Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Mystique doesn't enjoy Vietnam. It's sweltering, and she's already wearing as little as she can possibly get away with wearing. She was not bred for tropics, she realized soon after she first came here. She handles them, but she wasn't bred to endure it for long. Her skin is too thick, too ready to endure snow and blizzards to bother with the tropical sun. She can barely breathe.

On the bright side, she doesn't have to worry about sunburn.

"Hey, Cruz – look alive."

"Sorry, Sarge," Mystique says, imitating the Texan drawl as best she can, which isn't easy. She picks up her rifle and throws it over her shoulder. Private Tommy Cruz she is now, hailing from Eden, Texas. Faking a draft letter is surprisingly easy; she's served and been killed three times already. Faking wounds is pretty goddamn easy, too, it turns out, and so is faking a mad charge into the napalm, which has so far been her most reliable means of getting rid of an alias.

The sergeant nods at her. "You take point, I don't wanna hear Charlie so much as let a breath out."

"Yessir," she says, rolling her eyes once her back is turned.

According to the maps they're one mile away from the hidden base. Shooting is ill-advised at this point, seeing as they passed what Mystique is sure was a perimeter fence, but then Sarge is ten years younger than she and has about ten percent of her experience. She should be leading the squad, except it's so much easier to die and disappear as a private.

Still, the others have cottoned on to her quiet competence, so when she raises an open palm and lets it fall the squad hits the ground, and not soon enough. Someone is coming through the bushes, someone loud enough to not be an enemy patrol, someone whose hands are on fire, someone—

—like me, Mystique realizes. It's a boy, a young man, in khaki cargo pants and a white T-shirt. His feet are bare and the t-shirt is transparent with sweat, so that even if it was possible to overlook the fact that his hands are burning without causing him pain, the inhuman orange of his eyes would give him away. These eyes would stand out on any face, but when they are framed by pitch-black hair, the effect takes Mystique's breath away.

But there's no time to think, no time to act, because a gun barks and the boy falls over with a bullet hole between his orange eyes, dead before he even sees them.

"The fuck is wrong with you, Cruz?"

"Sorry, Sarge," she says, head down. She's not praying, not even close… But she needs to be careful now. The boy was a mutant, yet he wasn't running from the base. The gun at his hip, the heavy belt, the cut of his shirt, all of these suggest he is a Viet Cong soldier. So far so obvious. He was moving slowly, but not slowly or carefully enough to conceal the noises he was making: routine perimeter check, perhaps, considering the gun at his side, routine enough to travel alone and without concealment. He thought he was safe here within the perimeter fence.

Her source was right, which may complicate matters. She came here to free the mutants, but it looks like it might not be that simple, or as obvious as it was when she was raiding the US side.

"Get your head together, or stay back." The sergeant cracks the radio open, barks out a series of code words that indicate their position and falls silent. "Radio silence from now on," he says. "We stay down, observe only."

Yeah, fat load of good that will do when they come looking for the kid Sarge just shot. Mystique grits her-not-her teeth and soldiers on. Sarge will get his. Oh yeah. Her heel is itching to dig into his trachea, but as soon as it starts a quiet, annoying voice pipes up in the back of her mind to scratch the itch, to remind her that it wasn't his fault, that he saw a Charlie in the middle of a jungle, that it was reflex, that if it he didn't shoot, Mystique would have been forced to disable the boy. Goddamn it, Mystique scowls at the voice of reason. Shut up already, I get it: it's war. It's no one's fault.

Well, Sarge's still a bit of an asshole and Mystique doesn't like him, so there.

They move slowly and they move silently after that. Mystique kinda wishes she'd stuffed her uniform and boots into her backpack when no one was looking, because the helmet Tommy Cruz was given is bad enough, but the sweltering uniform is a pain in the ass. She likes being naked, even if she's pretending she's wearing clothes. It allows her to move like a snake through the tall grass, and the humans are usually none the wiser. On the other hand, the backpack has a limited capacity, and no place to stow the boots, so it's not like she'd be able to avoid clothes altogether. Plus the bugs and the slime and mud in uncomfortable places… yeah, jungle is not a good place for nudity.

Mystique wipes her brow and regulates her breathing. They should be close now. According to all the maps the jungle should be untrodden, which it obviously isn't, but what exactly is being secreted all the way out here is uncertain. She knows for sure that the Viet Cong is avoiding this place as well, she'd gleaned that much in the course of her routine going through the Colonel's notes. There's something in here, that's for damn sure, something that has to do with mutants, and Mystique is going to find out what.

They gain visual half a mile later. The building is a disappointment: barely a shack, a small structure, propped by the jungle on one end, with a vast field that had once been a jungle on the other. Even at the distance Mystique can see a reinforced obstacle course and a surprisingly low fence. Sure, they are inside a larger enclosure, but still, the enemy troops are only thirty miles away, as far as they know, anyway. Does no one care?

"Looks like a training facility, Tommy-boy," Dick says, crawling over to her side.

Mystique acknowledges him with a nod and keeps looking. There's someone on the field, running through what must be some kind of tire track, except he is running all wrong, unless the obstacles are hidden trampolines.

"Holy shit." Dick wiggles in excitement and produces a tiny pair of binoculars out of his pocket. It's the third pair Mystique's spotted on him that isn't military-issue. She'd be suspicious, except Dick also happens to doodle by the firelight and the doodles are mostly of exotic birds he's pointed out along the way. "Hey, it's a bird!" he says, shocked. "Look at her go, damn!"

Even without binoculars Mystique can see the girl run at a wall at a moderate pace and take a flying leap over it, clear it easily while flipping vertically, land on both feet and continue running without breaking her stride. A mutant, then. Her source was right. Yet the perimeter wall doesn't look too tall, certainly not to someone who can leap over fifteen feet without visible effort. There are no guards, which is… not that surprising, considering how deep in enemy territory they are.

Speaking of, they better haul ass and make for camp, pronto. She looks at the sergeant and sees the understanding dawn, and he signals a retreat. They caused enough damage for the day; someone will find the kid with the fiery eyes, and when they do they'll know he died of an American bullet. Mystique reaches down and closes his eyes as they go past the body. Hopefully it will take a few hours before he's found. It's late afternoon already; surely they won't be searching the jungle at night.

Back at their camp she waits patiently for the night to fall. She's sharing a tent with Dick, which makes sneaking out at night a breeze, as Dick wakes with the sun, but drops like a log if it's dark. She leaves everything behind; chances are he won't even know she was gone, and if she doesn't come back, well. The army loses more than a few kids to madness in the jungle. "Good luck," she whispers at her sleeping tent-mate, just in case. He may be a human, but Dick is a better person than he is an ornithologist, and his knowledge in the field is considerable.

She gets out of the tent brandishing several tissues, and pretends to sneak past the guard with a guilty expression. Mel snickers at her but looks away, and in seconds Mystique is out of the encampment.

She stops being Tommy the minute she's out of the range of the firelight. The navy blue of her skin melts into the night, but even that doesn't matter. Three minutes after she cleared out of the tent she is vaulting into a tree and taking a leap to another. A mile later she drops to the ground, rolls, comes back onto her feet and jogs. The jungle is dark and scary, but for a while now Mystique has accepted this truth about herself: whatever the darkness surrounding her, she can match it.

She makes it to the training facility in just over an hour. The body of the mutant Sarge shot is still mostly there, serving as a smorgasbord at a fancy jungle party. Mystique averts her eyes as she walks past. There's no time to bury him, even though she probably should. It's an impulse easily squashed. She's seen a lot of people die, and she's buried none of them, so she presses on, but not before she collects his gun.

This time there are guards posted at the door, but they turn out not to be a problem.

"Vãn," the guard says, nodding at her. "You found what you were looking for?"

"Yes," she says curtly. Before she steps into the light she makes Vãn's jaw turn blue on the side. Vietnamese inflection is hard, and she has no idea where Vãn is from. "Thanks."

"Everything okay?"

Mystique turns her head, exposes the bruise. "Tree branch."

The guard snorts. "Better hurry, they want everyone in the barracks tonight."

"Oh?"

"The Soviets brought your commander." He doesn't look happy about it and Mystique feels her heart crank up a few knobs and get ready for a marathon. Soviets? Brought a commander into a Vietnamese training facility? That sounds ominous. She hurries past the gate and into the building. It's small enough that she doesn't need to pretend to be disoriented; she makes straight for the sleeping quarters and finds them full of mutants.

Well, full might be a bit of an overstatement: there are about ten, herself included, and a few look human, but it seems a safe bet that all have powers. There are ten beds, and all but one have a young soldier sitting on it. Mystique claims the last and sits down, shaking her head in response to a question and pointing to the side of the face she's wearing.

"You should bathe," the woman on her left tells her. "They're showing us off tonight. We're to be in full uniform." She seems uneasy, but excited, which is a mood shared by most. "Not gala ready, but presentable, you know."

The way she says it doesn't sound ominous at all, so it's understandable that it takes a moment before Mystique realizes the girl is speaking Russian and, by the looks of her, is in fact Russian – her skin is pale and her eyes are blue. Her hair is… nonexistent, as her scalp is covered with soft spikes that gleam green in the half-light. Suddenly a Soviet commander doesn't seem strange at all. Mystique takes a good hard look at the other mutants, and yeah, this isn't an isolated incident. Seven out of the ten present are Asian, but to Mystique's inexpert eye at least two don't seem to be Vietnamese at all, and she has doubts about two more. The other three are white, and when they speak they speak Russian.

The hell is this place, Mystique wonders.

"Vãn?"

"Yeah, sorry." Mystique stretches, grabs a towel and soap, both of which are arranged neatly on the pillow of Vãn's bed, and leaves the sleeping quarters. Finding a washroom is slightly more problematic, as it doesn't seem to be inside the building, which is more of a glorified hut, really. Except for the light shining between the floorboards. Mystique tucks the soap and the towel out of sight and follows her instinct, which leads her to a hole in the ground from which a ladder is protruding. It looks like the hole is normally hidden by more floorboards, and Mystique can hear voices mumbling something in Russian and Vietnamese, neither of which she can understand given the distance and obstacles in the way.

She slides down the ladder and puts her ear to the door, but before she can make out more than a whisper a gun barks and a beam of light from a fresh bullet hole next to her face blinds her. The door falls open and she is grabbed by two pairs of arms. Relax, she tells herself, hands loose and open. They have no reason to hurt you, the door was barely guarded at all, they can't fault you for looking in, not with the total lack of security.

"Ah, this is one of yours," says a shadow by what looks like a dentist chair. He's Vietnamese, but he's speaking in heavily accented Russian. "Bui Vãn. His talent is fire." Mystique blinks, and, as her eyes adjust to the white light, she sees several things at once: first, the man who spoke is holding himself stiff as a board, and the table bearing all manners of tools is strategically positioned between him and the chair. Second, the room is bigger than she thought, and opens into a tunnel. Third, there is another man in the chair, one who stands up and instantly commands the attention of every person present. Fourth, there is a gun in his hand, a gun that's rising in the direction of Mystique's forehead, as the man opens his mouth.

"No, she is not," he says, and Mystique drops all disguises when the gun fires, kicks the man on her right while twisting so that the one on her left is between her and another bullet.

She's been hit, she realizes belatedly. Only a graze, but still, he was quick enough to change the shot while she moved, and the gun was once again staring her in the face—

Fifth: the man is Charles.

Except as far as Mystique remembers she has never seen Charles aim a gun at a person, not the way he was doing to her right now, not with such an obvious intent to fire, not with his finger firm on the trigger. He is hesitating, she realizes, the fraction of a second she is given is his hesitation, and that is all she is going to get: she pushes, hard, leaps for the door and scales the ladder in under a second. She is Vãn again when she tumbles into the sleeping quarters, and it's like she sets off a powder keg: everyone is on their feet, Russian girl reaches for her, but Mystique doesn't even see her. The footsteps follow, but before any bullet can be shot Mystique feels an ice-cold wave of confusion and pain, then a ghostly shudder and a distant scream – Charles' – and then she is out the window, running exposed through the open field. She doesn't dare look back, not even for a second, not when she hears a harsh voice ordering the recruits to stand down. She pushes through the pain and confusion, and throws herself past the first line of trees, even as another bullet flies close enough to shave the hair off her neck.

The sound carries, but through the pounding of her heart and the rush of wind in her ears she hears only hints of sound, syllables that transfer meaning long after it could be of any use. Good thing she doesn't hear anything useful, anyway: "restrain", "chase", "switch off".

She needs to get out.

The wounds are not serious, barely grazes. She sucks it up and runs, runs like hell, keeping up the sprint until her legs threaten to give out and jogging afterwards. The campsite is silent; no one's noticed Tommy is missing yet. Mystique knocks a guard unconscious and steals a jeep. No one follows her, but she hears the first explosion before she is out of range.

Forty-seven hours later she is in California, and at long last she breathes out freely.

Well, in a manner of speaking.

Did Charles have a twin that she never knew about? Doubtful. She would have known.

It takes her almost a week to cross the country, a lot of which is spent leaving traces of her presence in Nevada, Montana and Maine, until at last she arrives at the JFK airport. She pays cash for a rental car and drives out to Salem. The gate to the mansion is closed, but not locked; barely a barrier. She drives on, turns into a rural road nearby, parks the car and proceeds on foot, not bothering with keeping a disguise up.

The choice to walk proves to be a mixed blessing. On one hand, she avoids getting her face studded with shards of glass from the windshield, on the other, she lands naked in a rose bed, which fucking hurts.

"Stop trying to set me on fire!" she yells, holding her hands up. The dry stalks still have flames clinging to their edges. Alex is standing several yards away, fists clenched. She hasn't changed much since she saw him last, even though the set, closed expression on his face is new.

"The fuck are you doing here?" he asks, scowling.

"I'm here to see Charles," she says defiantly, and is rewarded with an incredulous stare first and a red-hot plasma beam to the face second, which she avoids by rolling back into the roses.

"I just want to talk!" she says, springing to her feet.

"It's a little late for apologies."

"I'm not here to apologize."

"Wouldn't accept an apology, anyway. Get bent, Raven."

Now's her time to scowl. "That's not my name."

"Get bent, blue bitch," Alex says and walks away.

"Hey!" she yells, and immediately has to dodge another shot of plasma. He's better than the kid who took heads off of statues, she reflects, and he's not wearing the vest, but the shot still does considerable, likely unplanned, damage to the rosebushes.

Alex turns slowly and regards her as he would a persistent rat. "Let me be clear. Whatever your play is, we want none of it. You're putting us in danger just by being here. You are not wanted. Leave before I fucking drag you out in pieces."

"I just want to see Charles," she says, stubbornly.

"Charles died in Cuba," Alex says as he walks away, a parting shot over his shoulder. "You're only a decade late to the funeral."

Mystique tells herself the words mean nothing, because how can they mean anything, when she saw Charles just a week earlier, but her heart expels all the blood at once and she doubles over, cold and numb.

By the time she gets a hold on herself Alex is long gone and the shadows remind her that she's exposed and in the open. She walks back to her rental and pulls onto the road, fabricating a dress and a sweater out of her skin, as a buffer against the faux leather seats. Her mind is spinning faster than the wheels. Charles died in Cuba, Alex said, and there was no lie to it that she could detect. The anger was fresh, but the grief was not.

Charles died in Cuba.

A part of her needs to go back and demand explanations, reason, hurl accusations, because how could that have happened, how could you have let that happen, but the part of her that keeps her alive these days is quiet, is certain. She sticks an elbow out the window and lets it go blue. Not like anyone would notice.

Whatever was going on in Vietnam – and a possible explanation already forms in her mind – it wasn't meant to be seen. She saw it, and worse, she was seen seeing it.

Charles died in Cuba.

The thought won't leave her, nonetheless, so thirteen miles later she pulls into an empty parking lot and screams, screams until her lungs burn, until her tongue dries, until her skin crawls off her bones, leaving her exposed for all the world to see.

How had she not known this?

How did he die? she asks herself stubbornly, when he was—

Mystique is good at lying these days, but she's not that good.

Another car comes into the lot, and she puts her own in gear, steps on the gas pedal with her naked foot and drives away, her head and soul drained of thought and feeling.

She drives aimlessly at first, until the emptiness no longer resists being filled by what she tried to chase away. Regardless of what supposedly happened in Cuba, the man in Vietnam was Charles. She knew this much then, and she knows that now. There is no room for a mistake. She has a gift for faces, Mystique does, and that was Charles' face. The hair was longer, messier, the shave not as close or smooth as he liked it to be, but the shape was exact, the eyes were just as blue, their freckled frame perfect. If he wasn't Charles, then he must have been another Mystique, but she doubted that. Her imitations were flawless in every way, but she could still pick a facsimile out of a line-up, could always tell, in pictures, whether it was the original or herself.

To be fair, she's never met another shapeshifter, so the trick is more that she remembers where any given photo was taken, if it was her, but there were a few photos she could say without a doubt had her in it, even though she wasn't sure when and where they were taken, or by whom. They tested that ability of hers, she and Charles, one summer in Tuscany. He'd stalk her with a camera, her and her chosen subject both, throughout the day, and they'd compare later. She was never wrong. Not once.

Plus, she remembers something else: the confusion and the pain, not of a wound but something more like menstrual cramps, the kind that start in the center of the body and radiate outward, paralyzing her limbs along the way. She wasn't due one of those for another two weeks at that point, so it is safe to assume the pain came from somewhere else.

Mystique returns the car with zero trouble, and disappears into the bustling city. For people like her safety is in a crowd. Speaking of crowds: she ducks out of the path of a group of buzzed teens and into a kiosk that sells hotdogs and buys three. She needs backup on this one, she thinks a short while later, perching on a subway railing and guzzling the food down. The trouble with backup is, she doesn't really have anyone lined up. She's been on her own for almost nine years now, and while she's had some close calls, she never needed help. Not for herself, anyway. Better to be alone than see friends, brothers, lovers go down, she always reasoned.

She has to find Charles, nonetheless, and there is only one person she can turn to now, never mind that the person on top of her list is also on its bottom.

Mystique visits a post office, counts the money in one of her safe deposit boxes, exchanges passports and faces, and buys a plane ticket to Washington, DC.

Chapter Text

Time is of the essence. All her extractions in Vietnam afforded her the luxury of lying low and observing, which, nine times out of ten, allowed her to get in and get her marks onto planes unchallenged.

The prison is different. It is going to be different. Hopefully not much harder.

She joins a tour group and splits early on, flits through several security points as the man with a mop and is out of the building in an hour, which is still enough to confirm what she found out the first time she visited.

Magneto is a hundred yards underground, in a concrete cell, with security measures she's only half-conscious of. Getting in there is going to be next to impossible. Getting out is going to be worse.

On the bright side, since there's no way in hell this is going to remain a secret, being covert with getting in or out is not essential. Sure, every scale on her body might be standing up to attention, but the ball is rolling and if Mystique has learned anything about how Soviets operate – and her Russian is much better than her Vietnamese – there are kill squads carving her name onto bullets while she finishes her popsicle on Pentagon's front lawn.

She goes in the same evening, pockets of a fabricated wool jacket full of iron scraps. The guards managing Magneto's cell have a routine, the basics of which haven't changed since he was first incarcerated. It's a question of timing. Mystique slips in as a middle-aged woman she'd seen leaving a while back, and whose badge she swiped along with her face, wearing an apologetic expression as she explains to the guards that she left her medicine in her drawer, silly her. They wave her in with indulgent smiles. She drifts out of the hallway and when she emerges into the level below she is a floor cleaner – humans pay little attention to cleaners, so it's a form she's most familiar with these days. Learning to wield a mop took a while, but nowadays she could go toe to toe with anyone.

