The hours they waited after the call were the longest of Raven's life. After a while, Karol started to cry, quietly but inconsolably, so utterly unnerved by the continuing strangeness, the deviation from the routine that had shaped his entire life.
The agent holding him shushed him increasingly uncomfortably, but as Karol's weeping intensified and the man raised a hand to him, Raven reached out desperately.
"Give him to me, please. He'll be quieter with me. He's just scared – he's only a baby."
The agent propped a questioning eyebrow at Trask, who waved a tiny hand negligently.
"Oh, by all means. But please do keep your guns on the child."
Karol was deposited whimpering into Raven's outstretched arms, his tail coiling around her arm tight enough to cut off her circulation, huddling closer as his face freckled red from the laser sights suddenly congregating on him from every corner of the room. Raven lowered her chin protectively over his head, whispered into his ear in Russian.
"It's OK, baby. Everything is going to be OK." Karol turned a tired, tearstained face up to hers, eyes beseeching.
"Want papa, mamch'ka. Want to go home." Her eyes filled with sudden, helpless tears.
"Soon, baby. Papa will be here soon. And then we can all go home."
She leaned closer, lowered her voice, and in the same soothing tones whispered: "Karolek. Remember earlier, by the swings, before the men came? Mamch'ka was trying to take you off, and you went away?"
He nodded, rubbing one eye with a furry fist. "Went poof. Like Papa," he mumbled with disconsolate pride. She gently pulled his hand away from his face, gazed into his eyes.
"Do you remember how, baby? Could you do it again? Now?" He looked at her with wide, golden, uncomprehending eyes.
"Didn't mean to, mamch'ka. Just happened." His lower lip started to wobble again. "'M'sorry, mamch'ka. Go home now?" Raven wrapped her arms around him, rocked him on her lap, pulled his head down onto her breast so he couldn't see the tears streaming down her face.
When Azazel arrived, with another contingent of gun-toting CIA agents and a sack over his head, Raven and Karol weren't allowed in the same room. She was on the other side of a window of bulletproof glass, looking at him as the sack came off over his head and his eyes cut sharply left and right, the eyes of a snared predator, taking in everything and categorizing it as threat, weapon, opportunity. Then his eyes flicked over her and his face twitched – he recognized her somehow through the disguise, and for a second she saw him flicker in the air, almost coming to her. But then he saw the agent standing next to her, Karol once again held in his arms, pistol pressed into the base of his skull. A look of ice-cold, killing rage crossed his face, but she could see him visibly stand down. This wasn't a battle that he could win.
Trask, apparently unpeturbed by the murderous look on Azazel's face, stepped forward with a small, chilly smile.
"So glad you could join us, Mr Azazel. As you see, your son and your woman are unharmed, as promised. And they will remain so, as long as you remain co-operative. So let's not drag this out. Say your goodbyes, and we can get on with the business in hand."
Azazel gave the little man a look of such blistering disdain even his sangfroid seemed to falter.
"Once you do not have them," the Russian said, slowly and carefully, "you will die so slow and so hard they will be finding your body for weeks. This is bad mistake you are making, čeloveček."
Trask mouth had thinned at Azazel's grim prediction. But he maintained his businesslike reserve.
"Well yes, I rather imagined that would be your view. Which is why they will remain under my close surveillance. Perhaps you – and your friend here - are imagining that they can hide from us once they are free, leaving you free to effect your escape? Please disabuse yourself of that idea. Your child's conspicuous appearance guarantees that he will always be easy to find; and your friend's face is even now on file with every security agency in the free world."
Azazel barked a short, hard laugh at that, but stopped when he caught Raven's warning eye. She saw him realize that they really didn't know who and what she was, saw his eyes widen with sudden hope. He quelled it instantly, then turned imperiously back to Trask.
"Ostav' nas. You say that we can say goodbye."
Trask shook his head.
"And so you may. But we aren't going anywhere, I'm afraid. You can say your farewells just as well with us standing here."
Raven had been watching the scene unfold with a growing sense of unreality. Somehow, it hadn't truly registered just how well and truly trapped Trask had them. She had been waiting for Azazel, somehow imagining once he was here she – they – would be able to come up with something, some way to bring this nightmare to a close, to escape. But the bullet three inches from Karol's brain remained an ineluctable fact, cut off all routes out of the trap. As long as they had that, all her power, all Azazel's power, meant nothing – nothing at all.
