Sorry for the longer update time! I'd intended to get this up by Thursday, but I've had to spend time with family so I missed out on making it a birthday present. That said, this is a little longer than usual! Also, for once you get to see some things before the LJ people do.
This was a bit tougher to write—Raven started out being really fun to do dialog for, but as she struggled to find the right thing to say, well, so did I, ha. Full disclosure: I have no siblings. Additionally, I know pretty much nothing about the world of X-Men, so I'm just making up characters as they come along, basically. I dunno.
For your interest: look up the Siberian Traps on Wikipedia. Largest volcanic event in Earth's history, concurrent with the largest extinction event.
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xx.
When she knocked at the door, Charles thought Beth was warning him of her entrance, and didn't say anything.
But then the knock came again, and he knew.
"Come in," Charles called, after a frightening moment where his voice cracked and he thought she might leave before she heard him. He hadn't seen her in years, not since he'd been captured, and she had looked at him with a mixture of pity and anger and apology and turned away, letting Erik's soldiers take him.
The door opened, and it was Raven, and she was, was—
Dear god, she's naked, he thought, blushing a little and raising his hand to his forehead to block his eyes.
"Charles?" Raven inquired, concern in her voice; in her mind as well, although Charles, keeping to his old promise, did not look any deeper. Instead, he took a moment just to listen: to hear the unique cadence of her thoughts, always shifting but at the core, unchanging. Constant.
"Charles?" He saw Raven step cautiously closer from between his fingers, which he managed to pry away from his face so he could meet her eyes. Her eyes. Charles' first glimpse of breasts in four years needed to not be those of his adopted sister.
"Raven, it's… It's been a while, hasn't it?" he asked, cautiously, reaching a hand down to turn one wheel of his chair, angling to face her.
Raven's scaled blue skin creased with a small, teasing smile as she padded forward on bare feet. "No one's called me that in a long time."
Charles sighed, and rolled his eyes. "I'm not calling you Mystique," he protested. "It's just, it's silly."
It was a comment that could have offended, but Raven barked a laugh. "Fine, fine, you can call me Raven. But only you," she clarified. She had reached his chair, and she paused, looking down at him apprehensively. She seemed about to speak, but stopped herself, pressing a single finger against the edge of the chair's armrest.
"Charles…" Raven began, her voice trailing off and leaving them in the grips of a jumbled silence.
"You never came to visit," Charles finished for her, eyes dropping down to watch where her finger sank into the padding where he sometimes rested his hand.
"I…" Raven shook her head, and started over. "…I won't say that I couldn't have. I should have. Charles, this is a poor excuse, I know, but I was angry at you for a long time, after."
Charles nodded grimly, his lips pressed together in a firm line. "What changed? You're here now."
He glanced up to see a brief, bitter smile pass over Raven's face as she studied his knees. "I don't know. The world. Time. Me, maybe. It was dumb, and after a while I just couldn't think of anything you did that was bad enough for me to never talk to you again. By then, it had been so long that I didn't know if you…"
"Perhaps I'm simply infuriating by nature?" Charles mused, the sincere worry of his expression a revealing contrast to the levity of his voice.
A grin, finally, spread over Raven's face, and she pushed at Charles' shoulder. "Of course! But not that infuriating. You're only a small nuisance, really."
Charles leaned forward and narrowed his eyes a little. "You don't get to call me a nuisance. You're the queen of nuisances."
Raven bent down and met his stare fearlessly. "Every kingdom needs a king," she replied, smugly.
Unable to maintain his frown, Charles felt his face crease with the first true smile he'd had in a long time, and he slung his arm around Raven's shoulders to pull her down into a fierce, if somewhat unbalanced, hug. Her scales were soft and dry beneath his fingers and against his cheek, and her palms against his back were more solid than they had ever been in his dreams.
"I missed you," he whispered, almost soundlessly, near Raven's ear.
"I'm sorry," she responded, just as quietly. "You shouldn't have had to."
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xxi.
