The Weight of Water . X-Men; First Class . Part I - 1 .
Title: The Weight of Water, Part I
Author: pprfaith
Summary: Raven, Charles, and Erik over the span of twenty years. Because the whole is always more than the sum of its parts and together they could rule the world.
Pairings: Charles/Erik/Raven in all permutations. No Erik in Part I, though.
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the X-Men franchise, nor the quotes I use throughout the story. I make no profit off this.
Rating: R, for violence and adult themes.
Warnings: Deep breath, okay: Violence. Child abuse, canon alcohol abuse, attempted child molestation. Murder. Telepathic bonding, telepathic manipulation and slight consent issues in the form of telepathy. Discussions of suicide, racist themes and torture. Threesome relationship with het and slash bits. Underage (13 and 16, for about half a page) pseudo-incest. Angst, Erik’s anger issues and my wordiness.
Length: 51k, all told, around 17k for each of the three parts.
A/N: reena_jenkins wanted someone to write a story where Charles, Erik and Raven rule the world. This is that story. Sort of. God, when did this get so long?
Beta Goddess: vesselandpestle, who is glory personified and knows it. Let’s face it, I’d be lost without you.
Additional Blabber: So. Americans, your strange laws concerning driver’s licenses confuse me. Especially because, Jesus, can’t you agree on something? But I tried, I swear I did, to figure out how the state of New York handled driver’s licenses in the fifties. I found nothing and fudged the rest. Sorry. Don’t hate me.
I’m more or less disregarding X-Men: Wolverine. Since X-Men canon resembles something like a bad LSD trip, I’m not feeling very bad about that.
Also, you get cookies if you a) know the fairy tale Charles references and b) can figure out how the enumeration works. There’s a system.
Apart from that, have fun and please tell me what you think.
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The Weight of Water
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Part I: Two
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1
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Sister.
A sister.
He has a sister.
Charles has a sister.
Her name is Raven and she is blue and brilliant and just like him and her mind is like music and picture books and they have a plan.
All night they’ve been planning, playing with her ability to make Raven Xavier, Charles’s sister.
Because that’s what they are now, brother and sister. They’ve claimed each other with those words and they won’t be alone anymore, now.
Charles is aware, of course, even through his exhausted giddiness, that the words alone do not make it so. There is work to be done, especially for him. And they’ll need time to really become brother and sister, but those are details.
The overall plan is much simpler: Together.
Something stirs in the hall and Charles stretches enough to feel Cook’s mind. He winces. Already so late? Or early, in this case?
Raven is sitting next to him, playing with her new, blonde hair, chewing on something or other. Charles calls her name inside her head and loves her madly for the fact that she doesn’t jump. She just blinks big, blue eyes at him and they flicker gold, like a treasure at the bottom of the sea, gold hidden under blue. She’s not very good at keeping shapes up.
Cook is coming. We need to leave.
Her eyes grow wide, panic settles on her face, a steady of stream of They’ll hate me, send me away, hurt me, I’m a freak, not normal, they’ll be scared, they’ll hate me…
Stop, Charles tells her, sternly. The word reverberates in both their heads, testament to how tired he is. He usually spends most of his time trying to keep himself together, but he’s been stretching all over the place all night long. There are pieces of him scattered all over. With Raven, outside the door, keeping watch, with the maid who sometimes sleepwalks. He’s everywhere at once, a puzzle with the parts scattered all over. Confused. His headache is murdering him.
I need you to be quiet and hold my hand, alright?
She still reels, inside, but then she visibly steels herself, thinking that Charles is her brother now. Brothers protect their sisters. It still tastes of hesitation, that thought, but she wants to believe.
Brother and sister. They’ll fill up the spaces later, colour in the white between the contours of themselves and this new creature they gave birth to: us. Later .
For now, Charles needs to hide Raven from Cook’s perception long enough to get her to his room. There, they can sleep for a bit. Later, when his headache is better, he’ll start changing people’s minds about her.
Later.
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2
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The first person whose mind Charles changes is the maid that is sent up to check on him when he doesn’t show up for lunch or dinner. She walks in on Raven, bright and blue and both of them scream and Charles lunges across the room, throws himself between them and orders them, sharply, to shut up.
Then he shoves his way into Marietta’s head and makes her believe that Raven has always been there. Raven is Charles’s little sister. Raven is Sharon’s and Brian’s daughter. Raven is blonde and pretty and loves chocolate. Raven is nice. Raven likes to play with Charles.
Everything is alright.
She repeats everything he feeds her, word for word, her expression blank, her eyes glassy. Raven stares, scared. A bit of him, but mostly of the almost-discovery. There is terror living in her very bones and it will take a long, long time to bleed out.
Once Charles is done, he orders the girl to forget Raven is there, for now. She’ll report that he’s feeling under the weather and bring him a light dinner later.
She nods, walks out of the room, shutting the door quietly behind herself.
Charles collapses onto the floor, crying and retching.
Raven is there, on her knees at his side, holding him, asking him what she can do, how can she help, please? Her panic swirls through his head, making it hard to think and he keeps retching, keeps twitching with pain and he wants to roll up, wants to stuff his head in cotton and never feel again, it’s never hurt this much, he’s never pushed so hard, he had to go so deep, oh gods, it hurts. Raven panics, high and loud inside her head. She thinks she killed him.
But then, suddenly, she stills and he thinks she’ll run, thinks he’s probably hurting her, projecting his pain, but then she’s moving again, her hand on his shoulder, stroking softly. And her mind isn’t panic anymore, but smooth and blue, like she is.
She concentrates hard on that, blue and smooth and nothing else. He can feel her emotions and thoughts clamouring to get back in, but she pushes them aside. Blue and smooth and quiet, like the deepest sea.
Clever girl, she figured out that she’s making things worse, figured out that his gift is all out of control. Pieces of Charles all over the floor, shattered under the pressure of what he just did.
Blue and smooth.
Charles sinks into it, lets himself fall into her mind and eventually, falls asleep. He dreams of the ocean and hidden treasure revealed.
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3
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It takes him three weeks and almost constant migraines to make Raven his sister.
The pain gets a bit less every single time, but it’s still crippling, leaving him shaking and throwing up for hours. And always, every moment of it, Raven is by his side, holding onto him and making her mind into a perfect escape, empty and soothing.
She lets him in without reservation or hesitation, without fear of what he could do. The fact that he’s hurting himself to help her, to make her safe, means more to her than any declaration of love ever would have.
There is no more hesitation when she thinks of him as her brother because brothers protect their sisters and he does that. Even though it hurts him.
“Thank you,” she whispers the night after he gets done changing the last mind - Mother’s. Charles has stopped retching, is only shaking, wrapped in all the blankets Raven could find because, she insists, being warm is important when you’re sick. He keeps telling her that his body isn’t what’s sick, his mind is, but she worries and she wants to do something.
So he sweats silently with her skinny blue arms wrapped around his middle above the blankets.
