Chapter Ninety-Two:
Peace and quiet was a hard thing to come by these days.
Not that it had ever really been easy to find, of course, but she'd forgotten just how chaotic a house full of teenagers could be.
Worse still, she couldn't terrify them the way she had the boys in Bayville.
Charles had made her promise to play nice.
A green energy bolt shot past her head, and a voice shouted, "Whoops! Sorry Ms. Darkholme!"
Grumbling, Raven took a long sip of her coffee and imagined hanging the little brat who was shooting lasers from his hands by one of the tiers on the roof of the mansion.
"Dylan, you moron," another boy's voice cried. "You're going to get us grounded!"
And, because clearly it was the intelligent thing to do, this Dylan's friend decided to fire off his own powers to stop his mischievous friend. Raven clenched her jaw and leaned forward against the table as a blue orb of some kind crashed into the wall.
"Boys!"
At the sound of Scott Summers' angry voice booming through the mansion, the group of teenagers playing a game of "mutant fuse ball" quickly dispersed in a hurry from the nearby game room, the sounds of sneakers squeaking loudly as they all scampered about in fear of getting caught by Cyclops.
Despite herself, Raven snorted and shook her head.
Children were entirely too coddled these days, if the likes of Scott Summers frightened them.
After all, she remembered a time when the Brotherhood boys had not only found Scott's ire amusing, they went out of their way to piss him off, as it were their sole purpose for living.
Ah, the good old days, Raven thought with a smirk.
Summers didn't know how lucky he had it; these little brats at the Westchester Academy were amateurs.
The Brotherhood boys had been an absolute torment.
Rogue had been her single breath of sanity in that house, even as moody as her daughter had been during those difficult teen years.
After losing her to the X-men, Raven had nearly gone mad being left alone with the boys.
Footsteps coming down the kitchen staircase drew her attention, and Raven looked up and smiled, pleasantly surprised to find that it was her daughter coming down the stairs, and Rogue was alone at that.
"Good morning," Raven said as Rogue entered the kitchen.
"What's good 'bout it?" Rogue grumbled.
"Morning sickness?" Raven surmised gently, watching her daughter cross the kitchen to one of the cupboards in search of a glass.
"More like all-day sickness," Rogue retorted. "Ah was up half the night."
"I'm sorry," Raven murmured. "But it does get better as time passes. After the first trimester, the morning sickness begins to dwindle."
"An' is replaced by swollen ankles, backaches an' the urge t' pee every five minutes?" Rogue drawled sarcastically, moving to the sink to fill her glass with water from the faucet. "Joy, Ah can hardly wait."
"You'll forget all that ugliness of pregnancy the first time you feel the baby kick," Raven told her.
Rogue made her way to the table with her water and settled down in the chair across from her, lips pursed together in an all too familiar expression.
The one that meant she had something to say, but wasn't sure how to say it.
"Did Kurt kick a lot?" Rogue asked at last, although it clearly wasn't what she'd intended to say.
"Incessantly," Raven responded with a small smile. "And once he discovered his tail in the womb, he started hitting me with that, as well."
"Huh," Rogue said. "It's strange t' think of Kurt as a fetus."
"You were a fetus once, yourself," Raven pointed out. "And you were just as active as your brother, always feeling the need to start banging around in there when I was trying to fall asleep. You were a night owl, even then."
"Wit' mah luck, this kid is gonna be jus' like me," Rogue groaned.
"One can only hope," Raven murmured sincerely.
Her daughter raised an eyebrow at that, skeptical. "Somehow Ah doubt Irene would share that sentiment. Ah was a li'l terror."
"Yes, I know," Raven chuckled. "Irene liked to blame that on me."
"Ah miss her," Rogue said softly, looking down at her glass. "Sometimes Ah wish Ah'd jus' gone back t' Caldecott, maybe Ah could have saved her."
"Irene might not have let us save her," Raven told her gently, reaching across the table to lay a hand on top of Rogue's fidgeting hands. "She was a precog, Rogue, she knew her death was coming. Why she let it happen, I don't know, but I'm certain she had her reasons."
"Yeah, Ah know," Rogue said dully, and gave an awkward shrug of her shoulders. "It's jus'… Ah wanna be mad at her, ya know? Fo' lettin' herself get killed."
"I know," Raven assured her. "I'm still quite upset with her about that myself."