After Charles had a moment to wipe at his eyes—something he always did openly, because he believed that a person could only be as embarrassed as they looked—he had a chance to really look at Raven.
She didn't appear to have aged at all, which didn't surprise him, although Charles himself had a number of gray hairs and lines he hadn't before. Unlike Charles, Raven's body showed signs of harsh use; she had grayish scars and notched scales, a thinner face, and her color was not quite the intense shade he remembered. Charles wanted to ask her what she'd been doing, but he thought he knew.
"So am I allowed to sit down?" Raven asked, a mocking glint in her mottled yellow eyes.
"Sure," Charles replied, jolted from his observations. "The couch is free."
The words had barely left his mouth before his adoptive sister was sinking into the couch—at one time, she would have flopped down—and he didn't comment on the fact that she was sitting more-or-less exactly where Erik always did as he wheeled himself over.
"Fancy rooms," Raven observed, looking around at the nice furniture and wood paneling.
Charles grimaced. "Boring rooms. Erik could at least have provided me with something to do during the day."
"Only you would complain from the lap of luxury," she teased fondly. "I'm a little surprised he still lets you call him that, by the way."
"It's his name," Charles reminded her. "You're just hurt because 'Magneto' was your idea."
"Maybe," she admitted, the enigmatic tilt of her head matching her own nickname. "Speaking of, he told me you have some sort of news?"
"Did he?" Charles inquired, the quirk of his eyebrows ruining the effect of his studied nonchalance. "Very well, I suppose I'll have to demonstrate."
"Please do," Raven told him, settling her hands in her lap and straightening up, every inch the perfect student she never was.
Leaning over, Charles wrapped his hands around his right knee to bring his foot close enough to remove the slipper, which he placed on his other thigh. Then, still holding up his leg, he concentrated, wiggling his toes and rotating his ankle. It wasn't a smooth motion, because it had taken hours lying in bed and staring down at his feet just to re-locate that part of his brain where messages to his toes were filed; still, it elicited a gasp from Raven.
She reached out to brush her fingers along the edge of his foot, and Charles, with a small noise of surprise, tugged it away from her, still using his hands to move the estranged limb. "Tickles," he admitted, and Raven's smile was almost crafty enough for him to attempt escape, but instead she settled back and grinned at Charles as if he'd actually gotten up and tap-danced.
"That's fantastic!" Raven declared. "You know that I would have, would have never left back then if I'd… But I'm glad." She paused, and Charles could feel the hum of her mind—genuine happiness, but also…
"You knew about this, didn't you?" he accused. Charles kept his tone light, but he felt a hard glint of hurt at the thought that his surprise had been taken from him, along with everything else. "Did Erik tell you?"
Raven flushed a deeper blue. "No, he didn't, but I knew you were here and I knew that the lab's had some success in that direction, so it was easy to guess."
Charles raised his eyebrow. "I wouldn't have thought you'd have anything to do with somewhere science was taking place."
It would have been a feat for another person to look as mischievous as Raven did then. "I have a, let's say, vested interest. You should talk Erik into letting you get down there sometime."
"Mm. Perhaps I will," he agreed, frozen beneath his smile. Charles wanted, right then, to tell her about the—what? Arrangement? Bargain?—between himself and Erik, wanted to tell her that he had asked, but that asking might not be good enough. Raven, however, was smiling as if he were the best thing she'd seen in a long time, and the words just wouldn't come. Instead, Charles guessed, "It's Hank, isn't it? He's your vested interest."
Her blush spread, but Raven remained evasive. "You'll just have to see, won't you?"
Charles leaned forward, hands folded together, and told her, "Well, I'll just have to act surprised when I do."
Raven reached out to give him a playful slap upside the head, laughing at his stunned, blinking silence. "You've had that one coming for a long time," she explained. "I can just imagine you, sitting by yourself with nobody around to beat some sense into you, and it breaks my heart."
Giving Raven the glare that meant she was definitely not being as funny as she thought she was, Charles rearranged his ruffled hair. "I'm beginning to look back on those days with a fond nostalgia."