He nods, attempts a smile. “Of course,” he agrees. “We’ll have to go through some of the old rooms tomorrow to find some dolls and other things to put in your room. A girl needs toys.”
And they can’t very well buy them because Raven should already have them. But Charles knows they’ll find enough to create the illusion that the room across the hall from his has been Raven’s for the past nine years. He just got done changing the world to make it fit her. They’ll manage one room. Clothes are not an issue, thank god, because Raven can create them like she creates skin and hair. As long as Charles is there to tell her what she should wear, she’s perfectly fine. They’ll get her some eventually, just so there’s laundry, but for now, they should be set. Everything is fine. As soon as the shakes are over, everything will be absolutely fine.
He changed the world. He changed the world.
Raven smiles brightly, her nose almost touching his. “I’m glad you’re better,” she tells him. “You don’t look so bad anymore. And now you won’t have to do it again, right?”
He nods, tries another smile and manages. He’s better. The exercise of the past few weeks has done fascinating things to his ability. It’s stronger than before, easier to control and, like Raven says, he gets less sick with every try. Also adding to his better than usual state is the fact that the last mind he changed was the easiest.
It should have been the hardest, making his own mother believe that she gave birth to another, second child, but it wasn’t. He copied her emotions for him - minus the repulsion and fear she tries so badly to hide - and connected them to false memories of a daughter with her blonde hair and her dead husband’s blue eyes.
There was no love he needed to manufacture, because she feels no love for her real child. No memories he needed to fake because she never spends time around Charles, so why would she spend time with Raven?
All he did was implant knowledge. You have a daughter named Raven, and she accepted it and moved on. There were no emotions involved, except a quiet little voice that whispered, at least she’s not as freakish as the boy.
Charles just changed his mother’s mind forever and it was easier to do than changing the cook’s or the butler’s because his mother has no love for her own flesh and blood. He always thought it was his freakishness that made her distance herself so, but it’s more than that, he realizes. Mother never wanted children, has no patience for them, no care for what happens to them. She knows Charles - and Raven - are taken care of. Beyond that, she is too involved with herself to care.
He is an object, a possession, like a coat or a dress that is pulled out of the closet for a special event, put back in the late evening, forgotten. He exists outside his mother’s narrow orbit, outside her gravity, far from her centre, cut loose from her at birth.
It hurts.
But he has Raven now, and she loves him because he protects her and is there for her and is not scared of her. And in turn she protects him, too, and doesn’t let his ability frighten her away.
Raven and Charles.
Charles and Raven.
That’s all that matters now.
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“No, like this, see?” Raven asks, reaching behind her head to tug her hair from Charles’s grasp and take over the braid. “First this one, then this, then this. And again.”
Charles, who has been trying unsuccessfully to braid her long, blonde hair for almost twenty minutes, grunts in frustration. “You can just make it braid itself, Raven. Why do I have to learn?”
Her hands drop to her sides and her hair disappears, zipping back into her scalp, leaving her with a boy cut too short for any sort of braid and when she turns around, her face is solemn and her eyes moist.
Charles cringes and sweeps across the surface of her mind, trying to find out why she’s upset. He’s telling the truth. There is absolutely no need for him to be able to help her with her hair. Any hairstyle she wants she can just create with a bit of concentration.
But, oh. It’s not about the hair. The hair is an excuse only, a way to gain entrance to his room after dinner. She wanted… oh.
“Raven,” he says, sounding older than he is. He always does. He is older than his years, so much so. Knowing every secret will do that to you, he muses, smile crooked. “You do not need excuses to come to my room. Just bring yours toys and you can play here, or do your homework. I don’t mind having you around, you know that.”
She blushes dark purple, averting her gaze. “I’m sorry,” she mutters and then looks back up, fire in her eyes suddenly. “But you never tell me these things.” She sounds annoyed.
Charles thinks back over the past few months and finds, yes. She’s right. He hasn’t told her. “My apologies,” he offers. “I sometimes forget that not everyone can read minds. But I promise I don’t mind.”
She looks sceptical, Really?
When Raven wants to make sure he tells the truth, she always asks inside his mind. She says he can’t lie there. He can, but she doesn’t need to know that. It’s exciting, getting to speak to someone like this. Really.
Her smile is back and her mind turns to happy things, flowers and sunshine and chocolate, which Charles knows to mean that everything is fine. There is a learning curve with this thing - Charles and Raven - but they’re getting better at it.
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5
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Sometimes, when Raven is playing out in the grounds and finds something exciting while Charles is inside, reading, she’ll call for him in his mind. It feels like a tickle along his spine and when he lets her in, she’ll tell him what she wants him to do.
Take my hand she’ll say, or, Take my eyes. And then she’ll show him what she found, sharing her treasure with him without reservation.
He doesn’t know what the scales of a snake feel like until Raven gives him her fingers to learn.
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6
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“Can you pass me the butter?” Raven asks, munching on a bite of dry toast.
“Of course,” Charles says, hands it over.
“Are we going outside later?” She sounds hopeful.
“I have homework to do, and so do you, dear,” Charles reprimands, gently. Raven isn’t really good at keeping track of her school work. She’s never had to before.
“I did my maths last night. It’s stupid.”
“No, it’s not. It’s important.”
“You sound like an old fart.”
“And you sound like a child.”
She grins, points a finger at him. “I am a child!”
“That doesn’t mean you have to act like one all the time!”
“Does too!”
“Does not!”
“Does too!” Charles, who has never before had anyone to have silly fights with, actually enjoys this. So does Raven, her mind awash in mirth.
“Does not!”
“Children!” They both jump suddenly, at Cook’s sharp reprimand. She gives them stern looks from where she’s standing at the stove, making breakfast for Mother. “Speak out loud,” she orders.
She, as well as the butler, have been in this house for longer than Charles has been alive. They know about his ability, even if the rest of the staff doesn’t and refuses to learn. Sometimes Charles thinks he might be keeping them from learning, without meaning to, but he’s not sure. Still, the butler ignores what Charles can do, but Cook has never seemed fazed by it.
Until today. A slight dip into her mind reveals worry, a bit of fear and a lot of apprehension. Charles slips a bit deeper, finds the last few minutes in her mind.
She’s been watching him and Raven gesture and laugh and frown, but they haven’t said a single word, the whole time. Their conversation has been completely silent and they didn’t even notice.
“Oh,” Raven says across the table and Charles realizes she’s seen what he’s seen. He’s shown her, even as he dug through Cook’s mind, what he was finding. Even now, their minds are still tangled.
It’s almost like -
Charles rips himself away, pulling out of Raven’s mind hard enough to shove him backwards in the real world. He almost falls out of his chair, stumbles to his feet and, ignoring the worried calls of Raven and Cook, he runs.
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Sorrow found me when I was young
Sorrow waited, sorrow won
Sorrow, they put me on a pill
It’s in my honey, it’s in my milk
The National, Sorrow
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7
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Please, he thinks, please no, not Raven. Not her!
