Sorry this took so long, everyone! D: I am still here, still writing, it is just sooooo busy here. I am hoping that I can start going a little faster now that I'm a little more into the swing of things, but we'll have to see. Chapters may have to get shorter to keep more regular updates.
Thanks for reading, and to my fabulous beta, LJ's idioticonion!
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lxix.
There had been a fresh snow that night; here and there, the green tips of the courtyard grass poked through with resigned determination. All of this lay in the soft blue shadow of early morning.
"The meteorologists think it should get warmer again soon, for a little while," Raven assured Charles. Once again, she wore her human shape. "Then again, they've been trying out a lot of hypotheses lately, so who knows."
Charles breathed in the crisp wintry air and exhaled a tattered plume of steam. "I'm outside," he stated, obviously. "I don't care that I have to wear a coat." Indeed, he was quite happy bundled up in his black wool. The sky above was only a wide rectangle of gray, framed on all sides by the red-tiled roof of the mansion, but now and then there came a small fitful breeze through his hair, and the flat earthy scent of limestone made a welcome change from dust and wood polish.
Inhaling again, as if to store some of that smell for later, Charles mused, "I wonder what this little excursion is in return for."
Raven looked over at him in confusion, and Charles remembered suddenly that the details of his life were not common knowledge. "Charles," she said, sounding hurt, "You may not be here by choice, but you're not our prisoner. Magneto just thought it'd be nice for you to get outside for a little while."
Charles ducked his gaze down and chuckled ruefully. "Of course—I'm sorry. It is nice; I feel like I can stretch, finally." Then he closed his eyes, leaned his head back, and did just that: sending his thoughts out over the mountains. Erik's people—and any of the anti-extinctionist squads who may have been out there—were well hidden, but it still felt good to confirm that the world did in fact exist outside of his windows. The minds of birds and beasts were stolid and uninteresting, but they were there.
Feeling Raven's amusement was like catching a glimpse of her smirk out of the corner of his vision; he didn't turn his telepathy to look, but he felt an answering smile bloom on his own face. "Yes, I know I look ridiculous," Charles remarked, lifting his head and opening his eyes. "I don't care. Anyway, I notice that you seem to no longer be using 'theory' and 'hypothesis' interchangeably. You may consider me to be impressed."
Raven's pale skin was still creased with mockery as she responded, "Why, thank you for that backhanded compliment. I guess I just got tired of you scientists whining about it all the time."
The geneticist frowned to communicate that the difference was definitely a big one and certainly worth keeping straight. Then he began to move down the sidewalk, which had already been trampled into a thin ice that would later, Charles knew, melt in the heat of the sun. For now, however, it was slick beneath the wheels of the chair and Charles had to stifle the urge to go skating over it; it certainly wouldn't look dignified to any of the people who may be watching from the windows, and he'd never really had the chance to master the art well enough to avoid tipping.
"What do you and Magneto do together, anyway?" Raven asked, keeping pace. Charles looked over at her, startled, mouth half-open with his first impulsive answer: why, snog, of course. He sealed his lips together before he could say it and tucked his chin down, studying Raven quickly from the corner of his eye in case she'd noticed his stumble.
His sister's blonde hair made a meandering frame to her face and splayed out over the black of her coat, twining into the white ruffles of her blouse, and he wondered whether her clothing was real or an extension of her body. Charles remembered playing in the woods with her when they were younger: with only their deep footprints to lead them back to the manor, they'd tunneled and built and Raven had never needed a coat to stay warm.
Sometimes, she'd run out through the bristling gray trees and turn herself a perfect sparkling white; after a while Charles would lose track of her entirely and it would be as if he were all alone, not just in the woods, or because of his mutation, but in the entire world—just Charles and the endless woods sharing the echoing silence of the space between breaths, until yellow eyes flickered open beside him and Raven would shove a handful of snow under his shirt.
"Talk, mostly," Charles replied, glancing away at the shining windows lining the mansion walls.
"Solving the worlds problems?" Raven guessed fondly, and Charles turned back to her and chuckled ruefully.
