Aglaea ("Beauty")
The wrinkles can't quite erase the face she once had.
She examines her head in the mirror with eyes still dark and clear, counting the black hairs among the white. She's on eighteen when her husband enters the room; on nineteen when he stops behind her to close his hand over her upper arm.
"I'm busy," she says severely when he attempts to kiss her under her ear, though she tips her head to let him anyway. If she cheats, she can count an odd reddish strand that hasn't quite made up its mind to grey yet. Twenty. She holds it away from her head and crosses her eyes to study it.
He tucks his chin in the curve where her neck meets her shoulder and smiles at her reflection in the glass. "Who's this young woman?" he asks, as he always does. "What have you done with my wife?"
"An old woman," she scoffs. Try as she might, she cannot find a twenty-one. She dips her head towards the mirror again, peering through fallen hair to search the snowy scalp. "A dried up husk."
"Fresh," he says. "Like a kiri tree."
"Foolish old man," she scolds, and pinches her nose, embarrassing herself with a vanity she refuses to acknowledge aloud. The face in the mirror makes a face, deliberately comical. Age has relaxed the skin that was tight in her youth, and hollowed the curves of her cheeks. The line of her jaw is no longer as clean as it once was. She traces it, massaging the sag of her throat, and thinks wondering thoughts about mortality.
His hand closes over hers, twining gnarled fingers between slim ones. "Like an autumn dusk," he says with reckless extravagance. He brushes his lips against her knuckles. "The maple leaves of fall."
She turns her head to look back at him. "Foolish old man," she says again, but her lips twitch as she says it.
He stoops with great dignity to kiss her on the lips. His taste like green tea; hers like peach. "When a man reaches my age and is married to such a woman, he is entitled," he says. "It is the privilege of a long life, to rest and bask in the company of the wife he has managed to win."
"Old," she says.
"Graceful," he says.
"Barren."
"Beautiful."
She can see herself reflected in miniature in his eyes. They are more truthful than the mirror. It is hard to argue with such belief. "Like an autumn dusk," she says, and smiles.
Euphrosyne ("Mirth")
There is a grasshopper sitting on the Professor's shoulder.
He is oblivious, his attention engrossed in the retelling of some historical event. Scott's specialty, tactics, but Xavier has never cared about such boundaries. An audience is an audience, and by some tortuous route only he or Hank McCoy would find reasonable, he has worked the conversation to the Battle of Thermopylae. "In 480 BC the pass was a narrow track only a few yards wide," he tells the students at his feet, hands sketching the outlines of a cliff. "Herodotus wrote--"
The older students roll despairing eyes at her. She takes pity on them and leans across the blanket, crushing grass under the palm of her hand. "Charles," she says. "You have a bug."
The enthusiastic storyteller's voice breaks off, focus tugged out of the path of narrative. "A bug?" Xavier echoes. His brows draw together and he cranes to look down at his immaculate front. Even dressed in a tropical shirt and shorts, he wears his clothes as though freshly pressed.
She cups her hand and strikes, closing it in a cage over the insect on his shoulder. It bumps into her palm, bouncing against imprisonment in a startled hiccup. A second leap is more successful; she feels the little prickles of hooks digging into her skin, latching on. It tickles.
Charles murmurs something grateful. Freed by his distraction, students scatter and escape around them. He looks after them with a frown.
"Children have no appreciation of history," he says regretfully. She opens her hand, palm up, and frees the grasshopper over Sean's potato salad. It clings, refusing liberty, and stares at the luncheon spread without approval.
"Thermopylae," she says. The sun feels warm against her bare arms. "It's Saturday, Charles."
"Nonetheless," he says, and then smiles, warming her much as the sun does. His gaze slips to the grasshopper. She spreads her fingers, attempting to whisk it off with a shake of her hand. It digs in stubbornly. "Are you intending to garnish our lunch with it?" he asks in mild tones.
She smiles back, reaching to pluck it off. It moves adroitly, avoiding the oncoming fingers, and crouches between her joints to glare at her around a knuckle. "I'm no cook," she admits. A gust of charcoal-thick haze from the grill pours past them, and she looks to where the rest of the X-Men are struggling with the grill. "But then, neither is Sean."
The noise of children playing is loud across the park. The Banshee's argument with Hank is no less exuberant. Dr. McCoy is eloquent on the origins of the word 'kindling.' "A fine chef," Xavier says tolerantly. Cassidy is nearly invisible behind the smoke. "Our very own Chimney Cricket."
She laughs. The grasshopper, startled, flits away.
Thalia ("Good Cheer")
She is a whisper on the outskirts of the family.
She hugs the shadows and sits behind doors, a silhouette of a secret pressed on rice paper. Conversations part around her and flow on, wearing away her silence to carry it further down the currents of history. She is there in a thousand ways, in the spaces and the stillnesses: shibui. They acknowledge her with a pause, then move on.
She is a ghost. They do not speak of her.
The small children see her, knowing nothing of mortality or immortality. They smile, shyly at first, then with growing confidence; something in them, some memory of blood, recognizes her smiles back. In dusty rooms now emptied by time they play their games, strange, quixotic ones involving string and balls and small pebbles picked from the garden. They romp on her as though she were a magical toy (she is) unbreakable and inexhaustible and endless (she is, she is!) filling empty chambers with the shriek of their laughter. When even their energy is spent, they curl like puppies and nestle along the line of her stomach and hip, little limbs heavy and sodden with dreams of future play. She tangles herself around them, almost not daring to breathe, balanced on that beautiful, aching edge of love.
At some point they learn to recognize the strangeness, to follow as their elders lead. They drift away and she is left invisible again, like a cobweb in the corner of the room. They grow while she watches from the shadows, childhood's rounded faces giving way to strong ones. Lives web out from the household, escaping to other homes, knitting with other lives. Some return to the nest, bearing their stories with them, adding new blood. She sits outside the windows and listens to their laughter, her head leaned against the walls, hands pressed against the wood as though will alone could resurrect the drowsy little children long gone. She basks in their warmth, never quite touching. Their eyes slide off her. She skirts the light.
When the stories die, she fades away to bide her time patiently, waiting for the next generation. She submerges herself into the background, nostalgia poised like a ghost-white crane around a bend in the hall. There will be more children if she waits long enough. If she endures.