watched for a moment longer, poised in the doorway, before saying, "We should have breakfast together tomorrow."
"Definitely," said Charles. "Have you got anything good?"
"We have tea, if that's what you mean," she said, and smiled briefly before leaving and shutting the door behind her.
Part 5
Part 2
Part 3
Once Charles had an idea where to look for Erik and his companions, it was surprisingly easy, given how the question had tormented him for the past year. Erik still had that damned helmet, Frost would know it was Charles the minute his mind touched hers, and Charles still held himself bound by his promise to Raven, but he had made no such promises to Angel, Azazel, or Quested, and they had no sort of shielding to prevent him from pinpointing their location to a small town fifty miles outside of Chicago in a house owned by Emma Frost.
Moira had been quite keen on going, but they ultimately decided that it was best not to risk the safety of any of their human friends and particularly not Moira, seeing as how Erik might still hold a grudge against her. They weren't flying anywhere in the south and Charles had, as Sean so quaintly put it, "a shitload of money," so, despite the odd looks they got in the airport and the incredible hassle it was getting on the plane, the group ended up being Armando, Charles, and Sean. Sean remarked that the three of them seemed like the beginning of a joke: "A Mick, a Negro, and a cripple walk into an airport...." Armando pointed out that the joke could have also gone "Three mutants walk into an airport," and he and Sean shared a laugh. Charles might have had a better sense of humor about it if the stewardesses would have stopped talking over his head to address Sean. It was halfway through the bloody flight before either he or Armando could get a drink.
They flew into Midway and rented a car. The portable wheelchair Hank had designed wasn't nearly as comfortable as his regular chair, but it was miles better than the flimsy chair the airport insisted on rolling him about in, and it was fantastically easy to get himself from its seat to the back of the sedan they'd rented. Charles thought there was great possibility in this "self-elevating seat" business that Hank had come up with.
The drive was enjoyable, but the tension began to mount as they approached the Brotherhood's safe house. Charles feared that Emma Frost might keep an eye on the sanctity of her colleagues' minds, so he avoided focusing on them in particular; instead, he cast his mind far and wide, casually monitoring Quested and Azazel with the psychic equivalent of peripheral vision. It left him unfocused, but not so very unfocused that he couldn't see how nervous Sean and Armando were.
"You ever had an idea that sounded real good in theory but didn't look so good in real life?" asked Sean, fidgeting with the radio. We should have listened to Old Charles, Charles heard. He's been around. He knows more than we do.
"Sure," said Armando calmly. As usual, the doubts he hid were not about his own safety, but about that of others. Don't think they'd hurt the professor, but it's not like he can fight, not with the wheelchair and the helmet/hope Sean doesn't do anything stupid, we should just let Charles do the talking/What are they even doing? What are Raven and Erik and Angel even thinking? "But you never figure out whether it's gonna work or not if you don't try it, right?"
They were driving through farm country now, minds scattered few and far between. It was extremely difficult to ignore his traveling companions' thoughts. "Armando's right," said Charles, trying to sound confident. "Let's not write off the plan before we've even given it a try, hmm?"
Sean's efforts at banishing his fears mostly consisted of him thinking about Frank Sinatra singing "I've Got You Under My Skin," very, very loudly. "Sure, Professor," he said in a reedy voice. It wasn't terribly reassuring.
I don't suppose you've got any words of wisdom to contribute? Charles asked on the off-chance that Old Charles was around. No answer. He sighed and focused on shielding them from Emma Frost's telepathy. He'd never actually tried this before, but it ought to work in theory, and the element of surprise was one of the few advantages they had. He wasn't about to give it up.
They pulled up outside the safe house at about 4:30. It was late enough in the year and they were far enough north that the sun was already setting. The place was desolate--nothing but bare cornfields for miles about, only the distant feel of loud minds in the distance hinting at the existence of Chicago and Gary.
"Wow. This sure looks promising," muttered Sean. They'd rolled down the windows, despite the cold, and Armando had stuck his head out the window, gazing at the barren landscape with a dubious expression on his face.