"Ooh, Professor Grumpypants unsheathes his claws," Raven replied, smirking.
"I'm even less of a Professor now than I was then," Charles corrected, his playful mood quickly evaporating into weariness.
"Yeah," Raven acknowledged, looking away. "Yeah, but if anyone could succeed at it in this world, it'd be you."
"How do you mean?"
Raven sighed, looking down at her hands, which she curled palm-up on her thighs. "Another reason I avoided you for so long, I guess, was because I was afraid you were going to say 'I told you so.'"
Charles furrowed his eyebrows, trying very hard to look as if he were thinking no such thing.
"I suppose it can't be justified," Raven admitted, "but, well, what started out as a simple separatist movement encouraging individuality and self-worth became terrorism, became militarism, and when that wasn't enough…"
"So you're saying it got a little out of hand?" Charles asked, his expression deceptively mild.
With a wry little smile showing she had noticed, Raven replied, "Yes. We wanted to use our powers to intimidate humans into leaving us alone, and to show other mutants how to be strong; how to escape from the oppression of stigma and fear. Things like the Argentinean traps… Those weren't supposed to happen."
She was referring, of course, to the massive volcanism ongoing in South America, which even as they spoke poured sulfur dioxide and ash into the atmosphere from across more than half a million square kilometers of flood basalt, and showed no signs of stopping. Very few mutants possessed the necessary abilities to get anywhere near the area and survive, let alone measure or prevent the eruptions.
Charles took a deep breath. "I can't dispense absolution for that sort of thing, Raven."
"I know," she muttered, seeming, for a moment, as if she'd actually believed he might. "But I thought if I told you…"
"You're my sister," Charles told her, choosing his words carefully, "and I could never hate you."
Raven bit her lip and nodded, blinking rapidly and glancing away. "That's good. Thanks. Better than I expected. It's not just me, though, who I'm talking about."
Charles wasn't sure whether he wanted to laugh, so he settled for a harsh chuckle. "You want to apologize on Erik's behalf?"
Her quiet little smile was exactly the one she'd always used to mock his disbelief in the past. "He certainly won't apologize," Raven explained, and leaned forward with a languid grace Charles thought was new. "Erik is—god, don't tell him I said this, but he knows just as well as you do what's happened to the world—what that makes him—and he's become… Well, it seems odd to think of him as being fragile, but he's the only person preventing us from falling into total anarchy, and if something happens to him…"
"Are you saying I should hold his hand and ask him how he feels?" Charles asked, voice flat.
Raven's teeth glinted bright between the blue of her lips. "No, not at all; in fact, the less you say about it, the better, maybe. Just… Be careful with him. For him. He's a bit of an ass, but he's all we've got."
"Sure," Charles agreed, the word stumbling from his mouth, tripped by others he wouldn't say. This was a concern he didn't need. "I'll be careful."
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xxii.
The rest of Charles' day, while still largely claimed by boredom, saw him in a much better mood. Additionally, that afternoon he found his monotony interrupted by a summons to begin physical therapy, further breaking the routine; he did not even mind that his therapist, whose slender feminine face bristled with the same black and white hair covering the rest of her body, spent most of the session hissing and swearing. She introduced herself as Badger and regarded Charles as something of a bewildering, annoying inconvenience.
"Your flexibility is good," she'd admitted grudgingly, reaching a thick milky-white nail beneath her helmet to scratch. "But I don't know how you think you'll ever be walking anywhere if you can't even lift your leg up."
So Charles had gritted his teeth, stared down at where his legs dangled from the edge of the table, and pulled at the pitiful remnants of his thigh until his toes rose, very briefly, to a level that might have conceivably been halfway to level with his knee, and then immediately sank down as the energy drained from his muscles.
Badger's sigh implied that perhaps they had been at it for years, rather than five minutes. "Well, okay, just… Do that until you feel like you can't anymore, then do it a couple more times, both sides. I'll be watching."