The two fell into a sad silence, and Raven once again found herself cursing her old friend. It was a waste, Irene needn't have died, and what made it so damn difficult to accept was knowing that Irene had foreseen her own death and done nothing to stop it.
She hadn't even given Raven the chance to try.
"Things happen as they are meant to, Raven, my dear. Some things can be avoided, others are fated. It is part of my curse to know the difference."
How many times had she heard those words, over the years?
Irene had always been calm about her visions, always patient and accepting of what they held, and Raven had hated her for that.
It had been Irene who predicted the lonely turn Rogue's powers who take, and the precog had been the one to suggest they tell Rogue from an early age that she had a skin condition. The vision had not shown the exact time when her powers would manifest, and it was better to be safe than sorry.
"Her powers will shut her off from the rest of the world, Raven…it will be easier if she learns to cope with the solitude before it happens."
Raven had known that Irene was right, she was always right- it was part of her gift.
And she trusted Irene Adler more than anyone in the world.
So the decision to leave her young daughter in Irene's care hadn't been a hard call, even if the actual act of leaving had.
Irene had been good to her little Marie, she'd been a better mother than Raven could have been at the time. And though she'd missed the child fiercely, she'd slept well at night knowing that her daughter was safe and loved and protected. Irene's powers more than made up for her lack of sight, and there had never been any question about Rogue's safety in her care- there was no one more capable of guarding the child.
Still, it had stung the first time she visited and heard Rogue call Irene "mama".
Despite Irene's assurances that it was only a phase, that Rogue was just a toddler and too young to understand that Irene was really more like an aunt, Raven had nearly wept in relief the following year, when she heard a little voice holler "Auntie 'Renie someone's here" when she pulled into the driveway.
She'd missed out on so much of her children's lives…
It was easy to blame Erik for that, to point out that the life she'd been living while working for him hadn't been safe for a child, or to rage about how it had been Erik who drove her to the bridge that fateful night when Kurt slipped from her grasp into the river.
In truth, though, Raven knew that it was her own fault.
Rogue was right, she could have walked away.
She could have returned to Caldecott and raised her daughter herself, she could have taken Kurt from the Wagners or at least revealed her existence to him once she found out he was alive.
But she hadn't.
Perhaps she just wasn't good mother material.
Her visits to Caldecott had grown less frequent over the years, and she'd always suspected that Irene never bought her excuse that Erik kept her too busy to make the trip.
It was hard to fool a precog.
But it had been painful to see her daughter growing up without her, to have those emerald eyes pass over her without even a hint of recognition.
And so she'd started to visit less and less, and Irene had never pressed her.
Pictures had arrived in the mail regularly, every month, along with news of how Rogue's life was going. Sometimes Irene included premonitions she'd had of the mischief Rogue was going to get into down the road, but mostly she just kept Raven up to date on her daughter.
The letters, and the photos, had been stored in a small lockbox, the edges worn from constant examination.
There hadn't been pictures or letters with Kurt.
Raven had been forced to content herself with the occasional glimpse of him when her work happened to take her to Germany, which hadn't been very often.
As distant as she'd felt from her daughter's life, at least she'd had something.
Her son had been a complete stranger, the baby she remembered had disappeared into a young man that didn't yearn for his mother's arms anymore, if he could even remember a time when he had.
The price we paid for our mission, Erik, Raven thought with a sigh.
She had been fortunate enough to get a second chance, not only with Kurt but now with Rogue, as well.
Only time would tell if Erik, too, had been given a second chance with his children, but ever since his agreement with the United Nations and his relocation to Genosha, it looked as if he might just be able to win Wanda over, at least.
"Ah didn' know bein' pregnant made ya so thirsty," Rogue commented, gulping down the last of her drink.
"One of many lovely side affects," Raven replied, rising from the table to refill her glass for her. "But it's always worth it."
"Always?" Rogue echoed. "Ya never regretted it?"
"Never," Raven promised with a soft smile. "Not a single day ever went by that I wasn't grateful for both of you. I've never tried to hide my past, I've done a lot of things that I wish I could take back and still more than I'm not proud of. But you and Kurt are the best things I ever did."
And, for a long time, they'd been the only good things she'd done.
"Thanks," Rogue said softly. "Ah needed t' hear that."
"I should have said it a long time ago," Raven conceded with a sigh. "I should have been honest with you from the start."
"Yeah, ya should have," Rogue agreed flatly. "But Ah fo'give ya."
"Thank you," Raven whispered.