If there had been any doubt that they were in the right place, however, those doubts were dispelled when Azazel popped into existence right in front of their car. His face, which had been twisted into a threatening snarl, slackened in surprise, and he vanished with a cloud of smoke, gone as quickly as he had come. It seemed Charles's shielding had worked, at least.
"Holy shit," said Armando, and Sean nodded, too alarmed to speak.
Before Charles could assure them that this was actually a positive sign, and that things were going according to plan--before he could even send them a burst of mental reassurance--the door of the house flew open, screaming on its hinges, and Erik swept out, Raven and Emma Frost at his heels. "Charles?" he said incredulously. "What the hell are you doing here?"
*Oh, God,* breathed Old Charles in a corner of Charles's mind. For once, Charles found himself in utter agreement and sympathy with his future self. Erik. Still wearing his damned helmet, dressed in some sort of hideous red outfit that didn't suit him at all, with dark circles under his eyes, but Erik nonetheless, in all his glory. And Raven! Charles found he couldn't look her full in the face, for fear of what he'd see there, but she looked well enough. Healthy. Completely naked. Lord, why was she completely naked? No. No, Erik had asked him a question.
"Oh, um, Erik!" he said, as if they'd run into each other in the grocery store. God, he was an idiot. He needed to get out of the car--impossible to have a conversation like this, Erik on the front porch and Charles in the back seat of the rental car. Could you help me with the chair? he asked Sean and Armando.
"Sure," said Sean, glad to have something to do. He got out and pulled the chair out of the trunk, unfolded it, and held it steady while Charles transferred himself into it. Raven made a little choked-off noise; Charles busied himself with straightening his trousers so that he wouldn't have to see her or Erik's faces. His mental shields were so rigid it was as if he'd stuck his head in a lead box.
Once Charles was sure that everyone, including himself, had had time to school their expressions into something like calm, he looked up and gave Erik his best polite smile. "As I was saying, we've actually got something of a business proposition for you."
Erik, who had probably mastered the art of chilly calm while Charles was still studying Cary Grant films to learn how to flirt, raised one eyebrow and said simply, "Oh? And who is 'we'?"
"Oh, well. The Xavier Institute." He gestured towards Sean, and then Armando, who was still sitting in the driver's seat. "You remember Sean Cassidy and Armando Muñoz, I bel--"
"Darwin? " Armando barely had time to get out of the car before he found himself with an armful of naked blue shapeshifter. "Oh my God, Darwin, you're alive! Angel, get out here, it's Darwin!" Ah. Yes. It should probably have occurred to Charles that they would find this surprising.
Armando, taken aback and no little bit confused, put a tentative hand on Raven's shoulder. "Oh, uh, yeah. I kind of...turned into energy? Hank or the Professor could probably explain it better than me." He turned his head to look over the car at Charles, his mind a non-verbal question. Charles shrugged, trying not to feel jealous that it was Armando and not him Raven had seen fit to hug. It wasn't as if he wanted a close-up view of her breasts, anyway.
Angel appeared in the doorway, wearing a backless top of some sort that allowed her obviously well-healed wings to flit about freely. Sean gave her a weak smile, which she ignored in favor of staring at Armando as if she was looking at a ghost. Which, Charles supposed, from her perspective, she was.
Erik's eyes went sharp and then soft. He turned to Charles. "Energy?" he asked.
Charles nodded. "Energy. Albert Einstein, eat your heart out." They shared a grin, and for a moment it might have been a year ago. Charles and Erik against the world. Then Erik seemed to remember that he wasn't--that they weren't--that they had gone their separate ways, and he looked away, leaving Charles feeling vaguely cold.
Emma Frost rolled her eyes, looking excessively long-suffering. "What a touching little reunion." She focused her sharp eyes on Charles and said, "I didn't feel you coming."