She’s banging against his door, calling for him to let him in, nudging him with her mind, but Charles can’t let her in. He can’t.
Not Raven!
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a
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Maggie is little Charles’s nanny from the moment he is born. Mrs. Xavier is too weak to take care of him after the birth and seems to develop no interest as her strength returns to her.
So it’s Maggie all the way. Maggie who bathes him and changes him and feeds him and sings him to sleep and holds him when he cries. Not that he does, sweet, silent, little boy.
She’s had half a dozen other children to take care of in her career, but never one so young, and never so completely. Sometimes it’s like no-one wants that boy at all. Mrs. Xavier has no interest and Mr. Xavier is always too busy. Cook is the most regular visitor in the nursery, after Maggie.
And then, when Charles is about four months old, things get strange. Maggie starts to feel a warmth, like feather down, whenever she is with the baby. Warmth and comfort and contentment. She attributes it to getting attached to the baby, at first, but it grows stronger and she notices, after a while, that it fades when Charles is hungry or tired or needs something else.
She knows what he needs, without checking, without thinking. He fusses his little fists at her and she knows he is hungry, even though she’s recently fed him. He fusses at her the exact same way and she knows he needs to be changed. She just knows.
And he has no expressions. He makes no sounds, pulls no faces, doesn’t scream. Utterly silent. And yet she finds herself in his nursery time and again in the middle of the night, swearing up and down he cried for her.
When he is eight months old she goes to visit her mother on her weekend off and feels cold and alone and desperate the whole time. The feeling fades as soon as she holds Charles in her arms again.
That’s when she really figures it out.
She doesn’t tell anyone, except Cook, because the older woman is a friend. That, and she has her own suspicions about the boy, even earlier than Maggie. She believes Maggie when she says, “I think he cries inside my head.”
It scares her for a while. It isn’t normal. But he is a baby, in the end, helpless and fragile and, she figures, everything he does is normal for a child his age, except for the way he does it. He doesn’t smile to show affection, he makes her feel warm. He doesn’t cry, he just nudges her mind, letting her know what he wants. He doesn’t scream, he just summons her to his bedside.
He is a boy. A tiny, silent, special, little boy.
It’s okay.
And with enough patience, with enough care, she teaches him to speak out loud, to behave normally. To hide, because she knows the world won’t accept him.
When he is four, he finally speaks normally most of the time and Maggie, who is tired of putting off her wedding to John again and again, decides that it is time for her to go.
Charles doesn’t need her anymore, and it’s not like she’ll leave forever. She’ll visit him, and after the honeymoon, she’ll make sure to show his new nanny everything she needs to know. She’ll make sure the other woman sees how special Charles is, and what he needs, how to help him, protect him.
Later.
For now, she’s newlywed and on her way to Florida for her honeymoon and John is beaming next to her in the car, so happy. Charles’s warmth is slowly fading as the miles stretch between them, but she’s happy and she knows he’ll be alright. Children his age forget quickly.
They’re just past Bethlehem when Charles’s warmth at the back of her mind is abruptly gone and a headache like an ice pick stabs through her skull.
It hurts, it hurts, oh god, she’s screaming, she can hear John screaming, he’s touching her, calling her name, but it hurts so much, she can’t see, everything is red, and it hurts so much, oh god, oh god, oh -
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8
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Charles won’t let Raven end like Ms. Maggie did. He won’t.
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9
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They need to talk.
Charles has been avoiding this conversation for weeks, ever since Cook and the kitchen and the breakfast where he slid so deeply into Raven’s mind that neither of them could tell inside from outside anymore. He has imagined a dozen versions and permutations with increasingly horrifying outcomes. There is one where Raven runs away again, one where she hates him, one where she stays but forbids him from ever entering her mind again. There is one where he slips up and she dies.
That one, he thinks, might be the worst.
He hopes she won’t run, hopes she’ll just tell him to stay away. He’ll hate it, every second of it, and it’ll hurt, but she’ll be alive. Safe.
But the idea of never being allowed into her mind again, of never being close to her again… Raven’s mind is so very special. She can’t hold her shapes very long, but they are an inherent part of her and reflected in her mindscape. Everything inside her head changes. A chair becomes a desk becomes a bottle of water becomes a bird and flies away and words become scribbles become worms become earth. Everything is constantly shifting, changing, moving. Evolving.
It should be nauseating, but to Charles it is nothing but wonder.
He’s missed that, those past few weeks, ever since the kitchen. With that thought, unbidden, a tendril of power escapes him, sneaks through long, empty hallways to find Raven playing alone in her room. It reaches her moments before Charles himself does, slips into her mind, clicks into place.
It’s been weeks since he felt her like this and the rapid brightloudsweetsoftlove-changechangechange of her mind feels a bit like coming home.
Joy floods him, followed closely by guilt and he jerks back, pulls into himself, removing all traces of himself from her mind. He has to. To keep her safe.
Raven, who felt him coiling in the back of her mind, snaps her head around to stare at the door before he ever opens it. Her expression, when he enters silently, is sullen and angry.
“Raven,” Charles says, “we need to talk.”
She lets go of her doll, drops it carelessly to the floor and lets her skin ripple. Emotion makes her lose control and she’s blue and angry before him. “Have you decided you’re talking to me again?”
Snooty, prideful, she already sounds like a true Xavier. Charles is both pleased and repulsed. Sweet Raven, so angry. It’s his own fault, though, and he knows it. He’s about to make it worse. When he tells her what he almost did to her…
He shuffles his feet around as he closes the door, tucks his hands into his pockets and studies the ground. “I’m sorry,” he tells her, his sister, his best friend, his confidante. He’s so terribly scared and he feels alone again, the way he did before that night when they met and had hot chocolate and talked until dawn. “I would like to explain myself, if you’ll let me.”
She glares for another moment but he can feel her softening. She sighs, finally, tucks a strand of bright red behind her ear and ripples back into her other skin, soft and pink, then back again to blue. So beautiful and far too forgiving. “Well,” she says, trying to sound sharp and not quite hitting the mark. “I’m waiting.”
Against his will, Charles chuckles.
He sits down on the plush carpet she uses to play on, folds his legs and puts his hands on his knees. Raven mirrors him, trying to keep the angry look on her face. But there is excitement leaking through already, and joy. She’s so happy he isn’t abandoning her that he feels like the world’s worst person.
But he has to protect her.
He takes a deep breath and starts, “You know that I’m a telepath.”
The look she gives him is more scathing than any girl her age should be capable of.
