The first time she even wondered was after two months of staying with him. Just a kid, she couldn't quite understand the complexity of the familial relationships around her – or lack thereof. It didn't occur to her to question why Charles didn't have a father running around the mansion, hugging him and swinging him onto his shoulders and holding his hand as they crossed the street, just like all the other kids had.

She had never had parents. Not good ones, anyways. Orphaned almost immediately, then fleeing from the terrible orphanage that she got thrown in to. Maybe that was why it didn't bug her that his father wasn't there. She had seen good parents, though; sighing as they reluctantly bought their child a stuffed toy in a store or tucking their child securely in their arms as they carried their sleepy charge home at night. That was why she knew that his mother wasn't a good parent, a caring parent.

His mother wasn't around often. When she came home, she stank of things that a child Raven's age shouldn't know of, of beer and men and the acrid smell of a freshly smoked cigarette. But even with those scents clinging to her, she looked elegant, classy, her dress freshly pressed and not a single hair out of place. Her smile, looking feral to Raven but not to others, gleamed white.

The first time Raven met her, she was afraid. Charles held her hand, though, and sent her encouraging feelings from his mind. At the time, Charles didn't have the superior grasp on his mutation as he would eventually grow to have, so she could feel the undercurrent of unease and reluctance surging through him. He was nervous, but was trying so hard not to let on that she didn't say anything and gave him a shaky smile instead.

"Mum, this is Raven," he said to her. She was in the sitting room, surrounded by ash trays filled to the top with cigarette butts, glasses half full of amber liquid scattered about the room, and the remains of a glass vase – destroyed earlier in a drunken fit of rage – dotting the floor with dangerously-sharp looking shards.

She blinked blearily at him, like she wasn't sure for a moment who he was. Then she said, "So?"

"She's going to be staying with us for a while, mum," he said. "A really long time."

She snorted then, and took a long drag on the cigarette held loosely in her hand. Then she said, to the small child no less, "As long as she doesn't get pregnant, I don't care what you do."

Charles nodded. There were no tricks, no theatrics. Charles was much too young to do anything like erase her memory or convince her to believe that Raven was her daughter. Instead, Charles tugged on her hand and led her away from his mother. Raven could hear Ms. Xavier barking orders at the servants as they left, silly, inconsequential orders that just created more meaningless work for the overtired staff.

They didn't see much of his mother after that. She wasn't in the house often, attending parties and galas and being in important places that children don't care to go to. She was an important community member, well loved for her voluntary service to the homeless kitchen and charitable donations to the nearby children's hospital. After helping out her community, she went to the bar, got smashed, and arrived back at her house in time to pass out.

Charles did his best to keep her away from his mother, though at the time Raven did not realize what he was doing. They were always conveniently occupied at the other end of the mansion, or Charles was sharing some new bit of information with her, or they were asleep. Raven only saw his mother once or twice after that.

So it felt like they were in the same boat, her and Charles. Both parentless, living in a large home, both teaching themselves the lessons that a parent should teach. Later, Raven would discover that Charles would sneak away from her sometimes, aid his mother in getting to her bed. Or clean up her vomit after a particularly bad night. Piece together someone who was inalterably broken.

But that would be much, much later. Too late.

The next time the idea that Charles had a father occurred to her was when they were staring up at his mansion, their recruits around them, and Erik was making some comment or other about how well off he was. Raven felt like yelling, "Stop! Charles didn't have parents his whole life!" but that wasn't true, it wasn't, and he had had a wonderful life up to that point. He had her, didn't he, and didn't she count for something?

So the thought washed off of her like soft butter off a knife, and any curiosity vanished.

The next time she wondered she was surrounded by an overpoweringly antiseptic smell, white-washed walls glaring in her vision as she sat numbly next to the bed of the newly-paralyzed mind-reader. He was asleep ("Let him get some rest… been having terrible nightmares… poor boy…") and Erik was standing next to her, his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists, his eyes squinted as if he couldn't bear to look at Charles full-force.

"I… I'm not sure I can believe it," Raven – no, Mystique now – said, horror and pity and sadness mixing to create a potent elixir in her system. Her friend, her wonderful, smart friend, would now forever be confined to a chair, never again to run around his mansion to help teach a mutant to use his abilities, never again to dive in water to save a friend, never…

She cut these thoughts off. Instead, other things popped into her mind, things she hadn't thought about in years. What would his mother say if she learned he was crippled? Was she even still alive? What about his father?

What about his father?

The thought, the thought that she should have vocalized years ago, now hit her like a ton of bricks. Where was he? Who was he?

"Erik…" she said, caution in her voice, "do you know anything about Charles's father?"

Erik turned to her, confusion on his face, "No, I don't believe I've ever heard him mention him. Why?"

"I don't know anything about him, either," Mystique said, and the issue died there.

They would never ask Charles about his father. It would be something that would be unaddressed for years.

But perhaps they should have. Perhaps it would have lessened the blow that would come, years and years and years later.

They had been captured. Key leaders of the Brotherhood. They were confined in a glass prison, Magneto sitting regally on the bed next to her, while she lounged on the desk, portraying a calculated picture of nonchalance.

