Archive of Our Own ^beta

When Erik tells her, “I prefer the real Raven,” she can’t explain that there is no real Raven. There never has been. She has always lived in between, neither one thing nor another.

His kiss is just one more disguise that she feels too comfortable slipping into.

Raven doesn’t have a type, but she knows how to be one.

She wears the skin of a pretty blonde and brings home a different man each time: handsome, soldierly men, slender ones, fat ones, young ones, old ones, black men and white men, men who speak Spanish and Italian and, once, Thai; men who have nothing in common except that they are always gone by sunrise. She picks up women, too, as a short-haired brunette with an anchor tattoo on her arm, or as a dreamy bohemian, a flower pressed behind her ear, her thin skirt almost translucent in the moonlight.

Charles, being Charles, worries. He says that he wants her to be safe. The world is brighter than it seems but it still has its shadows. Like she doesn’t know that already. Like he has any room to talk.

Once in a while she squares out the jaw of that pretty blonde, flattens the breasts, narrows the hips — shifts into a man for the night. Raven can’t quite be pinned down, Raven can’t quite pin herself down, so sometimes, not often, Raven feels like a man, and so is one. That Raven, with dark eyebrows and long sideburns, he takes home whoever makes him smile, and he doesn’t care that Charles can’t quite meet his eyes.

In the morning, when Raven's alone again, she stands in front of the mirror, and the face of her latest lover watches from within the glass. She pretends they're still here by becoming them — the person who spent a whole night believing Raven is beautiful.

She starves and steals until she meets Charles, who breaks her frightened heart right open with his kindness, but she refuses to believe she owes him everything. She loves him too much to pretend she’s never given him anything in return.

Like Raven, Charles has raised himself. “Mother’s not bad,” he explained to her that first night, as they curled together in his soft bed, “but she looks at me like she hasn’t a clue what to do with me, because she really hasn’t. And Father doesn’t look at me at all.” His eyes, meeting hers, seemed very blue. “I could make him, you know, but it wouldn’t be the same.”

Raven doesn’t even remember her parents, and she never had a slew of nannies and housekeepers and tutors like Charles has, but at that moment, sharing blankets, warm for the first time in a long time, Raven believed that she and Charles were exactly alike. Twin spirits come home at last. She knew she’d do anything for him.

Just stay with me. His voice touched the edge of her dream. That’s all I want.

But she can’t just be what he wants. She becomes what he needs. She gives Charles motherly attention and fatherly advice, and when he’s angry, she’s his conspirator, his confidante. She’s his playmate and his pupil. She’s his first guinea pig. He reads her mind like it’s his favorite book, his tried and true bedtime story, and with practice he learns to influence not only her thoughts but her actions, so that she’ll find herself spinning in circles or leaping like a frog and have no idea why. Waking from his grip, she laughs and laughs, and Charles, the slight curve of his smile expanding out like the horizon, joins in her laughter.

This is all before she makes him promise to stay of out her mind, once she begins to realize that there are parts of herself she doesn’t want to just give away. It’s hard enough to feel like a real person when the only body she knows as her own is the one she’s not allowed to love, and it’s even harder when she realizes there’s no separating herself from Charles, no finding two distinct beings in all the chaos.

Raven is Charles’s first kiss, and his first regret, and when they finally sort it out, he decides that she is his sister. That’s the one that sticks, and it’s enough for her. Raven can be anybody. For Charles, she can be everybody. She could even be a blue-skinned girl with yellow eyes, if that was ever who he asked for.

It’s the most like herself she’s ever been, in the body she was born with, but even it is not all of her. All of her is change. All of everybody is change: puberty and old age, mutation, evolution. That’s what Charles taught her. But Raven is change itself, ever shifting, ever shaping and reshaping herself, a new being at each moment — new body, new breath, new heart beating with new blood — but more elastic, more electric than a mold. She usually feels disconnected from the body she wears, like everything has been misaligned, put together wrong, which can leave her numb, sick, angry, but there have also been times when a body, stolen or patched together from pieces, a copy exactly to her specifications, has felt so damn right.

It doesn’t matter. In the end, she keeps them all. She can’t let them go, the bodies she wore and the people she was, so they grow into her. She is a chimera. She is Janus, the two-faced god.

Raven, Mystique, sister, lover, woman-man-child. Erik sleeps with some of what she is, more than anyone else ever has, but he can’t touch all of her. There is too much, too many, alive in her body and alive in her mind, where only one person has ever really known her, where only Charles has ever been.

“That’s some smile you’ve got,” says the boy with the big brown eyes, the one who sits next to her in algebra.

