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Chapter Text

He had to find his students. Stryker had attacked the school, had taken the students, only that one little girl left, he had to find the other students so that she wouldn’t be all alone…

Charles felt Cerebro all around him and pushed himself harder. He had to find them, he had to –

A voice he didn’t recognise: “We’ll have none of that.”

Charles felt the fog lift from his mind. He was in Cerebro, but it was not his Cerebro; it was the one Stryker had built, and oh god, the illusion Jason had trapped him in… he’d been on the cusp of killing everybody, all the mutants, all his people…

“But you didn’t.”

Charles removed the Cerebro headset and turned his chair.

Jason was gone. In his place stood a man in his early twenties, dressed in black boots and loose combat trousers, his chest bare. He was built like a gymnast, more for speed than strength. His black hair was long, his eyes were the blue-and-green of heterochromia. Charles couldn’t get past the walls in his mind, and he stopped trying the moment the young man took notice of his efforts.

“Where’s Jason?” asked Charles. A headache was pressing at him. Without the numbness of the illusion, his body was catching up to him – how long since he’d last eaten? Had something to drink?

“I teleported him away,” said the man. “I run a refuge for mutants. I sent him there. He’s very damaged – or maybe it’s she, that was an interesting psychic form – so who knows how much healing is possible, but… they can try. And I can help.”

Charles looked around the room, the door locked, the man standing there, so out of place. “Who are you? How did you get in here? How did you find me?”

“To answer the questions in order… I’m David. I can teleport. Stryker took some people I care about ,and I traced them here. I’d intended to get them out first and then you, but… it’s hard to rescue people when Cerebro’s torn apart their minds. Speaking of which, Stryker didn’t do a very good job of putting this thing together, did he?” David’s eyes flared white, and Cerebro came to life, lighting up all around.

“Strictly speaking,” said Charles, a little faintly, “You ought to be wearing the headset.”

The lights faded, David’s eyes returned to normal, and he shrugged. “I find looking through the psychic plane to be more effective. The connection’s more direct that way.”

“The psychic plane is also an incredibly dangerous place,” Charles told him. This man was so young, likely nobody had ever taught him how to use his telepathy, the dangers a telepath could face.

David looked at Charles levelly. “I know. And I think that whatever is out there on the psychic plane is probably smart enough to keep away from me.”

A youth’s overconfidence, or was he really that strong?

“How do you feel?” asked David, something strange creeping into his voice. “I think Stryker probably drugged you, it might still be in your system.”

“I’m – I’ll manage, I – who are you?” Charles repeated, because there was something about the way the boy was looking at him, the intensity of his gaze, as if he knew who Charles was, knew intimately, even though Charles had never met him before this moment.

David dropped his gaze, then looked back at Charles, the confidence gone, nervous for a reason that Charles could not discern from those impenetrable mental barriers.

Then he vanished.

On the other side of the door to Cerebro, Charles found the X-Men, as well as a blue-skinned mutant he didn’t know.

Ororo sighed with relief. “We weren’t sure how to get into Cerebro without damaging your mind.”

“I had help,” said Charles.

“From who?” asked Logan, looking into the very clearly empty room Charles had just left.

“I’ll explain later.”

“Let’s get out of here.” Logan turned to the blue man. Charles quickly read his mind – Kurt, that was the man’s name. “Can you teleport us out of here?”

“I don’t think I can do that many people,” said Kurt nervously.

“Then we leave the way we came,” said Jean.

They set off down the corridors of the facility, the X-Men retracing their steps.

But when they reached a spacious morgue, they found Stryker and his soldiers arranged there, facing away from them, guns pointing at the pair of heavy metal doors the X-Men would need to get through to escape the facility.

Stryker turned, took them in, and then, impossibly, did not order his men to shoot at them.

“You will all want to say out of this,” said Stryker.

“Why?” asked Scott. “Who’s out there?”

“I can feel a mind, but I can’t read it,” said Jean.

It couldn’t be Magneto, thought Charles. Erik had already been and gone, and he would have opened those metal doors in an instant.

“The mutant out there?” said Stryker, with the tone of a big game hunter declaring the arrival of a lion twice the normal size. “Your son, Xavier. And if what I’ve heard of him is true, he’ll step over my corpse just to finish you off.”

“I don’t have a son,” said Charles. “I – I’ve never had any children of my own.” One of the few genuine regrets in his life, up there with never managing to get Erik on his side.