"That was the idea, Miss Frost," Charles said, resuscitating his grin for her. There was something satisfying about having outdone her in at least one respect; from what he could understand, she was quite a skilled telepath, even leaving out the sort of crystalline shapeshifting business.
She nodded once, shortly. "Nice trick."
He nodded back in acknowledgement. Erik, apparently frustrated, looked from Emma to Charles and said brusquely, "You mentioned a business proposition?"
It wasn't exactly, Oh, Charles, I missed you, sorry for leaving you to bleed to death on the northwestern shore of Cuba, what a dashing new wheelchair you seem to have acquired. Charles still managed to keep the smile on his face as he said, "I did, yes. Perhaps you'd like to come out and discuss it?"
A slight frown wrinkled the spot between Erik's eyebrows. "Why not go inside?"
Charles gestured at the rickety wooden stairs leading up to the porch, then at his wheelchair. Erik looked down for a minute, the slightest hint of a flush staining his cheeks. Embarrassment, perhaps? Charles had never known Erik to get embarrassed.
"Ah," Erik said. "I see." Raven broke away from Armando, and she and Erik exchanged a look before Erik said, "I could always...." Instead of finishing the sentence, he curled two fingers up, and Charles could feel the spokes of his wheels shaking before the whole chair was lifted a whole inch off of the ground.
Distrust like alarm bells went off in Sean's head, but Erik could have no conceivable reason to harm Charles at this point, and his control already seemed miles better than when they'd trained at the mansion together, so Charles nodded and said, "If you would, it'd be much appreciated."
The inside of the house, like the outside, was what Charles imagined to be a rather typical Illinois farmhouse. Emma in her white furs, Quested in his impeccable suits, Raven and her...nudity...they all looked wildly out of place. Miss Frost caught the thought, and a reply as hard and sharp as a polished blade appeared in Charles's mind: It's a bit quaint, but it serves its purpose. Charles looked up to meet her eyes; she stared at him with assumed innocence. It keeps you out, doesn't it? She pictured the porch steps with mocking satisfaction.
Charles pictured thick stone walls around his mind and thought, perhaps more viciously than the jab had merited, I bet she poked dogs with sticks as a child.
*Hardly,* said Old Charles, and Charles blinked, hoping his surprise hadn't shown itself in either his face or a weakening of his shields.
What, are Miss Frost and I friends in the future? Do we sit about comparing childhoods?
Old Charles laughed in an avuncular way that made Charles want to take a hammer to his skull. *Friends might be overstating the case a bit. But yes, we know each other. We've actually got quite a lot in common.* Miss Frost frowned at Charles as if she were trying to figure him out, and Charles felt an exploratory tendril of thought trying to poke its way past his shields. Charles simply thickened said shields and smiled sweetly at her; she narrowed her eyes at him. Old Charles laughed again. *Believe it or not,* he said, *Miss Frost also takes an interest in mutant education. Some years down the line--in my timeline, anyway--she starts another school for mutant children.*
The image of Miss Frost, dressed in her Bond girl outfit and teaching children about the glories of nuclear war, was simply too absurd to be contemplated for long, and Charles banished it from his mind as he rolled up to the small kitchen table. Armando and Sean took a seat on either side of him while Erik and his associates ranged themselves on the other side of the table, Azazel and Quested standing as if to reinforce the point that they outnumbered Charles's people two to one.
"So," said Erik. "Your business proposition."
Charles reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope Hank and Yasuo had put together. "Some preliminary design notes on Cerebro," he said plainly. "We're thinking of rebuilding it."
Half of the other party simply looked confused at this revelation, but Raven bit her lip, Emma Frost exhaled loudly, and Erik blinked. "You're recruiting," he said. "For what?"
"As I said earlier, the Xavier Institute." Charles looked at his hands and wished he had a drink or something with which to busy them. "After...all that business in Cuba, I decided that my career with the CIA was probably at an end."
Erik snorted. "I should say so," he said, a thin, unamused smile quirking one corner of his lips.