Raven is sixteen. She’s been settled into this shape for so long that it almost feels like home. Like Charles’s manor, it’s familiar — but it’s cheating, too. The Xaviers are not her family, no matter what Charles has made his parents believe, and this is not her smile that this boy is admiring. And later, when she brings him back to the mansion and into her bed, she wants to pretend that it’s her that’s making him hard and not the illusion she has created, but somehow it’s enough that that he falls for her illusion. That’s a kind of power.

“Have you ever—?”

“No,” she says. “Not exactly.” Once, she kissed Jenny Mueller’s breasts, and Jenny’s lips, and Jenny’s neck, but Jenny flinched away and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t, I can’t, it’s wrong,” and wouldn’t talk to Raven after that. Wouldn’t even look at her.

The boy’s hand, pressed between her legs, moves, and then so do her hips. So does her mouth, opening in a little gasp.

“I have,” he says. “I’ll make you feel good.”

She pulls him closer, and finds that his skin is as hot as hers, that his mouth is hot, too, that he’s a very good kisser. She pulls away, breathing hard but grinning that grin he likes so much. “You better.”

From what she’s heard, whispered in the hallways at school, or outside, when the girls are sneaking a cigarette, it’s not supposed to feel good, at least not at first. It’s supposed to hurt. Her body isn’t supposed to be able to take it. But maybe because he knows what he’s doing, or maybe because her body is a miracle anyway, it doesn’t hurt much at all. It’s strange and slick and new, and, with the afternoon sun dipping in the sky and a pile of algebra textbooks on the floor and her so-called brother sitting downstairs in his room clacking away at a typewriter, Raven has sex for the first time. And when she comes, she wonders if Charles is there with her, inside her just as deep as this boy who will never touch her again.

Charles flirts with Moira, and Raven flirts with Hank, and Raven pretends it all makes sense. Pretends it’s okay that the two of them are spinning away from each other, maybe even out of each other’s orbits. Sometimes Raven sees him, her brother, her friend, her whatever-he-is, and he feels so far away, like he’s looking up at her from beneath the surface of a lake, and he’s sinking down and down, until all she’s left with is her own reflection.

Everything moves too fast after Cuba. “I keep forgetting where I am,” she tells Erik. “I keep forgetting I left him.”

Erik’s eyes are unforgiving, and she doesn’t mention Charles again.

“Stop mourning,” Azazel murmurs in her ear one day. “It doesn’t suit you.” He touches her arm, a gentle touch from someone so fierce. “We’ve all left something behind, but it doesn’t mean we’re alone.”

Erik is too caught up in his own anger to care when she stops sleeping with him, or to notice when she starts sleeping with Azazel. It isn’t a romance, exactly, but it’s close. There are moments, when Azazel thumbs across the line of her jaw, when he traces the patterns in her skin, that Raven suspects he might love her, if he was capable. But Azazel is old, she knows this, old and grown hard with time — and besides, Raven doesn’t love him, either.

She likes him. He doesn’t scare her, the way Erik does, and nothing she does, nothing she is, seems to throw him. He’ll take her in any shape she comes in, whatever gender, whatever color of skin or hair or eyes. Once, he catches Raven at the mirror, wearing his face and his body, that exact shade of red, and all he does is kiss Raven’s shoulder that is his own shoulder, kiss the ear that is his own ear.

“Are you a narcissist, then?” she jokes later. She’s blue again, but it’s uncomfortable today, this body. It doesn’t sit right. But nothing suggests itself as better, no blonde-haired girl, no square-shouldered man, nothing. Nothing to do. Nothing to change.

“Yes,” he says. “Why aren’t you?”

It’s hypocritical, but Raven doesn’t trust Angel. Not after that disastrous night at the facility, Darwin’s death, the bleak horror left in Shaw’s wake. Raven walked away, yes, but she didn’t leave any bodies behind her. Not really.

Charles is still alive. She left him broken on a beach in Cuba, but he lived — to start a school, to smile that same stupidly charming smile he’s always had. He smiled when he saw her, just an hour ago. From the beginning she knew he’d recognize her. Whatever disguise she wore, he’d see straight through her thoughts. Still, going behind Erik’s back, she asked Azazel to take her to the mansion, and then she let Charles catch her.

It took three minutes. I know it’s you, Raven. His voice, loud in her head, sounded so much the same — fond and kind and just a little condescending. I hear you.

Where are you? I want to see you.

She found him in the kitchen. Of course. Like he’d planned it, like he’d known she’d return to him. She, blonde and white, the beautiful woman he always seemed to prefer, looked at him and she didn’t cry.