Stryker furrowed his brow. “Why the hell would you lie at a time like this? He is standing outside those doors. Two inches of metal won’t keep him out for long. He will come in here and kill us all. When it came to my plan of using Cerebro to wipe out your kind, my only worry was that it wouldn’t be enough to finish him off.”

Charles opened his mouth to say that he wasn’t lying, he had no son, he’d never had a son – but something slammed into the doors, buckling them inwards, leaving a small gap at the impact point. A pair of hands reached through the gap and forced the doors the rest of the way open, crumpling the metal like paper.

David stood in the doorway.

Why had he come back? And why come back like this?

Briefly, David’s gaze flickered to Charles and the X-Men, before he fixed his eyes on Stryker. “I thought about letting you live,” he said levelly. “But you were going to initiate genocide. And if I somehow managed to get you thrown in prison, we both know that the US government would just Operation Paperclip your arse straight out of jail. And you’ve killed and tortured so very many mutants.”

David slammed his hand against the wall by the mortuary chambers, and the doors began to rattle. He moved the hand in a sweeping motion, and one after the other, the doors of the chambers clicked open.

The mutants that climbed out were dead, but not yet decayed. Some had been flayed open, others half-dissected. Some were still whole, yet to have the secrets of their bodies picked over by those who’d ordered them killed. They stumbled towards Stryker’s men on legs grown emaciated from imprisonment, and when the soldiers fired, they kept coming. The dead felt no pain.

They either didn’t or couldn’t use their powers anymore, so instead they went with tooth and nail, clamping jaws on throats and biting down hard.

Stryker fired at David, but the gun clicked empty, and David held out his hands, let a full clip of unfired bullets tumble from his fingers. He clicked his fingers and Stryker fell. Charles couldn’t even tell what had killed him.

The mutant corpses stilled over their kills, and David murmured, “Shelo ted’u od tza’ar,” waved a hand, turning them to ash. He gave no such cremation to the soldiers, but stepped over them – literally stepped over them, he walked a foot above the floor supported on nothingness until he touched down next to the X-Men and looked at the door they’d just come through.

“David,” said Charles weakly, “Stryker said you were my son.”

“Do you remember Gabrielle Haller?” asked David quietly.

It was so unexpected that it blindsided him. “Gabrielle? That was almost twenty-five years ago…”

“And I just hit twenty-three.”

“You could have come to me,” said Charles earnestly. “You could have come to me before now. You said you run a place for mutants – I do too. We can work together.”

David’s expression shuttered. “No.”

“But –”

“I wiped your mind,” said David. He looked at the other X-Men. “I wiped all your minds. It was the only way for me to be free.”

“Why?” breathed Charles.

David fixed his eyes on the shut door. “Because you were the worst father in the world. Because of you and mum, I did not have a childhood. I wanted to live a life, and you would never have allowed it. Stryker tortured his child, and so did you.” He sighed. “And speaking of wiping minds…” he looked at Kurt. “After you broke free of Stryker’s control, you went to a church where you’d once performed with the circus. Didn’t you think the posters for the performance looked older than you remembered? Would you like to know what you were doing in the years between the circus and now?”

Kurt gasped and clutched his head, then straightened. “David. David! Mein Gott, how could Stryker have made me forget so much!”

He was grinning at David like an old friend, but David still looked serious. “It’s not over yet.”

David took off down the corridor the X-Men had just come through, Kurt matching pace with him like someone who was used to doing it. David was moving fast, purposefully, and even though it meant delaying the time between now and breathing free air, Charles turned his chair and followed them, the X-Men hurrying behind.

David wasn’t waiting to see if he was being followed. He seemed not to care what the X-Men did next, so long as he could keep moving towards his destination, which turned out to be a room full of cells with a single occupant – a young woman with dark hair, wearing a blindfold. Charles recognised her as one of his ex-students, Ruth Aldine.

A pair of mutants were halfway through dismantling the lock on her cell. One of them was another ex-student, Megan Gwynn. The other was a tall, abnormally thin black woman who floated one foot in the air.

“I’ve nearly got the lock,” said Megan. “Give me like half a minute.”

David made a gesture, and the cell door unpeeled itself from its frame.

Instantly, he and Ruth were hugging.

“Worst two weeks of my life,” David muttered into her shoulder.

“Liar,” Ruth murmured back.

“Up for debate,” David replied.

“Your dad knows. Shit.”

Eventually, they pulled back. “Let’s go,” said David. “Kurt, do you want to do the honours, or shall I?”