"Oh, no, I'm afraid not," he admitted. "No, mostly we just… Talk. Sometimes about books. People. Gossip, I suppose."
Raven raised one of her perfect brown eyebrows, now that she had them at her disposal. "'Gossip?' Magneto? Really? You hardly know anyone, so that means…"
Charles' laughter was genuine this time. "I can guess what you're imagining and no, Erik doesn't sit down with a cup of tea, cross his legs, and start telling me all the rumors." He paused, then added, "I'm the one who does that."
Wrinkling her nose up, Raven grinned and smacked the geneticist's shoulder. "You do not," she protested. "You're just full of it today, aren't you?"
Struggling to keep his expression serious, Charles conceded, "Maybe. Say, how is your beautiful young inamorata?"
"Destiny? Oh, she's all right. She's…" Raven hesitated, glancing down at her feet, then shrugged and brushed the hair from her face. "Well, I suppose I can probably tell you this much at least: she's precognitive, and from what I understand, her visions have never exactly been pleasant, but they've gotten worse in the past several years."
"Understandable," Charles agreed, nodding and pressing his lips together to keep from interrupting Raven with just how incredible he found the idea of precognition.
Raven nonetheless rolled her eyes at him. "Not because it's been bad—she sees the future, not the present. If I'm understanding her correctly, it's because there are so many options—so many ways it could go, still, and it's overwhelming."
Charles immediately wondered whether he had caused any of those futures—then chided himself, because that was more than a little narcissistic. Then again… He was rather intimately entwined with the empire's leadership, and he was more-or-less planning to overthrow said leadership. Maybe it was a good sign, if the future was still uncertain; that they still, perhaps, had a future beyond war and extinction.
He didn't say any of that, however, as Raven hadn't told him about her partner's abilities just to set his mind at ease.
Raven leaned her head back and sighed; the moisture of her lungs drifted up until it was torn apart by a captive eddy. "I blame him, sometimes, for her stress; for all the headaches and late nights. If he hadn't… If he could only…" She looked over at Charles, and if she appeared older it wasn't due to her mutation. "It's probably a good thing that you don't talk about serious things with him. We did a bad thing; maybe the worst there is, and I think knowing that, but not being able to admit it—I think it's driving him insane, and maybe if he has someone he can talk to who he knows might forgive him… Maybe then he'll be able to admit it to himself and he'll be able to make some real changes."
Charles stopped; they had reached the other end of the courtyard. He stared down at the rounded limestone bricks as Raven continued, "He needs you, Charles, and when that time comes… Just remember that you're not the only person I care about, and if you hurt him… Why, I'd probably never talk to you again."
Raven smiled to show that she was joking, and after a moment of struggling, Charles managed to return the expression.
They turned around and began to go down the next side of the triangle.
"It looks like you've taken Beast's challenge seriously," Charles observed, after some time.
His sister looked down at herself, at the skirts hanging out from beneath her coat and above her fashionable shoes, to her pale shins, untouched by the cold. "Yeah," she sighed. "It's been… I suppose Beast would say that results are 'inconclusive.' Everyone knows who I am when I'm myself, so it'd be different no matter what."
"Too many variables," Charles offered, pushing at his hand-rims idly; they tended to slip a little under the soft gray fabric of his gloves. "You need a control group."
"Yes, so… I've started going around as a mutant, too—an obvious one, I mean. I decided to try out fish scales; I thought I might as well practice patterns while I'm at it." She watched her feet for a while, hands hidden in her pockets.
"And?" Charles asked. "What have you noticed?"
Raven took a deep breath and furrowed her eyebrows. "I'm… Not sure. It's more complicated than what Beast said, though; not so bad, but…"
"…But it could become that way, in time," Charles concluded for her.
She nodded. "Yes; in time, maybe." Then Raven smiled and continued, "How about that, huh? Neither one of us had it right—we both wanted to see the extremes and reality was somewhere in between."
Charles huffed a laugh and ducked his head. "Of course—reality is seldom as black and white as we believe."
Raven arched her brow, marveling, "Wow, you're surprisingly accommodating today, aren't you?"