The wheelchair didn’t surprise her. Neither did the face that seemed just that little bit older. But that he was, essentially, the same, that he held as fast to his beliefs as ever, that did surprise her. Erik left — she left — and Charles never questioned himself for one moment, did he?

“You can stay,” he tells her. “If you’d like.”

“You know I don’t want to, Charles.”

His eyes, those inquisitive eyes that had once seen her as she was and hadn’t minded, glanced away. “I do wonder if you’ll ever forgive me.”

“Me too.” But I love you.

He wouldn’t, or couldn’t, look at her, but she heard him: Do you, Raven? Do you still?

She left before he could parse through her thoughts, and answer the question for himself.

Love you.

Raven is ten years old, and Charles is her best friend, her only constant amongst all the shifting selves she is still discovering.

She lets him kiss her cheek and then she thinks, Love you too.

It’s hypocritical that Raven doesn’t trust Angel, but it’s true. It’s not the same way she doesn’t trust Erik, whose volatile moods leave everyone on edge, and it’s not the same way she doesn’t trust Emma, who is so cold that she is impossible to understand. Angel isn’t like that. Angel is warm. Her laugh, like her smile, is just a little sharp, but she is warm, always making conversation when no one else seems willing, and buying good booze for their shared dinners. She makes jokes. No one, not even Raven these days, makes jokes. But Angel does.

Raven doesn’t trust Angel because she can do what she did and still make jokes. Darwin is dead, all of those men at the facility are dead, and Angel can be kind.

And it’s with kindness that, barely an hour after Raven returns from her meeting with Charles, Angel knocks on her door and tells her that Emma knows exactly what she was up to this afternoon. “She spilled it to me and, lucky for you, no one else.” Raven tries to keep her face blank, but Angel just rolls her eyes. “Look, Mystique, I’m not gonna tell Magneto. I wouldn’t do that to you. But you have to be more careful. Worry a little more about yourself than you do about whoever you screwed over once upon a time.”

“Charles is—” Raven shakes her head and sits on the edge of her narrow bed. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Listen,” Angel says, “maybe you don’t like me. Because I turned my back. I let Darwin die. That’s what you think.” Her gaze pierces Raven.

“I’m not—I’m not saying you could’ve stopped Shaw, but you just—you went after him like it was nothing.”

With a shrug, Angel says, “It’s fine. You judge me all you want. I’ve learned better than to expect to be anyone’s favorite.” Her mouth thins into a line. “Here’s the thing, though: you don’t know a damn thing about my life. And you don’t get to know a damn thing, either, except that it hasn’t been easy. But in a fight, I’m betting on myself, every time. So: no one else in the world knows what I’m worth. It doesn’t matter. I know, and I’ll fight like hell for myself, and you can’t make me feel guilty about that. I am sorry about Darwin, but don’t you dare think his blood is on my hands. I decided long ago that the only blood I’m responsible for is the stuff running in my own veins.” Then, her mouth softening into a smile, she takes one step into the room and says in a lowered voice, “It’s not my job to take care of you, but I like you, so here’s my advice: Bet on yourself. Every time.”

There’s a little twist at the bottom of Raven’s stomach, a realization that Angel is right, and that she’s the most beautiful woman Raven’s ever met.

Angel lets Raven kiss her, but only once. “I don’t want a relationship, Raven. I’ve already been in love.” Raven wonders who, wonders how, wonders what went wrong. All Angel says is, “It wasn’t worth it.”

It takes Raven years to understand what Angel meant. It takes the baby she abandons, Azazel’s baby, and it takes watching Erik grow older and more bitter with each day. It takes Angel leaving, and Emma losing her mind, and Raven falling in love, real love, fierce love. Raven wants to live a thousand lives — wants to be all of her thousand selves — with Destiny, wants to wake every morning in her arms, and to spend every night between her legs. Under the force of Destiny’s love, Raven feels whole for the first time. She wants to feel like that forever.

But when Destiny dies, Raven stops. Stops trying to contain it, the voices and faces and bodies that are struggling within her. It’s not important anymore, to be Raven. There’s no one to be Raven for. All anyone needs is Mystique.

What she’s lost, what she’s given up — that’s all still inside her. If the world doesn’t need Raven, then Raven doesn’t need the world.

Erik has become his fight, and Destiny is dead, but Raven can be them. In the mirror, she can grin like Erik did when he felt, for the first time, like he belonged, and she can kiss her lips with Destiny’s mouth. She can be all the good, forget all the bad. She can deny death, and old age, and the broken-down bodies of everyone she’s loved.

She can speak in many voices, touch with many hands. She can look back at herself with bright blue eyes and love herself the way Charles never could.

She’ll never be alone again.