He bites his lip and then just forces it all out in a rush, because she has to know. She has to understand how dangerous he is. “I… I’ve found that… when I spend a lot of time inside someone’s head, and I mean a lot of time, I form a sort of link with them. It happened once when I was a baby, with my nanny. She left when I was four and I found out later that she died of an aneurism. I spent a lot of time in her mind and eventually, it was no effort at all anymore. It was like part of me was always with her. I could find her anywhere with only a thought, even when she was in town. And when I wanted to, I could influence her mind a bit. She always knew when I was hungry, or tired, or wanted something. She always knew where I was or what I needed. She married and left when I was four and…”
He clutches at his own hands, stares at them. He shouldn’t be here. Raven is too young, she cannot possibly… But she does. Because he’s been inside her head and he knows how she lived before she came here, how she hid and ran and hungered and she understands far too much. More than him, sheltered little boy. He’s lived a thousand years in others’ heads, but not a day out in the real world.
She crawls over to him and into his lap, pushing his arms apart and away, snuggling herself into the hollow created by his folded legs. She rests her head on his shoulder and pulls his hands into her lap and she smells of starch and something wild and utterly unknown. She smells… blue. Charles inhales deeply and fights the urge to slip into her mind, to borrow some of the warmth he knows he’d find there.
“I was too young to understand when it happened, but eventually, when I learned to access my own memories, I figured it out. I had a link with Ms. Maggie. My mind…moulded itself to hers. When she left… she went too far and the link broke and… she died. I killed her, Raven.”
She gasps, small and horrified, but there is no fear in her, only sorrow. She’s so very strong, so very brilliant. Charles goes on. “The reason I have been staying away from you is that I can feel myself forming a link, a bond, to you, like I did with her, and if I do, you’ll die.”
Something hot trails down his cheek and he realizes he’s crying. He feels so ashamed. He loves his gift, loves his abilities, but he hates them, too. It’s always so loud and he can’t ever be close to anyone, can’t ever love anyone because he’ll kill them when they leave and he’s only twelve. He’s too young, even if he feels a thousand years old.
He’s glad, so very glad, that Mother doesn’t care much for him because if she did, he would have killed her years ago when she went on one of her trips and he doesn’t want to… Charles wants to protect. To nurture and preserve and love and hold. He doesn’t want to be a killer but his power is so terrible, so strong and he can’t contain it, can’t hold it down, he’s only twelve, only twelve…He killed his nanny when he was only four and he didn’t even mean to. There was a piece of him inside of her and it killed her, poisoned her, like the mirror shards in the fairy tale she read him once.
“Only if I leave, right?”
Raven has her hands on his cheeks, holding his face, looking him straight in the eye. Her eyes are so beautiful, yellow and bright. He dips into her mind to understand the question he only half heard, finds, It will only kill me if I leave, right?
He nods.
“And you’ll be… you’ll be with me? Always?”
“Raven, you don’t understand! I’ll kill you! Ms. Maggie….”
Her expression falls, eyes going wide and scared again, the way they were in the kitchen, before she realized Charles would never hurt her. But he is. Hurting her. And he’s twelve and that’s too young, he knows that, but she’s even younger, nine looking seven, and he will hurt her. But then she says, “You’re going to leave me?” and he can’t move.
“No,” he says, too loud, in her head and out, making her wince, “No, Raven, you’re my sister now, I would never leave you. But you’re going to grow up and find someone and you’ll leave me. You cannot possibly want me inside your mind forever. You’d never be free of me. Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t, because I’d kill you if you left.”
He sounds like an old man again, he knows. He always does, when he’s unsure. He borrows words and phrases from the minds of the people around him, from smart men, wise men, men who are respected and known and he tries to hide behind them. Tries to hide the fact that he’s only twelve and so scared. He thought he didn’t have to be anymore, now that there’s another one like him, but he was wrong. He has to be twice as scared now.
She presses herself against him, impossibly small but so heavy. She’s the weight of their futures, curling into his lap, shoving herself against his chest like she can crawl inside, if only she tries hard enough, blue like water, blue like the ocean, crashing down on him, pulling him into its depths like treasures lost.
“I’ll never leave you and you’ll never leave me. Brother and sister, you said, Charles, you said! We’re never going to be alone again. You promised me and I don’t want to be alone again, please, I don’t want to!”
“Raven, I can’t possibly…”
She shakes her head so hard that her hair hits him in the face, small stings. “You have to!” she yells, sounding choked. “You have to! And if I ever want to leave… you can change my mind. Like you did with Cook and your mother. If I ever want to leave, you can just change my mind and make it so I don’t want anymore and we’ll be together. We’ll be together, Charles, you have to!”
She doesn’t… she wants him to… how could he…?
Charles stops thinking. He shouldn’t, he knows. Someone has to be the adult here, to think logically of the consequences. But he’s only twelve and he’s scared. Scared and alone and too powerful. And Raven is alone, too, and different from anyone else. Before Charles, nobody ever loved her.
Before Raven, nobody ever loved Charles. He thought Ms. Maggie did, and she was certainly fond of him, but he wasn’t her child. He was the strange, sickly boy she was charged with. She left him. She didn’t love him.
Not like Raven does. Not like he loves her.
There’s only them, her and him, against the rest of the world. Together. He promised her that, in the kitchen. And she doesn’t hate him, doesn’t run away. She doesn’t lock him out, doesn’t doom him to watch from the outside for the rest of his life. She loves him. She lets him in. He’ll never change her mind because he won’t have to because it’s him and her, Charles and Raven now, and that will never change.
He wraps his arms around her, squeezes her too tightly, buries his face in her neck and lets his power seep through their skins, from his body into hers. He lays himself over her mind like a blanket, finds a spot that’s soft and dark and empty and curls up there, grows roots like a tree.
It takes no effort. His mind has been reaching out, trying to do this for weeks, knowing what he didn’t know yet. Charles and Raven. RavenandCharles. He lets it happen now, and Raven makes an awed little sound, like wonder, and smiles so widely he can feel it against the skin of his cheek, along with her tears and her snot and her warmth. She loves him.
The tree grows, its roots strong, its crown powerful and beautiful and there are blossoms, yellow like her eyes and sunshine and treasure and Charles slowly withdraws his conscious mind, leaving behind that tree and a part of himself within its bark.
A part of his soul.
“I’ll never leave you,” he says, and he knows that it is true because he can’t.
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b
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There is another world, one where he doesn’t find the right words. One where Raven is more scared of belonging to someone so utterly than of being alone. One where something is different.
In that world, Raven tells him no, tells him he has to stay out, and he spends the next twenty years hovering at the edge of her mind, like a dog scratching at the door, begging to be let in and he can feel the pull of her tide against his skin and soul and is never permitted to give in. She never allows him entrance and he can never hate her for it even though it’s killing him and then, on a beach in Cuba, she kneels over him and wishes, fiercely, that he would read her mind.
But he can’t. The doors have rusted shut, the locks have corroded into solid steel clumps and there is no getting through anymore.
He stays outside, forever lost, and she remains inside, free but alone. She leaves him there, taking with her the only other person Charles could have ever loved and their paths only ever cross again when there is fighting to be done.
They regret it, both, until their dying day, but it cannot be undone.
Sometimes children do stupid things.