Charles hummed noncommittally, then stopped and leaned over the armrest, beckoning at the snow. "Hand me some of that, would you? I've been staring at snow for years now without being able to touch it."
"Sure," Raven said, and she walked over to the edge of the sidewalk, crouched down, and scooped up a big solid handful of sticky flakes. The grass beneath sprang up in relief as she transferred the lump of snow into Charles' outstretched hands.
The cold radiated through the knit of Charles' gloves and numbed his fingers as he peered into the blue depths of the crystalline water— hydrogen bonding , his mind whispered—then leaned forward, closed his eyes, and licked into it, recalling the clear and faintly ammonia taste of freshly fallen snow.
Raven screwed up her face in disgust even as she laughed at him. "That was right against the ground! There's probably dirt in that."
Charles smiled, smug. "My immune system has been coddled for too long; a little dirt will do me good." Then his lips dipped into a smirk and before Raven could quite get her hands up, he had wound his arm back and thrown the packed snow at her.
She stood frozen for a moment, body still half-turned to avoid it even though there was no possible way Charles could have missed from that distance, her mouth gaping open in betrayed horror as she looked down at the smear of white beginning to melt into her coat. Then Raven's eyes narrowed, and she gave Charles a pointed glare before stalking purposefully toward the grass to get more snow.
Charles laughed and started to roll away backwards. "No, no, Raven, don't—"
His sister stood and examined the snow that she packed between her pink fingers.
"You can't retaliate," Charles insisted, glancing behind him as one of the chair's wheels slipped off the sidewalk and caught stubbornly. When he looked up again, Raven was in pursuit and closing fast, the snow held up like a prize in one hand as she reached for him. Charles ducked his head down between his shoulders and twisted away as she drew near. "Raven, how could you, to your own brother—I'm helpless—!"
Then Raven shoved the snow down through the back of his shirt collar and Charles stopped talking to gasp, reaching up over his shoulder as he tried to arch away from the sudden, startling cold.
Raven crossed her arms triumphantly as she watched him pull his shirts out of his pants to shake out the snow. "The best part about this is that you can't throw any back because you need someone to hand it to you first," she observed.
"I'll be able to walk soon," Charles reminded her crossly. "Just you wait. You'll regret this."
Raven made a rude noise in her throat to indicate that she was unimpressed.
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lxx.
Charles held a tiny loop of wire at the tip of a motionless cone of blue flame, watching as intently as if it were new to him as it flared up with sodium and then quieted. It took only a moment for the metal to begin glowing a dull red, and then, satisfied, the geneticist withdrew the wire, paused to let it lose its glow, and quenched it with a drowned sizzle on a clean patch of the X-gal plate.
With supreme care and delicacy, Charles picked the tip of the wire out of the agar and lay its curved edge precisely against the side of a white circle of bacteria; with a little twist of his index finger, he swept the colony up onto the wire, leaving only a small dull smudge on the surface of the plate.
Charles replaced the lid on the dish and, in the same movement, plucked the rubber stopper from a small glass test tube; he thrust the loop of wire down into it, stirring around the golden broth until he saw the ragged wisps of the colony whirling around inside.
Then Charles withdrew the wire, re-stoppered the tube loosely so that a little bit of air could still reach the bacteria, and sterilized the wire again before setting it down on his table. He sat back and surveyed his work; eleven tubes containing three milliliters of lysogeny broth, and at least one cell of successfully modified bacteria in each. There had been somewhat fewer colonies than he'd been hoping for, but in a couple days he'd have as many clones as he needed.
His project was barely underway, and until he could work up to having a steady supply of samples waiting for him Charles wouldn't have much real analysis to do, but he felt content that things were progressing steadily; both in the study of gene expression and in his scheming with Beast.
There had been a setback in their plan—Beast had sent an inquiry to Medical to find out why it was taking so long to get the inventory report he had asked for, only to be told both that he should be more patient and that they had nonetheless completed his request in record time; had, in fact, already sent it the day prior. After rummaging around in his office for a while, Beast had come to the reluctant conclusion that he had indeed received the information, but since he had not remembered ordering it, merely threw it away after a cursory glance.
