Dear Raven,
This is the first letter I've ever written anyone – are you proud? I've started it a hundred times in my head, and can't seem to envision a way for it to be everything that I want it to. So instead I'm just going to start writing, and hope the right words come to make you understand.
I wish I had somewhere I could send this. Or better yet, that you were here right now, and we could talk about it all– really talk. More than that, I wish I just knew whether you were dead or alive. After Erik was arrested, Charles entertained a hope that you would come back home – watching that hope sicken and die was one of the saddest things I've seen in a year that has been full of sorrow.
Why didn't you come home, Raven? Or at least call or write? I know Charles hurt you when he said that you should leave; I know you've followed Erik a long way from the path Charles would have wanted for you; but you know there's not a sin on earth he could hold against you, not for long. He's needed you so badly; and I have. If only you'd been here, maybe you could have talked him out of – well, I'm getting ahead of myself.
I'm writing this letter because, if you ever do come back, I want you to understand. You told me to look out for Charles, and I really tried. You felt free to leave him because you thought I would be here. If you're reading this, then you have come back, and found that I am not. In fact, if you're reading this, there's a good chance I'm already dead, so this will be my only chance to explain to you why I had to let you down, to leave.
Of course, that's probably going to be the least of your questions. You'll also be wondering how come your brother can walk again – and why he's no longer a telepath.
Of course, you may not see this as so big a problem as I do. I know how much Charles's pain hurt you; and I know you never liked the idea that he had the power to look inside your head. So perhaps you will see this as an improvement; not the abomination Erik would perceive it as.
Erik. He was all I could think about when Hank and I sat down with Charles and told him about the serum Hank had invented, how it could smuggle my mutation into Charles disguised as his own DNA. How it could allow him to be healed; how the healing would come at the price of his own gift. I could only imagine how appalled Erik would have been; and I tried not to imagine his utter horror and disappointment when Charles said "Yes" without a moment's hesitation.
I tried to talk to him, to make him think about what he might be giving up. Hank's mutation returned whenever the serum had burned up in his blood – but we were shooting in the dark; there were no guarantees that Charles would respond in the same way, that his powers would return and no harm done once my healing powers had done their work. Charles simply didn't seem to care.
"I'll take that risk more than happily, dear," he said, with a sad smile. "My gift's more of a curse than a blessing these days. But you know that."
He wasn't wrong. What with the drinking and the insomnia and his fragile emotional state, Charles's powers were all over the place, rebounding on those around him (which pretty much boiled down to me and Hank by that point). I wasn't sure if the graphic dreams we'd begun to simultaneously have about Erik being tortured by the government were his demons reverberating in my mind or the other way around; but certainly the effect was magnified by Charles's powerful projections. Certainly Hank wasn't about to lose any sleep over Erik's fate in the usual run of things; but he would come down to breakfast in the morning as ashen and drawn as the two of us, after spending the night racked by the same nightmares.
Charles had confided in me one drunken night that with his extra senses stripped raw and out of his control like this, his greatest fear was that he might somehow pick up on Erik's mind, once so familiar to his. He couldn't bear to think about what he might find in it. He drank still more to deaden his power, to dull himself to that agonizing roar of suffering that he so dreaded contained a strand of Erik's pain.
Charles had begun to complain of us "thinking too loudly", and to spend more and more time alone in his room, no more blood-training with me or companionable chats with Hank. The worse he suffered from all this, he worse his drinking became, and so on in a bleak spiral until his power was a torment to himself and anyone within reach. I think by that point he might have taken the serum even if it didn't come with the promise of the use of his legs – frankly, I think there isn't much he wouldn't have sacrificed for a single night of deep, dreamless sleep.
At least it gave Hank a bit of leverage as to Charles's lifestyle. He insisted that Charles should be in as good a physical state as possible before we attempted the injection, in case of another adverse reaction. He managed to cut down on the booze, to get some sleep. But although his face filled out, and the bags under his eyes lightened a little, the eyes themselves remained dulled and bereft of hope.
Even when, after Hank was satisfied that he was fit, and the injection to his spine went according to plan – even when he was able to stand up almost immediately, and Hank pronounced that the tests his spine was almost completely back to normal – even then, the warming fire that used to burn so brightly in Charles failed to come back to life. He seemed relieved more by the silence inside his head than overjoyed by the vitality returning rapidly to his wasted limbs.
Before long, the temporary nature of the reprieve provided by the serum was confirmed – moreover, it transpired that as soon as the serum had worn off, his own recovering mutation turned on the spinal cells mine had repaired, taking away his legs even as it gave him back the tumult of voices calling out to his mind. The visceral agony this caused Charles was pitiful to see. He began a cocktail of the serum and alcohol combined at alarming levels, taking more than he needed more often than he needed it, so desperate was he to keep the pain, and those voices, at bay.
I want you to know, I wasn't standing idly by watching all this happen. I tried to reason with him, and with Hank, who could have cut Charles off any time he liked and should have in my opinion. Hank and I weren't getting along so well by then it's complicated to explain, but frankly I felt like I didn't really know who he was any more, and not just because of the way he looked now. I tried to make him see that what Charles needed and what he wanted weren't necessarily the same thing, and that he should remember that he was Charles's doctor as well as his friend. But he would just turn his head away and insist that he had no right to dictate to Charles the terms of his own treatment.
"This is his home, Maddy. This is his lab. None of this would be possible without his say-so. Do you know how much the equipment costs that allows me to keep making this serum? And anyway, we – he – needs it. It's the only thing that lets him lead a normal life."
A normal life. To be fair, I'm no expert on what a normal life is; I suppose none of us are. But if this was what it looked like, then it wasn't all it was cracked up to be as far as I was concerned. Charles stumbling from bed to bottle with that dead look in his eyes; Hank and he injecting every day to keep reality away; and all of us ignoring the elephant in the room – that whatever it was that had brought our little family together in that beautiful house, it was dying a slow death in the absence of half of its members.
Even so, I had no plans to leave. I had made a promise to you, and to Erik, to look after Charles. And anyway, where would I even go? So I drifted around the mansion like a ghost, feeling more like an animal in a trap every day, but not knowing daring to stick my head out of the trap in case what was outside was even worse. I went back to watching TV, something I'd thought I'd had enough of in Fiskel's facility to last me a lifetime – just to feel connected to something. But somehow it felt like a window onto a world I wasn't part of any more, as if I was in a space-ship a million miles away from the smoking remains of a dead planet, looking at documentaries about what life had been like there. The news was my science fiction; it all seemed very long ago and far away.
But it was while I was watching the news one day not so long ago that everything changed – somehow, impossibly, for the worse.
"Police in Oregon are seeking leads in the mysterious disappearance of Olympic hopeful Jessica Burroughs, who vanished from her family home only weeks before selections for the national swim team last month. At first, the authorities had surmised Burroughs had left of her own volition – perhaps feeling pressure for the upcoming trials. However, Burroughs' distraught parents have always insisted their daughter would not have left of her own free will without a word, and today, they came forward with a message they had received from – we surmise – the swimmer's kidnappers."