She greets the administrative staff, who pays her no mind at all, and gets onto the roof of the elevator that is the sole point of contact between Magneto's cell and the upper levels. No one else uses it. She waits, patiently, until the guard with the food tray emerges from the kitchen, and the door slides closed behind him. She's ready; she drops from the ceiling onto his back, silent as a cat. It takes barely a nudge to bring him to his knees and get her elbow around his neck to knock him out. A roll of tape ensures he takes least possible space and can't scream, and just in time: Mystique straightens and adjusts his cap on her head as the door of the elevator slide open again and a narrow, empty corridor opens up before her.

The guard standing at its mouth nods at her and she offers a listless smile in return. She waits at the other end, and at last the thick, concrete wall slides open, just enough to admit her inside, into a grey room, lit from below. There's a hexagonal skylight in the floor, containing a white space in which Magneto is resting. Mystique drops the tray of food in the chute in the floor and waits for it to hit, waits for the presence of iron scraps to register.

Magneto blinks at the food and then at the glass above, and she looks back, scales rising and falling like the sea in a storm.

She takes a step back when the iron balls pierce the glass and alarms echo throughout. Magneto pulls himself onto her level without visible effort, coming to stand with the iron orbiting his side.

"Do not kill them, if you can," she says, and waits for the concrete slab to open. The guards all carry plastic guns, but she has Magneto armed with iron; it's not even remotely a fair fight. They go down in a matter of seconds, and there seem to be no immediate casualties, which makes her feel marginally better about what she's doing.

Magneto is… complicated, she thinks. It's better if he's not around, but she needs him for this.

The alarms are still blazing when they emerge into the kitchen, along with the water sprinklers, but Mystique has come prepared; there is a suit and a pass waiting in a nearby bathroom, behind a hastily removed ceiling board. Even at the height of an emergency she and Magneto walk out of the Pentagon unchallenged, and fifteen minutes later they board a bus that takes them by where Mystique's rented Chevy is parked.

"Took you long enough," he says at last, when the lights of Washington are behind them, wearing a mocking smirk. He's stretched in the shotgun seat, head propped on his knuckles, watching the road before them.

"I didn't come for you," is her reply, and it is cold, nearly a hiss.

"If I had a roommate, he was the most silent, least obtrusive person in existence."

"Charles is alive," she says before he can utter one more word.

Magneto raises a brow. "This is the news you broke me out of jail for?" he asks, and his lips twists, and for anyone else, anyone at all, it would be all. Mystique, however, sees a touch of Erik behind the mask, and it's a sight she wishes she never had to see again. "What other news do you have to dispense, that's he's sitting in his mansion, doing nothing, as usual?"

"Alex told me Charles died in Cuba," she says, eyes on the road. The asphalt doesn't change, but suddenly the hood of the car begins to undulate under the moonlight, crackling the paint on it into flakes. "Leave the car alone," she snaps. "Alex told me he died, but I saw Charles alive."

"Problem solved, then," he manages through clenched teeth, but the metal settles.

"Not at all." She presses on the accelerator, overtakes a couple of SUVs and returns to her lane, just in time to pass a New York 250 miles sign. "There's food on the backseat, in the bag. Eat now, because I doubt we'll be invited for breakfast."

This comes out slightly more dramatic than the future that follows. Mystique is a fast driver, so even with the detour (it pays to stay off the main roads), a short nap she sorely needs, and a very early breakfast, they make it to Westchester County seven hours after they walk out of the Pentagon. This time Mystique stays in the car and drives through the gate that opens at the flick of Magneto's fingers. It's still early enough that no one should be up, but the moment they turn into the round driveway immediately in front of the door the welcoming committee shows up, brimming with unreleased plasma.

"Good morning," Mystique says pleasantly, as she gets out of the car. Shit, gravel. She's learned to cope with most surfaces, but gravel is not good for her feet.

"Fat chance, now that you're here," Alex drawls, but there's a hand on his shoulder, a surprisingly human hand, considering it's Hank who comes into the light.

"This is a surprise," he says mildly, and his gaze slides down Mystique's naked body and then flicks to Magneto. He's looking for weapons, she realizes belatedly; his gaze settled on her empty hands. It's ridiculous, Magneto has no use for guns, but that's what it is.

"We need to talk," Mystique tells him nonetheless, striving for her most commanding voice, but traces of Raven began to seep in ever since that night in Vietnam, and her words carry far less confidence than she'd have liked them to.

Hank must sense it, because meets her gaze calmly and smiles. It's a tired, worn smile that makes no attempt to pretend it's genuine. "I don't think we have anything to talk about."

"Charles is alive," she says, shaking her head. "I wouldn't have come back if I wasn't absolutely sure."

Alex snorts. "Yeah, well, we wouldn't have left in the first place if we weren't absolutely sure, so, you know, between you and me, I choose to trust me. Offence intended."

"What's going on?" Sean pokes his head out of the mansion's door. Going by the impressive bedhead and half-closed eyes, sleep is still the major, if not only, theme on his mind. "Oh. Are we gonna fight? Because I didn't have no coffee and my throat hurts."

"Didn't have any coffee," Alex says, crossing his arms.

"My throat still hurts."

"Grammar don't care."

"Grammar doesn't care," Sean shoots back triumphantly, a little more awake. "One for me."

"So, yeah, I was thinking, a fight would be good." Alex hops off the step and a flash of red circumnavigates his torso. "Get the fuck off of our property."

"Your property?" Magneto walks around the car to stand at Mystique's side. His arms are folded across his chest, and the faintest twitch of his upper lips tells Mystique he's making an effort not to sneer.

"Not that it's the time and place, but yes, essentially. Charles left a will, of which I'm the executor." Hank hesitates. "It was supposed to be the both of us, actually," he adds, looking at Mystique, "but the lawyers spun your failure to respond to summons as automatically ceding all powers onto me. It's perfectly legal as per the will, and doesn't infringe on your inheritance, it just means you have no say in the foundation."

"I don't care about the money," Mystique says. "I have my trust fund money." The fund was, thankfully, substantial, if managed with care. She cashed and redistributed most of it back in 1963, and if her calculation were right she didn't have to worry about money for another ten-twenty years.

"Then I think we're out of conversation topics." Hank takes the glasses off his nose and rubs at them with the hem of his t-shirt. "I'd appreciate it if you removed Erik from the premises immediately, we can't have a fugitive here."

Magneto smiles pleasantly, inclining his head. "And a good day to you, Beast."

"My name is Hank, thank you." The steady glance Hank levels Magneto's way is decidedly unimpressed. "Dr. McCoy, even."

"Hank," Mystique says forcefully. "Charles is alive. I saw him in Vietnam last week."

"What, your conscience finally caught up?" Alex sneers, but stops when Sean's shaking head gets in his field of vision. "What, you believe her?"

"I dunno what I believe," Sean says, "but I've been to Vietnam. Not a place that gives you a conscience."

Alex gives him an incredulous look. "You can't be fucking serious."

Sean blinks at him. His ginger hair is shorter than Mystique remembers it, and darker. He looks older in a way that Alex and Hank don't, even if he smiles guilelessly when he says, "No, I've really been, remember?"

"Go drink some coffee, Jesus Christ, I can't deal with this," Alex says, but even though he rolls his eyes, he also holds up his hands, palms up. Sean turns to Hank and something more mature crosses his face. Hank leans back to look at Alex, who lets out a breath and nods.

"I take it we can come in?" Magneto asks, with a layer of mildness that just barely conceals the burning anger within.

"I still vote no," Alex mutters, "but I guess it's not a conversation for the porch."

They slip into the house, leaving Magneto and Mystique to follow. The two of them make their way inside slowly, fighting against the pull of memories. That's what's happening to Mystique, anyway. Something about the house really drives it home that it's not Raven's home anymore, and it’s not that she hasn't been here in ten years. She can see the changes when she looks around; the things are more or less the same, but the atmosphere is significantly lighter than she remembers from before 1962. There are people living here now, people who give a damn about what happens to this place the way even Charles never did.

Hank leads them down a familiar corridor and into the kitchen, where Sean starts a pot of coffee and yawns his way through pouring himself a bowl of cereal.

"You said you've seen Charles," Sean prompts when he achieves the feat of filling a dish with milk and cornflakes. "Where?"

"There was a—a training facility," Mystique says, sorting through the relevant memories. "I was investigating with a squad, well, they were investigating suspicious placement of troops, but I heard about odd things happening around the place, so I joined up. There was a training facility run by the Soviets and the Vietcong, and it was full of mutants, and not like those they rounded up on the US side – they were there voluntarily, and they were training, they had an obstacle course and no fences."

"Yeah, I did think they might," Sean says, nodding absently. The spoon moves from the bowl to his mouth automatically, at a steady pace, dip, scoop, slurp, like he's eating to the beating of a drum, and he talks without losing the rhythm, too.

Magneto turns to him and his lips twist into a wry smirk, one that's easy to mistake for a snarl. "You've thought?"

Sean fails to be intimidated, which visibly upsets Magneto. "There'd been a skirmish – I can't prove shit, but I shot and killed a guy I could swear I saw lift a log off his pal with zero effort. Hard to keep track though, eventually all I saw was the wrong uniform and black hair. But I did see a Charlie lift a log, and I'm pretty sure he was a mutant."

"You didn't get detained?" Mystique asks, curiously. Sean isn't visibly mutant, so maybe he just slipped their scrutiny?

"What were they gonna detain me for, that I scream like a girl? Gimme a break." Sean toys with his spoon, staring at the light reflected there. "I know some guys were reassigned 'randomly'. A kid with no hair and weird tattoos, this one fellow with spikes all over. Didn't serve with them personally, but they were pretty obviously mutants."

"The army has been mucking about with mutants in service," Mystique says. "I'm not sure what happens to those that got reassigned stateside."

"You weren't drafted?" Magneto asks both Alex and Hank.

"I was too old for the draft, and Alex is three-A," Hank volunteers, when it's apparent Alex isn't inclined to answer questions. "We didn't think to do worry about Sean."

Sean shrugs at that. "Hey, what didn't kill me gave me nightmares. I got off easy."

"Means they've got dependents," Mystique tells Magneto, who's still frowning at the three-A. she knows, as Dick said something to that effect one night: "Been trying for a kid with my girl, thought I could get a three-A going, she could hardly support herself, but she wasn't pregnant what I got the papers, so here I am."

"You've been busy," Magneto acknowledges.

"It's really none of your business," Hank says, though his eyes flash a vivid yellow as he does, and the skin around his eyes gains a blue tint. He's glaring now, glaring in earnest, and Mystique feels a sharp pang of regret that she didn't get a chance to get to know this man better.

"Daddy," says another voice, small and childish, cutting into the tense atmosphere. As one, every head at the kitchen table turns to look at the three-year-old who stands in the doorway, clutching a Bucky-Bear to his chest. "The scary man says I'm on fire inside," he sobs.

"C'mon, Scotty. So long as you're on fire on the inside, is all good, see?" Alex closes his fist and a tiny bolt of plasma ricochets off the wall and shatters a potted plant. "Oops. But we don’t worry about pots."

"Every goddamned time," Hank mutters, but it's with a smile. He rises to gather the pieces and changes his mind halfway through, leaving them as they are.

"But…" the child begins, until Alex hushes him.

"Back to bed with you, Scotty. It's just a dream, and if you are on fire inside, well, we can deal with that, not gonna be a problem. I'm on fire inside, too. Okay?"

"Okay," Scotty says, and lifts his bear so that Alex will pick them both up.

"Is he Alex's?" Mystique asks, when they are out of the kitchen, the boy snug on Alex's hip, one chubby cheek against the worn flannel covering his shoulder. Hank shrugs in response and Mystique bristles. "You can tell me this much!"

Hank raises an eyebrow. "I'd have thought it was fairly obvious. He didn't get deferred just by saying he's unavailable."

"What about you?" she asks, genuinely curious. "You have someone?"

"Not that it's any of your business, but I'm a legal guardian," he says, and turns to distribute the coffee. Mystique takes her cup and the offered milk with it, spooning sugar into it like she's never going to see sugar again. The coffee is rich and fragrant, the only kind Charles would consent to drink, a treat after the sludge they served in the army.

They sit in silence until Alex returns, his face distinctly unsmiling. "Okay, playtime's done. Give us something concrete, or get bent," he tells Mystique, who grits her teeth.

"I got into the training facility, and downstairs they had this elaborate setup, a chair, some weird machinery, reminded me of Cerebro now that I think of it, and there was Charles, in the middle of it," she says curtly.

Alex and Sean exchange looks. "That's all lovely and nice," Alex says, "but you haven't seen Charles in ten years. How the fuck can you be sure?"

"I don't forget faces."

"Ten years on? People change."

Mystique scowls. "They don't change enough."

"Look," Alex says, leaning forward so that his elbows hit the table. "It's not that I don't believe you, it's that I think you're full of shit. Just spit out what it is you want, so that we can tell you to go to hell all the quicker."

"I'm not some twittering imbecile," Mystique snaps. "When I say I saw Charles in Vietnam last week, I fucking saw Charles in Vietnam last week!"

"Raven," Hank says slowly. "When we say Charles died, we mean we saw him die. After you left, a squad of Cuban soldiers came, and Charles made us run. He must have been doing something to the soldiers, too, but it wasn't enough, because we saw one of them come up and shoot him in the head. There really wasn't any doubt."

"No," Raven says to that. Erik's whole being seems to be vibrating quietly. "I don't believe you."

"Well, if you'd stayed five more minutes, you could have watched." Alex isn't looking at them for once. He's glaring at the table with the widest, most mirthless grin Raven has ever seen.

"You ran?" Erik doesn't so much speak the words as he hisses them, a feat when neither of the two syllables has an s in them.

"Charles made us run," Alex snaps back. "He made us run. We'd have fought, but we were given no choice, he didn't give us a choice, one moment we were all trying to calm him down because he was freaking out about his legs, the next my own fucking legs start fucking moving on their own, and there's shit all I can do about it! So take your hissyfit and shove it up your ass, Magneto, I'm done with you! Whatever you want from us, I'm one hundred percent out."

"Alex," Hank says softly. "Calm down."

"Don't fucking tell me to calm down!"

"You'll break the kitchen and wake the children."

That gets Alex to calm down, though it costs him. His eyes close, his jaw tightens and he swallows a couple of times. "I want them out," he says, and his words burn like he was spitting plasma at them. It takes Raven a moment to realize that's mostly because his body is emitting red sparks and flinging them unconsciously all over. They are small enough not to cause damage, at least no more damage than cigarette ash would, but they are present.

"Alex," Hank continues in the same soothing tone of voice, "If Raven saw him, then maybe he is alive."

Alex's eyes open wide and the shower of sparks becomes a firework show. Still technically harmless, but Raven still takes her elbows off the table. "Are you crazy?" he asks, incredulous.

"We saw him get shot at close range with a small pistol, and that kind of wound is survivable. If you're lucky."

"To the head?"

"There've been cases. I've read an article about a guy who survived having a railroad spike shoved through his skull." Hank's hands are definitely going blue now, fingernails extending into claws. "And—I didn't have any doubts then, understand, the control snapped practically the moment we heard the gunshot, you saw his head snap back, but—Cerebro is extremely taxing. The first time we tested it, the agent who volunteered ate and breathed through a tube for six weeks, and that was only because his wife insisted he's kept on full life-support. That was after five seconds of exposure. Charles spent something like fifteen minutes in it, he was sifting through unimaginable amounts of data, and he walked out without even a headache. He walked out high."

"What's that mean?" Alex asks, frowning, but decidedly not on fire anymore.

"It means that if there ever was someone you could bank on to survive a bullet to the brain, it'd be Charles."

"And you come up with this theory now?" Alex rises in his chair and the sparks are back again, no longer to be shrugged off, his whole torso is glowing.

"Calm down!" Beast roars, fangs bared, and there's no escaping it; his face is blue, and covered in fur. He doesn't seem to notice that his words emerge in a guttural growl, however. "The chances of surviving a shot to the head are negligible, and that's even when you get immediate help! Normally people who shoot don't go on to administer help!"

"We could've…" Alex says, but the glow is dying down.

"We couldn't have," Hank says decisively. "But if Raven saw him, then we owe it to him to check it out."

"What, you wanna believe her?" Alex tries again, but it's weak, just running his mouth for the sake of not being silent. "Her? Of all people?"

"I want to believe Charles is alive," Hank says quietly. "Don't you?"

"Wait," Sean says slowly, raising his hand. "If he's alive, where has he been? Why didn't he come back?"

"You too?" Alex howls.

Sean holds both of his hands up, twirling the spoon between his fingers. "Hey man, you don't have to convince me, but look, if it turns out they're yanking our chain, we can just kill them and bury them in the vast, vast yard, yeah? No problem, no one would miss them. And if she's not lying, then Charles didn't come home for a decade, and we're going to need all the help we can get getting him back."

"Don't come crying to me if we get stabbed in the back," Alex mutters, but sinks back into his chair.

"So glad that's behind us," Erik says with a roll of his eyes. Raven can't exactly rebuke him, she's not thrilled with the reception either.

"I'd just like to state, for the record, that I can scream loud enough to explode vital vessels in your brain, and I own a resin knife with an extended manual," Sean says, cocking his head to the side, the spoon tracing restless spirals between his fingers. "I've got medals and everything, for gutting people I didn't even particularly wanna gut, in retrospect. Imagine what I could do if I felt like it." His lips stretch in a smile, the kind that has exactly no mirth backing it up. "Just throwing that out there, into consideration."

"Noted," Erik says, and Raven nods.

"Okay, proceed."

Raven—Mystique takes a deep breath. "I don't forget a face. I know it was Charles. I'm pretty sure he tried to use his telepathy on me. But he was speaking Russian, and he didn't stop me." She takes a breath. "He didn't even know me. He looked me in the eye and didn't know me, and he shot at me. I barely got out alive."

"Makes sense to me," Alex says quietly enough that only the closest neighbors hear.

Mystique is getting out of her chair, enraged, but before she can open her mouth the door to the kitchen closes, the lock engaging with a soft click, and she finds herself staring at a stranger looking out of her brother's eyes.

Chapter Text

No one breathes a word. Not even a curse. Mystique is too petrified to look, but her ears tell her that no one moves, either, and the rate of their breathing has not changed.

"I know your face," Charles says, a shadow of a man in the early morning light. "Why?"

She slides out of her spot and moves away from the table. "You know me," she says, and her voice trembles just a little. This man shot at her. Even instinct she has is ringing the alarms, her feet scramble to find purchase on the cold kitchen floor so that she can get a head start and run, just run, get as far as possible. Instead, she lets herself transform into the face she even now wears when she needs to be normal. The least possible change from her natural appearance: no structural modifications, just the hair, tumbling over her shoulders and the skin, peach and cream overlying midnight blue scales.

She doesn't get the chance to realize it's a mistake.

Charles moves. In a fraction of a second the breath is driven out of her body and there's a vice-like hand on her neck. He lifts her with one arm and slams her onto the table, heedless of her fingernails digging into the gloves he's wearing. "I know your face," he says again, and squeezes until her vision goes spotty and her body gives up pretending. Only when she's wholly blue again does his grip loosen. "Why?"

