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From what Erik could tell, no one seemed to care very much about Charles’s disappearance.
… But no, that wasn’t right.
For people seemed to care about Charles, that much was certain. The picture that Erik got of him from the people that he talked to was a very flattering one – one that, Erik was pleased to note, complemented his own mental image of the man he was searching for. The problem wasn’t that they didn’t care; it was more that they weren’t concerned.
‘Nonsense,’ he was told by one overly-condescending senior lecturer. ‘Charles isn’t missing. Far too smart to be one of those people,’ he said with a sniff, and Erik had to severely restrain himself from punching the man squarely on his pointed, upturned nose. ‘No, no, he’s off in some secret lab, no doubt, working away at some problem or the other. He’ll resurface soon enough, don’t you worry.’
And that was the problem; everyone seemed to believe that Charles Xavier was off in some top-secret bunker, doing some classified, hush-hush work for god only knew who.
‘It’s kind of what he hinted at,’ one of Xavier’s old lab assistants said when Erik questioned him. ‘That he had got some sort of offer and he was taking it and that we shouldn’t search for him as he would be … how did he put it? – “deep underground”.’
Erik’s eyebrows rose.
‘Yeah,’ the man grinned. ‘Sounds like some sort of spy gig, doesn’t it? I would think so too, but Charles, bless his heart, doesn’t have a secretive bone in his body.’
Erik had smiled at that. No, he thought, remembering the bright, trusting face from the picture, Charles wasn’t the type to hide things. He would be open and honest and sincere, and –
The lab-assistant began to speak once more, breaking Erik’s reverie.
‘I’m sure he’s all right, though,’ the man was saying. ‘He can look after himself, Charles, even if he doesn’t quite look like it. Plus there’s the fact that he’d never let anything happen to his sister.’
Erik’s head jerked up.
‘Sister?’ he repeated. ‘Charles has a sister?’
The lab-assistant gave him an odd look – was it because he hadn’t known about the existence of the sister or because he had referred to the man’s colleague as “Charles” instead of “Xavier”? – before speaking.
‘Yeah,’ he said slowly. ‘Younger than him. Completely unlike him in almost every way.’ The corners of his mouth pulled up in a smile. ‘I met her one night when Charles and I went out for drinks. The two of them together are … interesting.’ He smiled fondly.
Erik found himself gritting his teeth, startled by the sudden curl of jealousy that seared through him. He frowned, shaking his head at the unexpected emotion. Quickly pushing it to the side, he determinedly focused his attention on the man in front of him.
‘What was her name?’ he asked brusquely, trying not to scowl at the man. ‘The sister, I mean.’
The assistant frowned.
‘I actually can’t quite remember,’ he admitted almost guiltily. ‘I know, I know – I met the girl and everything but I was quite drunk at the time, you understand. Charles talked about her all the time, though. What was her name? Something unusual, I think. Raina? Rowena? Or – Robin. Maybe it was Robin.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said apologetically. ‘I just can’t seem to put my finger on it.’
Erik grunted at that, and after a few more questions, had gruffly thanked the man and left.
A sister, he thought to himself. That changed things somewhat. There was still somebody out there in the world – someone other than him, of course – who cared about Charles’s existence.
He wasn’t quite sure how he felt about that.
He spent the next few nights trying to find out anything he could about a Xavier sibling, but all of his searches turned up fruitless. The lab-assistant’s guesses at a name weren’t much help either, Erik thought grumpily. Sighing, he turned his face towards the picture on his wall.
Charles stared back at him, calm and patient as always.
‘It’s taking time,’ Erik told him earnestly, ‘But we’ll get there in the end. I promise.’
Charles seemed to smile back at him gently.
Erik stared for a moment more before getting up and heading deliberately to the kitchen.
If he was going to lose his mind then he may as well do it with the aid of some good, strong alcohol.
*
A few weeks passed in this way. Erik rarely bothered showing up to work now. He did everything asked of him in the shortest amount of time possible and then immediately went back to searching for Charles and the Dollhouse. In a way, it was lucky that his reputation had sunk so deeply at the department – this way he was only saddled with boring, routine cases and paperwork, most of which he could finish at home if he so wished. The rest was the sort of mind-numbing drudge-work that allowed him to operate with only a fraction of his attention on the matter at hand; the rest of his mind was devoted to Charles.
