Raven glared impatiently at the clock on the wall of the control room. It read 12:56, but none of the X-Men were there yet. She told them 13:00, 1 o'clock, and when she said sharp, she meant on the dot. It especially wasn't like Scott or Jean to cut it this close. They were usually suited up 15 minutes before training even started.
She checked her digital watch; 12:56 turned into 12:57 just as the analog clock ticked over, too. They couldn't both be wrong.
She paced the room in her yellow and black flight suit, which doubled as the X-Men's uniform. Hank McCoy, codename Beast, fiddled with the buttons and switches of the master controls. He was in his brown haired, bespectacled human form at the moment instead of the blue, furry, mutant body he'd accidentally turned himself into long ago. She'd known him for years, and had watched him inject the medicine that turned him into a human hundreds of times, but it never failed to make her feel sad for him. Telling him he didn't need the stuff never seemed to make a difference, either.
On the other hand, who was she to judge? She felt a little safer in public when she transformed into a normal looking human, too. But Hank took his medicine whether he was in public or not. In fact, she hadn't seen his beastly mutant side in months.
Below them in the danger room, Hank watched as the mechanical obstacles clanged into place. All of the blast-proof doors sprang from the top and bottom of the room, then retracted, followed one-by-one by all the metal tentacles, electrical barriers, laser stun turrets, and wind machines.
After he was certain everything was in working order, he began typing into the control room computer. A brand new, souped-up IBM motherboard hummed and clicked below the control panel, running an astounding 8 megabytes of RAM, which held nearly 100 different programmed obstacle courses.
He typed 'start_course_brotherskeeper' into the DOS command line, leaving the cursor blinking at the end.
"There we go," said Hank. He spun around in his chair and adjusted his glasses. "It's ready, all you have to do is press the 'enter' key."
"I know," said Raven, attempting not to roll her eyes. The computer was fairly new, but it wasn't as if she couldn't figure out how to start it on her own.
"Are you all right, Raven?" he asked in his quiet, bookish voice. "You look a little tired."
"Not much sleep," she replied with a sigh. She looked at the clock again; 12:58. Still no X-Men. "Jean woke everyone up at 8 this morning."
"Oh yes, I heard! Stanford! Good for her. You know, I had one or two colleagues from Stanford, back in the day."
She snorted. "'Back in the day.' God, Hank, you sound like an old man already."
"We are old, technically, by most social standards. Though you..." He trailed off and cleared his throat uncomfortably.
She raised an eyebrow. "I what?"
"I was only going to say, you never looked a day past 25."
In another time, perhaps she would have been graciously flattered. Now his kindness left a bitter aftertaste that should have been sweeter.
"I can look however old I want," she replied, matter of factly.
Hank, suddenly becoming absorbed in the control panel again, twisted one of the knobs back and forth. "This one's a bit sticky," he muttered to himself. He took the knob out of the panel and started cleaning the shaft inside. "Don't you usually get up much earlier than 8, anyway?" he asked her.
"Yes, but... I guess I've been having nightmares," she muttered.
"No wonder you've got bags under your eyes," he said absentmindedly, sticking the knob back into the panel.
Raven stiffened a bit. Classic Hank. Flattery and criticism, unflinchingly uttered in nearly the same breath.
Suddenly, the phone on the wall began to ring, startling them. Hank and Raven both instinctively moved to answer it, but before they could, Kurt teleported in between them with a puff of smoke, breathless and dressed in brown slacks and a red-and-white raglan tee shirt.
"Sorry," he panted, "I got a collect call a few minutes ago, but I didn't want to hang up so soon, so I transferred the call down here so I wouldn't be late and... can I take it, please?"
The phone continued to ring as Kurt waited for Raven's permission. "I... sure," she said, confounded.
He picked it up and said, "Hallo, Mama?"
Raven's heart froze. Kurt faced the wall and continued to speak in German to his adoptive mother.
She stared at him and imagined for the slightest moment that he was talking to her.
Hank, finally noticing her discomfort, put a hand on her shoulder. "Would you come down to the danger room with me so we can fix that turret?" he asked her, already leading her towards the elevator.
"What turr- oh," she said, for once being the clueless one in the room.
She watched Kurt coil the phone cord around his tail as the elevator door closed and they descended into the danger room.
Raven stared up at the window of the control room above them, watching Kurt smile and speak fond words she couldn't hear, words that weren't meant for her. The stainless steel danger room gleamed around them, reflecting polished streams of fluorescent light. Her reflection shone back at her from the floor almost as clearly as a mirror. Despite wearing her uniform, the world felt cold all of a sudden, alien, like the world in her dream. She clutched her arms close to her chest. Hank opened a panel of the wall and pretended to inspect the perfectly functional laser turret.
"You haven't told him yet, have you?" he asked.
She forced her eyes away from the window. "No," she said, after a long pause.
Hank closed the panel. "Jesus, Raven. Charles and I have kept your secret for almost a year. This is insane."
"This is incredibly hard for me, okay?" she hissed. "How in the hell do you just tell someone you're their mother?" She couldn't keep her voice from cracking. She bit her lip, fighting her tears back with all her might.
"You form the words with your mouth and force air through your larynx."
"Don't be an asshole!" she exploded. The anger helped burn her tears away. "You have no idea what this feels like."
"You're right, I don't. I'm sorry," he said. "Isn't waiting so long just making it harder for the both of you, though? You should have told him when you rescued him from that fight club in Berlin. I mean, if you need someone to be with you when you do it, I could-"
"I can't do it yet, all right, Hank?" she said. "Don't tell him. Please?"
"It's not my place to, anyway," he said. He scratched his head. "Is all of this because of Azazel?"
Raven sensed a trap in the tone of his voice, or perhaps he was pushing a button in her he didn't know was there, even though he damned well should.
"What about Azazel?" she asked.
"Are you afraid of explaining to him that his father... you know... murdered people for a living?" Hank shook his head. "What in God's name did you ever see in him, anyway?" he muttered.
She walked up to him slowly, her blood now boiling with rage instead of frozen with anxiety. She was several inches shorter than Hank, but could intimidate a man twice her size with her burning, yellow eyes and battle-hardened glare. He looked as if he didn't understand he'd set off a nuclear bomb inside of her.
She kept her voice deadly cool. "You seem to be conveniently forgetting that Magneto killed people, too. But do you know what Azazel didn't do? He didn't try to manipulate me, like Eric. He didn't make me feel ashamed of myself, like Charles did. He didn't find my natural body hideous and disgusting, like a certain person I can't remember the name of at the moment."
"I- I never said that," he stammered.
"You tried to get me to take that... stuff... that turns you into a human. You didn't need to say it." Her tears flowed freely down her cheek now, and there was nothing she could do to stop them. "I was just a tool to Magneto. Totally disposable. It took me years before I could look you or Charles in the eye again. Azazel was the only man I've ever met who loved me for who I was."
She marched to the elevator, Hank following close behind. "Raven! Raven, please," he pleaded, but she closed the elevator door before he could get inside.
She kept her finger on the 'close door' button. In her little capsule, she refused to go up or down. Instead, she sat on the floor, tears staining her cheek, her hair, her uniform, and let her anger overwhelm her.