Trash bin now embarrassingly empty, Beast had waved Charles away so that he could draft a new request from memory. Satisfied that Beast knew what he was doing—and a little chagrined that he should have known such a thing might happen—a little troubled that he hadn't thought about it—Charles had retreated back into the comforting world of genetic recombination and left Beast to his writing.
The geneticist labeled the test tubes with the date and a curling X, set the entire rack on his lap to balance as he backed up and then went out through the open door into the rest of the lab to find the shaker. Hannah hadn't been enthusiastic about leaving the door to her tiny domain open, but instead of protesting she had simply rearranged the entire workspace so that she now sat in the most remote corner of the room, well-hidden from all but the occasional lost lab assistant who quickly learned not to repeat the offense.
The eyes of the other scientists slid away from him as they went about their business, but Charles knew that it wasn't personal; a few of them did smile at him in an absently bewildered sort of way as he passed, but they didn't greet each other with particularly more warmth than they did him. There were some light-hearted conversations around the balances and deionized water tap, but for the most part they were all there to work.
The telepath was not so naïve as to believe that his fellow scientists were immune to judgment. This was a more mixed crowd than he'd ever seen in Oxford—there were, after all, not all that many mutant scientists in the world, so they were all of different nationalities and races and there were even quite a number of women. They did not come without their prejudices, but at the very least they didn't spare the energy for it while occupied with a project. For the moment, they were united, if cautious in their truce.
They knew who Charles was of course, and that made things a little—strained—at times, but neither his fans nor his detractors much cared to bother him and they seemed to believe that if they didn't make eye contact, he wouldn't read their minds. Honestly he almost preferred anonymity to this, but at least some of the others had powers nearly as frightening as his own and that made the caution less hysterical and more pragmatic.
Charles found the shaker, which was living up to its name and endlessly sloshing around any number of uninterestingly colored liquids, most of them other cultures of bacteria. He stopped it just long enough to add his, securing the tubes at an angle with a strip of tape, and closed the lid before too much of the heat could escape.
When he returned to his table to clean up, the geneticist realized that his jar of LB medium—they all had their own, to avoid contaminating each other's work—would be empty soon. Charles looked around at the jug of stock solution, high on a shelf and surrounded by a number of trays and little bottles that had all overnight mysteriously sprouted labels warning don't touch. He estimated its height compared to the length of his arms and concluded that, while he could probably reach, the jar was too full to risk it.
Charles cleared his throat a little, not so much to get Hannah's attention as to judge how loudly he needed to speak to be heard over the music playing muzzily over the radio between them, broadcasted irregularly from a hand-made rig run by the theoretical physicists downstairs. Here, finally, Charles heard new music, although like all new things it was not without its failed experiments.
When he did talk, it was like shattering a glass pane of ambient noise. "Hannah, dear, could you get the LB for me?"
The woman looked over at him sharply, eyes huge in her thin face; then she blinked and relaxed. "Sure," Hannah agreed, sliding off of her stool and walking over. "This shouldn't be up here anyway. I should re-organize again, put all the stock bottles in one spot, move all of my solutions up…"
Sitting back as he watched her reach for the liter jar, eyes caught on the spot where the sleeves of her lab coat drew back off of her bird-like wrists, Charles observed, "You must never leave the lab; this room is different every time I come in here."
Hannah paused, frowning, the tips of her gloved fingers resting lightly on the wide sides of the jar. "What, are you having trouble finding anything?"
Charles glanced down and chuckled to himself. "No, I'm just glad that there's someone in this building with even less of a life than myself," he assured her. She peered at him doubtfully for a moment, as if she weren't sure why he was satisfied with second place, before turning back to the LB and lifting it back down to the counter.
They stared at it in silence for a moment.
"That's cloudy," Hannah agreed into Charles' silence. "Have you…"
"I've hardly used it," Charles protested, looking away from the contaminated broth to pull his face into a shrug.
"Hm," she commented, her gaze drifting back to where her recently-centrifuged rack of cell products sat slowly, inexorably diffusing back out of its neat bands of density.