Now as if in a dream she was moving towards the thick glass window, towards Azazel, who had put a red palm against the glass. She put a shaking hand up to meet his, willing him to feel her warmth, the last friendly touch he might ever know. She looked into his eyes, felt the weight of all the words they neither one could say because of the enemy eyes on them. So she said the only thing that she could say that was true.
"I'm so, so sorry. I never thought-"
He shook his head.
"No, siniy-" but then he cut himself off, even that long-standing pet name suddenly denied them, the clue it might offer to her identity making it verboten. He tried again.
"No. Do not say this thing. Do not feel it. It will eat you if you do. No regret. What is done, is done."
She shook her head, made no attempt to hide the tears as they streamed down their face.
"But they'll torture you. And there's nothing I can do! Karol-" he interrupted her harshly.
"You do nothing, yes? You get away from here. And then you get away from them. You will. I know."
She pushed her hand harder against the glass, watched her fingertips whiten, bit her lip.
"Aren't you afraid?" she whispered. He shook his head.
"Before, when I did not know where you were – then I was afraid. I did not know if Karolek was safe. Now I see you are together, and I know he will be safe. You are strong; and you will make him safe. But first, I must make you safe. I am not afraid to die for you, for our son. I am proud to do this thing."
She looked at him one long, last time, this man who had given her so much and asked so little, this man who had made her who she was – a soldier, a proud mutant, a mother. And she realised there was still one true thing she could still say.
"Azazel. I love you. I love you. I love you."
His eyes had closed the first time she said it, and she realised in that moment that it hadn't escaped his notice that she had never said the words before, that he had been waiting for them. And as much as she hated herself at this moment for bringing him to this, she found a little more hatred to spare that she had denied him - and herself - that simple truth, until now, until it was too late.
He let out a soft sigh.
"Ya tozhe tebya lyublyu. Vy oba. Vsegda." And then he squared his shoulders, opened his eyes, and she saw the finality in them, saw him trying to look through her.
"Go now. Go with them. Get away from this place."
And his hand dropped from the window, and he held his arms out to his captives. Raven shook her head helplessly, and then someone was jerking her arm, pulling her out of the room, down the hall, away from Azazel.
Karol was in her arms again, guns pointing at them both from all sides. She saw the lenses of cameras at regular junctions in the ceiling, and she knew that Azazel would be watching them now as they were led out of the building, towards freedom. Or had he taken Trask at his word? Were they even now strapping him down, taping electrodes to his brain, twisting his mutation with drugs and chemicals? She shuddered violently, clutched Karol tighter in her arms.
So captive in her dark imaginings was she that she didn't notice at first when the van they had been bundled into u-turned in the desert night, began to track back the way they had come. Only when it pulled to a halt in the darkness did she come to.
"What is this?" she said. "You were supposed to let us go."
The agent driving the Land Rover smirked. "Yeah, about that…" and that was when Raven felt the crushing blow hit the back of her head. Her mutation allowed her to absorb a lot more of the force than a human could, as her skull shifted and thickened instinctively, and she crouched away from the impact. But she was still stunned as she was pushed from the car, rolled in the sand. The men were all around them now, as she sat helplessly on the ground, clutching her son. Karol whimpered in fear, squirmed wildly in her arms.
"Mr. Trask was just so taken with your brat, he couldn't bring himself to give him up. And really, what's to stop him going for a two-for-one? The only thing we don't need here is… you." And with that, her tormentor pointed a gun at her face, cocked the trigger. Raven shut her eyes –
and then felt a rush of air, Karol's tail again tight round her wrist, and then a sudden stillness and quiet completely different from the hollow sounds of the desert night.
Gingerly, she opened her eyes, found herself staring at the back of the sofa in their Berlin apartment. Karol was trembling in her arms, a blue-grey smoke diffusing around him.
"Baby?" Mystique breathed.
"Home now, mamch'ka," the boy said shakily, then curled up in her lap like a puppy. She stroked his back as he began to cry, then when he slept, began to cry herself.