Sometimes not doing them is even worse.
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Continued in Part I - 2
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Author: pprfaith
Summary: Raven, Charles, and Erik over the span of twenty years. Because the whole is always more than the sum of its parts and together they could rule the world.
Pairings: Charles/Erik/Raven in all permutations. No Erik in Part I, though.
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the X-Men franchise, nor the quotes I use throughout the story. I make no profit off this.
Rating: R, for violence and adult themes.
Warnings: Deep breath, okay: Violence. Child abuse, canon alcohol abuse, attempted child molestation. Murder. Telepathic bonding, telepathic manipulation and slight consent issues in the form of telepathy. Discussions of suicide, racist themes and torture. Threesome relationship with het and slash bits. Underage (13 and 16, for about half a page) pseudo-incest. Angst, Erik’s anger issues and my wordiness.
Length: 51k, all told, around 17k for each of the three parts.
A/N: reena_jenkins wanted someone to write a story where Charles, Erik and Raven rule the world. This is that story. Sort of. God, when did this get so long?
Beta Goddess: vesselandpestle, who is glory personified and knows it. Let’s face it, I’d be lost without you.
Additional Blabber: So. Americans, your strange laws concerning driver’s licenses confuse me. Especially because, Jesus, can’t you agree on something? But I tried, I swear I did, to figure out how the state of New York handled driver’s licenses in the fifties. I found nothing and fudged the rest. Sorry. Don’t hate me.
I’m more or less disregarding X-Men: Wolverine. Since X-Men canon resembles something like a bad LSD trip, I’m not feeling very bad about that.
Also, you get cookies if you a) know the fairy tale Charles references and b) can figure out how the enumeration works. There’s a system.
Apart from that, have fun and please tell me what you think.
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The Weight of Water
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Part I: Two
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1
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Sister.
A sister.
He has a sister.
Charles has a sister.
Her name is Raven and she is blue and brilliant and just like him and her mind is like music and picture books and they have a plan.
All night they’ve been planning, playing with her ability to make Raven Xavier, Charles’s sister.
Because that’s what they are now, brother and sister. They’ve claimed each other with those words and they won’t be alone anymore, now.
Charles is aware, of course, even through his exhausted giddiness, that the words alone do not make it so. There is work to be done, especially for him. And they’ll need time to really become brother and sister, but those are details.
The overall plan is much simpler: Together.
Something stirs in the hall and Charles stretches enough to feel Cook’s mind. He winces. Already so late? Or early, in this case?
Raven is sitting next to him, playing with her new, blonde hair, chewing on something or other. Charles calls her name inside her head and loves her madly for the fact that she doesn’t jump. She just blinks big, blue eyes at him and they flicker gold, like a treasure at the bottom of the sea, gold hidden under blue. She’s not very good at keeping shapes up.
Cook is coming. We need to leave.
Her eyes grow wide, panic settles on her face, a steady of stream of They’ll hate me, send me away, hurt me, I’m a freak, not normal, they’ll be scared, they’ll hate me…
Stop, Charles tells her, sternly. The word reverberates in both their heads, testament to how tired he is. He usually spends most of his time trying to keep himself together, but he’s been stretching all over the place all night long. There are pieces of him scattered all over. With Raven, outside the door, keeping watch, with the maid who sometimes sleepwalks. He’s everywhere at once, a puzzle with the parts scattered all over. Confused. His headache is murdering him.
I need you to be quiet and hold my hand, alright?
She still reels, inside, but then she visibly steels herself, thinking that Charles is her brother now. Brothers protect their sisters. It still tastes of hesitation, that thought, but she wants to believe.
Brother and sister. They’ll fill up the spaces later, colour in the white between the contours of themselves and this new creature they gave birth to: us. Later .
For now, Charles needs to hide Raven from Cook’s perception long enough to get her to his room. There, they can sleep for a bit. Later, when his headache is better, he’ll start changing people’s minds about her.
Later.
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2
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The first person whose mind Charles changes is the maid that is sent up to check on him when he doesn’t show up for lunch or dinner. She walks in on Raven, bright and blue and both of them scream and Charles lunges across the room, throws himself between them and orders them, sharply, to shut up.
Then he shoves his way into Marietta’s head and makes her believe that Raven has always been there. Raven is Charles’s little sister. Raven is Sharon’s and Brian’s daughter. Raven is blonde and pretty and loves chocolate. Raven is nice. Raven likes to play with Charles.
Everything is alright.
She repeats everything he feeds her, word for word, her expression blank, her eyes glassy. Raven stares, scared. A bit of him, but mostly of the almost-discovery. There is terror living in her very bones and it will take a long, long time to bleed out.
Once Charles is done, he orders the girl to forget Raven is there, for now. She’ll report that he’s feeling under the weather and bring him a light dinner later.
She nods, walks out of the room, shutting the door quietly behind herself.
Charles collapses onto the floor, crying and retching.
Raven is there, on her knees at his side, holding him, asking him what she can do, how can she help, please? Her panic swirls through his head, making it hard to think and he keeps retching, keeps twitching with pain and he wants to roll up, wants to stuff his head in cotton and never feel again, it’s never hurt this much, he’s never pushed so hard, he had to go so deep, oh gods, it hurts. Raven panics, high and loud inside her head. She thinks she killed him.
But then, suddenly, she stills and he thinks she’ll run, thinks he’s probably hurting her, projecting his pain, but then she’s moving again, her hand on his shoulder, stroking softly. And her mind isn’t panic anymore, but smooth and blue, like she is.
She concentrates hard on that, blue and smooth and nothing else. He can feel her emotions and thoughts clamouring to get back in, but she pushes them aside. Blue and smooth and quiet, like the deepest sea.
Clever girl, she figured out that she’s making things worse, figured out that his gift is all out of control. Pieces of Charles all over the floor, shattered under the pressure of what he just did.
Blue and smooth.
Charles sinks into it, lets himself fall into her mind and eventually, falls asleep. He dreams of the ocean and hidden treasure revealed.
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3
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It takes him three weeks and almost constant migraines to make Raven his sister.
The pain gets a bit less every single time, but it’s still crippling, leaving him shaking and throwing up for hours. And always, every moment of it, Raven is by his side, holding onto him and making her mind into a perfect escape, empty and soothing.
She lets him in without reservation or hesitation, without fear of what he could do. The fact that he’s hurting himself to help her, to make her safe, means more to her than any declaration of love ever would have.
There is no more hesitation when she thinks of him as her brother because brothers protect their sisters and he does that. Even though it hurts him.
“Thank you,” she whispers the night after he gets done changing the last mind - Mother’s. Charles has stopped retching, is only shaking, wrapped in all the blankets Raven could find because, she insists, being warm is important when you’re sick. He keeps telling her that his body isn’t what’s sick, his mind is, but she worries and she wants to do something.
So he sweats silently with her skinny blue arms wrapped around his middle above the blankets.