Charles sighed. "I have nothing else to do right now; I'll go mix up a new batch."
Hannah let out the breath she had been holding and smiled wonderingly at him. "Really? Are you sure?"
As Charles gave his assent, he guessed that there was a good chance that she might even deign to let him lend a hand on her project without too much arm wrestling; perhaps he'd have something more interesting than routine maintenance to do after all. As he left with the jar full of miscellaneous bacteria, his colleague turned to cough dryly into the crook of her elbow and it was with a crease of concern between his eyebrows that Charles dumped the broth down the sink. That crease, however, was lost in his grimace at the too-rich protein smell of the liquid, tinged by the faintly bready odor of biological waste.
The telepath set the dirty glassware on a cart with its fellows before grabbing a sterile flask to fill with tryptone and other powders, which he mixed with water, covered with a cap of aluminum foil and temperature-sensitive tape, and sat precariously over his legs as he went out into the hallway and down, a little, outside the autoclave room. The doors there were closed, but were light enough and loose enough that it was a small matter of concentration to edge up sideways to one half, set the brake on the close wheel, hold onto the flask, and use his free hand to turn the other wheel, pushing the chair into the door at an angle.
It swung open and, with a little finagling, Charles was through and sharing a damp room with a number of huge sweaty machines set into the wall. Some of their gauges read with extraordinary pressures and temperatures, but there were a few whose spidery, rubber-lined hatches hung open.
Preparing the autoclave was difficult from inside the chair, but Charles managed to not become entirely soaked as he filled a deep plastic tray halfway with water. The telepath felt some measure of pride that he was strong enough to then lift the tray into the autoclave without spilling it, and perhaps he was even showing off a little when he used the hatch to pull himself to his feet and set the flask of culture medium into its water bath—although it then occurred to Charles that there was no one to show off to except for himself.
Thus chastised, he sat back down and ducked out of the way of the hatch as he pushed it closed. Charles spun the lock tight and then waited, for a moment, to listen to the rumble of captured steam, to the secret army in the war against contamination. One of the machines was prone to leaking its spent water, and another tended to rattle disconcertedly, but they were all functional and the telepath suspected that, so long as they were properly maintained, they could enjoy longer lives than many of the mansion's inhabitants.
Finally, Charles grew bored of the burnished steel and puddled concrete and decided to go and see whether Hannah had anything more interesting for him to do; or perhaps Beast had finished with his writing and could afford to be distracted for an extra few minutes.
It hit him the moment he nudged the door open, like the sudden angry reek of hydrochloric acid—Emma Frost, nearby, her presence scattered and echoed through the open doors and shielded walls. Charles winced, his hand raising to his head reflexively as he searched: where? he asked, flitting from eye to eye until he saw her. There, there she was; up the hallway in the next lab. Performing a random inspection.
Beast, Charles thought, his tongue sticking like sandpaper to the roof of his mouth; Beast was still in his office, memory still intact, and Emma—Emma was getting ready to leave, to walk out in the hallway, down to their lab, and if she saw him—if she saw him she would want to talk and he'd never get to Beast in time, couldn't change Beast's memory while she was standing right there—
Charles squeezed his eyes closed, drove the fingers of his mind deep into the brain of a tech—there was no time for subtlety—and shoved; in the lab down the hall a hapless biologist stumbled over nothing, tripped, bumped into Emma, and dropped the plastic jug full of bleach he had been pouring into a cylinder. Charles didn't even need to push the tech into diving to his knees at Emma's feet to stop the bleach from slopping out all over the floor; instead he applauded, silently, as he darted out into the hall and raced down into his own lab—as Emma curled her lip in disdain and stepped around the tech, into the hallway Charles had just left.
The geneticist kept and air of calm as he wheeled through the suddenly over-crowded room toward Beast's closed office door, his mind quite literally elsewhere; he could not read Emma without alerting her to his interest, and there was no one else around to see her. He counted out her steps in his mind, hindered by the fact that he himself had never walked that corridor; she was bored, he knew at least that she was bored, but would she walk quickly to get it over with or would she take her time?
