A/N: Mystique and Eric are back together, and they are a joy to write! I hope you enjoy this chapter.

Chapter Ten – Diagnosis

Raven watched Eric carefully as he took in her meagre home surroundings. She could see the revulsion in his eyes but, to her surprise, he said nothing. A silence fell between them, unspoken thoughts gathering like thick storm clouds above their heads. Raven could not quite believe she was sitting opposite the man she had sworn to kill, having invited him into her home and even made him tea. During the short walk to her apartment, Raven could have been walking with a stranger rather than the person she knew best. Whereas before, Eric would walk proud daring the world to challenge him, now he kept his head down and refused to look the world in the eye. He was ashamed, humiliated, weakened and defeated. And Raven could not bear it. The silence stretched on, like an enchantment, too strong to be broken but Raven had to speak. Her shift at the café was due to begin in half an hour.

"My Mystique, working in a café? Oh, that is intolerable."

"What would you rather I do, Eric? Sleep on the streets?" The passion of her response surprised him.

"My dear, I did not mean to imply…"

"Don't, Eric. I want everything back the way it was just as much as you do, but it's over. That life is over." She thought of the chess piece falling over, and the look on Eric's face, the absurd level of optimism on the otherwise melancholic face. "Party tricks, that's all we have left."

"Is that so?" said Eric coolly clearly not appreciating the defamation of what he considered to be a sizeable achievement. "I see you have become quite hot headed in my absence." This was like the spark to dry timber.

"In your absence! You left me to die, Eric! And don't you dare try to claim otherwise. I would have given my life for you, I did give my life for you, and here you are trying to make me believe that I need you! I don't need you, Eric. This is my apartment, this is my charity. You need me." Raven was on her feet, her chest heaving. She had stood up to Eric before but now she towered over him and watched as he shrank back from her rage, and she realised that, for the first time in their relationship, he was afraid of her.

Mystique left without saying another word, slamming the door on her way out. Eric waited for the reverberations to settle before allowing himself to think. She always had been prone to passionate outbursts, and he had been on the receiving end of quite a few, but they had never disagreed on anything fundamental. Their goal had been so simple; mutant freedom, mutant domination. She had been the one person who had embraced every aspect of the Brotherhood's mission, the one person whom he had trusted with every detail of every plan, the one person in whom he had placed his personal confidence. And though they might have been evenly matched on some things, he had always been more powerful. Everything was different now. No one could imagine the dark world he had been dragging himself through before she had arrived. He felt like he was living without a heartbeat, the force that kept blood running through his veins had been torn from his body. He thought anger would sustain him, but anger had not come, only a desperate aching misery that made the sky dark on the brightest day, and sound dull even in the liveliest setting. Part of that misery came from the loss of his powers, of course, but another part came from the knowledge of the past, the things he had done weighed more heavily upon him now. He relived the death of Charles so often that he began to feel he had been killed along with him; and he remembered abandoning the one person who had been loyal in the face of every obstacle, the one woman he had ever loved. Regret had not come until he had been staring into the face of the monster he had created, Phoenix's power more terrible than he had ever imagined, but when regret had come it had come without measure. In those first few desperate days, he had felt all the pain he had caused come back to him full strength and it had nearly killed him. More than a few times, Eric wished that he truly had died. Anything was better than his life, a half-life, living with the perpetual understanding that you were to blame for your own fate.

His bones ached as he stood up, another reminder of his human condition. He walked over to the kitchen, which was barely big enough to turn around in, and opened the first drawer he reached. Rows of silver cutlery greeted him, glinting in the light coming in from the window. Slowly, trembling with the effort, he passed his hand over the contents of the drawer concentrating solely on the desire for the objects to move, to respond to his whim as once they had. One knife trembled then lay still. With a shout of exasperation, Eric wrenched the drawer from its holdings. The sound of metal crashing taunted him. He could only hear it, he could not feel it. And it was all his fault.

Hank McCoy knocked lightly on Xavier's office door. If Storm was going to be found anywhere, it was usually here. Sure enough, her lilting accent bade him to enter. She was sitting on the professor's desk staring out of the window. Hank cleared his throat quietly and she slowly turned to face him.

"Hank," she smiled sadly, "How can I help you?" She caught sight of a small file of red liquid in his hand. "Is that blood?"

"Yes," replied Hank giving the file a quick shake, "Mystique's blood. I took it from her when she fell unconscious, the second time."

"The only time," reminded Storm.

"Quite. I have been running a series of tests on it, trying to determine the cause of her unexplained illness and I believe I have discovered something." Storm was frowning, her dark eyes interested.

"Go on," she said.

"Well, I may be wrong on this, but it seems as if her immune system is fighting against the agent responsible for the cure. Her whole body is trying to fight against the alien invasion." Storm's eyes narrowed.

"What does that mean for her?" Hank's expression grew grave.

"It means that her body is trying too hard, I fear that, even with help, Mystique is in great danger."

At the same time as Hank McCoy delivered his findings and suspicions to Storm, in a café in downtown San Francisco, a waitress was about to swat the hand of an overeager and presumptuous customer away from her legs when she was jolted by an intense stabbing pain that rendered her incapable of speech or coherent thought. Somehow she managed to stumble through the kitchen and reach the back alley where she was promptly, and very violently, sick.

A/N: Thank you to everyone who reviewed! What do you think of this new twist?