He nods, attempts a smile. “Of course,” he agrees. “We’ll have to go through some of the old rooms tomorrow to find some dolls and other things to put in your room. A girl needs toys.”
And they can’t very well buy them because Raven should already have them. But Charles knows they’ll find enough to create the illusion that the room across the hall from his has been Raven’s for the past nine years. He just got done changing the world to make it fit her. They’ll manage one room. Clothes are not an issue, thank god, because Raven can create them like she creates skin and hair. As long as Charles is there to tell her what she should wear, she’s perfectly fine. They’ll get her some eventually, just so there’s laundry, but for now, they should be set. Everything is fine. As soon as the shakes are over, everything will be absolutely fine.
He changed the world. He changed the world.
Raven smiles brightly, her nose almost touching his. “I’m glad you’re better,” she tells him. “You don’t look so bad anymore. And now you won’t have to do it again, right?”
He nods, tries another smile and manages. He’s better. The exercise of the past few weeks has done fascinating things to his ability. It’s stronger than before, easier to control and, like Raven says, he gets less sick with every try. Also adding to his better than usual state is the fact that the last mind he changed was the easiest.
It should have been the hardest, making his own mother believe that she gave birth to another, second child, but it wasn’t. He copied her emotions for him - minus the repulsion and fear she tries so badly to hide - and connected them to false memories of a daughter with her blonde hair and her dead husband’s blue eyes.
There was no love he needed to manufacture, because she feels no love for her real child. No memories he needed to fake because she never spends time around Charles, so why would she spend time with Raven?
All he did was implant knowledge. You have a daughter named Raven, and she accepted it and moved on. There were no emotions involved, except a quiet little voice that whispered, at least she’s not as freakish as the boy.
Charles just changed his mother’s mind forever and it was easier to do than changing the cook’s or the butler’s because his mother has no love for her own flesh and blood. He always thought it was his freakishness that made her distance herself so, but it’s more than that, he realizes. Mother never wanted children, has no patience for them, no care for what happens to them. She knows Charles - and Raven - are taken care of. Beyond that, she is too involved with herself to care.
He is an object, a possession, like a coat or a dress that is pulled out of the closet for a special event, put back in the late evening, forgotten. He exists outside his mother’s narrow orbit, outside her gravity, far from her centre, cut loose from her at birth.
It hurts.
But he has Raven now, and she loves him because he protects her and is there for her and is not scared of her. And in turn she protects him, too, and doesn’t let his ability frighten her away.
Raven and Charles.
Charles and Raven.
That’s all that matters now.
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4
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“No, like this, see?” Raven asks, reaching behind her head to tug her hair from Charles’s grasp and take over the braid. “First this one, then this, then this. And again.”
Charles, who has been trying unsuccessfully to braid her long, blonde hair for almost twenty minutes, grunts in frustration. “You can just make it braid itself, Raven. Why do I have to learn?”
Her hands drop to her sides and her hair disappears, zipping back into her scalp, leaving her with a boy cut too short for any sort of braid and when she turns around, her face is solemn and her eyes moist.
Charles cringes and sweeps across the surface of her mind, trying to find out why she’s upset. He’s telling the truth. There is absolutely no need for him to be able to help her with her hair. Any hairstyle she wants she can just create with a bit of concentration.
But, oh. It’s not about the hair. The hair is an excuse only, a way to gain entrance to his room after dinner. She wanted… oh.
“Raven,” he says, sounding older than he is. He always does. He is older than his years, so much so. Knowing every secret will do that to you, he muses, smile crooked. “You do not need excuses to come to my room. Just bring yours toys and you can play here, or do your homework. I don’t mind having you around, you know that.”
She blushes dark purple, averting her gaze. “I’m sorry,” she mutters and then looks back up, fire in her eyes suddenly. “But you never tell me these things.” She sounds annoyed.
Charles thinks back over the past few months and finds, yes. She’s right. He hasn’t told her. “My apologies,” he offers. “I sometimes forget that not everyone can read minds. But I promise I don’t mind.”
She looks sceptical, Really?
When Raven wants to make sure he tells the truth, she always asks inside his mind. She says he can’t lie there. He can, but she doesn’t need to know that. It’s exciting, getting to speak to someone like this. Really.
Her smile is back and her mind turns to happy things, flowers and sunshine and chocolate, which Charles knows to mean that everything is fine. There is a learning curve with this thing - Charles and Raven - but they’re getting better at it.
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5
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Sometimes, when Raven is playing out in the grounds and finds something exciting while Charles is inside, reading, she’ll call for him in his mind. It feels like a tickle along his spine and when he lets her in, she’ll tell him what she wants him to do.
Take my hand she’ll say, or, Take my eyes. And then she’ll show him what she found, sharing her treasure with him without reservation.
He doesn’t know what the scales of a snake feel like until Raven gives him her fingers to learn.
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6
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“Can you pass me the butter?” Raven asks, munching on a bite of dry toast.
“Of course,” Charles says, hands it over.
“Are we going outside later?” She sounds hopeful.
“I have homework to do, and so do you, dear,” Charles reprimands, gently. Raven isn’t really good at keeping track of her school work. She’s never had to before.
“I did my maths last night. It’s stupid.”
“No, it’s not. It’s important.”
“You sound like an old fart.”
“And you sound like a child.”
She grins, points a finger at him. “I am a child!”
“That doesn’t mean you have to act like one all the time!”
“Does too!”
“Does not!”
“Does too!” Charles, who has never before had anyone to have silly fights with, actually enjoys this. So does Raven, her mind awash in mirth.
“Does not!”
“Children!” They both jump suddenly, at Cook’s sharp reprimand. She gives them stern looks from where she’s standing at the stove, making breakfast for Mother. “Speak out loud,” she orders.
She, as well as the butler, have been in this house for longer than Charles has been alive. They know about his ability, even if the rest of the staff doesn’t and refuses to learn. Sometimes Charles thinks he might be keeping them from learning, without meaning to, but he’s not sure. Still, the butler ignores what Charles can do, but Cook has never seemed fazed by it.
Until today. A slight dip into her mind reveals worry, a bit of fear and a lot of apprehension. Charles slips a bit deeper, finds the last few minutes in her mind.
She’s been watching him and Raven gesture and laugh and frown, but they haven’t said a single word, the whole time. Their conversation has been completely silent and they didn’t even notice.
“Oh,” Raven says across the table and Charles realizes she’s seen what he’s seen. He’s shown her, even as he dug through Cook’s mind, what he was finding. Even now, their minds are still tangled.
It’s almost like -
Charles rips himself away, pulling out of Raven’s mind hard enough to shove him backwards in the real world. He almost falls out of his chair, stumbles to his feet and, ignoring the worried calls of Raven and Cook, he runs.
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Sorrow found me when I was young
Sorrow waited, sorrow won
Sorrow, they put me on a pill
It’s in my honey, it’s in my milk
The National, Sorrow
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7
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Please, he thinks, please no, not Raven. Not her!