"You're a professional, right?" Charles asked, and he was joking, but when Badger replied, "Yeah, I took a class," he honestly couldn't tell whether she meant 'took a class' or 'took a class.' Her short body was made stocky with muscle, however, so he decided it would be better all around just to do as she suggested.
It turned out to not take very long.
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xxiii.
Charles didn't look up when the door opened; he didn't need to be able to read Erik's mind to know when he was in a room. It was probably rooted in physical clues such as sound and scent, but on the more whimsical side of things, Charles thought it could also be the way all the metal in the room seemed suddenly to be waiting, the way a dog's ears perked when its master had not quite reached home.
He'd been hanging his head over the back of the chair, watching the ceiling and feeling the way air moved differently through his bent neck, and while Erik approached Charles fought the urge to right himself and instead merely flicked his eyes over as the other man loomed into his field of vision.
Erik did not at first appear entirely sure how to interpret the pose, but after a moment of consideration reached out and lightly settled his ungloved fingertips along the notched cartilage of Charles' exposed throat. Despite his care, they formed a slightly uncomfortable pressure, briefly acknowledging the message of Charles' gesture before sliding back around to the nape of the telepath's neck, prompting him to lift his head.
"Long day?" Erik asked, his fingers dipping beneath Charles' shirt collar, smoothing down the hair there before it could rise.
"Not so long as before," Charles admitted, looking down into his lap with his chin nearly on his chest. Erik's thumb impressed slow circles onto his shoulder. "But tiring. Tell me, is your physical therapist trained?"
"Badger?" Erik's voice, somewhere above him, was low and amused. "Hardly. There isn't a man alive who could tame her. Or woman, I suppose."
"That's not what I meant," Charles muttered, the mobility of his jaw somewhat impeded by the fact that Erik's fingers scrubbing along his scalp had succeeded in introducing his chin to his clavicles.
Erik paused in his attentions, and then pulled away, moving to sit. "How did your visit with Mystique go?"
Straightening up, Charles ran his hand through his hair to fix whatever mess Erik had made there. "She called me names and recommended I investigate the labs," he replied, hoping that, for once, Erik would take the hint.
"That well?" Erik inquired, lifting up a corner of his mouth. "At least, I assume that name-calling is a good sign."
Charles scrutinized him; the sprawl of his legs, the easy way Erik's hands lay on his stomach, the dark humor of his eyes—he seemed at home, as if they were simply two friends talking. If only, Charles wished. Aloud, he conceded, "As far as anyone could interpret, yes, it is."
"We'll have to see that she comes by more often, then," Erik mused, watching Charles for a reaction. The geneticist tried to look grateful. "I take it that your time with our lovely Badger was less enjoyable for you, however."
"Yes, but I doubt saying so will get me out of seeing her in the future, so no; she's really quite… Enthusiastic, in her way."
This time, Erik's smile spread across his entire face. "You'll be running laps in no time," he reassured Charles. Then the expression slid out from beneath the helmet and vanished somewhere, leaving Erik to study his hands for a while in blank silence.
Just as Charles was considering clearing his throat, Erik's eyes snapped back up to meet his and he flashed his teeth in a feral grin. "Care to continue our game?"
We're playing it already, Charles thought, genuinely confused until he recalled that they had a chess match left to complete. "Sure," he said, hoping he didn't sound too flustered as Erik gestured for the end table with the board to wheel itself over.
Charles managed to win the game, but when he found himself glad that for once Erik had stayed around for long enough to finish, the satisfaction of his success soured somewhat. As the table moved past him, the black king rolling around on its side, he snatched for it impulsively and set it back upright, resulting in a slightly confusing moment where all the pieces almost scattered anyway as the table jerked to a halt. Erik frowned at him, but Charles only shrugged, refusing to find the question in his eyes.
Before Erik left, he bent down, the edge of a single finger lifting Charles' face, and kissed him, formal and chaste—but not, Charles believed, because he himself kept his lips tightly closed. Instead, he thought it very much resembled the sort of kiss given by someone who knew where they could easily find another.
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