AN: Guys, so so sorry for the long break! It has been mental at work. I hope some of you are still with me! I have written a bunch of stuff for way down the line, but for now, bear with me while I continue to demolish the little family I've built up *sobs* It has to be done, for the story!
Raven woke up to the sound of her alarm clock, and wished she hadn't. The routine her days had fallen into in the last few weeks was not one anybody sane would open their eyes to with any real enthusiasm.
First, before she ate or even washed her face, she had to go in search of Charles – to find wherever he had fallen asleep or unconscious the night before, and either wake him up or, if that proved to be impossible, manhandle him to his bedroom before any of the other inhabitants of the house had woken. Then she would clear up whatever mess he might have made the night before on his increasingly drunken circuits from study to wine cellar to liquor cabinet. Later, she would try to persuade her brother to get up, to shave, to wash, to dress, to take at least a few of his classes (the only thing that seemed to give him any real pleasure). To do anything, in short, other than stare out of his study window, dwelling on the memories that inevitably sent him back to the numbing refuge of alcohol.
Eventually Raven would hand Charles over, with a guilty sense of relief, into Madeline's care, who would watch over him as late into the night as she could, until he demanded to be left alone. Raven would sneak out of the mansion and wait for Azazel, allow him to take her away, make her forget, as only he knew how. The irony of her compulsion did not escape her – she and Charles weren't so different after all; it was just that her drug of choice had less of an impact on her physical health.
This time she eventually tracked Charles down to the greenhouse just off the kitchen, his cheek resting in the soil next to a leggy tomato plant. She patted him lightly on the other cheek until he opened his eyes, and gave her a smile of such singular sweetness she almost burst into tears.
"Morning, my dear," he mumbled, spat out a bit of mud that had been clinging to his lower lip and somehow got inhaled as he spoke. She wiped his face clean tenderly, let he hand linger on his bristly cheek.
"Morning, jackass," she replied. She crouched down next to him as he struggled into a sitting position, made a desultory attempt to straighten his rumpled clothes. Raven wished, not for the first time, that Charles did get hangovers – surely if he'd had even a fraction of the clangers he had earned practically nightly since Erik left, he would think twice about reaching straight for the bottle again the second reality stopped being fuzzy round the edges. Then again, perhaps not. He was already suffering enough; what difference would a headache make?
She sank back on her heels and sighed.
"This is getting out of hand, Charles. I know you're hurting. But this isn't helping. Anyone." She almost regretted opening her mouth as his face suffused with guilt at her rebuke.
"I know, I know. I know you're all worried about me. I'm truly sorry. I'm trying, I am. But I can't sleep, Raven. I go to bed like Maddy begs me to, but I just lie there listening to the world, all that suffering, all that pain, until it nearly drives me mad, hoping to catch a glimpse of Erik's mind…" He broke off, bit his lip, his hand instinctively closing around the neck of the empty bottle on his lap. Raven quickly put her hand over his.
"He'll be OK Charles. You know he will. He's a survivor." Charles nodded.
"I know he is, love. I know. It's just… he could do so much more than just survive. He had a life here. With me. With us. And I ruined all that for him."
Raven's expression hardened.
"Charles, you made a mistake. Erik had a choice. He could have chosen to forgive you like you forgave him, to trust you. He chose wrong."
She felt very conflicted about Erik leaving, and she instinctively took shelter in the most straightforward of her emotions – anger. She was, obviously, furious about what his abrupt departure was doing to Charles. She was angry at the fact he'd left the rest of them to clear up the mess. But she was also horribly hurt – that he hadn't tried to take Raven with him.
Not that she would ever have abandoned Charles. But she and Erik had always been of one mind on the mutant-human conflict. He knew she would have had his back if he had ever decided to defy Charles's timorous strictures, go on the offensive. And if he was planning on fighting a war, he couldn't do it all by himself – he could have used her skills. So why had he just turned his back on her without a second thought? OK, she hadn't been there when it all went down; but he could have waited. Or he could have called since. He could have at least asked.
He asked Madeline.
