"Nyet! I am telling you already, it does not work like this. For what do we have this conversation again? Nothing is changed."
Azazel was getting tetchy, and in her heart of hearts Mystique knew that was fair enough. But she didn't feel like being fair; she was tired and heartsore and scared, and quite apart from anything else she felt like shit, as if a snake was twisting in her guts. Mystique never got sick; so she assumed the serpent-stomach was a symptom of the stress she had been under – both of them had been under – from the moment Erik had been taken.
Telling the Brotherhood had been the worst. Raven had never felt a shame or guilt like it, admitting to those wide-eyed kids that their leader had been lost while she and Azazel had survived. She had tried to front it out – to reassure them that they would recapture Erik, that their war was still to come – and some of them had been desperate and afraid enough to want to believe her. But Chamelea had seen through her completely. Her face was white with fury as she had faced Raven down.
"Is this what you wanted? To get him out of the way? You really think you can lead us like he did? You?" The contempt in the girl's voice jangled Raven's already shattered nerves.
"How can you ask me that? It was Erik's mission, Erik's command. I never wanted-" Chamelea spat, she actually spat at Raven's feet.
"Liar. Ever since you came here, you've been pushing your way up, screwing anyone who might get you that bit closer to the top-"
"Dostatochno. Enough."
Azazel had appeared silently by her side, and his tone was icy. Chamelea had glowered at him, but hadn't dared to defy his curt instruction. The red man looked around the room where all their ragtag army had gathered to hear the news.
"Erik knows there is risk. Still he chooses to take mission. Some missions fail. Some battles we will lose. Even sometimes some people we will lose. But the war, that goes on still, yes?"
This to a general shuffling of feet and murmuring of agreement from those assembled. But Raven could still see those looking to Chamelea for direction. The scarred girl's one eye dilated and darted around, missing nothing. She raised her voice.
"Do we even know where they've taken him? Do we even know if he's still alive?"
A nervous ripple ran through the assembled mutants.
"If they had wanted him dead they could have killed us all right there. They went to a lot of trouble to take him alive. There has to be a reason for that."
Raven tried to sound confident, but knew it rang a little hollow. How could it not, when she was trying to convince herself – both of the truth of her words, and that they were any kind of comfort even if they were true. Chamelea seemed to have read her mind, turned to the others with a grim triumph.
"If he isn't dead, he'll soon wish he was. And so will we, when they get out of him who we are and where we are, and they come for us all. He won't want to do it. But they'll make him in the end. We all know what they do. This is what they do," she finished, jabbing a finger at the ugly scar where her other eye should have been. "I don't know about you, but I plan to be a long way from here before that happens. Any of you don't want to die, and still want a war, can come with me."
It was heartbreaking how few of them either went with her or stayed behind. A handful followed Chamelea out the door to God knows where; a smaller group, including the pale Vitae, remained. But most of their small band simply melted away into the night alone, back to the lonely lives in hiding that Erik had tried so hard to save them from. Raven sat down at the kitchen table, put her red head in her hands. She couldn't even weep. She had failed so utterly it had yet to sink in. Azazel sat opposite her, inscrutable, then suddenly pulled out one of his swords as a shadow fell across the kitchen.
"Well hell, looks like I got here just in time for the wake."
Raven's head came up sharply, and she found herself looking up at Banshee.
Sean's arrival had been a godsend – his fresh reserves of energy and enthusiasm for the fight gave Raven the direction and the drive she needed in the wake of losing Erik. Most importantly, he had the confidence of youth, and between the two of them, Azazel and Sean had managed to convince her that rescuing Erik wasn't a lost cause.
Unfortunately, the two of them couldn't see eye to eye on the question of strategy. Sean had a hard time believing Azazel couldn't do pretty much anything he pleased; and Azazel's pride would not allow him to be explicit with Sean about the limits of his powers. So once, by dint of a bit of cat-burglary in government offices, they knew where Erik was being held, Sean had a fairly clear-cut plan of how to get him out – a plan which revolved around Sean's flatteringly unlimited assessment of Azazel's abilities. This resulted in more or less the same argument being had at hourly intervals for almost a week now, and Raven was growing heartily sick of it. Although right this moment, she just felt heartily sick.
"Aw come on, Boris!" Sean huffed in frustration. "Way I hear it, you can go from Palo Alto to St Petersberg and still get back in time for pancakes. Why do I find it so hard to believe you can't get in and out the Pentagon?"
Raven put a hand to her forehead, which was unaccountably and unpleasantly clammy.
"Sean, just drop it will you, please? He's told you enough times, he can't do it. Don't you think that he would have done by now if he could?"
Sean snorted. Although he was an eager recruit to their cause, there was no great love lost between him and Azazel. Having done their damndest to kill each other in the past seemed to preclude a bond developing.
"Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn't," the Boston boy said snarkily. Azazel's response was to bury one of his swords in the sideboard, where it stuck, vibrating back and forth.
"Do not make me pull that out again, tovarisch," he warned. Raven groaned inwardly. She knew she shouldn't let them fight like this; she should be like Erik, commanding obedience with a steely stare, or like Charles, weaving everyone's interests together so subtly they forgot they'd ever been opposed. But she was just herself – a scared, confused, fucked-up young woman who – who was definitely going to throw up now.
She made it to the sink just in time, retching miserably into the stainless steel while both Azazel and Sean stared at her as if she'd grown another head. She wiped her mouth and scowled sourly.
"What's the matter, never seen anyone barf before?" she turned on the rusty faucet to wash away the thin bile, trying to hide how unsettled she was by this unprecedented event. Azazel put a hand on her elbow as she passed him.
"Are you alright?"
His tone was unreadable, but when she met his eye, the concern was written plain there.
"I'm fine," she said firmly – so firmly she almost convinced herself. Certainly it seemed to be enough for Azazel. He squeezed her arm again, pulled his sword from the board with a judder of metal, shot Sean a dark look, and left the room.
Sean for his part was looking at her with a new intensity. She drew herself up to her full height and glared at him, trying to ignore the lingering twinges in her belly.
"What?"
Sean looked embarassed. He opened his mouth, closed it again, and then said evasively:
"So you and Azazel. What's up with that?"
Raven rolled her eyes.
"Do I have to draw you a diagram?"
Sean's ears when scarlet.
"Hell no, I'm not a baby. I get it, you two are a thing. But do you trust him? Really trust him?"
Raven scowled.
"He saved my life, Sean. Nearly got killed doing so. Yeah, I trust him. Why, do you think I'm wrong?"
Sean shook his head.
"Damned if I know. But for your sake, I sure do hope you're not. You know you're knocked up, right?"
Sean's words hung in the air like some sort of paralyzing gas. Raven felt the blood draining into her feet. Her eyes narrowed.
"Don't be ridiculous."
Sean shrugged, backing towards the door.
"Hey, don't shoot the messenger. But you are. Catholic family, five big sisters – I know the signs. You're expecting. I'm assuming that it's his?" She fixed him with a murderous look. He held up his hands. "Hey, OK, OK! But you have to decide what that means. For you, for him – for all of us. You say he cares for you; hell, he's hot for you, that much is plain to see. But he doesn't strike me as the bootie-knitting type; no more than you do, if it comes to that. Do you think he's got what it takes to stick around for all that?"
Raven didn't have an answer for him. She was still trying to digest his suggestion, to make a space for it in the already crowded roster of crises jostling for position at the top of her list. Pregnant? She sat down heavily on the edge of the table, on hand unconsciously coming to rest on her belly. She had always assumed… well, she'd always assumed she was … exempt from all that stuff. She'd never been a nun, or particularly careful. And nothing like this had ever happened before. But then again, she'd never had a lover like Azazel before. Another mutant. Pregnant?
Sean, sensing it was safe now to approach, sat down cautiously across the table from her.
"What are you going to do? Are you going to tell him?"
Raven shrugged helplessly. Sean put his hand gently on her forearm.
"Well you better choose soon. You'll start showing soon. But Raven? I know you like him. Damned if I know why. Maybe you even trust him, far as you're concerned. Maybe if you tell him he'll be a stand-up guy. But I sure as hell wouldn't want my sister to be relying on him at a time like this."
Raven snatched her arm away.
"You're not my brother, Sean. My brother isn't here."
In bed with Azazel that night, Raven spoke into the darkness – not about the… problem? Issue? Baby? Not about that, anyway, but about the other major question weighing on her heart.
"So you really can't go there unless you've been there before? At all?"
Azazel grunted. He really didn't like talking about this, she knew. But it had to be done.
"I have said. I must have been there before. Or I must have seen. Sometimes, Emma, she put the place inside my head. Thought like I have been there. Then I can go."
Raven sat up in bed sharply.
"So a picture, maybe – if I could get in, take some Polaroids-"
"Nyet. I am trying this before, years ago. Does not work. It is not real."
She subsided, disappointed. For a moment there, they almost had a plan. If they could get Erik back… If he was with them again, providing the structure, the direction of their lives… keeping them their own version of 'safe'… maybe then, she would have room to address the other thing. The problem. The issue.
The baby.
It wasn't that she didn't trust Azazel. She didn't think. She had almost told him about five times that day. I'm pregnant, Azazel. We're pregnant. We're having a baby. But at the last moment, something had always swallowed the words out of her mouth. Somehow she couldn't shake the image of him vanishing into a puff of smoke. She was ninety-nine percent certain that wasn't what would happen. But the tiny part of her that wasn't sure seemed to loom a lot larger after her conversation with Sean.