She’s banging against his door, calling for him to let him in, nudging him with her mind, but Charles can’t let her in. He can’t.
Not Raven!
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a
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Maggie is little Charles’s nanny from the moment he is born. Mrs. Xavier is too weak to take care of him after the birth and seems to develop no interest as her strength returns to her.
So it’s Maggie all the way. Maggie who bathes him and changes him and feeds him and sings him to sleep and holds him when he cries. Not that he does, sweet, silent, little boy.
She’s had half a dozen other children to take care of in her career, but never one so young, and never so completely. Sometimes it’s like no-one wants that boy at all. Mrs. Xavier has no interest and Mr. Xavier is always too busy. Cook is the most regular visitor in the nursery, after Maggie.
And then, when Charles is about four months old, things get strange. Maggie starts to feel a warmth, like feather down, whenever she is with the baby. Warmth and comfort and contentment. She attributes it to getting attached to the baby, at first, but it grows stronger and she notices, after a while, that it fades when Charles is hungry or tired or needs something else.
She knows what he needs, without checking, without thinking. He fusses his little fists at her and she knows he is hungry, even though she’s recently fed him. He fusses at her the exact same way and she knows he needs to be changed. She just knows.
And he has no expressions. He makes no sounds, pulls no faces, doesn’t scream. Utterly silent. And yet she finds herself in his nursery time and again in the middle of the night, swearing up and down he cried for her.
When he is eight months old she goes to visit her mother on her weekend off and feels cold and alone and desperate the whole time. The feeling fades as soon as she holds Charles in her arms again.
That’s when she really figures it out.
She doesn’t tell anyone, except Cook, because the older woman is a friend. That, and she has her own suspicions about the boy, even earlier than Maggie. She believes Maggie when she says, “I think he cries inside my head.”
It scares her for a while. It isn’t normal. But he is a baby, in the end, helpless and fragile and, she figures, everything he does is normal for a child his age, except for the way he does it. He doesn’t smile to show affection, he makes her feel warm. He doesn’t cry, he just nudges her mind, letting her know what he wants. He doesn’t scream, he just summons her to his bedside.
He is a boy. A tiny, silent, special, little boy.
It’s okay.
And with enough patience, with enough care, she teaches him to speak out loud, to behave normally. To hide, because she knows the world won’t accept him.
When he is four, he finally speaks normally most of the time and Maggie, who is tired of putting off her wedding to John again and again, decides that it is time for her to go.
Charles doesn’t need her anymore, and it’s not like she’ll leave forever. She’ll visit him, and after the honeymoon, she’ll make sure to show his new nanny everything she needs to know. She’ll make sure the other woman sees how special Charles is, and what he needs, how to help him, protect him.
Later.
For now, she’s newlywed and on her way to Florida for her honeymoon and John is beaming next to her in the car, so happy. Charles’s warmth is slowly fading as the miles stretch between them, but she’s happy and she knows he’ll be alright. Children his age forget quickly.
They’re just past Bethlehem when Charles’s warmth at the back of her mind is abruptly gone and a headache like an ice pick stabs through her skull.
It hurts, it hurts, oh god, she’s screaming, she can hear John screaming, he’s touching her, calling her name, but it hurts so much, she can’t see, everything is red, and it hurts so much, oh god, oh god, oh -
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8
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Charles won’t let Raven end like Ms. Maggie did. He won’t.
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9
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They need to talk.
Charles has been avoiding this conversation for weeks, ever since Cook and the kitchen and the breakfast where he slid so deeply into Raven’s mind that neither of them could tell inside from outside anymore. He has imagined a dozen versions and permutations with increasingly horrifying outcomes. There is one where Raven runs away again, one where she hates him, one where she stays but forbids him from ever entering her mind again. There is one where he slips up and she dies.
That one, he thinks, might be the worst.
He hopes she won’t run, hopes she’ll just tell him to stay away. He’ll hate it, every second of it, and it’ll hurt, but she’ll be alive. Safe.
But the idea of never being allowed into her mind again, of never being close to her again… Raven’s mind is so very special. She can’t hold her shapes very long, but they are an inherent part of her and reflected in her mindscape. Everything inside her head changes. A chair becomes a desk becomes a bottle of water becomes a bird and flies away and words become scribbles become worms become earth. Everything is constantly shifting, changing, moving. Evolving.
It should be nauseating, but to Charles it is nothing but wonder.
He’s missed that, those past few weeks, ever since the kitchen. With that thought, unbidden, a tendril of power escapes him, sneaks through long, empty hallways to find Raven playing alone in her room. It reaches her moments before Charles himself does, slips into her mind, clicks into place.
It’s been weeks since he felt her like this and the rapid brightloudsweetsoftlove-changechangechange of her mind feels a bit like coming home.
Joy floods him, followed closely by guilt and he jerks back, pulls into himself, removing all traces of himself from her mind. He has to. To keep her safe.
Raven, who felt him coiling in the back of her mind, snaps her head around to stare at the door before he ever opens it. Her expression, when he enters silently, is sullen and angry.
“Raven,” Charles says, “we need to talk.”
She lets go of her doll, drops it carelessly to the floor and lets her skin ripple. Emotion makes her lose control and she’s blue and angry before him. “Have you decided you’re talking to me again?”
Snooty, prideful, she already sounds like a true Xavier. Charles is both pleased and repulsed. Sweet Raven, so angry. It’s his own fault, though, and he knows it. He’s about to make it worse. When he tells her what he almost did to her…
He shuffles his feet around as he closes the door, tucks his hands into his pockets and studies the ground. “I’m sorry,” he tells her, his sister, his best friend, his confidante. He’s so terribly scared and he feels alone again, the way he did before that night when they met and had hot chocolate and talked until dawn. “I would like to explain myself, if you’ll let me.”
She glares for another moment but he can feel her softening. She sighs, finally, tucks a strand of bright red behind her ear and ripples back into her other skin, soft and pink, then back again to blue. So beautiful and far too forgiving. “Well,” she says, trying to sound sharp and not quite hitting the mark. “I’m waiting.”
Against his will, Charles chuckles.
He sits down on the plush carpet she uses to play on, folds his legs and puts his hands on his knees. Raven mirrors him, trying to keep the angry look on her face. But there is excitement leaking through already, and joy. She’s so happy he isn’t abandoning her that he feels like the world’s worst person.
But he has to protect her.
He takes a deep breath and starts, “You know that I’m a telepath.”
The look she gives him is more scathing than any girl her age should be capable of.