"Indeed," Charles continued, trying not to think too hard about what that smirk meant. "At any rate, after I got out of the hospital and rehabilitation and all that--" He didn't mean to look at Raven as he said this, but it would be rude to look at his hands the whole time, and he couldn't help it if she was the first to meet his eyes. "--I thought I'd best put all those years to academia to use, and open a school."
Now this seemed to surprise Erik, and he leaned forward. "A school?"
Charles nodded. "For mutants. The original idea was for it to be a high school, but man plans, God laughs, as they say. We've got about half a dozen students and about that many faculty--the teacher-student ratio is obviously fantastic, but a school with only six students is quite a small school indeed, and the business of finding mutant children in need of quality schooling is actually more complicated than one might immediately think, so...." He shrugged. "Cerebro."
Erik nodded, frowning. "And what makes you think we'd be interested?"
This was the tricky bit. Charles took a deep breath. "Well," he said, "Ms. MacTaggert still has some connections in the CIA, and one of them sent her some pictures the other day of you and yours breaking into one of their Chicago facilities." The atmosphere in the room changed immediately, as if the temperature had dropped; Miss Frost assumed her crystal form, Erik's face closed off into the hard face of a stranger, and even Raven seemed to grow a few inches. Charles soldiered on. "We talked the matter over, and thought that perhaps you, too, were recruiting."
"Did you," said Erik coolly. It wasn't even a question.
"Well. Yes." Old Charles, he thought, this might be an excellent time to help.
*Oh, I never had any idea what they were up to at this point,* said Old Charles. *Not until at least '65. Too afraid to find out. I can tell you that everyone but Erik and Mystique have left this group by '78, but I don't suppose that helps you now.*
Not all that much, no.
*Christ. I'm sure you get tired of my saying this, but Erik was so young. There aren't any pictures of us from '62, you know. It's so odd to see him at this age.*
Charles did, in fact, know that. He'd actually wept a bit, in the beginning, at the thought that the only records that Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr had ever been friends would be in his own head. You're right, he said. I do get tired of your saying that. To Erik, he said, "If we're wrong, of course I apologize for speculating and won't bother you further. But if we were correct--well, the idea was that you might come to New York for a bit and help us rebuild, I'd get some figures, and we could make a few lists, as it were. I could find children interested in learning to use their abilities in a more academic setting, and you could find. You know. Adults, who are dissatisfied with things and want to take more direct action. Well, no, I'd find them and give you their names."
"I'd want to use it as well," Emma cut in, but she was silenced by a glare from Erik, who turned back to Charles.
"Why do you need my help?" he asked. "I'm no inventor. Surely between you and Hank, you could re-engineer this thing."
*The world might be a better place if, in fact, Erik were no inventor,* said Old Charles, which wasn't especially helpful. Charles ignored him.
"Perhaps," he allowed. "But do keep in mind, the thing's like a giant metal golf ball. It runs on some of the same principles as a satellite dish, and it's about as big as one. I'm afraid I'm not as much use lifting and carrying things as I used to be, so it would actually be of some use to have someone around who can move metal with his mind." And then, because he was actually trying to make some sort of alliance with all of them, he added, "I daresay a teleporter and another telepath would also be useful. The original was built by a team of CIA contractors--a couple of high school teachers aren't going to be able to recreate it on their own."
"Depends on the high school teachers," Angel muttered, and the tension in the room broke for a moment.
Even Erik almost smiled for a moment before regaining his severity and saying, "How are we to know whether this proposition is sincere or whether you mean to feed information about us to your friends in the CIA?"
It's not that I don't trust you, Charles remembered Erik saying, just before he'd put that helmet on and condemned Charles to a lonely and painful death in Sebastian Shaw's head. Right. Trust, indeed. He shrugged with a casualness he didn't feel. "Leaving aside the fact that I have no reason whatsoever to do such a thing, you have got a telepath among your number. If you don't trust my intentions...." He tapped his head in invitation. "Look at them for yourself."
Emma Frost looked quite pleased at the prospect, Erik less so. "And if you give her false thoughts?"