Raven opens her mouth and gasps for air. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Erik, sitting unnaturally still. Only his eyes flicker madly from her to Charles and back. When her head is tilted a fraction in the other direction she sees Hank and Sean, similarly trapped.

"What's your name?" Charles asks. His voice is quiet, soothing, though the hand at her throat remains firm.

"Mystique," she says, a reflex she's trained herself into a long time ago. Her name is Mystique now, only Mystique; she left Raven behind, left her where she could be safe. Or so she thought.

This time she has time to realize the mistake. The expression on his face doesn't change, but all of sudden her whole body is aflame, muscles contracting rapidly and shaking. She tilts her head back to scream but all she manages to vocalize is a strangled sound halfway between a wail and a keen. Then the pain stops.

"You can try to lie to me," Charles says softly, "but for every time you try the pain will get worse. You will not pass out. You will not die. You will lie here and feel it." He doesn't smile. He's speaking English, but certain sounds come out wrong, like he isn't quite cognizant of the difference between English, Russian or Vietnamese, like he's just stringing appropriate words together without truly making them into a whole. "What's your name?" he asks again.

"Raven," she gasps. "Raven Darkholme."

There's no pain this time. Good, because she's still reeling from the first taste. She takes a deep breath, once he lets go of her neck and steps away. After a few moments she is able to lift her head and confirm for sure that the guys are all breathing, and blinking, straining to keep their eyes on the man who can't be anyone but Charles but at the same time is not Charles at all.

And what he does is start going through the cupboards, until he comes across a can of peaches in syrup, which he opens and proceeds to eat with a fork.

"Why do I know you?" he asks eventually, between bites.

"I'm your sister," she manages between gasps, which she only partially fakes.

"Huh." He pins her with a look that latches onto the tips of her toes and lets go of the ends of her hair. For the first time in a long while Raven feels naked, as though her skin was no longer protection enough. For the first time in a long while she is utterly exposed and all she wants to do is ripple into someone opaque, into someone who is not her.

Charles finishes the peaches, drinks the syrup straight out of the can, throws it into the trash and rinses the fork, which he sets aside on the counter. He stands there with his back to her for several seconds, and then he reaches out. When he turns back, the handle of a kitchen knife is laying across his loosely-curled palm. There's no expression on his face other than the eerie focus that used to mean he was reaching into someone's head. What it means now Raven can't bring herself to imagine.

Or, to be more specific: she can imagine it just fine, she just isn't interested in believing it.

Whatever god is looking out for her that day made sure to make Charles underestimate her recovery time. Sure, her limbs are still trembling and her breath isn't quite back yet, but she rolls from under the knife all the same, kicking out at Charles' legs as she goes. He avoids the kicks, but it does force him back, giving her time to get onto her feet.

When was the last time she didn't have surprise working in her favor? She can't even remember. When's the last time she had to fight one-on-one? Had she done it at all since Azazel?

For a fraction of a second she is paralyzed. Charles won't be wowed by her natural scaly body, shapeshifting as a diversion is out of the question, what is left? She's good, she knows she's good, but fighting a telepath, fighting Charles…

The knife flies towards her and she only barely avoids being impaled. She twists and this time her kick connects with the back of his knee, but instead of going down Charles leaps forward and into a roll, almost knocking one of her teeth with his heel. He uses the wall to change direction and spring onto his feet and attack again. He never lets go of the knife, either, and the next second the blade comes dangerously close to spilling her intestines on the clean kitchen floor. She dives under the table, slides to the other side, but the sound of a chair wobbling is her only warning before Charles leaps from the table and nails her shin to the floor with his knee.

Raven screams, but the snapping bone is the loudest noise she's ever heard, echoing through her entire body. Through the haze of pain and mounting shock she grasps Charles' wrist and holds it, tries to grind the bones together, but it's no use; she's strong, but he's wearing wrist guards underneath the gloves. Her right leg is useless, worse than, it's a festering black hole of pain, the tip of the knife comes closer with every passing heartbeat, his weight is resting on his other hand, which is digging into her stomach, restricting her breathing, and god, please, please, Raven thinks.

Charles flinches and his palm trembles, as though hit with an electric shock. The knife falls out, clatters to the floor, and here it is, blessed providence! He hefts himself onto his knees, reaches for the knife with his left hand, and it's enough, enough space, enough time. She slams her right palm into his left elbow, sends him sprawling, rolls onto his back and pulls his right arm over his head and to the side, as she wraps her right arm around his neck. She wedges her good leg around his thigh and rolls them over again, trapping his right hand between her back and the floor, dragging him on top of her, his back to her chest. With her now free right hand she tightens the chokehold.

Fifteen seconds, she tells herself, wrapping her calf around his left knee, wedging her foot under his other knee. Thirteen, she screams when he kicks at her broken leg. Twelve. Ten, she gasps, breaking her nose on the crown of his head, in an effort to avoid having an eye plucked out of its socket.

Nine seconds left and the struggling doesn't cease. Raven tightens her grip, and somewhere in the back of her mind an angelic choir begins a prayer. Let me withstand this, she thinks, swallowing blood and snot, lest it chokes her. Let me keep holding. Seven.

His heel comes down again, but she moves her injured leg enough to feel only a graze. It’s enough; she howls, digs the fingers of her left hand into his scalp and pulls. Four. Three.

The counter is dipping below zero and she's panicking, but letting go means certain death, and she doesn’t want to die yet, not here, not at Charles' hand—

—then it stops.

Raven stares at the ceiling through the tears in her eyes and relaxes the hold a fraction, just enough to know for sure.

"Jesus Christ, Raven!" Hank is at her side, his clawed hand carding through her hair. "Hold on, I'll be right with you – Erik, don't just stand there, restrain him!"

Yes, that, she thinks, blinking sleepily. She can't go through that again. Even through the haze she can see Erik staring down with terrible uncertainty in his gaze, something fragile and broken, further compounded by the fact that his face is bloodied from the nose down.

"Erik, for fuck's sake!" Sean slaps him across the face and that does the trick. The oven opens and three old-fashioned grills come flying out, reshaping mid-air and wrapping themselves around Charles' ankles and knees, then forming a complex set of iron ropes that traps his arms crossed against his chest.

Raven finds herself lifted with the utmost care, and without thinking about it she burrows her face in the blue fluff on Hank's neck. Oh god. Her whole body is on fire, it feels like.

"Alex, go check up on the kids. Sean, Erik, we're going to the infirmary," Beast snaps, and off they go, rushing through the silence of the early morning. Raven is tracking their progress through half-lidded eyes, counting the doors they pass. They are going to the west wing, she realizes immediately, where the old lab used to be. Where the old lab still is, she realizes when Hank ducks into a large room that Raven doesn't remember well, but which is now fitted out as an infirmary, with paper screens, a desk, a couple of chairs. It's painted a pastel yellow, probably in an effort to make it seem sunny, even though the windows are narrow and immediately to the left there is a wall, covered by ivy. It's a comforting kind of place, strewn with white towels and sheets, but otherwise seems like an ordinary room with the odd item of medical equipment, at least until Hank orders Erik to take a left and go through a set of double doors.

This is more like an infirmary, Raven thinks. Everything is stainless steel and gleaming surfaces, smelling of disinfectant. They're in a large, windowless space, a generous portion of which is shielded by a pane of opaque glass. Hank carries her past the glass division, and she realizes that's more than an infirmary: it's a fully-functional operating theatre. By the far wall there's more glass, though this one is transparent, and a battery of sinks.

"Put him on the table, and shackle him as best you can," Hank says, setting Raven down on a gurney by the wall. "Wait here, I'll be right back."

No problem, Raven thinks. She's so deeply in shock right now that if she stood up she'd probably manage to walk out of the house, never mind the bloody mess she'd be leaving behind.

"What are you doing, help her!" Sean yells, in response to Hank's digging through a well-stocked medicine cabinet and opening a book with the other hand.

"We don't know how long Charles'll be out," Hank tells him, "and we need to keep him under! He's unhurt, if he wakes up we're no help."

Raven watches with detached interest as the great blue claws rip through the leather covering Charles' elbow and inject a thick needle into the tender skin there. It's the same elbow she struck, she notes, and wonders how much damage was done. Hank is thinking the same thing, evidently, because he probes the joint carefully, finally letting it rest against the table with a relieved sigh. "This is all guesswork," he warns, "I'm giving him a double dose: it should work awhile, but just in case." He fills two more syringes and hands one to Sean and Erik. "If he twitches, inject him again."

Then he's back, holding yet another syringe in her line of sight. "I'm going to give you morphine, okay?"

"Yes please." She never even feels the sting, all she knows is the blessed relief spreading through her veins, numbing the pain of her mutilated leg and broken nose. "Ouch," she murmurs when Hank's claws probe at her face though a cotton tissue.

"It's broken," he says. "Hold on to something." There's a wet crack and Raven suddenly can breathe a whole lot easier, at least until two cotton wads get shoved into her nostrils. "Wasn't too bad, was it?" he asks, and she scowls. "The leg is going to be worse."

It is. Mostly because it's ages before he does something about it. It turns out they have an X-ray machine hidden behind a secret door in the steel infirmary, so a short while later Raven can admire the thorough splintering of both the tibia and fibula. "It's not as bad as I feared," Hank says, and his relief is palpable. "Both breaks are displaced, but I don't see any fragments. You shouldn't need surgery."

"Shouldn't?" she slurs, tracing the white shadows across the paper.

"Well, I'm going to guess you heal well?"

"I've never broken any bones," Raven says slowly. Her throat feels like a gummy worm. Blessed morphine.

"I'm just going to set and splint it. You got lucky."

"Don't feel lucky." Raven giggles. Her voice is funny when her nose is stuffed up. Hank shoots her a small smile, even as he unearths a contraption straight from the pits of hell and fixes half of it to her thigh, just above the knee.

"Is the morphine still working?" he asks, fiddling with the screws.

"I think so?"

"Good. Because this will be painful."

Raven doesn't feel the bones shift, thank god. Through the drugs the pain is more of a cosmic entity, omnipresent and potent, but a theory rather than an actual thing. Then Hank puts his weight into it and even then threat of pain magically disappears. Raven watches, fascinated, as he runs his fingers up her calves and presses in seemingly random places. He seems satisfied, because the next thing she knows the gurney is moving with her on it, she is warned not to move and Hank takes another picture with the X-ray. He shows it to her, satisfied, and points to the clearly visible dark line bisecting both her bones several inches above the ankle. "See? They aligned perfectly, you're going to be fine," he says, as he begins to bind the splints to her leg, and cover them with the cast.

Raven leaves him to it, and the feeling of having someone care for her injuries is so absolutely divine that she is still floating happily by the ceiling, only slightly cold, when Alex returns.

"Well, the kids are up, and all of them want food, but no one heard anything, so that's one less therapy hour. Everything okay in here?" he tries to feign indifference, but his eyes flicker to the fresh cast covering Raven's leg from above the knee to the foot, the unbelievable mess that has to be her face, and then he turns to look at Charles and his focus remains there. "Jesus. It's really him. He was alive all this time and we had no idea." His voice breaks as he finishes speaking, hands clenching into fists.

Neither Hank nor Sean say anything, but an odd sort of mood descends, one that Raven can only barely figure out. The three of them stare at the prone figure on the – holy shit, she thinks, it's an operating table, one with screws and special lamps and gleaming restrains – and say nothing.

"It doesn't look good, does it," Sean says finally.

"No. It doesn't." Hank polishes his glasses and clears his throat.

"Fuck."

Alex's hand twitches, but he holds himself still. "Did he wake up?"

"I pumped him full of morphine, he'll stay down for a while. It's a temporary solution though."

"Aren't you going to start a drip or something? We can keep him in a coma, maybe?"

Hank is silent for a long while. Raven rises into a sitting position and tries to look when he carefully approaches their patient and rips the jacket further to expose the bend of Charles' elbow. "I'm not exactly qualified to handle this," he says.

Alex lets out a string of "fucks" which seem to mean seventeen different things as they leave his mouth, judging by inflection alone. Raven isn't great with Vietnamese for that reason. Inflection is a mystery.

"What is it?" she asks. "I can't see."

"There's more," Erik says, startling everyone, or maybe just Raven. She'd forgotten he was even there, but he approaches the table now, palm extended about a foot over Charles' prone body. "Electronic circuits. It's how I got him to let go of the knife. Most of it is in his spine, here," his palm hovers where Raven presumes the hipbones are located, "but there are several others. Some of them in his skull."

"That explains how he's able to walk," Hank says thoughtfully.

"What do you mean?" Erik asks sharply, pulling his hand back.

"He couldn't feel his legs after he was shot. I think maybe the impact of the bullet shattered one of the vertebrae, or moved it. I didn't exactly have time for a diagnosis, and that was before I got my medical degree, anyway."

"You have a medical degree now?"

Hank shrugs. "Someone had to, and I'd done most of pre-med requirements back when I was getting my doctorate. I'm not a doctor," he adds, reassuring Raven not in the slightest. "I didn't complete an official internship yet." He looks down at Charles, then back at Erik. "Are you okay?"

Erik doesn't even look up and the bright red blood keeps dripping out of his nose and rolling down his chin at a steady pace. "I'm fine."

"Half of your face is a bloody mess."

"You try fighting his mind control, see how well you'll look," Erik says stiffly, but accepts a wet cloth when it's provided.

Alex comes up to Raven and drops a bundle of cloth in her lap, and a pair of slippers by the gurney's wheels. "Here. You probably shouldn't shift with that leg, but you should still get dressed."

"I'm comfortable like this," she says defiantly.

"Yeah, excuse us lesser mortals for being less evolved than your mutant highness. We're not running a strip club here. Get off your high horse for a moment, I can see you're shivering. Plus, we got one kid that randomly raises temperatures of stuff, including carpets, good luck if you step on one barefoot."

Raven considers this and half-reluctantly starts figuring out her way around the sweatpants and tank top. Halfway through she realizes that pants will have to wait, anyway, until the cast is dry, and that she is, in fact, quite cold. "Can I have a hoodie to go with it?"

"I'll find something," Alex promises and turns away. "I'm gonna go, make breakfast for the kids. You coming?"

"Hank, go. Someone should stay guard," Sean says.

"What, we're not trusting Magneto with guarding people? Say it isn’t so!"

"Shut up, Alex," Sean says, but he is sniggering into his palm and shaking his head. "Go."

Hank and Alex leave, and despite the less than amiable nature of Alex's attitude, something has changed. Raven can feel it in the air. For better or worse they are a team now, once again, and they have a common goal.

She didn't realize she'd missed being in a team until now.

"So, Vietnam?" she asks, for want of something more intelligent to say.

"Yeah." Sean doesn't quite dare come close to the table, but he can't seem to stop staring at it. His eyes flicker to Raven and back to Charles, not that she can blame him – she can hardly look away, either. Erik hasn't averted his gaze ever since he was free to move again, it seemed. "I didn't claim legal guardianship of any of the kids. We figured Hank was on all the paperwork, anyway, so it was safer, and I didn't knock anyone up, so I had no choice. It wasn't too bad." He picks up a scalpel, flips it in the air with enviable confidence: the razor-sharp metal spirals between his fingers like a murderous butterfly, and then he sets it back down. "Most nights I even get to sleep."

"I faked draft letters," she says. "Mutants have been going missing between the ends of their tours and coming back. I went to get them home."

"Good job," Sean says, somehow without any sarcasm. "We've had our hands full with the kids, but it's only scratching the surface."

"You're going round adopting mutant kids?"

"Well, kind of. Charles wanted to open a school here, proper school, which is insanely difficult, and none of us is proficient with the nitty-gritty. You should see Hank's face when the family lawyer started detailing all the things we'd need to get or do before we got anywhere near a boarding house, let alone anything that's educational."

It's nice talking to someone, Raven discovers with childish glee. It could be the morphine, but even without it Raven realizes she's been starving for attention from people who know her name – either of her names, the morphine high supplies helpfully – and who know who she is. She's enjoying herself, and this is as foreign to her as the drug-induced high these days.

So naturally this is when Erik's mouth opens and out comes a bombshell: "I think Charles killed Kennedy."

Chapter Text

"Excuse me," Sean manages to say, even though his face remains slack with shock. "Did you just pronounce 'I' in a really goddamn weird way, or did you mean to say 'Charles killed Kennedy'?"

"I didn't kill the president. I was trying to save him."

Sean looks straight ahead, no expression on his face. Raven finds herself mildly surprised as well. She'd thought that was exactly what he did, and then she found out Kennedy was a mutant – this was, unsurprisingly, kept very hushed up – so there was a moment of doubt, but not enough to sway her mind. It was a few years after the fact, and she couldn't have contact Erik if she wanted to, anyway.

"I believe you," Sean says slowly. "Yeah. Okay. Why do you think it was Charles, though?"

"For one thing, I was trying to stop the bullet," Erik says. "I stopped the first one, twenty meters away from the car, no one even noticed, but the one that killed him went haywire, and I didn't understand why. I tracked Oswald down, immediately afterwards, and he didn’t remember shooting at all."

"Why would Charles want to kill the president though?"

"Why would he want to kill anyone?" Erik asks bitterly. "They got to him."

"Who are they?"

"Soviets," Raven says before Erik can utter the word "humans". "You said Cubans took him, and in Vietnam he was clearly speaking Russian." She starts picking at the cast and it looks stiff enough to attempt getting the pants on. "Cubans handed him over to the Soviets." The brief time Raven spent there convinced her that if there was one place in which anything could happen it was Soviet Russia.

Sean cocks his head to the side. "Shouldn’t we be worried?"

"About the fact that Charles nearly killed Raven without breaking a sweat? I'd say."

"About the fact that Russians can mindfuck people into becoming this," Sean clarifies, indicating the ripped leather on Charles' elbow, the wires hiding beneath the skin. "If it can happen to Charles, what hope do the rest of us have?"

"He'd been shot first," Erik says, dismissive of the concept.

"Yeah, but still. Charles, for all I knew him, was a stubborn kind of a guy."

"People can be broken, if you're determined enough. Given the slightest chance they would do that to us all."

Sean shrugs and Raven's… not so sure. Soviets got creative, but the mutants in Vietnam didn't look mindfucked. They were excited. They were volunteers. And they were unmodified. None of them had any metal parts, she thinks, closing her eyes.

No one has an idea what to say next. "I'm hungry," Raven tries eventually, fiddling with the edge of the tank-top.

Erik ignores her, but Sean walks over to perch on her gurney. "Hank'll bring something over, soon as they get the kids under control."

"What do you do with them all day, anyway? How many do you have?"

"Seven. Four of them go to junior high in Salem, two are home-schooled until they're old enough, and Scotty is only three. We've got this elderly teacher coming twice a week, but the rest of the time it's just us."

"And Scotty's mom?"

"Not in the picture," Sean shrugs. "I don't know the details."

Sean is a terrible liar; he has plenty of details, but by the looks of it isn't inclined to share. Raven lets it go, nonetheless. It's Alex's problem, not hers, and her head is swimming. She lies back down on the gurney and stares at the ceiling. "What are we going to do?" she asks.

"Beats me."

They sit in silence for a while, until finally Hank shows up with a tray. "Alex is driving the kids to school," he says. "He'll be back in half an hour or so. He took Scotty for the drive, and the girls are doing their homework."

It is eight a.m. Raven pulls herself into a sitting position and inhales the plate of eggs scrambled with bacon Hank sets before her. "Do you eat at all?" he asks, watching the eggs disappear, chased by orange juice she drinks in huge gulps.

"I was on military rations for going on three years now, barring the occasional hot-dog. This is the first food I actually wanna taste."

