All of this enters the child's consciousness much sooner than we as adults would like to think it does. As adults, we are easily fooled because we are so anxious to be fooled. But children are very different. Children, not yet aware that it is dangerous to look too deeply at anything, look at everything, look at each other, and draw their own conclusions. They don't have the vocabulary to express what they see, and we, their elders, know how to intimidate them very easily and very soon. - James Baldwin

Kurt didn't really understand what was happening, but the nice man was crying and his mother was upset and it seemed to the boy that all of this was somehow because of him.

His mother was upset, but she wasn't crying like Charles was. She paced the room, a caged tiger, never coming very close to the wheelchair.

Kurt could not remember ever having seen her cry. He would never have imagined the amount of time she had spent doing so in the year prior to his birth. He couldn't know – would never know – how something in the ravening wound that passed for her heart had hardened the first time she held him, how an animalistic sort of mother-love had overtaken those weak and conflicted tears and replaced them with a ferocious determination to protect him from the hostile world by whatever means necessary.

But the man in the chair was crying. He was crying softly and as though he didn't want to, and Kurt watched as his hands swiped frustratedly at his wet eyes. There were dark rings around his eyes, and Kurt wondered if they were bruises, if they came from crying too much and then rubbing at your face to dry it.

Kurt spent a lot of time crying, too. Almost everyone in his life was hurting and angry in ways that he couldn't understand and which no one had properly explained to him, and he cried because of that and because he could tell that there were bad and dangerous things which wanted to harm him lurking beyond the walls of their home, though the face of this threat was as yet unclear to him. He was confused and scared almost all of the time so he cried a lot.

He didn't know why the strange man was crying now. Kurt didn't understand that Charles was weeping because he had held in his mind a very different picture of his sister's life with the Brotherhood than what he was seeing now, and at the root of this discrepancy he felt hatred and believed that it had to do with him.

Had Charles read her thoughts he might have seen differently, but she had forbidden this and he kept his promise now. Much future difficulty might have been avoided if not for this misunderstanding.

As things were, it seemed to Charles that the fact that she had cut him out of her life to such a staggering degree could only mean that she now loathed him. It was an easy mistake to make; he was not good at understanding people without the aid of his ability, and Raven's own motives for keeping silent about so much were to a certain degree a mystery even to herself.

In any case, now the nephew that Charles hadn't known he had was sitting on his numb knees, the most good natured child the world could hope to see, looking up at him with smoky, worried eyes. And so Charles cried.

Kurt crawled to his feet, his tail swaying for balance as he stood precariously on Charles's atrophied legs, and kissed Charles on the cheek. "Crying," he observed. His chubby, three-fingered hand patted the other side of Charles's face gently. "Owie. Crying, Mama, ow?" he asked, turning to look to his mother for help.

The movement caused Kurt to begin to lose his balance. Charles caught him before he could tumble and sat Kurt back down in his lap almost possessively.

The boy waited, still looking into his mother's face intently, but none of the make-it-better kisses that she always had for him were given to the man in the wheelchair now, even though he was still crying.

"I didn't want you to worry about me," Mystique said flatly.

The man in the chair sputtered. He was thinking about all the broken people they had found at the CIA base, though Kurt didn't know anything about that. He was seeing his mind a picture of his sister dead in the same way.

"Well – well, I am bloody well worried," he roared suddenly, and Kurt winced and pressed his hands over his ears. "Azazel – my god, what are you even thinking?" His voice was softer now. It was something like a hiss. "After what happened – all those people... Oliver Platt –"

There were coals in his mother's eyes. Kurt was afraid someone might get burned. "Erik is at least as dangerous as he is, and that didn't stop you."

"Ought to it have?" Charles asked. The presence of the wheelchair grew suddenly. Mystique had tried to avoid staring at it, but now she looked and saw that the thing was made entirely of plastic and canvas. No metal at all – or at least, none that she could see.

She had spoken angrily because she had not known how to defend herself and because she had expected that Charles would argue and therefore give her an opening to steer the topic to something else. Now she could think of nothing else to say – nothing, at any rate, that could be said easily – and the ensuing silence dragged on for such a long time that Kurt began to become bored. He leaned over the wheelchair's armrest, reaching downward for the acrylic spokes of one of the large wheels, trying to see if he could make it turn.

Kurt's busy tail struck Charles softly against the bridge of his nose and Charles nudged it out of his face, noting as he did so that the spade at the end of the boy's tail was rounded and blunt, very different from the stinger-sharp end of Azazel's tail.

"He's a wonderful child," Charles said. He'd finally gotten the tears under control. Mystique was relieved.

"I know it," she said. "Look, Charles, I –"

"Oh good lord," Charles said suddenly, but not to her. He frowned at the closed door.

He sat Kurt back down in his lap, advising, "Hands and legs – and tails – inside of the vehicle, please." He rolled toward the door and Mystique stepped ahead to open it for him.

Kurt liked riding in the wheelchair – it was fun – but when they crossed into the living room Kurt felt his smile curl up and run away.

Azazel was on the other side of the door, and usually seeing his Papa would have made Kurt very happy, but he was angry. He was very angry and there was ice in his eyes, and Kurt's head turned to follow Azazel gaze to find what had made him so angry, and he saw that there was a new stranger standing in the corner and that that man was mad, too.

"Everything alright out here?" Charles asked with forced cheerfulness, knowing very well that it was not. Neither man was easy to read – Azazel's thoughts were a jumble of strange associations, difficult to follow, and the mind of the other was oblique – but the hate-feelings that were passing between them roared like static inside Charles's head. "There's a couple of good chaps," he added brightly, and smiled without showing any teeth.

Charles glanced quickly – hopefully – at his sister. "This is James – Jim, rather," he explained. "Howlett. New recruit, you know."

The new man was head and shoulders shorter than Azazel, and he was very hairy. Kurt could tell from the other side of the room that he smelled like sweat and beer and smoking, but he wanted to go over and see him anyway. Kurt didn't get to meet many new people, and he liked everyone.

Charles held him back when Kurt tried to wiggle down to the ground. "Stay here with your uncle for a little while longer," he said, which confused Kurt, because he didn't see Erik anywhere.

Mystique had seen the distaste that tightened the muscles of Azazel's jaw as he glared at the other man, and she'd noted the mean, mocking light that danced in the stranger's narrowed eyes. Now she heard the edge in Charles's voice and learned over to take Kurt from him, drawing the boy up into her arms.

Jim's head turned. Kurt thought the man was looking at him (though in actuality it was his mother that Jim's eyes were crawling over) and it was a bad sort of stare so he buried his face against she shoulder and closed his eyes.

He didn't look up again until he heard the front door open and Erik's voice calling out.