That wouldn't actually be a bad skill to learn, but it wasn't one that had occurred to Charles to master thus far. "I don't know what to tell you, Erik," he said. "At some point you've simply got to take it on faith."
Erik made a doubtful harrumph-ing sort of noise and nodded at Emma. Almost instantly, Charles felt her cool, hard presence in his mind. He shut the doors to the places he'd rather she not go and imagined arrows pointing her towards his memories of discussing the plan with the faculty, the things he had done to keep the CIA from their doors, his genuine desire to mend the bridges between himself and Erik and Raven. He felt her poking about elsewhere, suspicious of anything that was offered her so directly, but not far and not into anything Charles wouldn't have been willing to tell her himself if necessary. She pulled out after a moment with a loud exhalation of breath, and Erik swept to his feet. His outfit may have been ugly, but it did make his every movement rather dramatic.
"We'll obviously have to discuss the matter further before we come to any decisions. In the meanwhile, it's rather late. Would you care to spend the night?"
Charles highly doubted that he'd be able to use any of the bathrooms here without assistance, and he hoped to God they had a first-floor bedroom, but at any rate, that was part of the reason Sean had come along, and they were a bit far from the city to drive back and find a hotel room now. "If you've no objections?" he said, turning to Sean and Armando.
"It's cool with me," said Armando, and Sean shrugged. Charles got the distinct impression that neither of them was planning on sleeping much that night.
He turned back to Erik. "Then, yes, and thanks very much for the hospitality."
Erik acknowledged his thanks with a nod and said, "Tempest. Show them to the guest room."
The name was unfamiliar, but Angel evidently answered to it now, pushing her chair back as if preparing to stand. Before she could, however, Raven, who was already standing, said, "No, I'll do it."
"I didn't ask you to do it," said Erik, and the two of them had an argument conducted solely through facial expressions, the sort Charles was particularly ill-equipped to interpret. At last, though, Erik conceded and said, "Fine. Mystique, get them settled and then meet us in the office."
"Aye aye, Captain," said Raven with a familiar, saucy tone. She crossed around to the other side of the table and said, "Follow me," motioning with one hand for Armando and Sean to get up. After pausing for a moment, she reached for the handles of Charles' wheelchair and pulled him from the table.
Charles felt indignation and tenderness warring in his chest and cleared his throat. "Excuse me," he said, "but if you'll just direct us towards your guest accommodations, I'm perfectly capable of following on my own."
Raven jerked her hands back from the chair as if she'd been burned. If Charles hadn't been so long accustomed to walling his mind off from hers, he thought she might have broken through his shields; even through them, he could feel her emotions pulsing, hot and confused. "Sure," she said. Without another word, she guided them down a rather dim and narrow wooden hallway behind the parlor. At one end of it was a bathroom; on either side, a small bedroom with a pair of twin beds. "Here," she said. "The one on the right's the guest room; the one on the left's Emma's. You guys can decide for yourselves who sleeps where."
"Hey, I don't want to be pushing anybody out of their beds," Armando began, but Raven waved his objections away with a gesture.
"Don't worry about it. It won't kill her to bunk with Angel and me for a night."
"If you say so," said Sean, who couldn't seem to stop himself from staring at Raven's body.
Hey, Charles said to him. That's my sister you're ogling.
Dude, Prof, I know, but, like, where am I supposed to look?
Try her face. To Raven, he gave a smile and said, "Thanks very much. I'm sure we can take it from here."
Raven chewed on her lower lip for a moment, shifting in an uncharacteristically graceless way from foot to food. "Yeah," she said, but she didn't leave, and they were all left in a tense little cluster at the end of the hall. Somewhere on the other side of the house, Charles could hear voices, but he didn't suppose his listening in would do anyone any favors, and his attention was needed in the here and now, no matter how uncomfortable it was. At long last, Raven said, "Do you have any bags in the car? I could go get them."
