Charles is 13, slumped on the floor of the third-story bathroom and he is so, so tired, he almost doesn't feel the little blue girl coming up beside him.
Raven is 9 and she's coming at Charles with an iodine-soaked towel and a determined gleam in her lovely yellow eyes.
"Raven…" Charles sighs, leaning back against the bathroom wall, unsure if he's putting up a token protest or just acknowledging her.
"Shirt." The one word demand is more forceful than Charles has the energy to argue with and he coaxes his sore muscles into complying with it.
His fingers fumble at the buttons of his shirt, clumsy with fatigue and pain, and Raven watches with muted anxiety but makes no move to help. I can do it myself, echoed time and time again, so often that Raven rarely tries to help Charles through the rudiments of their routine anymore.
Charles's sleeves are already rolled up to the elbow and he guides the cuffs carefully over his thin wrists so as to avoid stains. Then, belying his earlier care, he balls the article up and tosses it in the vague direction of the hamper. He misses.
Raven's eyes roam his torso critically, searching for new marks to sooth. Charles wishes she didn't know how to care for bruises and welts and burns the way she did. He had wanted to keep her from this part of his life, keep her only as the happy little cousin he had convinced his parents she was, but lines had a way of getting crossed Charles's life, and here they sat.
Delicate, blue-scaled fingers pick up his left hand and begin wiping away the blood from his torn wrist. Charles hisses as the alcohol hits his skin, but is otherwise quiet while Raven cleans first his left arm, then his right. "You'd think he'd at least put out for padded cuffs." Charles jokes thinly.
He hadn't expected to provoke any sort of mirth in his adopted sister and isn't disappointed when she keeps her eyes on his wrists, wrapping them with (really a little too much) gauze and finishing off the bandages with medical tape. Then she turns her attention to his bruise-riddled torso. The only new mark her sharp eyes find among older contusions of fists and restraints is a thick band of angry red across his ribs. "That looks…" She starts, reaching out tentatively.
"Nothing broken," He assures her, placing his hand over hers and settling it gently in her own lap, "Just had to make sure I didn't… thrash about. Hurt myself or anyone else."
A look too serious for a 9-year-old pulls at the corners of Raven's blue lips. "What about your ankles?" She asks, having patched up those same joints in the past.
Charles just shakes his head. "Thick socks do wonders, you know. Just bruises." He mumbles, "Always just bruises."
Raven suddenly looks fiercely angry, standing up and throwing the soiled towel into the sink with a vengeance. "He can't do this to you!" She cries, crumpling her fingers into fists, "He can't keep hurting you!"
"I think that he can, actually," Charles replies dully, "I'm his step-son, his pet project, and practically his property. He can do as he likes."
"But that isn't right, Charles, it's not!" Raven's voice is shrill and Charles would worry about attracting attention if anyone actually cared what they were up to, "There has to be a way to make him stop!"
"There isn't, though. This research is all home-based and personally paid for; there isn't anyone in power above him that can… I don't know, pull his funding, or something. Look at it this way," Charles cajoles, trying to talk the girl off the ledge, "At least I'm learning the limits of my powers."
"This isn't the way you should do it. I-I'll make him stop!" Raven utters with conviction.
Charles smiles his tired, indulgent smile, the one he saves for arguments like this. "How will you do that, dear?"
For a moment, Raven is unsure, but Charles can still feel the determination and conviction singing through her young mind, even exhausted as he is. Her eyes light up with an idea at last. "I'll turn into God! I'll turn into God and I'll come to him and I'll make him stop!"
Charles blinks up at the girl, genuinely surprised. "Raven… there is no God." He tells her softly, bluntly.
"What?" She asks, as though he hadn't been clear enough.
"There is no God, Raven. Just this." He gestures around the bathroom with his bandaged hands, at his crumpled shirt, at the bloody towel, at the seething and confused girl, at his own abused body, and drops his arms with a sigh, "Just… this."
He almost wishes he could take the statement back as Raven seems to shrink before him. Better she knows now.
"Then… what do I do?" She asks, her voice so small it might be the night he found her digging in the icebox.
Charles hesitates. The he holds up his arms once more. "Give me a hug?" He requests, and immediately finds his arms full of Raven.
She curls up in his lap like the sad child she is, though he's only a few inches bigger than her, burying her face in his neck and wrapping her arms gently around his midsection.
He returns the embrace, laying his cheek on her hair and pretending fiercely that doesn't feel salt tears on his bare shoulder, that his mother isn't passed out halfway across the house, that his step-brother wasn't waiting for a new excuse to throw fists at him, and that Kurt hadn't told him to come back tomorrow afternoon for more tests. He pretends that it isn't half past midnight and that he can make Raven happy and that one day they will be past this.
But he never pretends that he believes there is someone coming to save him. There are only so many lies he can tell himself.
Instead he holds Raven and pretends not to cry, too.