"Ya know," Rogue chuckled. "Ah recall yelling 'ya can't tell me what t' do, ya ain't mah mother' at ya once or twice back at the boardin' house in Bayville. It must have killed ya not t' shout back that ya were."
"There were many times I wanted to tell you," Raven responded. "But, yes, your more… difficult moments made it especially tempting to claim my maternal rights."
"Well, ya can enjoy watchin' it come back t' bite me in the ass when this li'l brat reaches his teenage years," Rogue told her wryly, patting her stomach with a smirk. "Ah know he's gonna be a handful, jus' like his père."
"Mmm," Raven mused. "I can't wait to watch Logan babysit."
Rogue grinned, and Raven couldn't help smiling at the bright glow to her daughter's face. "He has no idea what he's in fo', does he?"
"Sadly, no."
"Men never do," a new voice added, and they looked up to see Jean Summers entering the room, carrying her son at her hip. "But Logan will learn fast, just like Remy."
"Luckily Remy's had some practice wit' our nephew Jacques," Rogue said. "Although the kid does have him wrapped around his pinkie finger."
"Nathan here is the same way with Alex," Jean laughed. "Raven, Scott told me to apologize to you… he said some of the boys were roughhousing with their powers in the other room…?"
"Your husband needs to exert stricter control over his charges," Raven observed flatly.
"Ya mean like ya did wit' Lance an' the boys?" Rogue drawled.
Raven gave her a look. "Touche."
"Speaking of Scott," Jean cleared her throat, and turned her attention to Rogue. "The professor tells me that Scott offered you a team of your own, if you stay."
Blinking in surprise, Raven looked at Rogue who was staring down at her water.
"Yeah," Rogue admitted. "I tell ya, Scotty boy's gotten good at the emotional blackmail, Jeannie."
"Hasn't he?" Jean sympathized. "Have you given it any thought?"
"Ah dunno," Rogue sighed. "It's a big decision t' make. Mah home is wit' Remy's family, but Ah jus' found ya'll again an' Ah don' wanna leave. An' it's not jus' mah call t' make, it's somethin' that affects Remy an' Tessa an' Lucas, too. N'awlins is their home, Ah couldn' ask 'em t' leave even if Ah wanted t'."
"You don't have to decide any time soon, though," Jean pointed out. "Take your time."
"Yeah, Ah know," Rogue said, nodding her head. "We already decided that we were gonna stay until the baby is born, t' take advantage of Doctor McCoy an' all, so Ah guess we'll wait an' see what happens after that."
"The professor mentioned you might be staying during your pregnancy," Jean told her with a smile. "So I had a thought."
"Well?" Rogue raised an eyebrow. "Let's hear it."
"I know you'll be bored, hanging around the mansion and off-duty while everyone else is handling X-men business," Jean replied slowly. "So I was thinking that maybe you would want to take over a few classes."
"Ya want me t' teach?" Rogue asked flatly.
"Just for a few months, to give you something to do," Jean explained. "And the kids all really admire you, you could teach them a lot."
"About what?" Rogue asked. "How t' be a thief?"
"I was thinking more along the lines of a political science class," Jean retorted. "There's a lot of debate about the direction mutants should take, and these kids are just as interested in the matter as the rest of us. You have a unique perspective, having been with Magneto for a while and with all his memories in your head. I think the kids could really benefit from your experience."
"What do ya think?" Rogue asked, and Raven was startled to realize her daughter was directing the question at her.
"I think," she answered slowly. "That if you don't have something to do during this pregnancy, you are going to get restless and drive the entire mansion mad."
Her blunt honesty earned a chuckle from Rogue.
"And Jean is correct," Raven added. "You would make an excellent teacher."
"Ah'd rather be out in the field," Rogue said. "But that ain't gonna happen any time soon, now is it? Fine, Jeannie, ya win. Tell the professor that Ah'll do it."
"You won't regret this, Rogue, I promise."
"Oh, Ah know Ah won't," Rogue retorted with a smirk. "But gimme a month an' those kids sure as hell will."
A/N: I want to first off apologize for my horrendously long absence. The past year has been a very difficult time for me, and there has been so much for me to work through. On top of that, I've been trying to balance work and school, with mixed results I have to say. I have not forgotten this fic and I will do my best to try and get it updated again soon- there are only 8 chapters left now, so hopefully it won't be too much longer before this story is completed. Thank you all so much for your patience and understanding, and for hanging in there!