Ever the gentleman, Armando said automatically, "Oh, don't worry about that. I'll get them." He gave them all a thin, nervous smile and edged past Charles and Raven; a moment later Charles could hear the front door shut.
Sean looked from Raven to Charles and then back again; whatever he saw in Raven's face made his eyes widen, and he said, "Uh. Yeah, I'm just gonna--" And without even finishing the sentence, he followed after Armando, leaving Charles and Raven alone.
"Well, thanks again," said Charles, at the same moment that Raven said, "How've you been?" They both had to smile at that, and Charles said, "You first."
"Oh," said Raven, digging a bare toe into the carpeting. "Um. I just wanted to know how you've been."
Charles pondered carefully how to answer that question before saying simply. "Fine. And yourself?"
"Fine. Great." She let out a loud breath of air. "I didn't know. About the wheelchair."
He supposed that meant the Brotherhood hadn't been spying on him or anything. Thank God for small blessings. It was a rather cold comfort, though, given that it also meant that the girl he'd known and loved for fifteen years hadn't even thought to look in on him. "You might have phoned," he said. He probably sounded a bit angry, but, well, he was a bit angry.
"Phones work both ways," she shot back, but she must have realized the weakness in this particular comeback as soon as Charles had, because she winced almost immediately.
"Yes, but I didn't have your number. Or your address. And then there was that bit I was in the hospital. Wasn't making a lot of phone calls there. Too busy pissing myself and trying to keep myself from going insane from all the sick and dying people around me." He hadn't realized his voice was getting so loud until the sound of the others' voices across the house fell silent.
With an irritated scowl, Raven pushed Charles into the guest room and shut the door behind her. "Keep it down," she said, in a none-too-quiet tone herself.
"Oh, sorry," said Charles, beginning to feel lightheaded and reckless. "So sorry to be such a damned bother. So inconvenient, when your friends get shot in the back and you can't be arsed to see whether they're alive or dead. Silly me."
"Oh, up yours, Charles," Raven said, crossing her arms in front of her chest and lowering her head slightly, the way she'd always done when she was angry. "You told me to leave, and now you're getting angry that I left?"
"I'm not angry you left," said Charles, taking a deep breath. If he wasn't careful, he'd broadcast his anger all over the house. "I'm angry you left me there. You couldn't have gotten your red friend to teleport me out of a damned war zone? You couldn't have bloody visited me in the hospital?"
"We were on the run from the government, you asshole!"
"Right, sure, because it wasn't as if you had a telepath with you who could make the government forget all about you." Charles wanted to kick something, he wanted to pace, he wanted to fucking stomp his feet, but he had to settle for clenching and unclenching his hand around the armrest of the chair. "Oh, but wait half a moment. You did. And oh, wait, I did that anyway from my fucking hospital bed, until you had to fuck it all up by breaking into a CIA facility."
"Oh, what, so we could go back into hiding?" Raven spat. "So I could put on my human mask and follow you around like a damn lapdog?"
"So you could bloody live without being on the government's Most Wanted list!" Charles was getting loud again, but he couldn't make himself care too much. "I would have done anything for you, and you couldn't even--"
Raven snorted. "Anything? You would have done anything for me? That's a laugh." She paced, her scales flickering from one face to the next, her head periodically jerking back around to glare at Charles. "Anything but treat me like I wasn't some hideous monster you had to keep hidden. You know what I would have done if just once, just fucking once in my life you would have told me I was pretty the way I am?"
Oh. Oh, Lord.
She picked a loose scale off of one hand with her teeth and spat it to the floor. "I was in love with you for years," she said, the anger in her voice breaking into something a great deal more vulnerable that hurt Charles as her anger hadn't. "You were the only person in my whole world. But I was never good enough for you, was I? Just some ugly freak you kept around because Mom wouldn't let you get a kitten."
"Don't say that," Charles began, his own anger quite close to being burnt out, but Raven wasn't finished.