She tried her best to squash the thought. She knew that she was letting her envy of Hank's feelings for Maddy get mixed up with her sense of betrayal by Erik. And she knew the younger girl didn't deserve any of it. She had enough to worry about right now, with the question of her strange new powers still hanging like a storm cloud over the mansion, and her unshakeable conviction that the argument between Erik and Charles, and Erik's subsequent departure, were all her fault. Charles had made every effort, in his periodic moments of sobriety, to try and disabuse her of that notion, and Maddy pretended to believe him – and Charles pretended to believe that she believed. They were all walking on eggshells at the moment, Raven reflected grimly, no-one questioning anybody's façade closely, all too aware of the mess of difficult emotions writhing beneath the surface. Raven shook her head, then slapped Charles firmly on the knee.
"Come on then, Jack Kerouac. Let's get you cleaned up and halfway presentable – you've got that meeting with those people from the Educational Testing Service this afternoon-" but Charles was shaking his head.
"I cancelled the meeting. I can't face it just now Raven. To be honest, the thought of the first term beginning next month is enough to make my blood run cold. All those people, so much to do…" he trailed off, and Raven tried not to notice him weighing the bottle in his hand again. He spoke again, very low. "I always thought Erik would be here to help me carry the load." Raven sighed, pulled him into a rough embrace.
"I'm here, Charles. I can help you carry it. So can Hank, and Alex, and Sean. We're a team, remember? We're all right here with you, no matter how alone you feel right now."
Maddy had picked the post up from the end of the long drive as she was returning from her run. She was intrigued to find four manila envelopes with typewritten addresses, two of which had been redirected several times. She handed them out at the breakfast table to Alex, Sean and Hank, tucking the one addressed to Charles into her pocket to give to him later. Each man reacted differently upon opening the letter. Hank pushed his glasses up his nose and looked grave; Alex folded his up carefully and put in in the inside pocket of his jacket; and Sean scrunched his up into a ball and threw it scornfully across the room into the sink with an oath.
Maddy fished to soggy missive from the washing up and carefully opened it out. "'You are required hereby to register for Selective Service...' what's this?" Sean sneered.
"This is Uncle Sam ordering us to sign up to fight and die for people who would prob'ly burn us all as witches if they knew what we could do. And not even to protect our own country – just to screw around in someone else's civil war a coupla thousand miles around the world." He added a few choice suggestions about what Uncle Sam could do with their registration, until Alex slammed his fist down on the table in frustration.
"God damn it, Sean! Shut up, will ya? Just shut up. Just because you're a peacenik pothead drop-out, doesn't mean we all agree with you."
Sean's mouth dropped open. He and Alex were like brothers; they teased each other mercilessly, roughhoused and made more trouble between them than all the children combined – but they never argued, not really.
"You're not signing up for this shit?" he asked, incredulous. Alex nodded firmly.
"Of course I am, and so are you. For one thing, we've damn well got to – it's the law. For another, it's our duty as citizens of this country – being a mutant doesn't make us any less American. I thought that was the whole point of this place."
Sean didn't have much of an answer for that, so he merely swore again. Alex grinned, trying to lighten up.
"It probably won't even ever come to anything anyway. JFK's not an idiot, he's seen action – he knows what's achievable on the ground and what's not. He'll keep on throwing money at Vietnam, maybe send in some spooks to screw things up a bit, but he won't risk a full-blown war."
The rest of those assembled stared at him. To call the laser-thrower 'a man of few words' would be an understatement; him holding forth on any subject without cracking a joke for more than thirty seconds was almost unheard of. Alex blushed like a sunset.
"My dad was in the army, alright? He'd talk about stuff on the news, I paid attention. And he didn't raise me or my brother to welch out of signing up." And with that, he stood up and left the room.
Sean whistled, reached out for the marmalade.
"Well who knew we had our very own toy soldier in the house?" The redhead's levity rang somewhat false – he was obviously rattled, both by the letter and Alex's reaction. "What about you Blue?" he asked Hank, trying to cover his discomfiture. "You ready to do your bit for mom and apple pie?"
"Sean, shut up," said Maddy distractedly. She had just realized why Hank was looking so grim. Signing up for selection was one thing; but suppose Hank was drafted, had to report for duty? How would the US military react when seven feet of blue-furred scientist turned up at the assessment center? Even the best case scenario didn't bear thinking about.