In the time it took him to reach Beast's office, it seemed as if she must surely have been able to walk down the hall and back four times at least, and he had to fight not to glance around as he knocked. She had eyes in the room, he knew, but he could not feel whose they were.
There was the noise of shuffling papers from inside, and Charles thought it was probably the sound of papers being set aside; at least, he hoped so. His knee bounced a little, a small anxious luxury, and he tapped his thumb on the side of the armrest, out of sight. He looked around. The music playing from the radio was strangely atonal and disharmonious, more of that new rock music and it felt almost like funhouse music, mad and maddening and winding his nerves tight anew with each revolution of the guitar.
"The yellow jester does not play, but gently pulls the strings…"
Over the uneasy wobble of the mellotron, Charles thought he heard Beast's chair roll out from the desk. He noticed, absently, that Hannah had shut her lab again.
"…He smiles as the puppets dance—in the court of the crimson king…"
Footsteps.
The door swung open and Beast peered out, pleasant confusion lifting the blue ridges of his eyebrows as he began, "Professor—?" But he didn't have time to finish as Charles caught his eyes, trapped his mind, and tucked—
Emma's curiosity washed over him just as he withdrew, and Charles smoothly turned to face her, his eyebrows arched in casual inquiry. Beast, too, blinked and stared across the room at the other telepath. He looked so lost, for a moment, that Charles cringed away from his mind, thinking back to earlier: It's so strange, when I can't remember the things we do when we're alone, he'd said, but had left unspoken how helpless he felt in between their meetings; the impotent rage he felt thinking of Charles following blindly at Erik's side.
Picking her way across the room with distaste, Emma could have vanished into the white of the tile; may well have, for all that the other scientists avoided seeing her. Here and there, one of the biologists would freeze for a moment as she pinned them in place for closer study; her thoughts pressed against his own, for a moment, testing for entrance, and Charles broadcasted back a blank static. She left the surface of his mind with a mental shrug and an unconcerned, it was worth a try.
"Well look at you two," Emma commented aloud. "Snug as bugs, I see."
"We do work together," Charles pointed out, with rather less warmth in his voice than was polite. Beside him, Beast's eyes took on a glazed look, and the geneticist fought the urge to stop Emma; it would be so easy, just to reach out and snap the shards she dug into Beast's thoughts, to leave her mind bruised and reeling—possibly even to make her stop, for good, to go straight to the spun gypsum source of her outstretched telepathy and cut it off at the root. There was no doubt in his mind that he could, so long as he didn't mind the consequences.
Charles wanted to do it; he wanted to see her face when she tried to reach out and found nothing. He wondered if she would handle it as well as he had; hoped that she wouldn't. For a bitter, angry moment, he hoped that she would cry.
Charles took a deep breath, and then Beast shifted and his eyes cleared and focused and Emma had finished. The moment was gone. And anyway, what would he have done, after?
"Are you done interrupting our work yet?" Beast growled, the sharp edges of his teeth conspicuous in his speech.
Emma tilted her head and pretended to consider. "I think so," she said, without a trace of concern. "So long as you don't interrupt mine." Her gaze lingered on Charles, a glint of suspicion shining through her nonchalance.
Charles looked back coolly, willing his heartbeat out of his face as Emma reluctantly turned to go; as she sauntered out through the lab, the fringe of her short skirt brushing and riding not-so-accidentally along the curve of a chair. The geneticist dragged his eyes away from her thigh with a little shiver of disgust and sat still, for a moment, staring at a drawer that claimed to be full of pipette tubes.
Surely it was coincidence. Surely Emma Frost hadn't come then, right when Beast had been vulnerable, when Charles had been gone, for any reason other than chance. Surely they had not come so close to being discovered because they had been sloppy.
Charles had thought that when Raven told him about her partner, it had been simply to talk—but what if it had been a warning? What if she really had been warning him off? He'd never known her to be so subtle; there was no reason for her to be so subtle—but what if it were true? What if they knew?
He looked to Beast and expected to share a panicked relief with the leonine scientist, but of course the other mutant was as blank and unaware as anyone else.
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