"Preach," Sean says, lifting a fork and stuffing it into his mouth with a delighted sigh. "Army food sucks."

Erik, in contrast makes no sound as he eats, and he eats quickly, piles the scrambled eggs onto his fork and swallows them down without seeming to let any of the food touch his tongue.

"It's turkey bacon, if that's what you're worried about," Hank tells him, once he notices. "Turkey and no butter."

Erik pauses, looks down at his plate. "Thank you." He wasn't picking the bacon out of the eggs before that, Raven took note, but he relaxes visibly now, chews a little slower. "I appreciate it."

"One of our kids is Jewish, too, so it's no problem." Hank brought a couple of pieces of toast for himself, to chew on as he waited for them to finish. "Do we have any ideas?"

"None so far," Sean says.

"I'd like to take a couple of pictures first," Hank begins once the plates are clear. "X-rays, I mean."

"What would that accomplish?"

"We might have some idea what's been done to him." He's reaching for the book again, flipping through it with his curiously human-looking hands. The rest of him lost the blue as well. Raven makes up her mind to ask, but before she can think on it further there is a distant knock and immediately after Moira MacTaggart walks into the operating room, still dressed for the cold November weather.

"Good morning," she says, dropping a coat and a hat on a chair. Her eyes sweep the room, taking in Raven and Erik, mostly, barely touching on Charles. "Alex wasn't kidding."

"He doesn’t have a sense of humor," Sean says dryly, and she shakes her head.

"I didn't think he was."

"What are you doing here?" Erik asks, in a surprisingly controlled voice.

"I live here." Moira meets his eyes calmly, as though the omnipresent steel isn't vibrating.

"You weren't here tonight."

"I happen to have a cousin in Brooklyn, who asked me to help out. I was planning on getting back tomorrow, until Alex called me." She approaches the table on which Charles is immobilized. "Care to fill me in?"

Hank offers her a glass of juice and starts talking. Raven interjects now and then, with details of her Vietnam finding, and Moira listens in rapt attention, never interrupting once. The only time she moves is to sip the juice. "There were rumors," she says finally, when Hank's story trails off, "of a Soviet agent who could get anywhere, to anyone. It sounded silly, most of the time. No one took it seriously. The crackpots gave him the codename November Man, but there was never anything concrete. Like a ghost story for intelligence agents, though there were times when everyone wondered."

"Like what?" Raven asks, curious despite herself. She never managed to infiltrate the CIA. The one time she tried it ended up in a bit of a pickle.

Moira barely spares her a glance before answering. "There was an agent who'd worked both sides, but when he was apprehended he swore he only ever sent information to the CIA, even when they showed him proof. He said he was visited by a Soviet general who offered him money, but he didn't take it, which was true, they found no money, nothing that would indicate he switched sides, yet the flow of information was undeniable. Several stories of this nature cropped up over the years."

"Or, CIA is getting sloppy with their background checks," Erik says, his glare augmenting the intended insult, as though Moira's personally responsible for the agency's failings.

"It looks like the crackpots were right this time. Besides, I'm not CIA anymore," Moira tells Erik. "I was fired in 1964."

"Aren't you the kind to work on a leash, anyway?" His whole posture, including the smear of blood on his face he didn't wipe off, radiates hostility and sarcasm, which is strangely absent out of his voice.

"Aren’t you supposed to be in prison?"

"Moving on," Sean interjects smoothly, placing himself in the middle of what is a very intense glaring contest. "Erik tells us it's possible Charles assassinated Kennedy."

"It's possible," Moira says reluctantly. "I read the transcript of Oswald's interview, he was disoriented and didn't seem to have an idea what happened. The assassination had put everyone on high alert, Soviets and us, which made us even more uneasy. No one could prove any outside involvement, however."

"That works perfectly, doesn't it though?" Hank approaches the table slowly, a syringe at the ready. "A telepathic assassin."

"We know Oswald shot three times on a crowded street, so it's not like discretion was the priority here. It looks more like a test drive than anything else."

"Erik says he stopped the first bullet."

"Makes sense, though it was never found." Moira watches Erik's face for clues. "Officially, CIA maintains you were in on the assassination."

"CIA says a lot of things."

"The autopsy confirmed he might have lived if the bullet didn't change trajectory."

"It was meant to stop," Erik says through clenched teeth. "I had it. I can't explain what happened."

"It's not a big secret that the assassination was a convenient excuse," Moira says with a shrug. "They wanted you in that prison. Kennedy was a convenient excuse."

"Now you know that?"

"Maybe if you made less of a show of yourself, it wouldn't be a problem. There were photos of you by the street, waving your hands and controlling bullets, what were they supposed to think?"

"I didn't have a gun on me that day! You people can't tell if a bullet was fired?"

Moira doesn't flinch. "Perhaps you missed the part where you can control metal from a distance. Some of us have a working imagination." She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. "But I'll have you know that there were several agents who doubted the official story, not just crackpots, but ultimately people in the CIA remembered you, and Cuba, and this was a convenient reason to give chase." She's not looking at Erik and Raven guesses she wasn’t one of them. She feels a hot surge of anger, but on the other hand, she didn't think Erik was innocent either.

"When did they catch you, anyway?" Moira asks after a tense moment of silence. "You were still at large when I was fired."

"December 1969."

"Well done," Moira says. She doesn't quite manage to keep the sarcasm out, but for once Erik reacts without anger.

"Humans," he says simply, as though that explains everything.

"Believe it or not, Kennedy didn't die because he was a mutant," Moira says coldly. "There's no indication Oswald knew or had an opinion, and now that we know the assassination came from the Soviet side, it's even less likely. I sincerely doubt the Soviets cared. More importantly, what are we going to do about Charles?"

"We could try talking to him," Sean starts, but everyone is already shaking their heads.

"If he wakes up he's going to free himself," Moira says without hesitation.

"We can't keep him under the whole time."

"That would defeat the purpose, anyway. Where's your helmet?" Moira asks of Erik, hands on her hips, and Raven notices that the front of her dress bulges rather more in the stomach regions than the rest of her frame would suggest.

"Are you pregnant?" Raven asks, incredulously.

"I'm forty, I'm not dead yet," Moira says, eyebrows raised. "The helmet?"

"It's in the Pentagon," Raven supplies. She's spent a couple of minutes looking at security cameras before she broke Erik out. "In a display case."

"Great, you'll fetch it," she tells Erik. "If we have something that blocks telepathy, we can wake him up and try talking, maybe go from there."

"I'm not going anywhere."

Moira crosses her arms and frowns. "What was your plan, then? Sit here and stare?"

"I don't know if it's wise, sending him into the Pentagon," Sean says. Unsaid but clearly present is the implication that Erik is persona non grata in general, and he isn't to be trusted.

"Raven is grounded," Moira says. "Alex is too volatile and you're more at home with frontal attacks. Mostly, this is the kind of mission whose chances telekinesis could greatly improve. And of course I'll be coming along."

"Absolutely not," Sean and Erik say at the same time.

"Not to put too fine of a point on it, but yes, I will. You can't go alone, because you're a fugitive and your ability to contain yourself seems to be nil, and as a rule people don't pay attention to pregnant couples as much."

"Well, not that I mean to be an asshole," Sean says, in a voice that's freezing cold, considering his normally cheerful demeanor, "but Erik is an uncontrollable dickhead and I'd have reservations about leaving him alone with an armed block of concrete. No offence."

"Except in this case Erik wants to come back here, and by now he'd have realized that coming back without me is inadvisable. Didn't you, Erik?" Moira gives him a look that brims with humor that her voice contains exactly none of.

"I can manage alone, but yes. She has a point. We'll be less noticeable if there's two of us." God only knows what it costs Erik to say this, but his eyes never leave Charles' prone body as he speaks. "If she can keep up."

"Alright. We'll drive down tonight, hopefully get back tomorrow afternoon."

Hank nods along, one hand on Sean's shoulder. "She's got a point," he says quietly.

"Yeah, I suppose you're going to be explaining this to Alex."

"No, I'll leave that to Moira as well," Hank quips. "Alright, Raven, you should get some rest, Erik, you can help me in here."

"I'll get rooms ready for you both," Sean says. He and Moira leave, and Raven makes herself comfortable on the gurney. It's better than some of the things she's slept on in the last half-decade, having spent much of it in the jungle. She'd splurge on expensive hotels now and then, when she had a moment of downtime, if only to remember what it felt like to be pampered, but for the most part it's been tents and army barracks for her, so the gurney is actually somewhere in the middle of the scale, when it comes to comfort.

She watches, though her eyes are fighting to be allowed to close, as Hank slowly removes the jacket Charles is wearing, every move betraying nervousness and a tremendous well of emotion. His human face is crisscrossed with blue and the blue is spreading across his features until Beast emerges, no less careful, not less tender, but undoubtedly in control.

"Damn," he half-whispers, half-growls when the jacket is fully off. There's a thin shirt underneath, and Hank rips it away without a thought, revealing pale flesh. Raven can only see so much, but the sound Hank makes when Erik levitates Charles over the table to remove the shirt is so distraught that she forces herself off the gurney and hobbles over, using a chair as a crutch.

"What—" she begins, but her mouth decides a soft keen would be more appropriate. Gleaming metal plating covers Charles' spine, level with his hipbones, sunk into the flesh and surrounded by scar tissue. Just beneath the skin there's more, narrow cables connecting the plate and whatever it's hiding to several smaller scale-like plates, creating a skin-deep wing pattern in the small of Charles' back.

The operation table is rattling, and so is her makeshift crutch.

"Erik, stop," Hank says mildly, despite the distress written plainly across his face. "For all we know that's what allows him to walk. Move him onto the gurney and into the X-ray machine, I want to take some photos."

The photos, however, don't make anything better. Hank hangs them side-by-side on the lamp, carefully aligns corners and takes a step back. Raven joins him, hoping for some medical insight. She can spot the obvious intrusions, they are practically radiating whiteness, but the implications are lost on her first-aid-only medical training.

"It looks like cybernetic enhancers," Hank says finally. "See, there're marks on the lumbar vertebrae here, these components all seem connected to the wires here – my guess is the bullet splintered the vertebra and this was done to correct it. And here," he moves to the head X-ray, upsetting Raven's balance, "here you can see the difference in bone density, here's where the headshot would have been, although it seems weirdly fresh."

Raven can maybe see a circle of what could be slightly brighter shade of grey. She's not sure. Even if she was, she pretends not to hear. "Those look metallic," she says instead, pointing to the seven bright spots beneath the skull.

"They also look highly specific," Hank says with a frown. "I'm going to have to do some research."

"What's that supposed to mean?" she asks, but Hank can hear next to nothing in research mode. Immediately several books make their way onto the table, all open on the human nervous system, plus whole reams of handwritten notes, which Hank fetches from the actual infirmary next door.

"Do you need any help with that?" Raven asks, awkwardly, and repeats the question a couple more times before it's heard.

"What?" Hank blinks, shakes his head, and looks back down. "No, I'm fine. Get some sleep."

"Erik?"

"Go. I'll stay and—I'll stay."

Raven goes, so to speak. She climbs back onto her gurney and covers herself with a sheet. She's asleep in a matter of minutes, and sleeps through what she soon learns was nothing much. "Charles started stirring at one point, but Hank had set up a morphine drip," Moira tells her. Raven notes that Erik is dozing in a gurney by the opposite wall, which wasn't there when Raven fell asleep, and that Hank is gone. "If you don't mind, I'd like to have a chat with you."

Half of Raven immediately goes into lockdown mode. "Why?"

"The last time we were supposed to work together, you bailed. You and him both." Moira indicates Erik with her chin, but her eyes remain on Raven. "I'd like some reassurance that it will not happen this time."

"I didn't bail!"

"I've an inkling of what you've been doing since Cuba," Moira continues, all business, Special Agent Stone Wall written all over her face. "Not much between sixty-four and sixty-nine, but I saw some footage from 1963, so I understand why that might be. Not that you were easy to track, but we kept an ear out."

"Really," Raven says, a wry twist to her lips, but Moira shuts her up quickly with only two words: "Lincoln Bennet."

"How did you—"

"Paperwork has a nasty habit of coming up when you least expect it. Sean picked that up, actually, when he was drafted. I think they were writing your obituary at the time, couldn't find the family, even though the next of kin was clearly noted, but swore she had no brother."

"How did he know it was me?" Raven asks quietly. She'd been so sure she was invisible.

"Bennet was a lucky guess, though the fact that he apparently ran screaming into napalm, without a word of warning, was a clue. Then I did some digging, followed Mr. Bennet's past. It wasn't hard when you know what to look for."

Raven looks away.

"It was extremely well done," Moira says. "You're a master. But you're not a team player."

"I'm good on my own."

"But you can't handle this on your own." Moira sips what smells like herbal tea and continues to stare at Raven, who feels terribly underdressed, lying on the gurney in sweats and a tank top, despite the fact she's been going around in the nude for years now. Someone had fetched a hoodie and spread it over the sheet she was under, for which she's grateful. "Despite Alex's protests, this concerns all of us, and I strongly doubt Charles doesn't have a strike team trailing him. So unless we kill him and bury the body at sea, sooner or later we will have his handlers to deal with, and they're not likely to arrive without backup."

None of this sounds implausible to Raven. "Yes. I know."

"And if we are to deal with it, with a strike team ready for assault on American soil, then we need to know you are trustworthy."

"He's my brother—"

"And you're a lone wolf, Raven. Can you work in a team?"

"Are you going to be leading it?"

"Who else has qualifications?" Moira almost laughs, but then she hesitates. "But it depends. If I know I can trust you, if I can trust you to manage Erik, at least, there's no need to resort to an outright chain of command." It's not easy for her to say with a straight face, Raven can see. It's not easy to trust, either.

"You can trust me," Raven says, all the same. Her eyes dart to Charles, immobile, sleeping in a drugged semblance of peace, ripped apart and put together wrong, and she says, "I'm in. All the way."

Moira doesn't quite believe her. Her face gives it away; it stays the passive, formal mask of a CIA agent, with no warmth coming through, no friendliness. Moira doesn't trust her and perhaps she is right not to trust her, but Raven is not out to be trusted. Raven wants her brother back.

"Good," Moira says. "I need you to speak to Erik about this. We need him, almost as much as we need you, if we are to get Charles back, and he needs to understand that."

"Yeah." Raven swings her legs off the gurney. The morphine is wearing off and her leg and face begin to throb like crazy, but it's a dull pain of recovery. She hadn't experienced much of it, save for that few weeks after April of 1964. "You're not CIA anymore, so what do you do?"

"I'm working on my doctoral thesis in genetics." Moira makes herself comfortable in her chair, sliding down and exposing her rounded belly. "I got a dual degree in biology and education along the way, I'm all set to teach when we get the school off the ground."

"How did you get back?" Raven asks, staring at the tiled floor. She can feel Moira looking at her in confusion, before she catches on.

"From Cuba? It was a combination of luck, money, and sheer desperation."

"Personally, I was only along so that I could wring your stupid neck," Alex says dryly from the door. He walks into the room and sits down on a chair he brought. "But not to worry, I've mellowed out since then."

"Nice to know," Raven says weakly.

After Alex the other two walk in, Hank with his eyes burning with yearning for his notes and books. "What's the plan?" he asks Moira, checking on the monitors he hooked up to Charles earlier.

"Erik and I will go to Washington to fetch the helmet," she says calmly. "We'll leave around six. You keep on researching and Raven can help out with the children, as far as her leg allows."

Alex doesn't spit fire at that, but he doesn't look comfortable either. "If you say so." He stares at the ceiling for a few moments, then looks straight at the table. "What if we can't get him back? What if he's too far gone?"

"Then we're going to have to kill him," Hank says slowly.

"Absolutely not!" Across the room, Erik rises from his gurney and glares at Hank. Much as it pains Raven to even think, her instinctual objection isn't as definite as Erik's. It's there, to be sure, but she can't forget the broken leg, or the kitchen knife flying at her belly.

"We will get him back," Moira says calmly, before Hank can have his say. "There's no need to worry about that."

"What makes you so sure?" Raven asks, hands digging into the thin mattress.

"Because Charles held the guys immobile with his mind, but fought you hand-to-hand." Moira shakes her short, sleek hairdo apart as they all stare at her, confused. "Oh for crying out loud – Raven, he promised never to read your mind. He had no problems getting into their heads, but not yours. November Man honors a promise Charles made, what more do you need to know?"

Chapter Text

Raven corners Erik half an hour before he is due to leave. She doesn't have to look far at all, as he didn't seem to have budged from his gurney at Charles' side.

"Hey," she begins cautiously, hobbling to his side. Hank found her a couple of ancient crutches, ones that she dimly remembers from when she still lived in the mansion – maybe she'd seen them in a portrait somewhere. But they still work, which is the important thing; they work well enough to get her from her sleeping quarters on the ground floor, by the kitchen, to the makeshift hospital. "Did you eat?"

"Yes."

"Moira wants to know if you're trustworthy."

Erik turns his head and bares his teeth. "Moira wants to know?"

"I want to know, too."

"What do you want me to say?"

"We fucked up," she tells him plainly. "We should have seen them off the beach. Azazel could have taken all of us. It's on us to make it better."

"They left him to be shot!"

"We left first. We could have stopped them, saved him, but we weren't there." Raven sets the crutches aside and drags herself onto Erik's gurney. "I didn't even know. For ten years I didn't even call to see how he was." The realization strikes her in the face with the intensity of a napalm bomb, burns out the air in her lungs, forces tears into her eyes. When she lost Azazel and the others she was devastated, but truth be told that was never meant to last, she sees that now. Hell, she probably saw it then, too, but she was young, eager; she was excited. She was finally free and intoxicated by the freedom, but the intoxication was always going to end. She was always going to move on from the Brotherhood.

Charles though, Charles was supposed to be there when she needed him, when they've won.

"I thought he'd outlive me," Erik admits. "I don't even know why, he's such a naïve idiot, but whatever horror I imagined I always knew he was going to be there. That he'd survive." He lifts himself from the gurney and his palm hovers over the exposed flesh of Charles' elbow, where a needle feeds glucose and morphine directly into his veins. The rest of him, save his face, is modestly covered by a blanket. "I'm going to find whoever did this to him." Erik says, gaze fixed on Charles' face, and the fire in his voice scalds Raven. Seconds ago he was a small boy who watched his world shatter, but now Magneto is back in a flash of fire that could melt stone.

"Erik!"

"They deserve to pay."

"And they will. But revenge has to wait."

"How? How can it wait?" Erik bares his teeth and a steel tray flies across the room, slams into a wall and rebounds. All the scalpels and scissors in sight lift a few inches into the air and tremble. "We don't even know if there's anything left to save, if Charles isn't gone, and you want me to stay and what, talk at him? He's been tortured, Raven, I know what that does to people. There're implants in his brain." His voice cracks and he turns away, gripping the edge of the table. "How could anyone survive this?"

"Charles is not you!" she yells. Her ass slides off the gurney and she accidentally lands on the cast, grabbing Erik's arm to stop herself from falling, jerks him away from the table so that he is facing her. "He's nothing like you! This won't have broken him! He doesn't belong to them." Then, a little lower, she adds, "He will come back."

"Where's this hope coming from?" Erik asks, letting his head fall to her shoulder. He spits the word "hope" like it's poison on his tongue.