Sean finished spreading his toast and pushed back his chair.
"Everyone's very tense these days, man! You all need to chill out. If anybody needs me, I'll be in the rec room."
After he'd gone, Maddy went and sat beside Hank, patted his arm.
"Alex is right. I know there's a lot of noise about Vietnam right now, but you shouldn't worry – it's so far away, it doesn't really have anything to do with us. There isn't going to be a real war; you won't get drafted."
Hank didn't respond. He just kept staring at the letter as if it were a grenade that might go off in his hand any moment. She took it out of his hand, put it behind the teapot.
"Don't borrow trouble, Hank. God knows we've got enough of our own already." He blinked at her, then nodded.
"You're right. I know you're right. How is Charles?" Madeline sighed.
"I guess I'm just about to find out – I've got a date with him this afternoon to try out some control techniques, to see if he can help me manage my impulses when I've had some blood."
Hank frowned.
"Do you really think that's a good idea?"
Maddy almost laughed. Hank was not one of nature's diplomats; she had never heard anyone ask a question in a way that made it clearer what their own answer to it would be.
In truth, she didn't know if it was a good idea or a terrible one. She had thought long and hard before accepting Charles's offer to help her explore her powers safely. She had come close, a hundred times, to just turning her back on all of it – the blood, the strength, the speed, the joy, the hunger. It was all too much, too strange, too much like something out of a bad Hammer horror. She had lived her whole life without these powers. They brought a host of questions and dilemmas with them; and most of all, it had been her reckless exploration of them that had led to Charles and Erik falling apart. Who knew what else she might bring crashing down if she carried on down that road?
So much for the con column. In the pro, there was nothing except for the fact that she could not get the memory of how the blood had made her feel out of her head. To be so strong, so free… she shivered even now, remembering. And then there was Charles. If anyone had reason to advise her to let it alone, he did. Instead, he was encouraging her to try and find a way to live with her powers.
"If you repress something, it tends to re-emerge in unexpected ways," he had said. "And I don't want to make the same mistake with you that I did with Raven – trying to get her to be something that she's not just to be safe. If I've learned anything from E-" at this point his eyes had widened in horror as he almost said the name that was forbidden between them. "From… everything," he continued eventually, "it's that you can't just ignore difficult things and hope it will go away. If there's something not right, it'll only get better if we confront it and resolve it. These powers are a part of who you are; what matters is that you don't let them control you. And that works both ways – letting your fear of them prevent you from exploring this aspect of yourself is allowing them to control you as much as giving yourself up to the impulses it provokes in you. You need to move on from that fear to become who you truly are."
Madeline had looked at him then, rumpled and slightly sour-smelling even early in the evening, bags under his bloodshot eyes. Physician, heal thyself, she thought sadly. Charles talked about moving on, but seemed to be stuck himself in an ever-narrowing spiral of misery and regret that nothing anyone could do could halt. It was so characteristic of the man that he would try so hard to help somebody else when he could do nothing to help himself. Still, if it gave him even a crumb of comfort, Maddy wasn't going to be the one to deny him.
Hank was still frowning doubtfully. She tried to smile confidently at him.
"Don't worry so much. Charles will be there the whole time – he'll stop me doing anything bad. And anything that takes his mind off his troubles and keeps him out of the scotch has got to be a good thing, right?"
"Damn right." Raven came into the room, sank down into the chair Sean had vacated. Her leaden tone and the dejected slump of her shoulders said more than words could tell about the difficult morning that she had had. She looked at Maddy with exhausted eyes.
"He's ready for you now, in the study. He actually seems quite keen to get started – let's hope the good mood will last, at least as far as lunch."
Maddy got up and crossed the room, gave the blue girl's shoulders a squeeze. Working together to try and support Charles had brought the two girls even closer, even as Hank's continued attentions toward Maddy threatened to drive an wedge between them. The idea of losing Raven's friendship over Hank's infatuation bothered Madeline more than she cared to think about. She took this opportunity now to leave the two alone, all she could do to try and mend whatever was broken between them. With an encouraging smile for Hank, she left the kitchen, went to find Charles.