Kurt grinned. “Four is easy.” He held out his hands, David’s team held on to each other, and they vanished. None of them looked back at the X-Men before they went.

Chapter Text

In the week after Alkali, Charles spent hours going through his own mind with a fine-toothed comb, searching for the memories where his son used to be.

After a time, he was able to spot them, the absences, like a face cut out of a photograph and replaced with background. But he could not recover them. All he could do was find the spaces. Notice the gaps. He suspected it would be the same if he looked into the X-Men’s minds.

He considered calling Gabrielle, but what if David had wiped her mind too? What could we possibly say?

We had a son, but we weren’t very good parents, so he wiped our memories.

What could he ever say to her?

At the end of the week, a box of files arrived at the mansion. Files that had clearly once sat in the X-Men’s own record room.

Right at the top was a pencil sketch of David, young and painfully thin, strapped to a hospital bed, asleep, an IV attached to his arm.

It turned out that what David had not said to him during those brief moments alone together in Cerebro was that since the age of six, he had lived with severe dissociative identity disorder. He’d been treated at a clinic on Muir Island until he ran away in his teens. After that, the X-Men had kept tabs on him with only varying success.

Charles read through the documents from cover to cover – therapists’ notes, medication, descriptions of episodes. If that was how David had spent his childhood, Charles was surprised and even impressed at his ability to hold a conversation. But that moment when he raised the corpses, when he’d suddenly become so angry… had that still been David? Or was that something else?

Once he got to the end of the medical records, the documents turned into surveillance. David had been spotted in such a place, with such a set of people. David had been spotted with Ruth Aldine, and the girl stubbornly refused to stop dating him. David had been spotted talking with his mother.

And after the surveillance documents…

A plan on how to subdue David, if necessary.

Contingency Codename: Daedalus.

“I have a plan,” Scott announced to Charles, “For tracking David down. We need to locate him; he’s clearly unstable, and he violated our minds.”

Charles straightened in his chair. He could sense jealousy radiating off Scott like a wave. Scott, who could no longer privately think of himself as the functional equivalent of a son for Charles Xavier. “And when we find him? What then? He has spent years very pointedly not wanting to be found.”

“I just want to know where he is,” Scott replied. “So if we ever need to locate him, we already know where to look.”

Because obviously Scott didn’t trust David.

“I think the mind-wipe may have been self-defence,” said Charles.

Scott gaped. “Self-defence against what? So maybe he disagreed with you a few times. That doesn’t justify wiping all our minds.”

Charles turned his chair, picked up a file, turned back to Scott, flicked through the file, opened it at a particular page, and passed it to Scott.

“Would you agree to do that to a child?” Charles asked.

Scott skimmed his eyes over the paragraphs. His face turned serious, and he read the words again, slower this time, before looking up at the Professor. “No, of course not. It isn’t humane.”

“And nothing would ever justify doing this to a person?”

“Of course not.” The look on Scott’s face said that he hoped these were hypothetical ethical questions.

“According to the rest of the document, you thought it was perfectly acceptable to do that to David.” Charles looked around the room at the other X-Men. “We all did. Including myself, to my shame. When he wiped himself from our memories, I believe David thought it was the only way to ensure we would never hurt him again. I also believe that the mind wipe has very likely made us better people. I don’t know if I can recover our missing memories, but I find myself disinclined to try. I’ve read the notes I wrote about David, and I do not wish to become that man again.”

Yet some part of Charles wanted to remember. He wanted to remember David. He wanted to remember what it was to be a father.

But he’d been an abysmal father.

In the end, he did call Gabrielle.

David hadn’t wiped her mind, and she hadn’t known about the mindwipe; she and Charles spoke to each other so rarely that six years of radio silence on his end hadn’t seemed strange. That was part of her guess for why David had not erased her own memories. The other half of her guess was that six years ago was when the two of them had begun to patch up their relationship. Gabrielle had apologised to David. She had started meeting up with him a few times a year; she’d become his mother again.

“You’re right,” she told Charles, over the phone. “Perhaps it’s awful of me to say this, but you’re right. You’re different to the way you were before. Kinder.”

“Would you like me to call you more often?” asked Charles. He had never been in love with Gabrielle, but he had liked her, and she had loved him.

“Oh Charles,” said Gabrielle, “We only work when we hardly ever talk to each other.”