"Moira is right. He tried to kill me, but he didn't have to try, he could get me if he'd only wanted to. Charles is in there. He recognized me." She forces Erik's head back by the hair, forces him to look at her. "And when he's back we'll hunt down whoever it was that did this to him, even if we have to get into the Kremlin and nuke it from the inside."

"I missed you," he says.

Raven doesn’t have the heart to tell him she was relieved when he left for Dallas without her. She was gone the very next morning, packed what little she had and boarded a plane for Germany, left behind only a short note. "We can do better this time," she says instead and steps away. "Can you do this? With Moira?"

He nods, not quite able to speak.

"You realize that Alex hates us and Sean will gut you if anything happens to Moira?"

"Well then, maybe she should stay at home."

"Erik…"

"I'm not an idiot, Raven," he snaps. "I realize this. All of it. I will work with Moira."

"Not just—" She trails off, not sure she wants to say what needs to be said. "It's not just Moira. This is their turf now. Until Charles is back, for sure. They need to be able to trust us."

"That's on them, isn't it?"

"I'm with them, Erik. For Charles' sake. Are you?"

Erik looks away from Charles, where his eyes always gravitate, and says, simply, "yes."

Raven picks up the crutches and hobbles into the kitchen, where Moira is munching on a cracker dipped in melted chocolate and sour cream. "Erik is in," she says.

"But?"

"There's no but. He's not a team player either, but he understands."

"I can work with that." Moira nods thoughtfully and turns the cracker she's holding over, to smear some more chocolate on its back. "I've been thinking, how is your relationship with the Frost woman?"

"Nonexistent," Raven replies truthfully. She and Emma were never on good terms, and then the latter walked out of their lives with a cheery wave and a promise to write, only a week before the mission that killed Azazel, Janos and Angel. This was actually an improvement in their relations, Raven felt. "Why do you ask?"

"She is a telepath."

"I don't think it's such a good idea," Raven says, but it takes seconds to realize that no, it's the only idea that has a conceivable chance of working. "Can we wait until we try talking to him?"

"Absolutely." Moira bites her cracker in half and chews on it for a while. "I'm not thrilled about her myself. We had a chat once, on a plane. Stuck up bitch."

Raven smiles, not quite despite herself. "That she was."

"I kind of wanted to kill her and steal her breasts," Moira says, completely serious.

Raven smothers a laugh and helps herself to a cracker. "I used to shift into her and stare at the mirror. Once I did it for an hour." Turns out adding a dollop of cream to the chocolate actually is a stroke of genius. Raven licks her fingers, cursing when the chocolate gets close to a scale. Those things are impossible to keep clean.

"I don't think you could drag me away from a mirror if I could do that." Moira scratches the bottom of the tiny pot with a cracker, scooping all the remaining chocolate onto it. "Hell, I'd have killed to be able to do what you do when I was CIA."

"It is handy." Sharing does not come easy to her, but something prompts her to add, "For a price."

"So's having a uterus," Moira says, patting the bump she's smothering with chocolate and cream from the inside. "I literally only stopped throwing up last week."

"Not fun, huh?"

"At least I only crave chocolate and the occasional pickle. My cousin can only eat pumpkin chowder so spicy her husband's eyes water on the other side of the table."

Raven smiles, and swallows the rest of her cracker with difficulty.

Moira and Erik leave soon after that. It's not a joyous farewell; the guys vibrate with nerves and Moira is hardly unaffected, either. She'd traded the short dress for comfortable pants and a tight sweater, which makes her look like a pregnant tourist, out for a relaxing stroll, but there's tension in the lines of her face and in her grip on the steering wheel. Erik, for his part, doesn't bother to contain his distrust and dislike. He slides into the car and folds his arms, gaze fixed at an unspecified point ahead of him, deaf to the world. Raven feels apprehensive as she watches the car leave the mansion grounds.

It's a small comfort when Moira calls at ten p.m., to let them know they've checked into a hotel in DC.

She calls again the next morning, wryly informing Sean, who's been sitting by the phone since dawn, that they survived the night, that everything looks fine, that she'll call again once they leave DC, and that she'd like the eavesdroppers to please step away now, as the important part of the conversation is over.

They wait on tenterhooks for the next phone call, and, when the shrill ring wakes Scotty, dozing in Alex's lap, they all crowd the phone.

"We're in Bethesda," Moira says. "We'll take a detour, so don't expect us back before ten."

"Make it midnight, to be safe," they hear say Erik in the background. "There's one other place we can try."

"Midnight," Moira amends.

"Alright," says Hank, the winner of the battle for the phone. "Take care."

They return a few minutes after midnight. Erik carries the helmet with his power, along with the slim suitcase that Moira took for them both, though apparently the clothes they managed to find for him weren't enough, as he's decked in a turtleneck sweater and a brand new leather jacket.

They try to pretend they don't see Moira let out a breath of relief when she steps into the house, nor the guys' collective exhalation. Even Raven admits she was worried. "It went well?" she asks Erik, and isn't quite surprised when he frowns at her.

"We've got the helmet, nobody died."

That sounds like a success. Moira looks reasonably pleased, too, so it's fair to assume the extraction garnered minimal possible attention, or at least the attention was directed another way.

"Did—"

"Nothing happened here," Raven assures him. "We've kept watch, but Hank's got the anesthesia figured out, so he's been out cold the whole time."

Erik nods and the helmet flies into his hands, at which point Hank whirls and gently extracts it. "Not tonight. We'll going to sleep, then we're going to discuss the plan and then we'll try. Not before."

"We're wasting time," Erik says. "His handlers could find this place."

"Maybe, but we have kids, we have to plan ahead." Hank tucks the helmet under his elbow and starts ticking off items on his fingers. "Someone needs to be awake in the morning to take them to school, someone has to look after the girls and Scotty when their teacher isn't there. You can stand watch tonight, if you want, but we need to be ready. That means rested, too."

Erik clenches his hands, but Raven can see that though he might be more relaxed than he was yesterday, he's still exhausted. She grabs his elbow and pulls, until Erik is looking at her. "He's right," she says forcefully.

She doesn't feel she deserves the pronounced rolling of eyes and theatrical huff. "I'll be in the infirmary," Erik says, turning on his heel and disappearing down the corridor.

Raven doesn’t even bother pretending she's not shocked out of her mind, though it's nice to see her feelings echoed in the expressions of everyone around her. Camaraderie is kind of awesome, she thinks.

"You slept with him, didn't you," Sean says to Moira, completely serious. "He finally got laid. I knew it was literally that easy." Raven feels that he earns the swat to the side of the head this gets him, but he just sniggers along with Alex and Hank.

"I really need a nap," Moira says, catching Raven's gaze and rolling her eyes. "And a snack. Is there any food?"

"Yeah, we had a stew. I left the pot in the fridge," Sean says. "C'mon, I'll heat it up for you. Hank's recorded Star Trek, too."

They go inside and Raven hobbles after them, somewhat confident with the crutches now, after a whole day of getting around on them. Hank holds the door for her, and, while it's still nothing to write home about, she appreciates the warm feelings it gives her. Hank is uncomplicated, in many ways, much like Charles used to be uncomplicated.

Not that the uncomplicated things aren't the most complex, but Raven was never at home with metaphysics, really.

"You should sleep," Hank tells her. He takes a sniff of the evening air. "There's a storm coming."

"Is anyone going to fall asleep tonight?" she asks, but when she makes it to her bed she is out in a matter of minutes. She wakes up when the storm is overhead, shaking the window panes with sudden gusts of wind, even while the low rumble of thunder is far and almost lazy. Raven crawls to the window, props her elbows on the sill and watches the rain.

Charles used to love the storms.

She rises from the bed quiet as a ghost, but when she starts walking she's anything but. The crutches hit the floor with dull thumps and while her woolly socks are quiet (she learned the lesson about random surface temperatures the previous evening), now and then the cast swings low enough to make enough noise to wake a sleeping mouse, maybe. Even so, the infirmary is close. Raven slips into the yellow room, furnished with kids in mind, and then into the somber, sterile space behind it.

She's not surprised that Erik is there – they kept continuous watch, just in case, so someone was supposed to be here at all times, and he as good as volunteered – but she is surprised to see Erik has pushed his gurney next to the operating table and is curled up with his palm in the groove of Charles' elbow.

Raven doesn’t think of herself as nosy, exactly, and Erik either is awake, or should be awake, so she feels no guilt when she slowly moves into the room, making as little noise as possible. Erik doesn't notice. He doesn't seem to move, but from this angle she can see that his eyes are open and wet, as though he's been crying. Which… Raven isn’t sure if she's ready to admit that into her reality.

"Hey," she says.

Erik spares her a glance, no more. Sleeping Charles seems to be infinitely more interesting.

"I didn't peg you for a sentimental type." She'd pegged herself as sentimental, until one Monday in early November 1962, shortly after sunrise, when she woke up and realized she could live without Charles after all. It had seemed like an impossibility the first few nights she'd been away. Far from his condescending attitude, it was difficult to remember why she wanted to leave in the first place, why she'd gone with those people, who didn't seem that keen on knowing her, much less on being her friends. She'd won them over, eventually, once the magnitude of what she'd done finally dawned on her, and with it the knowledge that she had no choice now, unless it was to start over fresh. She could never go back to Charles, not without admitting she was wrong, and she didn't think she would ever be ready for that.

It is just as well that he doesn't remember her. It hurts enough. She doesn't think she'd be able to bear it otherwise.

"Then you don't know me that well," Erik says in a harsh whisper, and Raven shakes herself out of the maudlin remembrance.

This is a fair point, actually. "Why didn't you ever try to contact him?" she asks. "It's eating at you, I can see that. So why didn't you?"

"Because I didn't think I'd be able to leave again." Erik never looks at her, but his index finger twitches against Charles' skin and his jaw sets. "I envy you. I could never shake him off, no matter how I tried."

"Figures," Raven says with a sigh. Her love life has been one disaster after another: of course Erik will have turned out to be in love with Charles. Who in the entirety of the fucking world isn't? she thinks peevishly. Alex was ready to slice her face off at the merest mention of his name the other day, Hank merrily adopted Charles' plans as his own, Sean and Moira sure seem like they're willing to risk life and limb for the chance to have him back. And Erik… Raven swallows. Erik is curled up on a gurney, watching Charles' chest rise and fall with every breath, like he his own oxygen intake depends on it.

Oh, she thinks, and feels her heart stutter. He really is—

"Did you want anything?" Erik asks without looking at her.

"I couldn't sleep."

"Help yourself to some morphine, they seem to have a decent supply."

"I'm full of ibuprofen, mixing them doesn't seem to be a good plan."

"Have you tried not running around in the middle of a night?"

Raven is more in the mood for quiet introspection than wit, which she intends to hold on to, as it's not a frequent occurrence. The last time it happened she was contemplating her first kill in Vietnam, and the mood was rather ruined by the second.

"You're a colossal fuck-up," she says and climbs onto her own gurney.

"Takes one to know one."

"Not really. For all it's worth, I don't spend my days wishing I was somewhere else."

"Try going to prison then."

"I've been." Briefly. Back in late '69 she, or rather Julio Velasquez, was detained and arrested for trespassing on government property. She slipped out via the bathroom window, but only after about a week of getting solid first-hand knowledge of the inner workings of the prison system. She doesn't share this with Erik; it's none of his business. This, however, means she's run out of things to say. It's not a big problem, luckily. The gurney is soft enough and the hoodie warm, the heavy raindrops drums staccato against the distant windows, and Raven slips into a deep sleep.

Waking up comes naturally, through the magic of a hand shaking her shoulder.

"Rise and shine," Alex says, rather grimly. "We're ready to roll, or we would be, but apparently there's no interrogation before breakfast, so I brought you a sandwich and a coffee."

"You didn't spit in either, I hope?"

"I'm not twelve, for crying out loud."

"Could have fooled me."

"Go fuck yourself," Alex suggests and leaves her to her food. He wordlessly passes a plate and a mug to Erik, who takes it with nothing but a nod.

"Alex," Raven says. Alex pauses in the door, but doesn't turn her way, other than a slight incline of the head.

"What? Look, I gotta go, I got assigned babysitting duty, on account of not being ex-CIA, Hank, or able to make a man faint by screeching, and that's on a time-table."

"I was trying to be funny," Raven says, a little stiffly.

Alex lets out a huff that's not quite a snort, but only by a tremendous act of will. "I don't think we're there yet," he says, and adds, with surprising openness, "Thanks though. For trying. Maybe in a while." It doesn't come without a cost, that offer, she can tell. But he makes it, even if he's looking at Charles as he does.

"Thanks for the food," she says quietly. It's a good sandwich. And the coffee is sweet and milky, just like she likes it. Alex acknowledges the thanks with a nod and leaves.

She's still eating when she notices the changes. Someone had come in while she slept and placed the helmet on Charles' head, and removed the IV. They were ready, it looked like. Raven sits up straight, catches Erik's eye and in her veins the adrenaline surges.

Fifteen minutes later Hank enters the infirmary, nose buried in a book. He's explaining something to Moira, something that goes entirely over Raven's head, something about electrodes and cranial drilling, and brainwaves, until finally Moira stops him. "That's all fascinating Hank, but I honestly stopped understanding you ten minutes ago. I'm a geneticist, not a neurosurgeon."

"The electrodes in his brain match Cerebro," Hank says, throwing the book on the table, which it nearly breaks with the momentum. "I knew the placement was familiar – the electrodes stimulate the regions of the brain that made Cerebro enhance Charles' telepathy."

"You're saying the Soviets have Cerebro?" Sean asks, moving to stand beside Moira. "I don't feel good, knowing that." He starts to say something else, but Moira stops him.

"He's awake," she says softly. Raven rises from her gurney and stands in line with the others, and watches Charles open his eyes.

Chapter Text

"Hello," Charles says, seeming perfectly lucid, despite Hank's hissing protestation that it's too soon, that the morphine was still going into his system an hour ago, that— "Did I sleep long?" he asks in a curiously child-like voice.

"Not long at all," Moira says, stepping up to the table. "How are you feeling?"

"Cold."

"We can rectify that. Would you like another blanket?"

Charles frowns at her. "Blanket?"

"You said you were cold."

Charles' frown deepens. It's easy to see even though Erik had curved the helmet around his face so that it would be impossible to dislodge without his intervention. The metal is close to the skin, but it doesn't hide the wrinkles that form between his eyebrows. "I don't know you," he says in Russian.

"You know me," Raven says. "You know us." This is a level of conversation her Russian is prepared to handle. "We're your family."

Moira frowns at her, signals her into silence, but Raven takes another step forward, leans over the table and says, very slowly, "We're family, Charles."

The instant the words leave her mouth there's a hand at her throat. The worst things is that she doesn't see the expression on his face change, not a flicker, but one moment she's breathing normally (the cotton pads stuffed up her nose are but a memory now), the next her windpipe is being crushed.

Charles doesn't have time to do any damage, luckily; his fingers spasm and Raven falls back into Hank's arms, while Charles' hand returns to the side of the bed, dragged there by the metal cuff with ragged edges.

"I really don't understand why you are so upset," Charles says, tracking Raven's heaving breaths with detached interest.

"You can't kill her, Charles," Moira says.

He turns his head to look at her. "How do you know?"

"How don't you?" He holds her eye for a long moment, enough to let Raven to stop wheezing pathetically, then looks away, silent. It’s the wrong kind of silence. Raven's brother was never silent, even when he was saying nothing.

"Why do you want to kill Raven?" Moira asks, but the question doesn't even warrant a twitch. She repeats it a few times, throwing Charles' name in, for good measure, then familial relations. She speaks slowly, first in English, then Russian, even a horrendous parody of Korean, to no avail.

"You're wasting your time," he says eventually.

"This is not an interrogation."

"What is it, then?"

"We are not your enemies, Charles."

"You keep using that name," Charles says. "Why?"

"That's your name."

"It's not."

"It's the name on your birth certificate. On your papers, on your thesis."

"Do you presume to know me?" Charles asks, tilting his head curiously. "Or do you perhaps believe I am someone? Is that why you persist in naming me? But I suppose it makes sense, giving a name to an empty body. However odd it is." He frowns, but Raven's heart leaps in her chest. This was Charles' voice, Charles' accent, Charles' lilting tone, even if it is immediately masked by the alien composite of languages learned, but not understood.

"Why is it odd?" Moira asks slowly, and her voice stays business-like, but her hand tightens on Sean's wrist.

"Bodies are immutable," Charles drawls sleepily. "Name is supposed to reflect the shifting nature of the thing they mark. Names are permanent. Names are elusive, foolish, wrong."

"What do we call you, then?"

This time the answer is sharp, precise, delivered in flawless Russian. Insofar as Raven's expertise runs, the accent is native to Moscow. "Whatever you please."

"What's your name?"

"I have none," Charles says, looking at the ceiling. "Names are for things that are whole. Names are not for things." He frowns. "Names. I used to have a name, I think."

"Your name is Charles Xavier," Hank tries this time, but only earns himself a raised eyebrow. "You're a geneticist – you have a PhD in genetics. You're a telepath, a mutant, like all of us."

"All the same," Charles says and looks away, at the ceiling. He doesn’t speak a word after that, despite cajoling from multiple sides.

"Alright, what now?" Raven asks when they gather in the yellow infirmary, bathed in the cool light of a November afternoon. "What do we do?" she asks of Moira in particular, who's collapsed into a chair, presumably to think. "Don't you have a plan?"

"I was hoping his memory would have been jogged by unconsciousness, possibly by the lack of telepathy." Moira presses her palms to her thighs. "We have to keep trying."

"That's the best you can do? We have to keep trying?" Erik snarls at her. "Do you want us to what, wave colorful pictures in front of his face until he remembers?"

"What else is there?" Moira shoots back, unimpressed.

"We could try shock therapy," Hank volunteers, and immediately shrinks under the force of their combined stares. "Don't look at me like that, he's clearly set up for it. The implants in his head were designed with telepathy in mind, I don't know how or why, but that's clear. They don't seem to be doing much, so far as I can tell – Erik would know if they were active – so I think they might be for programming. Maybe, if we tried stimulating those…"

"You want to electrocute Charles to see what his brain would do," Moira says flatly, and it's a good thing she speaks, because Erik is shaking like he is already hooked up to an accumulator. "You can't be serious."

Hank juts his furry chin out and glares. "As far as we know whatever was done to him was both physiological and psychological, we can't rule it out."

"Let's maybe consider a plan that the Geneva Convention didn't ban," Moira says, waving her hand. She winces and covers her mouth briefly immediately after, swallowing with difficulty. The moment passes and then she's focused again, eyes sweeping the room for suggestions.

"I'm pretty sure we're past that," Sean remarks, when Moira looks his way. "Pretty sure it's illegal to strap a fella to a table and keep him unconscious for a couple of days. Don't quote me on that though."

"When did you become the voice of reason?" Raven asks, and bites her tongue. Not yet the time for being funny, she remembers. Fortunately, Sean only shrugs his shoulders.

"Around the time they locked me in a shed full of mustard gas. You'd be surprised how quickly you see the folly of youthful joy."

"Yes, thank god those days are over," Moira mutters, reaching out to pinch his palm. He smiles and their fingers intertwine for a moment, before they bother remember the issue at hand. "Anyway, I think maybe we could wait with the electrocution until we exhaust other options."

"Or, we could start with it," Erik says unexpectedly. Raven looks at him, mouth open, and she's not the only one.

"Oh, you're the expert?" Moira asks, only a little incredulous.