But it hadn't been humans to capture them. No, it had been something else, something sinister, something bigger that had wanted mutants out of the picture. And without her and Magneto, the brotherhood would slowly dissolve into chaos, uncoordinated and sloppy. Whoever had captured them had succeeded in their goals just by taking them, and Mystique knew that Professor Xavier and his little band of human-loving freaks would let the "normal" people overrun them and hunt them out of existence.

But the person who had captured them had stupidly not tied them up, leaving them to wander the glass prison. It had striking similarities to the one that Magneto had been kept in during the entire Stryker ordeal, and Mystique could see him grimacing now and again in remembered pain.

Then the door swished open, and two soldiers – wearing no metal – pushed in more people. Professor Xavier's silly little "X-Men". In came Scott Summers, his glasses gone and eyes shut tight. In came Jean Gray, looking worse for wear and gray in the face. In came Logan, uncharacteristically silent, tied to Hank McCoy, both positioned strategically so that if one attempted to tear through the restraints they would effectively tear the other person open. They were sat down roughly on the floor near the desk Mystique was occupying, before the soldiers marched out. Accusing eyes turned to her and Magneto.

"You did this!" accused Logan instantly, anger written on every line of his face.

"Not at all. We're just as surprised as you are." Mystique could tell that Magneto wasn't quite sure to what to make of this situation, especially when Jean groaned at the noise and put her head between her knees.

"Jean? Are you okay?" Scott patted the ground next to him, trying to blindly find his way to his wife's side. "What happened?"

"They've got some sort of telepath. But not like the Professor – this guy tears through your mind, digging up all your worst memories and playing them over and over," whispered Jean. "The worst part is, he went through my mental shields like they weren't even there."

It would take several hours before the men wheeled in the Professor, looking even sicker than Jean Gray. He was instantly deluged with questions from his gang, the concerned allies making his headache a thousand times worse.

"I'm fine," he said, smiling gently. Instantly, Mystique could feel hints of the Professor's influence in her mind, because she began to calm down, began to feel more optimistic about this entire situation. She felt like standing up and yelling at him, but she didn't.

A few minutes later, a man entered, a clipboard clutched in his hands and glassed perched on his nose. He talked for a while, something about experimentation on mutants and how he had always wanted to figure out how their powers worked, and how their past affected whether or not they became a "good" mutant or a "bad" mutant.

But Mystique wasn't listening. Her attention was focused on the man behind him. She had never seen this man before, but the sinister waves coming off him made it obvious that this was the man who had hurt Jean Gray and Charles. And then the clipboard man finished his speech. Mystique was sure that Logan had made a smart comment about something or other, but all she knew was that that man was stepping towards her and then putting his hands on her temples –

And then it hurthurthurt and it felt like memories were gushing out of her very ears and she couldn' and she wanted him to stopstopstop and she would do anything, absolutely anything, just as long as the pain the horrible pain the painful pain just went away and –

Then it stopped. She had fallen off the desk sometime ago, lying on the floor staring at the glass ceiling. She was vaguely aware of Magneto saying something, something threatening, and of the X-Men's shouts. Then the man moved on.

He kept moving on. Every one of them got the same treatment. They screamed, writhed under this man's painful poke to the temple.

Then they left.

There was no talking for hours as everyone tried to gain their bearings. The silence was occasionally broken as they shuffled a little, trying to find comfortable positions. And then the door made that awful swishing noise again, and the clipboard man came back in.

This time, he was without his terrible assistant. A flummoxed look was on his face, though.

"I don't understand," he announced to the room. "At first, you all seemed to fit into the exact modes I thought you would. The more extreme mutants – namely Mystique and Magneto – had poor childhoods." He gestured to them as if no one in the room knew who they were. "Then I thought that the passive side would have either good childhoods with a traumatizing event in order to inspire you to act, or a good childhood overall, or something along those lines. But my readings show that several of you do not."

First he stared at Logan. He began to talk for a bit about Logan's past, but Mystique tuned it out. She didn't care, because her mind was focused on one thing –

A bad childhood? She wouldn't call it that bad. Sure, she couldn't attend school or walk outside in her natural form. But Charles – Professor X – had made sure that she had had everything she needed, including companionship.

Clipboard man kept talking. "And I'm surprised especially with you, Charles."

Mystique's attention abruptly snapped back to clipboard man. How could he be surprised? He had a traumatizing event… though she supposed that wasn't what caused him to act. Char – Professor X was motivated by his goodness, his kindness.

"I mean, considering the parents you had, you should have been a bad mutant years ago," said clipboard man. Mystique felt a ping of anger at the classification "bad mutant", but held her tongue.

"I mean, a father like yours –"

Then the wall exploded, and the younger mutants – Rogue, Bobby, Pyro – burst through, saving the day.

Later, when they had gone their separate ways, her thoughts never wandered far from what that could mean. Judging by the look on Magneto's face, he was wondering to.

They thought about a friend who they had primarily judged based on a past that wasn't as good as they had originally assumed. They thought about a friend who had helped out mutants, at the cost of his own safety and welfare. They thought about a friend who had helped them reach their own potential, taught them everything they knew.

They thought about a friend who they had abandoned on a beach, left him to his own paralysis in order to pursue their own dreams and ambitions.

They thought about a friend – their friend – who they were indebted to, who they had failed.

Perhaps, long ago, this would have been avoided, this entire mess of a war, if they had opened their eyes to what Professor X – Charles – was going through for them.

Went through for them. And for others. But not for himself.