After the phone call, she emailed him scans of photographs. David had been such a beautiful child. Most parents thought their children were beautiful, and Charles knew he was biased, but he also knew he was right: David had been beautiful. And as the photos worked their way into David’s teens, he was still beautiful.

Beautiful and ill. Whatever they’d done to him at Muir had set a grey cast to his skin and hollowed out his cheeks and his eye sockets. Comparing those photographs to the way David looked at Alkali – he was so much healthier now. So much healthier now that he’d spent six years away from his father.

It was late one night when Charles did the simple thing, the thing which might yield nothing, but might yield everything. Since David had erased Charles’ memories, he would not have needed to change his name to remain in hiding.

Charles turned on his computer, opened the internet browser, and typed ‘David Haller’ into the search engine.

Charles did not really know David.

He knew what his son had been through on Muir Island, and a little of the months that followed after David ran away, but he did not know what had happened in the six years since he’d lost all memory of his son.

Looking back on what had happened at Alkali had not helped, either. In Cerebro, David had been slightly nervous, slightly confident, but mostly practical. But then, for some reason, he’d teleported to another section of Stryker’s facility and started forcing his way through the corridors, making a show of himself for reasons Charles didn’t understand, all rage and standoffish grandstanding. Then he’d started talking to Kurt, and had switched again, into a young man sick with worry for his friend and his girlfriend. Charles did not think it had been different alters – though Charles had no idea what David’s alters were like after six years where he might have had some treatment for his condition, or he might have had nothing.

So when he wheeled himself into the art gallery, he did not really know what kind of person he was hoping to meet, but the gallery website promised an exhibition of David’s paintings, and that the artist would be present today.

And they were such paintings. Sweeping contrasts of light and colour, forming themselves into landscapes, and portraits of people Charles didn’t know – except for the occasional self-portrait. The brush work was incredibly fine. Charles wondered if David ever applied droplets of paint with his telekinesis to achieve the more delicate details, or if his painting was just that skilful.

Would David be offended if Charles bought one or two of them? The paintings were for sale, after all.

As nervous as he was, Charles couldn’t hold back a smile as he looked around. His son was so talented. He was proud. Even if this meeting went awfully wrong, he could still have this quiet moment of being proud of his son.

The exhibition consisted of three rooms, one after the other, with harp music playing at a distance. Charles recognised Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Then he reached the third room and realised that the music was live. Charles just hadn’t been able to sense the player.

In the corner of the room, David sat at the harp, dressed in black jeans and a dark blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Some harpists performed ostentatiously, posing with each plucked string. David did not. He sat and played, facing forward, not looking at anything in particular.

Then he turned his head, and briefly shot Charles a look that stopped just short of a glare. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue turned into Vivaldi’s Winter.

When the Vivaldi was over, David stood up from the harp and walked past Charles out of the room.

Let’s go somewhere and talk.

Chapter Text

All art gallery cafes were the same. They all served cake that was a little too dry, sandwiches with too much salad in the filling, and indifferent tea. They were always in a room that was too echoing, with lighting that was either too bright, or too dark.

In this particular case, the art gallery café had seating which overlooked the gallery’s atrium, though it was the middle of the day and there were few people that Charles could sense nearby.

There was something about the way David moved. Charles had noticed it a little at Alkali, and he noticed it more in the cool white curving lines of the gallery’s architecture. David moved in a way that was otherworldly. Charles had the sense that if David walked towards a wall, it would either move out of his way, or he’d pass straight through without needing to think about it. The universe rearranged itself around him.

David pulled a chair away from one of the tables so that they could sit face to face over a table that was nothing more than a square of plastic. As distant as Charles felt from his son, the space across the table might have been a chasm.

“So,” said David.

“How are you?” asked Charles.

“That question does not have a simple answer.”

“You sent me that box of files.”

“Yes.”

“I’m so terribly sorry.”

David pulled back in his chair, expression taking on that of a cornered animal. He said, slowly, voice shaking, “I did not ever, not once, think I would get an apology from you.”

“What was done to you was inhumane. I’m ashamed of myself.”

“Who the fuck are you,” David breathed.

“I think the partial erasure of my memories caused a personality shift.”

David shifted his shoulders, hunched over slightly. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t exactly considering all angles when I did it. I could possibly reverse it. I might, since I’m not hiding anymore.”

“Please don’t.”

Now David looked hurt, and Charles wished he’d worded the outburst differently.