"I watched you flirt with every pretty girl you ever saw, and it was like you were stepping on my heart every time, but I put a smile on and put up with it, because I told myself that sooner or later you'd get it. Sooner or later you'd figure out that I was the person who made you happy, not them, and you'd figure out how I felt, and...." She made a noise like a muffled sob. "But you never did. Never even noticed. Just years of treating me like a kid and ignoring me and telling me I couldn't ever show my true face in public. So don't you play the fucking martyr to me. Why would you even care what I did?"
Her torrent of words apparently at an end, she gasped for breath. For just a second, her face flickered into the human one she'd adopted those last few years--the one she and Charles had come up with together, poring over magazines and pictures of movie stars, the one she'd come to hate so much at the end--before flickering back to her own face.
He'd come to think, a couple of years back, that those words, the secret Raven had held onto for so long, would never lie between them, said out loud for once. But Raven had always been braver than him. "I'm sorry," he choked out. "I'm so sorry. But...." It was as good a place to start as any. "I did figure it out, you know. Years ago."
He'd never seen her look more betrayed, and before she could reply, before he lost what he wanted to say in a thousand other things he wished he'd said long ago, he cut her off and said, "I didn't have to read your mind. All the, uh, lounging about in your robe, all the talk about what you looked like and whether I'd date you or not...I'm not the cleverest man in the world when it comes to that sort of thing, but I'm not an idiot either. I figured it out."
She frowned, her lip curling in indignant disbelief. "And you let me make an idiot out of myself like that?"
"I didn't know what to say," said Charles, feeling like a condemned criminal pleading for mercy. "I didn't want to hurt you--I didn't know how to tell you--"
"That you couldn't love me. I was too ugly. You wanted someone normal." She nodded, her eyes staring at some point over Charles's shoulder. "I get it."
He let out a rush of air, so frustrated he felt as if his body was incapable of containing all the things he wanted to say. "You don't get it at all," he said. "You're lovely."
"Yeah, right," said Raven with a contemptuous snort, but he shook his head.
"You are. You're unusual-looking, it's true, but that makes you all the more lovely. You're one of a kind--there's no other woman on this earth who's beautiful the way you are. I worried about your safety, but I never thought you were ugly. It isn't about that at all."
Her face was as open and defenseless as a child's. "Then what?"
"I--you're my sister," said Charles helplessly. "I mean, I know that we're not related by blood. I know you didn't see me as a brother. But I can't--I was an only child, you know, and I never counted Cain as a brother, but you were--" Damn. This had happened a lot to him as a boy. Words would fail him, and he'd end up stammering and stopping like a car with a faulty engine. "I did love you. I know you think I didn't, but--you can't imagine how happy I was when you came into the kitchen that night. I can't even think about what my life would have been if you hadn't. I loved you. I still love you. I'm sorry it's not the way you wanted me to, but I can't help it. You're family to me, you've always been. And..." He took a deep breath. "I never meant to hurt you, flirting with women like that. That was nothing to do with you, that was me being a coward."
She wiped tears from her face with one hand and blinked. "A coward? What do you mean?"
He rolled his chair forward and took her dry hand in both of his. He was so glad that she let him. "I'm going to tell you something now that I've never told anybody else. Please don't hate me."
"What is it?" she asked, staring into his face as if she could read it there.
"I'm a homosexual."
There was a long moment of silence before she scowled and grabbed her hand back. "No, you're not."
Charles had to laugh at that. "Well, I think I'd know, wouldn't I?"
"A homosexual. Like, you sleep with men." She couldn't have sounded any more dubious if he'd told her he was the wizard of Oz.
"Not recently," he said with a shrug, "with the wheelchair and the school and all. But...."
"Well, for a homosexual, you've sure fucked an awful lot of women," Raven said, her voice regaining some of its earlier hardness.
