Title: Scary Monsters
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Rating: all ages
Characters: Charles, Raven
Notes: Written for
this prompt at
1stclass-kink. 470 words.
Summary: Young Charles and Raven go to the movies.
Having a shape shifter for a sister makes getting in to see restricted movies a snap. All Raven has to do is disguise herself as Charles’s mother, buy two tickets, and they’re golden. That’s how they get to see films like Dead of Night, The Spiral Staircase, The Devil’s Bat Daughter - films Charles’s parents would never take him to see, not in a million years.
Their pockets stuffed with candy cigarettes, root beer barrels, saltwater taffy, and red hots, their fingers already glistening with butter from their popcorn, they wait eagerly for the lights in the theater to dim.
Once it’s safely dark, Raven reverts to her true form. She’s more comfortable that way, but it makes Charles a little nervous. One time, he leaned toward her and whispered, “What if we get caught?”
She just shrugged. “You can make them forget, right?”
Right. He supposes that he can, though he’d rather not. Still, he hasn’t mentioned it again. He just shoots her the occasional worried glance as fake blood oozes, lightning illuminates desiccated alpine castles, and monsters lurch after their hapless victims.
The couple of times Raven catches his concerned glances, she interprets them as fear. She grins and blinks her owl-eyes at him, slipping her hand over his and giving it a reassuring squeeze. He catches her thoughts - I can protect you, for once and Anyway, we’re the scariest monsters here - and decides not to contradict her. For now, anyway, it’s fine if she wants to think he needs a little bit of looking after. A part of him sort of enjoys it, since it’s such a novelty; he’s used to being protected, but not cared for like this. It’s fine, so long as she remembers that, to the rest of the audience, they really are the scariest monsters here.
Charles knows that he should stop worrying. So far, Raven hasn’t slipped up once. By the time the lights come back on, she’s disguised as his mother again. And she’s perfect, from her golden ringlets and indifferent expression, all the way down to the square toes of her shoes.
“Shall we?” she says, rising crisply from her seat.
Once they’re home, Raven changes again, this time into the form of a pretty blonde girl a year or so younger than Charles. She dashes up the main staircase and disappears into one of the many empty rooms. Charles follows slowly. He can hear her giggling with his mind, so it won’t come as any surprise when she jumps out at him, looking like Bela Lugosi or Lon Chaney. He’ll gasp and recoil in terror anyway, because that’s what brothers do. And it’s sort of fun pretending - for a little while, at least - that the real monsters have fangs and claws, instead of perfectly ordinary human faces.
7/23/2011