If Erik were here, maybe she could have handled that possibility, faced it head on. If only…
She sighed, rolled over onto her belly, buried her face in the pillow and groaned in frustration.
"What we need," she said, her voice muffled in the pillowcase, "is a telepath."
Azazel grunted in assent.
"We can have. If we want. I can bring him here in less than minute if you let me."
Raven shook her head hard.
"No. I've told you. We can't do that. Erik would kill us if we involved Charles."
Azazel scoffed.
"Erik is captured. You are leader. You must choose. Without professor, only plan is to fight our way in and fight our way out."
Raven lost her temper.
"NO! Are you stupid? We'd all of us be killed. Or worse, captured. There has to be another way we haven't thought of yet."
She felt Azazel shrug under the blankets.
"These are the choices; we will not be finding Emma unless she is wanting us to find her. It is you who does not want to involve professor, I think."
Raven swore into the darkness. She knew he was right, as far as it went. It was her choice, and her responsibility. But she didn't want it. Quite apart from having no idea whether Charles would be willing to help them, she was afraid to contact him again, to find out where the downward spiral she had left him on had ended up. And in any case, it shouldn't be her choice. It should be Erik's. It was his freedom, set against his pride. How could Raven guess at which he would have put first, if given the choice?
Suddenly, she knew what she would have to do.
"I have to get in there, Azazel. Not a rescue mission – I know I could never get him out on my own. Just reconnaissance. I need to ask him what we ought to do."
Azazel hadn't liked it, of course. No more had Sean, who muttered something barely audible about her condition, cut off by a killer glare from Raven. But they had chosen her to lead; she had her way.
It wasn't even difficult, in the end – not to get in. She trailed guards for a few weeks, interfered with some rotas, and then assume the guise of one of the guards while he was enjoying a day at home, thinking one of his colleagues had the shift – a colleague laboring likewise under the same misapprehension. Of course, if the two happened to be great buddies and talked about it to each other, the jig would be up. But the guards set to watch over Erik were rotated regularly, in a bid to prevent any of them developing overfamiliarity, to avoid the intensive security procedures surrounding contact with the dangerous mutant becoming lax.
The security rigmarole was certainly intense. Raven was scanned and checked so many times between the front door and the plastic elevator down to Erik's cell she was a bag of nerves, convinced she would be rumbled any minute. Certainly it put paid to any plan she might have had to smuggle some sort of metal weapon to Erik, something which might change the game, give them the advantage. The more she learned about the Pentagon prison, the more convinced she became that the only way of safely springing Erik was to try and leverage her brother's powers.
The guards worked in pairs, each keeping an eye on the other. Raven would have only the briefest opportunity to talk to Erik, when her counterpart answered a call of nature. Until then, she had to stare indifferently down at him, making noncommittal mumblings in response to the very small talk of a very fat, very boring man from Newark about the weather and his woman trouble. In the three hours she endured of this, Erik did not move once in the grey cell below. His back was to the observation window, and he sat cross-legged, looking at the wall. Beyond the relief of confirming with her own eyes that he was alive, she couldn't glean anything about his wellbeing or his state of mind. Finally, the hefty lunch he fellow guard had eaten caught up with him, and he lumbered off in the direction of the bathroom. Raven fell to her knees next to the observation window, pounded on it with her fists.
"Erik!" she hissed, in the guard's gruff voice. He didn't turn, didn't react in any way. Could he even hear her?
"Erik!" she shouted, in her own voice.
His reaction was electric. He exploded off the floor and spun around, and she finally got a good look at his face. She flinched. His eyes were wild, like a captive animal, trembling in a face as taut as wire. He walked up to the viewing window and hissed up at her, panicked.
"No, no, no, Raven, what the hell are you doing here? Get out, get out now, it isn't safe here!"
She rested the flats of her – his – palms against the glass.
"Erik, calm down. It's OK, no-one knows I'm here. And no-one will, if you stop screaming the place down!"
He was still panting, his eyes darting from side to side as if anticipating the arrival of enemies on every side. He ground the words out hard through gritted teeth.
"You don't understand. These people are dangerous, Raven. They know about us. They know about you. Don't do anything stupid. This could be a trap. You shouldn't be anywhere near them. You can't get me out of here, so just get out now while you still can."
Raven crouched closer.
"Trust me, I'm aware of all that. And God knows, there's places I'd rather be. And I'm not crazy. This isn't the cavalry, OK? Not yet. Just recon. Now please, relax."
A succession of expressions flitted across his face – frustration, relief, disappointment – all against an omnipresent background of fear. Fear for her. After a long moment, in which the world failed to come to an end, his shoulders dropped, and huffed the breath he had been holding in. Then he looked up at her sideways, smiled with half his mouth – and for the first time, someone like the man she knew looked through his eyes.
"It's good to see you, Raven. Although frankly, you've looked better."