By now Erik knew all that a person who had never actually met Charles Xavier could know about the man in question. He had talked to all of his known friends, he had trawled through innumerable websites and bios about the man – he had even gone so far as to wade through the incomprehensible morass that was Charles’s legion of journal articles and scientific texts, if only to try to glean a whiff of what the man was like. Granted, he did not get very much from his perusal of those works, but it nevertheless firmly reassured him of the fact that Charles was fantastically intelligent.
So what, he couldn’t help but think to himself, was someone so very intelligent doing with the Dollhouse?
This was the question that preyed on Erik’s mind the most. Charles was connected to the Dollhouse, Erik was sure of it. His strange disappearance, so much like Magda’s; the mysterious envelope that had arrived at Erik’s desk just at the moment that he was thinking of giving up … it was too much of a coincidence. The only real puzzle was the capacity in which Charles Xavier was employed by the Dollhouse. Common sense dictated that his position was that of a scientist, as he had been prior to his disappearance, but something in Erik hesitated to settle on that solution.
He turned his gaze to the picture on his wall, contemplative. No, he still couldn’t see it. The Dollhouse was bad – everyone knew that. The very notion of it made Erik’s skin crawl and he was as hardened and stoic as any tough-as-nails-detective cliché out there. Looking at Charles … Erik shook his head. Charles wouldn’t want to be involved in something like that. He just wouldn’t. His expression was too soft, his eyes too kind. Even his previous colleagues had mentioned Charles’s kindness, his soft-heartedness. There was no way that someone as good as Charles would have anything to do with the Dollhouse – not like that.
But then … what else?
Erik shook his head. He didn’t particularly want to follow that line of thought.
Thump!
The sudden sound from outside his door snapped Erik out of his thoughts and back into the real world. He froze in his chair, still as a statue. Just as he was beginning to wonder if he had imagined the noise, it happened again.
Thump!
Slowly peeling himself off his chair, Erik cast a quick glance up at the clock on the wall. It was a quarter to eleven at night; far too late for visitors, if indeed he were to have anyone who cared to visit him, which he did not. Erik was also the only one with an apartment on this floor; the flat opposite his had been empty for as long as he could remember and frankly, he preferred it that way.
That, of course, only made the noise more suspicious. Carefully reaching for his gun, Erik quietly slunk over to the door, his heart beating fast. He had been waiting for something to happen from the moment that he had started searching for the Dollhouse. He supposed that the time had finally come.
Unlatching his door as quietly as possible, Erik opened it a crack and peered through. A dark figure was standing at the door of the empty apartment, trying to quietly break in, their back to Erik’s door.
Smiling grimly – they really should have checked the door number before breaking in – Erik decided to use the intruder’s mistake against them. Quickly pushing through the door without so much of a rustle of clothing, Erik stepped forward until the nose of his gun was pressed up into the intruder’s back.
‘No sudden moves,’ he hissed out, eyes fixed on the back of the figure’s hoodie-covered head. ‘Put your hands up where I can see them and step away from the door.’
In his time as a police detective, Erik had witnessed many reactions from criminals upon being apprehended by a policeman with a gun. He was therefore surprised when, upon hissing out his instructions to the intruder before him, he was met not with a growl or a curse or an attempt to flee, but with a high, feminine shriek that almost made him drop his gun.
‘Oh you have got to be kidding me!’ came a girlish wail and Erik, startled, immediately reached out and grasped hold of the intruder’s shoulder, pulling them around so that they were face to face.
It was a girl. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and she was looking at Erik with something akin to amazed horror.
‘What are you doing here?’ Erik snapped out, gun still trained on the girl even though he was relatively sure that this incident probably didn’t have anything to do with the Dollhouse. ‘Who are you?’
The girl blinked, wide-eyed, and in a fraction of a second, her pale, scared face had transformed into an expression of angry indignation.
‘Who am I?’ she growled, the ire in her voice surprising Erik. ‘Who the fuck are you?’