"I know how conditioning works." Erik looks back at where Charles is, hidden from sight by the opaque glass. Raven fights to suppress a shudder, the memory of his hand on her neck still fresh. She knows that his hands strain with the effort to rip the cuffs apart again, and they might, by god. He's stronger now, she thinks distantly. Almost as strong as I am. She looks back at Erik, who is still staring at the milky glass and talking as though in a trance. "Getting through is difficult. But if we disorient him first, then we have a chance of getting somewhere."

"I'm… having a hard time arguing," Sean says. He takes his time, looking from Erik to Moira and back. "Erik's got a point, talking at him is just pointless. He's…" he waves his hands vaguely in the air, close to his head. "I don't think he's in there."

"Any of you knows something about any of that stuff? Anything at all?" Raven rests a fraction of her weight on her bad leg and tries not to glare. "You want to shoot him with currents until he's more chatty? You know there's a word for that."

"Electro-convulsive therapy is a legitimate treatment that helps people," Hank interjects, still polite, but firm. "Given his condition, it's an obvious course of action. Of course the presence of implants complicates matters. We don't know how they'd react to electricity."

"Do we want to risk finding out?"

"Let's go back to the part where none of us has a plan, exactly," Hank says.

"Any plan is better than torture!" Raven all but yells, drumming her crutches on the floor.

"Electroshocks are not just for torture, it's a treatment! It's very effective in mental patients!" Hank turns in a whirl of a white lab coat, grabs a book from a shelf and thrusts it into Raven's face, who knows why, when the title is all but unpronounceable. "And it's not even painful, it's administered under anesthesia!"

"Charles is not a mental patient!"

"Settle down," Moira says. "We're not hooking anybody to an electrical current yet. Although if Hank says it's a viable plan, we should consider it."

"Did I hear that right?"

As one the lot of them turns towards the door, where Alex is standing, his face a picture of shock. "Do you seriously want to—electroshocks?"

"You missed a murder attempt," Sean says. "It was hilarious."

"Speaking of hilarious stuff, look who I found lurking on the driveway," Alex says, hands in his pockets, face still set to display faint outrage, and expression Raven has seen so often since she came here that she's began to think of it as his usual. He takes a step to the side and none other than Emma Frost sweeps into the room, sparing a quick glance for everyone present.

"Magneto, I believe," she drawls. "And Mystique, is it?" Her eyes alight on Raven, cold, assessing, unimpressed. "Darling, so good to see you."

"Emma. You got our message." Erik doesn't move as he speaks, barely even breathes; it's a wonder any sound makes it out of his mouth.

"Something like that, yes. Where is he?"

"Where's who?"

"Don't play games with me; I don't have time for them. Neither do you. Where is our precious Mr. Xavier?"

"Yeah, I see no flaws in this plan at all," Alex mutters, but points the way, and Emma sashays through the door connecting the infirmary with the operating room, leaving the rest of them staring.

"The message didn't mention Charles at all," Erik says through clenched teeth, and Raven starts.

"What?"

"She knows something." Oh yeah, and going by his tone this is something Erik will drag out of her with his own bloody fingernails, if necessary. Raven shudders, but grabs the crutches and hobbles persistently after everyone. She's not as fast as Emma, even in those ridiculous heels, certainly not as fast Erik, so when she makes it to Charles' side Emma has already seated herself in front of the operating table, surrounded by the rest of the team, and is presently demanding to have it remodeled.

"We need to have a little chat," she says, indicating Charles, who is watching her without a trace of recognition in his eyes. "And remove the helmet."

"We can't—"

"I've got it under control."

"I find that hard to believe," Hank says slowly. "Charles was stronger than you," he adds with absolute conviction.

"Yes, was. He's broken now," Emma says, dismissive, which is how she usually speaks, but it cuts into Raven's soul all the same. Charles was never supposed to be broken. Charles was… immutable. A rock.

"What makes you so sure you can handle it, though?" Alex asks, hands in his pockets. "Far as I can see, if he's broken, doesn't make him safer. Means he's got no control."

"He might kill you," Emma says with a shrug. "I can defend myself."

"Again, what makes you so sure?"

"Because I was the one who broke him in the first place," Emma says sweetly. "I needed money and the Soviets were willing to pay handsomely for services rendered."

As though the atmosphere wasn't frosty enough, Emma's casual admission brings the temperature down to absolute zero. Not even a fly dares to buzz.

"You—" Erik begins bravely, fighting for the control of his tongue.

"Don't bother, Magneto." Emma brushes the golden-blonde hair off her shoulder, barely sparing him a glance. "You of all people should understand that I had no reason to love Mr. Xavier, or offer him help."

"I of all people?"

"He killed someone I loved. You know how that feels, don't you? Looking in the eyes of the man who took someone important from you? Do explain how far you'd go, how willing you would be to offer help."

Erik's fists clench, and around the room miscellaneous objects take flight, to Hank's palpable distress. "I killed Shaw. Not Charles," Erik hisses and Raven, not for the first time, feels the need to claw Emma's eyes out.

The woman, however, shrugs, unperturbed by the searing wall of hatred levelled her way. "If it helps you sleep at night, sure."

"It's not something I tell myself to sleep at night, it's a fact! I killed him!"

"Did you now." Emma rises from her seat and faces Erik in all the fury of an ice queen. "You think you killed Sebastian, with your telekinetic tricks. You claim you killed a man whose body absorbed and redirected kinetic energy by pushing a coin into it."

"Charles—"

Emma stops Erik with a glance colder than the depths of the Arctic Ocean. When she speaks, she speaks in a low, whistling whisper, which carries with it the force of her brilliant, cold mind. "Mr. Xavier killed Sebastian, Magneto. Mr. Xavier held him down and Mr. Xavier positioned him in the path of the bullet. You were, at best, the goon with the gun." Emma lets out a breathy huff, quite unlike herself, dispelling the frost. "I really can't see how you're failing to understand this."

Erik doesn't back down, but when he speaks next his voice is quiet, controlled. "You worked for me."

"I worked with you, for a time," Emma corrects. "I thought maybe you could continue what Sebastian started, which was as good a reason to stay as any. Plus, of course, your reasons were pure, much as I despise the word. I loved Sebastian, but god knows he had it coming. I couldn't exactly fault you for wanting to avenge your mother. I certainly would."

"If he had it coming, why would you take it out on Charles?" Raven asks, not quite able to control the shaking of her hands. "How dare you! Shaw was a monster, he deserved to die! Charles did what needed to be done!"

"Let me stop you right there," Emma says, holding up her hand. "I took nothing out on no one. I was contacted by an acquaintance in Soviet employ, shortly after I left your organization, who informed me that one of their weapon development programs required a consult from someone like me. Since Russians tend to pay well, I went, and I found that their secret project was none other than your Mr. Xavier. As to why I agreed to ally myself with you, well, it was because our goals coincided, or so I thought at the time."

"How could you just leave him there, Charles is one of us—" Raven cries.

"So was Sebastian," Emma says coolly. "I owed Mr. Xavier nothing. I owe you nothing, either." Her mouth twists, but to Raven's surprise (and horror) her face communicates sympathy rather than malicious glee. "But I will say this: in time you'll realize you're grateful for my involvement."

"You can't be serious."

"Indeed I am." Emma shrugs off her white coat and throws it at Alex, who catches it reflexively and then drops it onto the nearby gurney as though it burns. "I wouldn't have been able to save him, anyway," she says, sitting back down and making herself comfortable. "The place they were holding him was, out of necessity, insulated against telepathy, and the guards were trained to handle fighters much less brittle than I am."

"That still doesn't explain why we should be grateful," Moira says quietly.

"Agent MacTaggart, if memory serves?" Emma offers a blinding smile, the kind that used to make Raven literally green with envy. Her entire face becomes the very picture of sublimity; a flawless rendition of pale, golden earthly beauty. "The reason is quite simply this: when Project Phobetor kicked off, Mr. Xavier's brain was a bloody mess, and thus just pliable enough to be reprogrammed with electric shocks and crude machinery. Unfortunately, and it was a mistake which cost quite a few Soviet brightest minds, Mr. Xavier's brain heals itself rapidly, and the more healthy it is, the more difficult it is to bring him to heel."

"They'd have cut into his brain over and over," Hank says slowly. He's turning blue again, his claws resting on the table next to Charles' head. "Every time. To counterbalance the healing."

"Exactly. I suppressed him, much as I could. The brain healed, but nobody was home, so to speak," Emma says, enormously pleased with herself.

"You could have let us know," Sean pipes up. "We would have got him out, if you couldn't."

"That's really none of my concern," she says, and puts all of them out of her crystal mind, turning instead to Charles. "Mr. Xavier. Do you recognize me?"

"Wait," Hank says holding out his hand to stop her from removing the helmet, when Charles doesn't respond. "We should still think about it, maybe take his helmet off while he's sleeping—"

"I need him to fight me," Emma says. "I have no idea what's inside his mind after all those years, and I need him to fight me to know. As for discussions, we are out of time. His handlers are not far behind, and we need him operational before they get here, because helmet or not, they will make him compliant."

In the end they don't really have a choice. Erik reluctantly touches the helmet's rim and Emma reaches out and slips it off, once the curved edges around Charles' chin become straight again. Her entire body becomes translucent the moment the helmet slides off Charles' head, which cannot possibly be a good sign. Raven feels a wave of something intangible pulse through the room, and it's not her imagination that everyone except her and Emma seems to have trouble putting one foot in front of the other.

"Do you recognize me, Mr. Xavier?"

Charles looks at her, his face blank. "Should I?"

His reply pleases Emma, for some reason. "Good. It's a start. But now's not the time. We need to go. Your handlers will be here soon."

Charles cocks his head. "Then… I must stay," he says slowly, feeling out the words, but his brows furrow as he utters them and his mouth twists. "They can't be allowed to continue."

Emma curses. It sounds like she's rattling pearls in her perfect diamond mouth. "On your feet, soldier," she barks in Russian, following it with a string of words Raven doesn't quite catch, but which have the general ambience of codes that reach Charles where no other word could, and he heaves off the table. Emma's betrayal would be moot, regardless, because of the restraints keeping him immobile, but he focusses his gaze on Erik for a moment and, one by one, the cuffs melt away, leaving behind crude edges—

But no. Raven tries to make herself invisible against the wall, while the cuffs put up a fight and hold, even though Erik's breathing hard by the end and half his face is once again bloodied.

"Miscalculated, have we?" Raven asks, lips twisting. At her side Erik grits his teeth and clenches his hands, exercising a smidge of control that the others lack. Thin tendrils of metal, formed out of the now defunct restraints, creep towards Emma's legs.

"His handlers are coming," Emma says, annoyed. "Do you want to engage an attack team here?"

"We can handle them." Raven lets go of her crutch, stands up tall. "They won't be a problem."

"I'm counting on it, sugar," Emma tells her with the faintest trace of condescension on her face. She extends her hand, in Charles' direction and adds, "What you don't want is having that let loose on the lot of you. I've seen him fight, and trust me, whoever they told him to kill, he killed. I'll take him away, you deal with the team that's coming to extract him, everyone walks away alive."

"You don't get to have him," Erik grinds out, even though his nose is gushing blood at an alarming rate and he sways where he stands.

Emma straightens. "That's not your call."

"Too late," Charles says sleepily. His eyes close and his head lolls back against the table. "They're here." It's a distraction, calculated or not, but it only takes a moment. Erik shudders and his knees buckle, the restraints pop open and Charles rolls off the table, landing on all fours and springing forward, towards Raven, with unmistakable, deadly intent.

Chapter Text

Though it will haunt Raven's nightmares for years to come, it is Emma who saves her life. She will never let me forget this, Raven thinks as she falls to the floor, balance thrown completely, and watches Charles through Emma's translucent head. She's being protected by a glass statue, she thinks, as she scrambles back to her feet in panic.

"Move, please," Charles says simply, his wrist caught in a diamond vice.

"She is irrelevant," Emma snaps. "Irrelevant in general, but in particular right now. We have bigger concerns."

"But she must die," Charles says. He holds a scalpel in his hand, Raven notes, and her heart begins going absolutely bonkers in her chest. "There is no other way."

"Later," Emma promises, and her body becomes just a little more opaque. "A little later." Her hands are still diamond when she reaches for the scalpel in Charles' hand. He's frowning at her, shaking his head, and Raven just knows she's getting into his head. "Later—" she begins again, but doesn't finish. "What?" her lips flutter with unspoken words and she turns to look to where Raven is struggling to stand with only on crutch to hold her up. "You know, I have no objections," she says and steps aside, returning to her flesh-and-blood form as she does so. "Make it quick."

"Emma!" Erik yells, but is immediately quieted.

"No, he's right," the diamond bitch says. "I'll explain later."

"The hell you will," Erik grits out, and three things happen all at once: all available metal unfolds and rushes at both Emma and Charles, pinning them down, while the abandoned helmet flies into Erik's outstretched hand. He puts it on immediately and only then does he ask, "What the fuck, Emma?"

"Yes, yes, all life is precious; we all know that song. Although I'm shocked it means that much to you," Emma says as thin, steel spokes travel up her immaculate dress to wrap around her neck. "But some need to be sacrificed for the greater good."

"How's letting him kill me for the greater good?" Raven cries. If it weren't for the crutch, she'd have her hands around Emma's neck already, choking the answers out of that perfect mouth.

"Does the name Bolivar Trask mean anything to you?" Emma asks, giving the impression that she is only refraining from lighting a cigarette out of courtesy, despite the fact that steel digs into her skin wherever it is bared.

"He's a weapons manufacturer," Raven answers after a minute. "I think I saw some of his missiles in Vietnam." There's more she can't quite put her finger on at the moment. She's heard that name before.

"Doesn't he run labs or something?" Sean asks, frowning. He holds himself unnaturally still and speaks with effort, but he speaks freely enough. "The papers with orders to reassign mutants in Vietnam had Trask Lab logo on them." He pauses, mouth open, looks at Moira in horror and finishes, "He was pulling mutants out of Vietnam. Why?"

Emma inclines her head. "He's many things, chiefly an engineer. Not a patriot, though. He had a hand in designing the machines that kept Mr. Xavier so delightfully pliable, which allowed him just enough time for experimentation to come up with a device that can detect a mutant by their brainwaves."

"He can—" Hank nearly choked on the horrified breath he was taking. "I mean, that's how Charles did it, that's how Cerebro works, but—"

"Could," Emma says in satisfaction. "He is dead, courtesy of Mr. Xavier here."

"Good," Erik says simply. Raven shudders, even though it is good news, isn't it? That someone who would experiment on mutants is dead? She looks at Charles who holds himself deceptively still, as he tries to find a weak spot in the metal keeping him chained, and she thinks, it wasn't supposed to be you.

"Not quite. You see, Mr. Xavier wasn't sent to kill him. He was sent to commit what's known as corporate espionage in the business world. Except he saw something in Trask's head, which made him change the plans, and that's why he's going to kill Mystique today."

"There'll be no killing here," Hank says firmly. "I won't allow it."

"I can drag her out and have him do it on the lawn, it's no bother," Emma tells him casually, then looks at Raven and smiles. "It's not personal, sugar. I don't dislike you in particular. But Trask had plans for you, and they didn't exactly die because he did; his team was well aware and research was underway."

"That doesn't make sense," Raven says, thumping her crutch against the floor and nearly losing her balance in the process. "I've never tangled with Trask, or his lab." Not directly, anyway.

Emma cocks her head and looks at Charles, who stares back blankly. Something passes through the air between them, something Raven can't even begin to decipher, and finally Emma turns back to face them, her expression passive and considering. "No, but there is a video recording of you changing shape, or you in your blue, and Trask had it."

Raven blanches. "How?" She was always careful! Shifting in full-view of a camera? That's ridiculous.

"I couldn't tell." Emma frowns and shakes her head a little, enough to dislodge a strand of hair previously tucked behind her ear. "I'm only getting echoes of what Mr. Xavier saw in Trask's mind. It's black-and-white and very fuzzy."

"Could be a security recording," Moira says. "I heard they've been testing monitoring systems that record and store the surveillance."

"Like, making a recording? They can do that?" Sean asks, and Hank turns to look at him with a raised brow.

"How do you think I record Star Trek?" he asks, smirking when Sean scoffs.

"How delightfully domestic," Emma drawls. "More than that, Trask was famous for gathering intelligence on mutants since shortly after Cuba; he managed to pull some strings and get Azazel and Angel's bodies for dissecting."

"Why does it matter if Trask's people are hunting Raven?" Moira comes forward to ask, getting in the way of Emma's unimpressed smirk, and to everybody's surprise it makes Emma falter. "Why not kill them?"

"I wish I could give you a straight answer," she admits, "but that's the best I can do. Mr. Xavier saw something in Trask's head, and he's convinced that Mystique needs to die, or something terrible will happen. That's all I know. It's a recent memory and it's untouched by conditioning or reprogramming. Trask died last week, and that's when Mr. Xavier started hunting Mystique."

"Can't you dig any deeper?" Erik asks.

Emma turns the full force of her diamond-encrusted glare on him. "I'm sorry, do you want to run this by me again? Why don't you take off the helmet and then try to reason with him yourself? Maybe ask? Yes, why don't we try asking!"

"You're supposed to be good at this," Raven spits, not in the least willing to be kind right now. Not when Charles is struggling with the steel binding his arms to his sides and wins a battle now and then, and for every battle won a part of her shrinks in on itself, urging her to run.

"Did you ever try to read a newspaper in the middle of a hurricane, child?" Emma tells her, her pale, pink mouth twisted. "Because that's what's happening here. His entire mind is a rolling ball of razorblades, and that's on top of the fact of his natural labyrinthine thought process, though I hardly expect you to understand. The structures I helped the Soviets put there are the only solid thing, only thing I can conceivably manipulate. They're the only thing I can touch, without risking the collapse of his entire mind." She frowns and for a moment she looks as close to fear as Raven's ever imagined her. "This compulsion is not something I can just erase."

"You can't let him kill Raven," Hank says. "Come to think of it, why didn't he make one of us do it?" he asks before he fully realizes what he's saying.

"I can't presume to answer," Emma says, but she is frowning and staring at Charles intently as she does. She stays silent, until Erik prompts her not too gently into talking. "It's not a question of being unable to, can't be. If his abilities were that limited, I'd be able to waltz my way through. He is blocking me, there's a part of him that's locked down independently, one I haven't touched, one that was triggered by the sight of her—" her voice trails off. Erik frowns and releases the hold he's got on her a fraction, allowing her to take a half-step towards Charles. "You're seen her," she says, and even though she's addressing Charles, Raven can tell she's speaking to herself. "You’ve seen her before they sent you to Trask, that's how it stuck. That's why you're here, that's how you're here."

A snarl is her only answer; Charles thrashes in his bonds, teeth bared, and Emma turns into diamond instantly, protecting herself against a psychic onslaught that sends the rest of the group reeling. Even Raven feels that one, a violent, hot and dry blast that sweeps through her whole body, disrupting her ability to stand unassisted.

Then, as abruptly as it struck, the assault ends. "Too late," Charles says lips wrapping around individual words like they're mouthfuls of ice. "Gone forever and dead in the water; worlds collide and journeys end." His eyes close. "Time to sleep."

The rest of whatever he meant, presumably the crux of it, dies in an inhuman scream that tears itself from his throat, a guttural roar that's pulled up from the eons of ancient past, and it's not the kind that was spent climbing trees and hiding from the darkness. Raven trembles, her entire body is shaking with the force of it, with the memory that's older than the human race, and across the room the sentiment is much the same. Nothing sentient should make that noise.