“I – I want to remember you,” Charles clarified, “But I don’t want to go back to being that man. The kind of man who thought it necessary to treat you that way and called it kindness.” Charles took a breath. “I’ve read absolutely everything in those files. When you wiped our minds – it was because you’d found out about Contingency Daedalus, didn’t you?”

“That’s one way of putting it,” said David.

“You wanted to make sure I would never use it on you.”

David made a harsh, startled noise that Charles realised was a laugh. “Oh, father. You did use it on me.” David leaned back in his chair. “Did you think I’d give you the details of a contingency plan designed to neutralise me if I didn’t know I could survive it?”

Charles felt a constriction in his chest. I was a monster. “Then how are you –?”

David raised an eyebrow. “Awake? Functional? Not catatonic? You’d underestimated both my power and my discipline. I managed to stay conscious against the attack, and Ruth carried me to safety. I won’t pretend: I was very ill for a long time. My hair turned grey for a bit. If I went to sleep there was no guarantee I’d ever wake up, so I didn’t sleep. For a year I didn’t sleep, until my heath started to recover, and my hair turned black again and we found a few experts who thought I was on the mend. Even after that, I didn’t sleep for another four months out of sheer worry over what might happen. When I finally did, I woke in such a panic than an alter set fire to the sheets. Nearly scorched Ruth. But I healed. I held on. I had to – the alternative was nothing, for the rest of my life.

“So yes, you did use Contingency Daedalus on me. But immediately after we realised what was happening, I decided to erase your memories. I was still in the first throes of the Daedalus’s effects, but I managed it, with Ruth’s help to direct me as it got harder to focus. The instant I knew what you’d done to me, I knew that there was no limit to what you’d do. You would kill me and call it a necessity. Call it kindness. I wanted to live.”

David dropped his gaze to the off-white plastic of the table. “So was that why you came here? To say sorry?”

“Yes. And I wanted to see you.” Was it possible to miss someone you couldn’t remember? “I wanted to see if I could salvage whatever’s left of my opportunity at fatherhood.”

“So what, you read about the PTSD and the extensive DID and the autism and the world-breaking mutant powers and you decided that was what you wanted in a son?”

“It’s what I have in a son,” said Charles gently, “And you’re the only one I’ll ever have. And I hoped that – that is to say, at Alkali, it did not seem as if you entirely hated me.”

David shrugged. “I used to wish I could shake loving you. But I did, even if I couldn’t find a reason why.”

Charles said tentatively, “Were there ever… any good moments?”

“Few enough to make a short rope to hang myself with.”

“But you got me out of Cerebro at Alkali anyway.”

David ran a hand through his hair, looking younger and more vulnerable. The impassive façade he’d worn when he picked out the table was cracking like delicate porcelain.

“Alkali was a mess. I was a mess. I’m usually so bloody impassive when I prepare for missions – too impassive, sometimes. But they had my lover and they had one of my best friends, and we’d been searching two weeks when we finally realised they were in Alkali. But then I sensed you in there too, and what Stryker was making you do. So we split up. Kurt didn’t have all his memories, but he was with the X-Men and not in immediate danger, so Megan and Lost went to break Ruth out, while I went to get you.

“And I did. But Stryker was still loose and he was headed in Ruth’s direction – probably going to get the only mutant he still held captive so he wouldn’t be starting from scratch if he decided to set up a new facility away from Akali. I couldn’t risk him getting to the cells before Ruth was free, so I made myself into a distraction. I’m good at big, showy distractions.”

“You put yourself in the line of fire,” Charles pointed out.

“As we’ve already discussed, I’m tough to kill. I just wish I hadn’t used those bodies. That was messed up.” David couldn’t meet Charles’ eyes. “Those dead mutants deserved more than to be used by me. But I was angry, and worried for Ruth, and some of my alters wanted me to. They can make it hard to say no.”

“It did work out,” Charles reassured him. “You got your teammates safely away. Kurt’s memories were restored. You were improvising, but you did well.”

“Jason’s dead,” rasped David.

Charles kept quiet, giving David space to continue.

“Don’t know if it was a weak immune system from spending all her time in a lab or if she had an infection or if she’d just been dying anyway from what her father was doing to her, but she got sick. We gave her antibiotics, painkillers, anything we thought might work, but it wasn’t enough. She was too – too broken.”

David sniffed. “And she hated us, you know? Hated us, hated all mutants, hated herself. Hated humans too. Hated her father, but she was so desperate for his approval, too. I – we – me and the others who run the refuge, we’d hoped she might learn to think differently, with time. Pick out a new name for herself, too. But she didn’t have any time.