Erik blinked.
‘I’m Erik Lehnsherr,’ he said dumbly, before he could stop himself.
The girl glared at him.
‘Well hoo-fucking-ray for you!’ she sneered. ‘Now fucking let me go, or tell me why the fuck you are holding me at gun-point outside my own goddamn apartment!’
Erik stared.
‘Your apartment?’ he repeated, mentally cursing himself for sounding so hopelessly dim and gormless. Maybe being reduced to doing the grunt-work at the department had worse consequences for his intellect than he had realised.
‘Yes!’
‘But the flat’s been empty for years,’ Erik said slowly, still not lowering the gun.
‘And now it’s not,’ the girl snapped, rolling her eyes. ‘I moved in this morning, okay?’
‘Oh,’ Erik blinked, unsure what to do next. Deciding that the best thing to do would be to put his gun away, he quickly thumbed on the safety before sliding the gun into the back of his trousers. ‘Right. Hello, then. I – I’m Erik Lehnsherr.’
The girl, who seemed to relax a great deal more now that the gun was out of sight, raised an eyebrow.
‘Charmed,’ she drawled, folding her arms and leaning back against her door. ‘Now, care to tell me why you ambushed me outside my door like some sort of motherfucking serial killer?’
Erik frowned.
‘Nobody usually comes by at this time,’ he muttered, ‘And there’s this case I’m working on. I thought you were trying to break into my apartment but got the wrong door.’
The girl smirked at that.
‘I would have to be pretty goddamn stupid for that,’ she said, arms still crossed, ‘considering that the door numbers are hanging right there in the middle of the door.’
‘Yes, well,’ Erik said, refusing to feel embarrassed. ‘You come across a lot of idiots in my line of work.’
The girl cocked her head at that and assessed Erik thoughtfully.
‘You said you were working on a case,’ she said slowly. ‘You a lawyer?’
‘Police officer,’ Erik corrected. ‘Police detective, to be more accurate.’
To his surprise, the girl grinned at that.
‘Awesome,’ she said, her genuine enthusiasm allowing her youth to shine through. ‘And kind of a relief, too. Good to know that there’s a reason why you’re a paranoid dick with a gun.’
Erik raised an eyebrow.
‘Well you kind of are,’ the girl said in a tone that was supposedly meant to placate him. ‘A dick, that is. I mean, what kind of asshole does things like that? Seriously?’
Erik grunted.
‘Watch it,’ he said dryly, ‘I am, after all, a paranoid dick with a gun.’
The girl’s mouth split into a sudden grin.
‘You know,’ she said, eyes twinkling, ‘I think I might just grow to like you.’ She paused. ‘Despite the fact that you jammed a gun into my back instead of saying “hi” like any other normal neighbour.’
Erik wasn’t particularly used to being liked, but he was willing to go with it if it led the girl to dismiss his rather rude ambush of her. They were going to be neighbours, after all.
‘Right,’ he grunted, feeling slightly awkward now. ‘I suppose I should say “Welcome to the building” or some shit like that?’
‘That would be traditional,’ the girl said, nodding gravely.
Erik shrugged.
‘Well, in that case,’ he said, ‘Welcome to the building. The manager’s a dick, the electricity sometimes shorts out, and getting the lift to work is a bitch. I hope you like it here.’
The girl gave him an amused smile.
‘Yes,’ she said meditatively. ‘We will definitely get on.’
Erik raised an eyebrow.
‘If you say so,’ he said, noncommittal, before turning around to head back to his apartment. He paused at the threshold of his door, however, and turned back to face the girl, a frown on his face. ‘I don’t think I got your name?’ he said evenly.
The girl was still standing by her door, watching him closely.
‘You’re right,’ she said at last. ‘You didn’t.’
Erik waited.
‘Care to tell me?’ he asked dryly, when she didn’t speak.
The girl smiled then, a strange, curious smile that Erik couldn’t for the life of him decipher.
‘Yes,’ she said, smiling. ‘My name is Raven. Raven Darkholme.’
And with that, she turned on her heel, pushed the door of her flat open, and, giving him a wink, closed the door behind her.