The metal keeping Charles contained must have relaxed, because he falls to the floor clutching his head. He gasps for breath amidst echoing whimpers that sound no less painful, if a little more contained, than the scream. Raven swallows. Do they have medicine for that kind of pain? Is there such medicine?

"There's—" Erik starts saying, but has to pause to swallow. "The circuits in his brain are firing up. I don't know what's happening, how do I turn them off?"

But Emma turns her head as though she knows. "Stop," she commands and nothing happens. "Dr. McCoy, knock her down."

Hank blinks but he's on high alert; his arm shoots out and connects, his fist closing around an invisible arm, one that swiftly becomes visible again. It's hard to maintain control on your powers while Beast has you by the throat, Raven imagines. The person that solidifies in Hank's grip is small; a woman perhaps Charles' height, but much slimmer. There's a band of metal around her forehead, but otherwise she looks wholly unremarkable: she's pale, and dusted with freckles, with her hair cropped into an attractive bob.

"Get the band off her, I can't read her mind," Emma commands coolly, even when she has no business issuing orders, being tied up as she is. The state of confusion is such that Erik holds out his hand and the band goes flying across the room, and Emma's released at the same time.

About time, too: Charles is beyond howling how; he is curled on the floor, face pressed into the tiles, still clutching his head.

Emma crosses the crowded space in three strides, kneels next to the newcomer and snatches something out of her hands. "How do you switch it off?" she asks out loud and the woman twists and turns but her mind yields information, because Emma starts fiddling with the knobs and Charles goes limp where he lies. His breathing hitches and his hands tremble, but he's not making that horrid noise anymore, which can only be good.

"Aren't we in trouble," Emma says, slowly rising to her feet while the woman utters something in Russian, something pleading and far too accented for Raven to catch.

"What's she saying?" Sean asks.

"She's saying they're coming and she needs to take Charles away," Moira says. "Who is they?"

"American soldiers. Trask's strike force." Emma holds the device in her hands, frowning at it. "Also worth noting: her current mission is to terminate the asset."

Not even Hank utters a word at that. No one even moves, until Erik raises his hand and with it a jagged piece of pipe. "Move," he tells Emma, who is standing between him and the Soviet woman.

"Stand down." Moira comes up to the center of the room, directly between Erik and the other two. Her hand trembles but she keeps it raised, even though her fingertips are only inches away from the pipe. "Do not touch this woman."

"Don't think I won't go through you."

"Yeah, try, I dare you," Sean hisses, and fuck, a glass shelf shatters halfway across the room. The age Raven saw in him earlier has taken over; the boy she remembers is gone. He moves to Moira's side, teeth bared in a snarl. There's a knife in his hand, a knife the color of graphite, one that Raven is willing to bet contains no metal whatsoever. "I fucking dare you."

"Stand down, all of you!" Moira raises bother her hands, looks down at the Soviet agent, at Emma, and back to Erik. "She has intel. We can use her."

"She's one of them," Erik spits out, and his hands tremble.

"She's a mutant, Erik," Raven says softly. The woman keeps looking between them, eyes wild. Her legs tremble, as she slowly inches back, or at least as far back as Emma would allow her to go. "You can't just kill her."

"I can't? Can't you see what they've done to him? She helped them, she helped them torture Charles! She helped them turn him into that. And you want to let her go?" The jagged pipe fractures, then splits into a razor-sharp cloud of deadly intent. Even Emma begins to look worried, but stubbornly maintains her flesh form.

"You will never get him back if you kill me," she says defiantly. "And her?" She nudges the handler with the toe of her stiletto shoe. "She's his handler. She has his kill codes in her head."

"The rip them out and burn the rest to the fucking ground," Erik roars, crossing the room in three long strides, past Moira, whom Sean yanks out of the way, and wrapping both hands around Emma's neck.

Three things happen then all within seconds of each other. First, all metal in the room lifts from where it was, as if gravity suddenly is not a painful necessity but only one of many possibilities. Second, Moira grabs the handler by the arm, hauls her up, presses a gun to the side of her head. "You will cooperate," she says sweetly, in the same accented Russian the handler was speaking. The woman looks frantically down, to where Charles is still unconscious on the floor, and nods. "Erik," Moira says then, "let Emma go."

"She deserves to die," he says, decision already made and in the process of being executed. Emma's gasping for breath in his grasp, clawing at his hands.

"She's the only telepath we have. Let her go."

The third thing that happens is the lights go out.

Now, Raven's got decent night-vision. Much better than the humans do. But they're standing in a room bereft of windows, in which all light was extinguished. What little comes through the open door, all the way from the narrow windows of the yellow infirmary, catches on the edges of metal furniture, as though they are a cloud of focused, lethal fireflies. She can barely make out the contours of the room, which means everyone else must be blind.

"Frost, I need information. Erik, stay with Charles," Moira commands. "Hank, Sean, move out and find lights, if they cut the power they probably night-vision goggles. Raven, hide."

"Ten men," Emma says immediately. "They're scouting the hallway. We have a few minutes, maybe."

Moira moves out of the operating room and stops by the door to the infirmary, outlined by the pale light, one hand still holding the Soviet woman's arm, the other, the one in which she's clutching the gun, rests briefly against her stomach. "Can you stop them?"

"I can't," Emma says, with a touch of irritation. Raven recognizes this as a familiar argument, one they'd had many times over the short lifespan of the Brotherhood. "I can stop one, maybe two, ten is too much, and they're too far. They'd know."

"Really?" Moira cocks her head, blinks, or so Raven assumes from the brief flicker of shadows around her eye sockets. "Charles once stopped a whole corridor full of people from a car in the garage."

"I'm not Charles," Emma snaps.

"Where exactly are they?"

"Just past the main stairway, and heading our way."

"The kids—" Sean says, voice strangled. "The girls are upstairs with Scotty!"

"Alex took them and Scotty out," Hank whispers back, before diving for the cupboards. "He's gonna get the rest after school and wait for our call at a hotel."

"Good thinking," Moira says. Through the darkness Raven sees her shove the Soviet woman into the corner where the opaque glass meets the wall, gun still firmly clenched in her hand. "I will have no trouble shooting you, if you make trouble," she tells the woman in Russian. Something shimmers in her hands, something that Raven only recognizes as handcuffs when she hears the metal snap and click, immobilizing her to a pipe. "Go invisible and stay out of the way. We're not done with you. Frost, I'm going to need you to provide intel."

"I've no intention of dying for you," Emma says, her voice cold and indifferent.

"Wouldn't dream of asking," Moira shoots back. "Rudimentary assistance is all I require."

"You ask for much."

"And I will get it, rest assured."

Even in the darkness Raven sees Emma smile. "As you demand, Agent MacTaggart," she says, and her voice drops to a whisper. "They're around the corner."

Moira nods, wraps her hand firmly around her pistol and steps out into the yellow infirmary, immediately ducking into the shadows on the far side of the door, putting a wardrobe between herself and the only entrance. "Sean, if you can, take them out the moment they come through the door. Hank, go through the window, and give us light. Do not engage. Erik, you're on gun control."

Raven finds herself nodding, even as she ducks out of the way, curling into a corner of the operating room. The broken leg is hard to maneuver in the narrow space, but she manages. She'll be screwed if they lose, not that she has a shot at getting away with her leg immobilized from thigh to ankle. She wedges into where she remembers the shadows were, when the light was on, and listens. She has a good internal clock, but today the seconds seem to trickle down her back like icy water, either a steady stream she can't measure or agonizing, solitary drops she doesn't want to count.

The sound of the door being kicked open is like a bucket of water. She hears a screech, which could only have come from Sean, and the dull thud of a body hitting the floor, which is immediately followed by a hail of bullets. She hears a gasp; someone takes a step back and falls, as the patter of heavy combat boots echoes throughout the shadowed room.

"There's more of them!" an unfamiliar voice says, his words accompanied by muffled beeping.

"Find the shapeshifter," Raven hears another soldier respond, and ceases breathing when he raises his voice, addressing the room at large. "No one else has to get hurt, just give us the shapeshifter and we will go."

The rest of his words is scattered in a pained grunt and a strangled gasp. A gun fires – two guns, actually, Raven is sure of it, even though it's hard to triangulate the positions where she is, but she's still willing to bet one of them was Moira's – bodies hit the floor, and when it's over the lights come back on. Raven struggles out of her corner, crutches forgotten, and inches along the wall to peek into the infirmary.

There's a pile of bodies there, blood oozing slowly out of the few visible bullet holes. Raven forces herself to look, but none of the men look familiar, except maybe the one on point, the man with small, focused eyes. She's seen him in Vietnam, maybe? But it was only briefly.

Erik is crouched in front of her, by the door, staring at the carnage, and well, Raven can't blame him. She is having a hard time believing what she's seeing either.

Charles straightens slowly, his palm wrapped around a white handgun, in the circle of bodies. It's spellbinding, in its own way; Raven knows a thing or two about inferring actions from their aftermath, and she sees that the gun Charles' clutching has belonged to the man who now lies on the tiles with his right hand broken and his neck crushed, on top of the bullet wounds in the back of his skull.

She has little time to discern any more, however, because Charles turns and the gun travels upwards, aligning with her forehead. She collapses to the floor, and the bullet only grazes the top of her head, and Charles is coming closer, even though Erik is in his way.

"Stop him, Erik," Raven breathes, too frightened to move. "Erik."

"He can't," Charles says lightly, even though Erik is staggering to his feet and Raven sees, only now, that his hand is filled with blood spilling sluggishly out of a wound just below his ribs.

No one else moves. Not even Emma, who is flesh and blood, caught with a frightful look of surprise on her perfect face. No one but Erik, who heaves himself to his feet and stands in the path of the shot.

"I have to kill her," Charles says. "Bad things will happen if she lives."

"I can't let you shoot her," Erik says unsteadily.

"You don't have to die. Stand aside," Charles says. He speaks softly, his voice light and playful. "Your doctor will be back here the moment she's dead. He will take care of you."

"You won't shoot me," Erik says, with what Raven feels is entirely too much confidence from a man who's bleeding out where he stands. "You can't shoot me."

"I can and I will," Charles says, cocking his head, aiming the gun at Erik's shoulder. "I can shoot her through you. I practiced. It's easy. But if I do that, then you will be hurt more. It will be harder to fix you."

"You told me once you couldn't shoot anyone point-blank," Erik tries. His breathing is shallow; the skin on the back of his neck wet enough to darken his short hair. Raven can't see his expression, but she's sure the only thing keeping him standing is sheer force of will. "Least of all a friend."

"You're not my friend," Charles says and the gun inches up, until it's aligned with Erik's forehead.

Erik tries to take a deeper breath, and the effort nearly sends him staggering into the wall. He persists in maintaining verticality, however, and slowly his other hand, the one not straining to keep the blood from draining out of his body, travels to the helmet on his head.

The clatter, when the helmet hits the floor, is as loud as a gunshot in the quiet room.

Chapter Text

Charles keeps looking, his face passive and expressionless, gun still outstretched in his perfectly steady hand, its muzzle pointed squarely at Erik's forehead.

"You can't shoot me, Charles," Erik says slowly, bleeds the words out with effort. He's moments from losing consciousness, Raven thinks in panic, seconds at best, the only thing that keeps him up at this point is the shock. She'll have nothing when he inevitably falls. "You can't. Charles."

"I can," Charles replies stubbornly, but Erik remains standing, he's not moving aside. Raven can see Erik's face reflected in a glass cabinet door across the room, and his expression is one of focus and intent, not blankness like Sean's, Moira's and even Emma's. The Soviet agent, Charles' handler, cowers where she's crouched, visible but likewise incapacitated, her face as blank as the others'.

Aside from the focus and intent, however, Raven has next to no confidence. Erik's face is sweaty and betraying utter, overwhelming exhaustion. He shivers and it's all she can do to mimic his movement, keeping herself hidden. Maybe she'd be able to dive to the side, maybe not. Well, no, she's pretty sure there's no maybe about it. Charles doesn't need to see her to shoot her, she knows that. She's also pretty sure he hadn't been shooting to kill in Vietnam. She knows, with the cold certainty that she's learned on the battlefield, that he will shoot to kill now.

Erik pushes himself away from the doorframe, until he is standing in the middle of the doorway, swaying with every breath. "Your name is Charles. Charles Xavier. You're—my friend. You can't shoot me."

"I can," Charles insists, but this time Raven sees the faintest tremor in the black hole of the gun's muzzle.

Erik takes a shaky step forward, then another, until his forehead is resting against the mouth of the gun, and his right arm goes limp. "Then do it."

"I can," Charles tries again, but his forehead creases, his bright eyes dim. Something is crumbling, Raven thinks in excitement brought forth by the rush of adrenaline. "I'm not supposed to—This isn't my mission. You aren't. Why?" He focuses, and for the first time he is angry; it's no exaggeration for Raven to think she can feel his anger, coiled and roaring in a flimsy cage. She shudders with it, feels its claws on her skin, she sees Erik tremble with the force of it, but keep standing, keep himself propped on the gun propped against his forehead. "Who the hell are you?"

"Erik," he says. "My name is—Erik." His knees give out; Raven sees gravity take hold a fraction of a second before its grip tightens. Erik is collapsing, the one last barrier between her and a ceramic bullet is collapsing, falling to the ground and she's exposed entirely, at the mercy of the gun.

And yet Erik doesn't hit the floor. Charles' hands wrap around his torso, support his weight and together they sink down, into the blood spilled on the tiles. He lets Erik slide into his lap, pillowing his head on his thigh, on the wrist that’s still gripping the gun. His other hand covers the wound, presses against it hard enough to draw a pained gasp.

Raven inches into the room, slowly, one toe at a time. The window is yards away, but she can make it. A garage is nearby; much has changed, and if Alex was picking all their kids he must have a van or something, but there's bound to be another car there. She can drive with her leg in a cast. Probably.

"You're going to die," Charles says. Raven starts, but he isn't talking to her. "The bullet grazed your lung, nicked your liver. It's still inside you. Your mind is collapsing on itself, you're going into shock."

"I've had worse," Erik says, and starts coughing. He shakes violently, gory spittle spattering Charles' face in a grotesque parody of the freckles already there.

"You'll die," Charles says, slowly. The words come out forced, driven out of his mouth in painful gulps.

Raven bites her lip. Another inch, this much closer to—well, not freedom. But a chance, at least.

"Then let Hank help me," Erik whispers. "Let him come here."

"He'll try to stop me."

"You don't…" More blood, trickling down the side of his face. Raven is almost at the open window, close enough to feel the cold air on her skin. "…don't do this," Erik manages. "Don't let me die, Charles."

"Why?" Raven can hear the frown in Charles' voice, a curl with a falling fringe, unchanged since he was twelve. That tone always reminded her of a small dog, one with huge, floppy ears and curled tail. "Why do you matter?"

"I don't," Erik whispers, exhausted beyond speaking. "Not really. Save me anyway."

She sees Charles tremble, then. He looks ahead, unseeing, and his lips move, forming words whose meaning she can't begin to fathom, like ancient spells, or maybe prayers, if he was a praying man. He's not, not to her knowledge, but then she doesn’t know him anymore.

The windowsill is under her fingertips. The cast is going to be a problem, but Raven has gotten out of tighter spots before. She gauges the space between the window frame and the glass, the age of the hinges, hoping to hell pushing it open won't make as much noise as it looks like it might. Hank got out through here; she should be able to do likewise with no problem. Her back is to the window, even now, her eyes fixed on Charles and his inhuman, deadly focus. He moves fast, too fast; Raven can compete, maybe, when her bones are whole, but she lacks the supernatural sense that gives him the edge – right now she also lacks a gun to inconvenience him with. Charles had been a crack shot when he was young, that isn't likely to have changed; she's avoided his bullets twice now, and the third time might just be the charm. She needs to go. Now.

Charles looks up, eyes seeing very little, and his gaze alights on the Soviet agent. The woman stares back blankly, held in stasis. His hand extends, the gun sailing smoothly through the air, to point at the statue he's made her into and freezes. "I—" he tries to say, frowning. "Let me—" but she only shakes her head. Her eyes are wide and frightened, and so are Charles'. The gun wavers, trembles, and Raven waits, barely able to breathe. "I don't—" he tries again, "why…?" and falls silent. "You're my mission," he tries again, as he looks up at Raven, and the gun moves her way, but doesn't stop there, doesn't even pause. Instead it continues until it rests firm but gentle against the side of his head, just above the tip of the ear. He presses the trigger.

The muffled gunshot breaks the spell; the people, trapped in a telepathic hold seconds ago, explode in a flurry of motion. Only Raven stands petrified, unable to move.

"Oh god," she whimpers, as Moira and Sean pull Charles back, lay him down on the blood-spattered floor.

Hank barges into the room, doesn't even blink at the carnage; he leaps over the scattered corpses, skids to a stop and falls to his knees beside Charles and Erik. He looks between them while Moira and Sean croon what might as well be poetry that should be meaningful, but Raven can't seem to wrap her mind around—fractures, and stop, and metal plating.

"Help me move Erik," Hank says to Sean. "Miss Frost – the gurney."

Emma's lip twists, but she doesn't contradict the order. She pulls the gurney with some difficulty, holds it steady as Hank and Sean lift Erik onto it. "I'm going to need help," Hank says. "More help." Is gaze sweeps across the room, alights on Raven, then returns to Emma and remains there.

"I suppose," Emma says, with a deep sigh that conveys clearly that she's being dreadfully inconvenienced. "What do you need?"

"Assistance. There are clean scrubs in the cupboard."

Emma rolls her eyes, but immediately starts moving towards the indicated piece of furniture, fetching a pair of pastel-colored pajamas. She disappears into an adjacent bathroom without a word, but the clicking of her heels says plenty.

"What about Charles?" Raven manages, her fingers digging into the windowsill. "Aren't you going to fix him?"

"I can't be in two places at once. Erik's going to bleed out; Charles can wait."

"The bullet struck one of the implants," Moira says, fingers continuously probing the skin around the wound. "Hank—?"

"Give him morphine, shave his head. Make sure the bullet doesn't move. Can you do an X-ray?"

"I think so?" Moira replies, but Sean is nodding enthusiastically. "Yeah, we've got it."

"I'm going to need to see his head from different angles."

"Done," Moira says, then looks up at Raven, eyes pausing on Raven's blue hand, clutching the edge of the window, ready to vault into the shrubbery below. "You speak Russian, right?"

"Passably."

"Talk to the handler. See what she can tell us."

"Okay," Raven says, then starts to look around. "Uh… what about the—" Pile of corpses, she means, but it's hard to make the words pass her lips. There're ten of them, and Charles killed them all in a matter of seconds, in nearly complete darkness. Killed them quickly and without a second thought, one after the other. But there's nothing to it, they'll have to wait until Erik is slightly less shot in the stomach, until Charles no longer has a bullet in his head.

Raven whirls on her good leg, abandons the crutches, and walks over to the suspiciously still pair of handcuffs, picking up one of the white handguns along the way. "I can't see you," she says in Russian, "but I can make a guess. Believe me, I won't cry if I hit something vital."

The air before her ripples and the woman becomes visible. She's young, can't be much older than twenty-five, if that. Her skin is fair, but her eyes are dark, and slanted.

"What's your name?" Raven asks, perching on a stool and stretching her broken leg.

"Oksana Skorobogatova," she replies immediately. She looks up at Raven with fear, but it seems to be caused by the gun rather than Raven's face, which is both a welcome experience and an unwelcome levelling of a playing field. Raven's kind of used to being able to startle confessions out of people merely by showing them what she looks like.