He bites his lip and then just forces it all out in a rush, because she has to know. She has to understand how dangerous he is. “I… I’ve found that… when I spend a lot of time inside someone’s head, and I mean a lot of time, I form a sort of link with them. It happened once when I was a baby, with my nanny. She left when I was four and I found out later that she died of an aneurism. I spent a lot of time in her mind and eventually, it was no effort at all anymore. It was like part of me was always with her. I could find her anywhere with only a thought, even when she was in town. And when I wanted to, I could influence her mind a bit. She always knew when I was hungry, or tired, or wanted something. She always knew where I was or what I needed. She married and left when I was four and…”
He clutches at his own hands, stares at them. He shouldn’t be here. Raven is too young, she cannot possibly… But she does. Because he’s been inside her head and he knows how she lived before she came here, how she hid and ran and hungered and she understands far too much. More than him, sheltered little boy. He’s lived a thousand years in others’ heads, but not a day out in the real world.
She crawls over to him and into his lap, pushing his arms apart and away, snuggling herself into the hollow created by his folded legs. She rests her head on his shoulder and pulls his hands into her lap and she smells of starch and something wild and utterly unknown. She smells… blue. Charles inhales deeply and fights the urge to slip into her mind, to borrow some of the warmth he knows he’d find there.
“I was too young to understand when it happened, but eventually, when I learned to access my own memories, I figured it out. I had a link with Ms. Maggie. My mind…moulded itself to hers. When she left… she went too far and the link broke and… she died. I killed her, Raven.”
She gasps, small and horrified, but there is no fear in her, only sorrow. She’s so very strong, so very brilliant. Charles goes on. “The reason I have been staying away from you is that I can feel myself forming a link, a bond, to you, like I did with her, and if I do, you’ll die.”
Something hot trails down his cheek and he realizes he’s crying. He feels so ashamed. He loves his gift, loves his abilities, but he hates them, too. It’s always so loud and he can’t ever be close to anyone, can’t ever love anyone because he’ll kill them when they leave and he’s only twelve. He’s too young, even if he feels a thousand years old.
He’s glad, so very glad, that Mother doesn’t care much for him because if she did, he would have killed her years ago when she went on one of her trips and he doesn’t want to… Charles wants to protect. To nurture and preserve and love and hold. He doesn’t want to be a killer but his power is so terrible, so strong and he can’t contain it, can’t hold it down, he’s only twelve, only twelve…He killed his nanny when he was only four and he didn’t even mean to. There was a piece of him inside of her and it killed her, poisoned her, like the mirror shards in the fairy tale she read him once.
“Only if I leave, right?”
Raven has her hands on his cheeks, holding his face, looking him straight in the eye. Her eyes are so beautiful, yellow and bright. He dips into her mind to understand the question he only half heard, finds, It will only kill me if I leave, right?
He nods.
“And you’ll be… you’ll be with me? Always?”
“Raven, you don’t understand! I’ll kill you! Ms. Maggie….”
Her expression falls, eyes going wide and scared again, the way they were in the kitchen, before she realized Charles would never hurt her. But he is. Hurting her. And he’s twelve and that’s too young, he knows that, but she’s even younger, nine looking seven, and he will hurt her. But then she says, “You’re going to leave me?” and he can’t move.
“No,” he says, too loud, in her head and out, making her wince, “No, Raven, you’re my sister now, I would never leave you. But you’re going to grow up and find someone and you’ll leave me. You cannot possibly want me inside your mind forever. You’d never be free of me. Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t, because I’d kill you if you left.”
He sounds like an old man again, he knows. He always does, when he’s unsure. He borrows words and phrases from the minds of the people around him, from smart men, wise men, men who are respected and known and he tries to hide behind them. Tries to hide the fact that he’s only twelve and so scared. He thought he didn’t have to be anymore, now that there’s another one like him, but he was wrong. He has to be twice as scared now.
She presses herself against him, impossibly small but so heavy. She’s the weight of their futures, curling into his lap, shoving herself against his chest like she can crawl inside, if only she tries hard enough, blue like water, blue like the ocean, crashing down on him, pulling him into its depths like treasures lost.
“I’ll never leave you and you’ll never leave me. Brother and sister, you said, Charles, you said! We’re never going to be alone again. You promised me and I don’t want to be alone again, please, I don’t want to!”
“Raven, I can’t possibly…”
She shakes her head so hard that her hair hits him in the face, small stings. “You have to!” she yells, sounding choked. “You have to! And if I ever want to leave… you can change my mind. Like you did with Cook and your mother. If I ever want to leave, you can just change my mind and make it so I don’t want anymore and we’ll be together. We’ll be together, Charles, you have to!”
She doesn’t… she wants him to… how could he…?
Charles stops thinking. He shouldn’t, he knows. Someone has to be the adult here, to think logically of the consequences. But he’s only twelve and he’s scared. Scared and alone and too powerful. And Raven is alone, too, and different from anyone else. Before Charles, nobody ever loved her.
Before Raven, nobody ever loved Charles. He thought Ms. Maggie did, and she was certainly fond of him, but he wasn’t her child. He was the strange, sickly boy she was charged with. She left him. She didn’t love him.
Not like Raven does. Not like he loves her.
There’s only them, her and him, against the rest of the world. Together. He promised her that, in the kitchen. And she doesn’t hate him, doesn’t run away. She doesn’t lock him out, doesn’t doom him to watch from the outside for the rest of his life. She loves him. She lets him in. He’ll never change her mind because he won’t have to because it’s him and her, Charles and Raven now, and that will never change.
He wraps his arms around her, squeezes her too tightly, buries his face in her neck and lets his power seep through their skins, from his body into hers. He lays himself over her mind like a blanket, finds a spot that’s soft and dark and empty and curls up there, grows roots like a tree.
It takes no effort. His mind has been reaching out, trying to do this for weeks, knowing what he didn’t know yet. Charles and Raven. RavenandCharles. He lets it happen now, and Raven makes an awed little sound, like wonder, and smiles so widely he can feel it against the skin of his cheek, along with her tears and her snot and her warmth. She loves him.
The tree grows, its roots strong, its crown powerful and beautiful and there are blossoms, yellow like her eyes and sunshine and treasure and Charles slowly withdraws his conscious mind, leaving behind that tree and a part of himself within its bark.
A part of his soul.
“I’ll never leave you,” he says, and he knows that it is true because he can’t.
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There is another world, one where he doesn’t find the right words. One where Raven is more scared of belonging to someone so utterly than of being alone. One where something is different.
In that world, Raven tells him no, tells him he has to stay out, and he spends the next twenty years hovering at the edge of her mind, like a dog scratching at the door, begging to be let in and he can feel the pull of her tide against his skin and soul and is never permitted to give in. She never allows him entrance and he can never hate her for it even though it’s killing him and then, on a beach in Cuba, she kneels over him and wishes, fiercely, that he would read her mind.
But he can’t. The doors have rusted shut, the locks have corroded into solid steel clumps and there is no getting through anymore.
He stays outside, forever lost, and she remains inside, free but alone. She leaves him there, taking with her the only other person Charles could have ever loved and their paths only ever cross again when there is fighting to be done.
They regret it, both, until their dying day, but it cannot be undone.
Sometimes children do stupid things.
Sometimes not doing them is even worse.
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Continued in Part I - 2
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