He shook his head. "Not as many as you think," he said. "I thought I'd try--well, minds are much the same, aren't they? Men's and women's, I mean. It seemed foolish of me to--to limit myself, I suppose, in such a way that I'd have to spend my whole life hiding it, when I was already hiding so much else about myself, so I tried to make myself, well, normal, I suppose. But...." He shook his head. "I don't know, I couldn't make it work. It would have been a lie. Me and any woman. It wouldn't have been fair to me or to her, so I just...." He shrugged. "I just accepted that I wasn't going to get married and have children, and kept on flirting because, well, it got a laugh and kept people from guessing the truth. Mostly."
Raven's face softened a fraction, but when she said, "You could have told me," the hurt in her voice was more difficult to bear than the hardness had been. "You didn't trust me."
"No," said Charles, distressed. "It wasn't like that, it--I couldn't--how to explain--" In desperation, he sent a wordless plea for help from Old Charles, but the silence was deafening. Perhaps Old Charles was listening to Erik and the others talk in some corner of his subconscious, or something. "Raven, please," he said finally. "I'm no good at words, you know that. Can't I please explain my way?"
Raven had never been so firmly opposed to his speaking in her mind as to his listening to her thoughts, but it was still a great relief to see her reluctant nod. Charles tried to distill it to the essentials--the insults and threats he'd gotten from Cain, Raven's whispered comfort: Don't worry, Charles, just because you're not a caveman doesn't make you a queer--the boys at boarding school, covering up their loneliness with loudness and casual brutality, letting some of their soft hidden selves show in quiet meetings in the dark--when he got older, going to bars while Raven was home doing her homework, sleeping with men who wouldn't even look at him the next day, occasionally sending would-be assailants off with a spot of amnesia--reading in the papers about clubs being shut down and 'perverts' being thrown out of government positions. And above it all, the gnawing fear--What if Raven thinks I'm a pervert, I cannot lose Raven, what if she hates me, the frightening uncertainty that came with trying to relate to her without telepathy, the deep-seated terror that either one of them would be discovered by strangers who wouldn't understand, who would ruin their lives in a way that even Charles couldn't make them take back.
When he was done, he pulled out of her mind and replaced the shields as carefully as he could. She looked at him, her face blank, and asked, "Does everyone at your school know?"
Charles shook his head, his heart in his throat. "No," he said. "I didn't think it was any of their business."
She laughed, softly but bitterly, and said, "Always so worried about fitting in, Charles. You're never going to be normal, you know. Really, you should tell them. You could have told me." Before Charles could think of a way to defend himself--if the deepest fears of his heart, the self-recriminations he'd beaten himself with so many times weren't good enough, he didn't know what would be, but by God he'd try--Raven was crying, really crying, and she'd fallen to her knees and wrapped her arms around his legs, sobbing into his trousers.
"I'm sorry," she mumbled, the different layers of meaning in her words seeping around the edges of Charles's mental shields. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
He combed her glossy red hair back, straightening her parting with his fingers the way he'd done so many times as a boy, and said, softly, "I'm sorry, too."
They sat like that for some indeterminable period of time. Charles would have been content to remain there for longer, stroking Raven's hair as her sobs subsided and his own breath evened out again, but finally a knock on the door interrupted them. "Uh, Charles?" said Sean's voice, unsure. "Can I, um, come in? I've got your stuff. And, like, I wanted to see if you needed any help with the bathroom."
Shit, it was about that time, wasn't it? He smiled at Raven, who'd hurried to her feet the second she'd heard the knock, and said, "Sorry, I'm on something of a schedule when it comes to my washroom activities."
"Because of the wheelchair?" she asked, her voice still soft.
Charles nodded. "Because of the wheelchair. Also, aren't you missing a meeting right about now?"
She waved a hand dismissively. "Eh. It's probably mostly over by now, unless Emma's nitpicking. She's worse than you with your dissertation. Everything's gotta be perfect with her." She opened the door for Sean, who slid in awkwardly and laid Charles's travel bag on the bed nearest the door. She watched for a moment longer, poised in the doorway, before saying, "We should have breakfast together tomorrow."
"Definitely," said Charles. "Have you got anything good?"
"We have tea, if that's what you mean," she said, and smiled briefly before leaving and shutting the door behind her.
Part 5