“And we have a few healers at the refuge, fuck, I’m a healer on the right kind of day, but nobody managed to stabilise her for long. So she was just going downhill and downhill and nobody could fucking stop it. We were all just watching her, knowing she would die. Said we’d stay by her in shifts, but nobody really stayed away even if they were off-shift. Too scared that she would go when they weren’t there.

“I think I was singing when she died. Not sure what I was singing, but I think I was singing to her. I don’t know if she understood what was going on. Nobody was hurting her or making demands of her, so maybe she was more comfortable than she’d been in a long time. Or maybe she hated us all. Her thoughts were so confused, and the way her father treated her, sometimes it felt like hating was the only thing she knew how to do anymore.”

David was crying now, the silent weeping of someone who knows that nothing can make their situation better. “We burned her body, and there were these lumps of metal in the ashes from her implants, and what do you even do with something like that?”

Charles wanted to take David’s hand. He wanted to hug him. But Contingency Daedalus had been transmitted to David by touch-telepathy. David’s last memory of his father touching him had not been a good one, and Charles did not want to bring that recollection back any more than he already had.

“It helped,” said Charles very quietly. “Jason spent the last weeks of her life being looked after by people who cared about her, calling her a woman, and doing their best to ease her pain. Even if she couldn’t fully understand what was happening, whatever was left of her would have been comforted by that. You made a difference.”

“She’s still dead.”

“Yes. And it’s alright to mourn her. So long as you don’t view this as your own failure.”

“I wanted to help her,” David whispered.

“You did help her.”

“It doesn’t feel that way.” David took a series of long, shuddering breaths. “I’ve been trying so hard to hold it together today. The first day of my first big art exhibition. I had to turn up, but I’ve been a mess about Jason all week. So I figured if I brought the harp and played, people would write me off as a talented eccentric, but at least I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone.”

“You play well. And you’re an excellent artist.”

David glanced up at his father. “Actually, I wanted to be a physicist. You and mum made sure I was educated on Muir. But no physics department would take someone like me, and I’m a good painter, so… it ended up being art. It brings in money for my team, for the sanctuary we run.”

“I’d like to see this refuge of yours someday. But I know it might take time before you’re comfortable with me visiting there.” Charles reached into his pocket, took out the slip of paper he’d kept there, and passed it across the table to David. “My email and my phone number. You don’t have to contact me. But I’d like it if you did.”

David opened the paper, read the contents, and slipped it into the pocket of his jeans. “Alright.”

“If you ever need resources for the refuge – food, medicine, clothing. I could provide it. Designate a drop-off point and you could take it from there. It wouldn’t compromise your location.”

David fixed his mouth into a line. “We’d have to check it for trackers. And I’d have to okay it with my friends before bringing anything in. But maybe. No promises, you understand. But if it can help my people, then yes.”

“I am proud of you, you know,” Charles told him, smiling. “For all of what you’ve achieved.”

David gave him a small smile. “The other you told me that once or twice. But this time, I think I actually believe you.”

David collected his harp, and teleported home.

Home was a large complex of a building situated in the Himalayas. The Xorn brothers had ownership of the site, and David had created the building with his powers, all large, pale grey arches and organically shaped structures, accented with a rainbow of colours. Newcomers to the refuge claimed they’d never find their way around, but within a few days they’d be doing just that; the layout was intuitive.

He left his harp in the series of rooms he shared with Ruth, then went to one of the communal areas – a kitchen-living room combination with a floor to ceiling window along one wall.

The room was full of people – Ruth, of course, but also Kurt, Megan, the Xorns, Lost, and Xabi. Platters of finger food were laid out. Janelle Monae was playing quietly on the speaker system. There were colourful streamers scattered about the room. It looked like a –

“Are you lot throwing a party?” asked David.

Ruth walked closer to him and offered a small smile. “After Jason, _yes, we all needed cheering up. So we’re using your first big exhibition – _{thank you, please} – as an excuse. To celebrate.”

“Don’t worry,” Marinette reassured him, “I didn’t let Megan anywhere near the playlist.”

“Hey!” exclaimed Megan, filled with mock-outrage. Behind her, Xabi was lining up an improbable number of juices and alcohol, shortly to be transfigured into cocktails.

David moved closer to Ruth and let her slip an arm around his waist. “Yeah. Yeah, alright.”

Briefly, his mind flickered back to earlier that day, and the possibility that this new version of his father brought. But he had family here, too.