"You hurt Charles," Raven says, aiming for ice-cold threatening tone, sympathy carefully purged from her voice.

"I had no choice. The asset's deviating," the woman says defiantly. "He's dangerous."

"Whose fault is that?" Raven spits out in fury, digging the gun into the woman's shoulder. "You broke him. You made him into that. Charles was kind, Charles would never kill."

"I don't know anything!"

"Why kill him? He's… efficient," Raven says, chancing a look at the still warm corpses. "Makes no sense, if you have a soldier that can do that in seconds and sustain no injury."

The woman hesitates, but the gun and Raven's expression soon convince her silence is inadvisable. "He's efficient," she says reluctantly, "but erratic. Deviates from mission parameters too often. Sometimes he becomes a liability. We've orders to terminate if deviations exceed a period of five hours, and he went missing for three days."

"We?"

"Whoever's sent to monitor the asset," Skorobogatova says, and shrinks before Raven's fierce glare.

"His name's Charles!"

"I didn't know his name!"

There's precious little that stops Raven from raising the gun and putting a bullet in the woman's head. "He's a person, not some thing! How could you not know his name!"

"Asset's codename is Phobetor," the woman volunteers. "That's all I know."

"How did you keep him this long? If he's so erratic, how come he stayed for as long as he had?"

"He's not… awake most of the time. He's only woken up when he's needed."

"Not awake? How?"

"He's frozen," the Soviet says slowly. "It keeps the undesirable effects to a minimum. We're not supposed to allow him to stay out of cryo this long."

"Cryo—?" Raven chokes on the air she draws into her lungs and her fingers spasm around the gun. "You keep him frozen?"

"Raven!" Moira yells across the room. "Ask about the implants!"

Deep, slow breaths. Raven closes her eyes and breathes through the nose. This is interrogation, not terrorizing, she needs intel; emotions are a liability.

"Tell me about the implants," she says slowly. "How do they work?"

"I don't know."

"Tell me anyway."

"I don't know! I'm a soldier, I just know that there are codes that I can say to make him kill himself. And I know that I can flip a switch and he'll collapse in pain, so that he'll listen to the codes."

"The codes won't work on their own?"

The woman bites her lip. Raven feels her eyes widen and her hand closes around the woman's arm, clenching hard enough to cause pain. "He won't listen to you unless you shock him?"

"He's programmed with a mission, every time!" Skorobogatova says, gasping. "They make him listen to his handler speak until he recognizes our voices, so that he listens when we tell him to sleep, but he won't take orders! He won't listen! He obeys the programming only. He is useful, but he can't be managed."

"And—if we take the implants out?"

The Soviet starts. "No, you can't, he'll die!"

Raven grins, bares her teeth and maintains the expression until the other woman balks and whimpers. "He survived being shot in the head."

"They tried—" the woman gasps, and desperately tries to flex her purpling fingers. "You can't control him. He'll kill you all if you take them out."

"I guess we'll see," Raven says dismissively, and moves to stand. They're alone in the infirmary; Moira and Sean had moved Charles onto a gurney and rolled him into the bathroom, from where they were casting worried looks into the operating room, while shaving Charles' hair. Raven slowly picks her way there, pausing in the doorway. "She says the implants shock him, and that's how he obeys the codes in the field. She says he won't listen otherwise."

"So they have to come out," Moira says. She looks over her shoulder at the brightly lit table on the other side of the clear pane of glass, where Hank is directing Emma to very carefully lift the bullet out of the blooming red cavity in Erik's chest.

"Did they say how he was doing?"

"Hard to tell at the moment, but his vitals seem okay."

Raven squints and, sure enough, she can see a steady green pulse flicker through an otherwise dark screen over Hank's shoulder. As far as she can tell it's a little slow, but Erik is unconscious, so presumably it's not a cause to worry. Hank seems confident with what he's doing, confident and in control: the instruments flash between his fingers, one after the other and the thin green line on the monitors trembles only once in a while, before settling into a regular pattern.

There's not much to do but wait, until Hank is done and Erik is transferred onto a gurney and wheeled out of the operating room, still unconscious, but breathing. "It looks good," Hank says. "There was some damage to the diaphragm, but I'm optimistic. He could do with some extra blood, but we can't spare any at the moment, and his pulse is steady. He should pull through."

"Thank god," Sean says, visibly surprising himself most of all. "What? He's a dick, but I don't want him to die."

"What about Charles?" Moira asks, once the fond smile slides off her face.

"I think we need to talk about that," Hank admits reluctantly. "Miss Frost – will you help us?"

Emma, who'd just come in, immediately stuck her diamond hands under a stream of hot water, letting the blood spill directly into the sink. It must be useful, Raven thinks distantly, to be able to sterilize one's hands directly in a flame in preparation for a surgery. "You want my help in saving Mr. Xavier?"

Hank nods. "We need to save him."

"I suppose I can't hold a grudge forever," Emma says, reaching for soap. "Although don't think for a second you won't owe me."

"We have money."

Emma smiles as only she can, diamond-bright charm and delight, covering a moonless winter night. "I don't need your money, Dr. McCoy. I will, however, accept a favor."

"What kind?"

"Sanctuary, should I require it, for myself and a potential guest."

"Not if your arrival is a threat to our children."

"Who do you take me for, Dr. McCoy?"

"Very well, then." Hank holds out his paw. "Sanctuary and whatever assistance we can spare, whenever you require it, in return for your enthusiastic assistance with Charles' recovery."

"Enthusiastic is an interesting choice of words." Emma considers the offered hand carefully. "The deal is of course terminated if our respective goals fall out of alignment."

"Of course."

Emma takes his hand and shakes it firmly. "Well, I'm at your command."

"Check if the handler was telling the truth. And if taking out the implants in his brain won't hurt him."

Emma closes her eyes and hums a melody that gives Raven the impression should be performed on no less than seven musical instruments, half of them strings. "She was honest. She feels a little sorry for him, truth be told, but it's not her place to say anything."

"So if we take out the implants…"

"I can't be sure," Emma says, shaking her head. "But given what I know and what she knows, it should give him a fighting chance. If he can heal the damage, truly heal, then perhaps he can be brought back."

"You recommend this?" Moira asks.

"Yes," Emma answers immediately. "But I don't know the science behind it."

"The implants work on a similar principle as Cerebro did," Hank hastens to explain. "Only instead of boosting telepathy they turn it inward, causing pain if the amplification is strong enough."

Moira nods and brushes a stray lock of Charles' hair off the gurney he's lying on. "Alright, let's take them out then."

Hank winces. "It's—okay, cards on the table, I can handle bullet wounds to the torso, I did a rotation in a hospital in Bronx, but I've never dealt with a head wound before. I saw it done, but… the brain is a delicate, fine-tuned organ, one wrong move and I could damage him forever."

"It's sweet that you worry," Sean says with a wry grin, "but you can't possibly do any worse than what's already been done."

"We've done the X-rays." Moira hands Hank several sheets of plastic. "As far as I can tell the implants aren't too deep."

"Let's hope so."

"You should insulate a room for him," Emma says, looking formal enough to attend a ball, despite the fact she's wearing shapeless scrubs and a pair of flip-flops several sizes too large. "When he wakes up he's not going to be in control, and the helmet won't be a kindness."

Hank frowns at her. "Insulate how?"

"There's a compound you can use to coat glass. The result is a telepathy-proof mirror."

Sean grins. "We can do that. Let me call Alex, we're going to need lifting power and child labor; you make sure Charles lives to see it."

"I'm sure nothing would delight Charles more than knowing child labor contributed to his recovery," Hank says, but he is shaking his head and smiling. "Alright. Is he stable?"

"To the best of my expertise yes, but let's remember that my most evolutionarily advanced patients are fruit-flies," Moira says wryly. The fingers of her right hand grip Charles' limp wrist nonetheless and she's counting under her breath. "Steady, strong pulse. He's breathing normally."

"I need to do some research," Hank says. "Let me look at the X-rays, come up with a plan, you appropriate some glass."

Raven discovers swiftly that the guys have a ready-made routine for putting equipment together. Sean calls Alex, who turns up an hour later with all their children in tow. Raven sticks to the shadows when they arrive; all the kids have seen her by now, and one of the two young girls looks a lot like her – she seems to have no actual powers, Raven's learned, but her skin is enough of a giveaway – but she's not aching for company right now. She retires to Erik's room, settling in an armchair with a comic book she's lifted out of the kids' playroom, and pretends she's watching over Erik.

Moira drops in occasionally, jotting down some figures and leaving again without comment, but otherwise Raven waits in silence. She waits, re-reading the story of how Batman saved Christmas over and over again, until Moira opens the door for the final time and says, simply, "Hank's done. Charles is still alive."

Raven nods, mutely.

Erik wakes shortly after that, dazed and unamused by the amount of morphine pumped into his system, but he breathes freely and even attempts to sit up, which Raven prevents with one hand. "Charles is alive," she says, which is enough to settle not only Erik's injured body, but also the shivering metal fixtures around the room. "Hank got the implants out, we're waiting for him to wake up."

"Is he—" going to be fine, Raven presumes.

"We don't know. Hank's working out how to make telepathy-proof mirrors." This turns out to be the wrong thing to say, because Erik immediately resumes his struggles. "Lie down, what is wrong with you?"

"I wonder who in this house could possibly be qualified to layer glass sheets with metal," Erik says and, by the looks of it, faints from the effort of rolling his eyes. Raven rolls her eyes in turn, but leaves to inform Hank that he earned himself a half-mobile helper.

Despite house-wide reservations, Erik's involvement spares Hank from having to invent a machine for the purpose; between the two of them (and Sean's lifting power) they manage to set up a telepathy-proof space in the basement, where Charles is relocated immediately after it's finished. After that there's nothing but waiting, endless waiting, in what amounts to a minefield. Raven's consolation is that she is no longer topping the polls of most distrusted person in the room, not with Emma having elected to stay and Erik being unable to walk more than a few steps without collapsing from exhaustion, but it's a sorry consolation when it becomes patently obvious that neither Emma nor Erik care.

The waiting is far from idle; there are corpses to be disposed of and a Soviet agent whom Emma sends on her way, because, as she explains, her mission was to see the asset neutralized, and she witnessed him putting a gun to his own temple. Moira, after a lengthy debate, concedes that this is for the best, and so Skorobogatova departs unhindered, with her memory as intact as Emma's mercy allows. Dealing with the soldiers takes a little more digging, but Raven is well enough by the time they get to tying up loose ends. She's limping, but only slightly, when she disguises herself as the leader of the strike force, tracks their origins, and, after a short investigation, burns the facility to the ground. Emma, whom Raven really shouldn’t trust, manages to confirm that the files which led William Stryker, on behalf of Trask Laboratories, to Westchester were hearsay more than evidence, and most of them went up in smoke with the lab. They have Moira to thank for that, she learns later, Moira, who spent a good portion of her time with the CIA burying the paper trail of the mutants who'd worked there at one time.

Throughout all this Charles doesn't even stir. The monitors Hank hooked up to a radio he carries with him everywhere don't register a slightest peep, other than a steady heartbeat. "It's good news," Hank says, over and over again. "It's strong and steady; he's healing."

Finally there comes a morning when they sit around a breakfast table, the fourteen of them, picking at the bacon and eggs, when little Scotty frowns and clutches his Bucky-Bear tighter with one hand. "The scary man says he could hurt everyone," he announces, waving his sippy cup with the other.

"We're not worried," Alex tells him absently, and chews on his sandwich. "We don’t scare easily."

"He says whatever else he is, he's also a killer," Scotty continues, frowning at the lack of juice. "And he's un… unrestrained," he pronounces with difficulty, frowning as he does.

Moira lets her fork fall to the plate. "Scotty—did you see him? Did you see the scary man?"

"He showed me pictures before breakfast," Scotty says, still annoyed at his cup. "And then he disappeared. They were nice pictures. He's nice. But scary."

Raven feels her jaw do things she didn't mean for it to do. "Is—is anybody thinking what I'm thinking? Is he awake?" Is he playing us? Is he biding his time? Is he waiting until we drop our guard to kill us all?

"The door was open for a few minutes this morning," Hank says. "He's not awake, but if the door is open maybe a part of him is able to reach out."

"Why reach out to the boy, then?" Erik asks, frowning. Raven very nearly rolls her eyes, his tone is so petulant. Why the boy indeed.

"The boy is a child," Emma says dryly, half-awake and peering into her morning coffee like it contains the essence of wakefulness. "Children of his age are more open to unfocussed telepathy."

"Why haven't you sensed him, then?"

Emma favors Moira with a blank look. "Sugar, if I ever write that expose on how telepathy works, I'll be sure to inform you. I'm doing what I promised, I monitor him, and I can detect no change. It doesn't mean there isn't any, it just means any increments are too small for me to notice."

"If he's mentally wandering the halls, they can't be that small."

"Telepathy is not math. I couldn't draw you a picture of my own powers, and I know myself well. I don't sense a change, because whatever he's doing is not conscious. As long as he is not awake, he is no threat."

"Charles seems to disagree."

"Yeah… I'm inclined to agree with Charles," Sean says, reaching across the table for a butter roll, which Alex baked just this morning. "We gotta cuff him. He's stupidly strong, and well, not quite there. Especially if he's asleep."

The children all watch them, having been made aware of a child-friendly version of the situation. Raven wishes she could have that, instead of the bone that shakes and throbs when the weather changes, and a future which seems lonelier than ever. What will be worse, she asks herself often, if Charles wakes up, of if he doesn't?

She makes her way down into the basement later that day, after Erik tells her he helped Hank wreathe restraints that would keep Charles down without hurting him. It's a slow trip, even though her leg is healed by now. She takes it one step at a time, anyway, pausing when she reaches the door. The helmet is resting on a table brought here for that purpose, so that Hank can go and check Charles' vitals without worrying about another episode, but Raven doesn't have to worry about that, does she? Nevertheless, her hands shake when she pushes the door open and slips inside.

"Oh holy shit!" she manages, before leaping outside and slamming it shut again. Mirrors. Everywhere. She knew that, of course, but to actually see it, to walk into a room that was all made of mirrors… She shudders.

She tries again, a few minutes later, bracing herself for the sight of her face reflected in every surface, endless specks of blue disappearing into a dark infinity.

Charles is strangely peaceful, hands folded on the white sheets with a handful of wires attached to his chest, wrist, and a couple tucked beneath the bandages on his head.

Raven clenches her fists. "I'm sorry," she says. "Charles—I'm sorry."

There's no response. Raven closes her eyes briefly and twines her fingers with his. She used to love seeing them like this: his pale, freckled skin next to her blue, intertwined. It's pretty. It used to make her feel safe, and the crazy thing was, it kind of does now, too. His hand is warm and, even in his sleep, strong. She feels herself smile. "Please come back. Please be okay. For me."

There's no response this time, either, but Raven feels better nonetheless. She pulls up a chair and curls up in it, still holding his hand, and starts talking. She talks for hours, about every little thing she can remember about the past decade. She tells him about Azazel and about Angel, she tells him what happened in 1964. She tells him about the trees in the fall of 1967, about the snow, about the jungle and the icy lakes of Russia. She tells him about Vietnam and what led her there. She talks until she runs out of things to say, until Charles, if he's listening, knows everything about her, like he used to.

"Please wake up," she tries again, but his heart rate remains stubbornly fixed, his eyes closed, his breaths shallow.

Raven falls asleep in the chair, her forehead propped on her wrist. Hank wakes her when he comes in to change his bandages. "How's your leg?" he asks quietly, his claws deftly stripping the layers of linen off Charles' skull, inspecting the healing skin beneath. He makes a soft noise that Raven's learned means he's pleased – the wound must be healing well.

"I feel it when it's about to rain," Raven replies, equally soft. "But it's better every day."

"You know, coma patients are reported to be able to hear when people talk to them."

Raven looks down, where she's still holding Charles' hand. "Yeah, I'm hoping."

"He'll wake up eventually."

"I know," she says.

Chapter Text

The doorbell rings in April, just when the trees on the driveway have turned green after a brief period of intense pinkness. The outdoors is breathtaking, in more ways than one: at some point in the past ten years someone has planted apple trees on the grounds, and the smell is unbelievably good. This doesn't stop Raven from cursing the decision to plan her vacation in the mansion just when the toddling baby Cassidy is reaching the peak of her screeching capabilities. She hasn't inherited her father's voice yet, thank god, but she's pretty loud all the same. Sean couldn't be prouder, the smug asshole. He touts the little thing like it is a screaming badge of honor, and when she started walking he took to leading her around by the hand, to Moira's quiet amusement.

Thankfully they mostly reside upstairs, which is why Raven is happily stretched across the entire couch in the parlor, her bare feet propped on the backrest, enjoying the silence.

"Don't get up," Alex remarks wryly, as he goes past and sees that Raven and has no intention of moving.

"You were already standing."

"I'd be careful with the lying about if I were you, I don't think those scales of yours were meant to accommodate a bigger ass," he calls and cackles when she flips him off. That's been a journey and a half, Raven thinks, and almost smiles. Some day in the future they might even be friends again.

In the meantime she vaults off the couch when she hears Alex swear up a storm in the open door.

"Good morning," Charles says, peering shyly into the dark hall. He is haloed by the verdant light filtered through new leaves, glowing with it. There's a rucksack strap on his shoulder, and set of car keys in his hand, which he puts in the pocket of his jacket. "Your name is Alex."

"Yeah," Alex breathes. "Alex Summers."

"How appropriate. May I come in?"

Alex stands aside and Charles takes his time stepping through the doorway, as though the threshold is a barrier he failed to account for. He looks… good, Raven thinks, her heart in her throat. Infinitely better than the disoriented shadow that disappeared from the mirror room not three hours after waking. His hair didn't grow back, she realizes when he slips the hat off his head, leaving the pale, symmetrical scars circling his skull in plain sight. He's slimmer than he used to be; not frail, by any means, his skin sun-kissed and littered with freckles, as though he's been spending his days frolicking in the sun. Most importantly, his eyes are as bright and blue as the sky outside, and his smile is almost what it used to be.

"Raven," he says softly. "I remember. You were my sister."

"I still am," she says breathlessly, watches the words settle.

"I wasn't sure." A frown crosses his face, but is quickly chased away. "Never mind. I'm glad to hear it."

Raven doesn't feel the brush of a telepathic welcome which causes Alex to startle and let out a whoop of delight. She does feel the floor tremble under her feet, when Erik comes running, hardly daring to believe his eyes, but Charles smiles when he sees him. "Erik Lehnsherr," he says, pointing, and from what Raven can see nearly flooring Erik where he stands with the gesture.

"Charles. You're back."

He nods, just a barely-there incline of the head, and runs his hand over his forehead, the way he used to brush his hair out of his eyes, even though there's no hair to brush away now. He is back, Raven thinks, choking back a sob, when the curious chattering of the children at the top of the stairs alerts Sean and Moira, and Hank, too, and they all come sweeping into the hall in honest delight that Charles bears with a guarded smile. It's hard to say who moves first, although sometime later Erik will probably claim he did, but within moments Charles is enveloped in a tangle of limbs. He's tense, but reciprocates the embrace with a breathy sigh, his temple against Erik's shoulder, one hand around Alex, the other around Raven.

"Welcome back," someone whispers into the hug and Raven feels Charles shake. The hand on her back trembles, but she says nothing, only clutches him tighter. "Welcome home."

THE END