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labingiTitle: "A Dash of Truth Spread Thinly"
Fandom: X-Men (movieverse)
Characters/Pairings: Erik/Raven, Charles
Word Count: 3500
Rating: PG-13 for sex and themes
Summary: Set after X-Men: First Class and after X2, implied AU for X3. Erik and Raven: Forty years together, and it does seem a day too much.
A/N: The title is from Tori Amos's "Pancake," my new X2 Erik and Raven song.
"A Dash of Truth Spread Thinly"
1963
Erik was in no rush to sleep with Raven. He could have her any time he wanted, and that made it an interesting exercise to probe his own feelings for the optimal moment, the day he genuinely wanted her, not for her perfectly sculpted breasts or the curve of her thigh or the satin of her indigo scales, not because she was Charles's sister, but the day she had earned her own space in his life.
She had come with him like a child, seeking someone new to lead her. And she stayed with him like a child. When he went out recruiting or gathering materiel, he let her tag along, set her insignificant tasks to test her faces and voices. Her disguises themselves had been spotless for years; it was the choice of which and when and how he honed.
They continued the earlier lessons in self-defense he'd given her at the mansion. He could still (most of the time) throw her easily, because she didn't really believe she could fight. But in raw potential, it began to be clear she was both faster and stronger than he was.
In an endless succession of motel rooms, he let her sleep in his bed, let her nestle up against him, gave her a languorous morning kiss before loading her up with their suitcases. He built her as he was building his new order, by nut and bolt.
***
Yet she proved perhaps most useful in her simple passion for reaching out to other mutants who, like her, wore their superhumanity on their skin. He'd watch her embrace the outcasts with her eyes and, in the tones of a co-ed preaching disarmament, proclaim, "We can create a home where we can be loved just the way we are." That innocent yearning, at least, required no sharpening.
***
In the latest motel, he licked her scales and cupped her breasts until she moaned; then he drew back.
She turned on her side and poked his shoulder. "You are a tease," she told him in that deep, rich voice he could now reproduce exactly in his head.
It was true: he was a tease with her. He didn't play games like that by nature, but this slow dance with Raven he was thoroughly enjoying.
***
Driving down the highway, they talked about birth control.
"And then he looks up from this big, old science journal, all excited, and he says, 'Raven, they've approved the pill; get on it!'" She nailed Charles's tone and accent, though keeping her own register. (He'd cautioned her explicitly never to impersonate Charles.) "And I said, 'You know you said that in exactly the same tone of voice you use when you're telling me to put my face on because someone's coming?'"
Erik chuckled. "And what did he say?"
"He just laughed, like you." She snaked a finger through his hair. "Well, actually harder than you. Charles is kind of a fan of sex puns."
"Yes, I know."
***
There was no revelation, no moment when suddenly things had changed. Those first months soldered them. Divisions of labor grew automatic; looks began to serve for conversations; as he gave her more responsibility, she grew into it; they learned each other's textures and weights. And one night--they were at "home," Shaw's place--he decided not to pull away but lay down on her and let her divest him of his underwear. He rode her a long time, with such contentment that he was more sorry than satisfied when it was over. And she was blue; she was the most perfect blue he had ever slept with.
She flopped over on top of him, studying his face a bit too piercingly. "Jesus, Erik, you made me wait a fucking long time for you."
He brushed his fingers across her cheek. "Was it worth it?"
She kissed him roughly in answer, scraping her teeth against his lip. He met her with an equal roughness of lips and teeth and tongue. Then, he caressed her smooth hair and said against her ear, "This is only the beginning."
***
2003
To: isaacspared@fort.net
From: waterysenator@fort.net
Date: October 18, 2003, 9:44 p.m.
Subject: Change of Plans
M,
I'm going to stop doing Kelly. We can talk about the best way. For right now, K's going on a medical leave. I'll be home soon.
M
***
To: waterysenator@fort.net
From: isaacspared@fort.net
Date: October 18, 2003, 11:19 p.m.
Subject: Re. Change of Plans
Don't be absurd. We will, of course, not throw K away. If you need to act out, go fuck someone. This tantruming doesn't become you.
M.
***
To: isaacspared@fort.net
From: waterysenator@fort.net
Date: October 19, 2003, 12:13 a.m.
Subject: Re. Change of Plans
I'm done with this conversation. I'll see you at home.
M
***
She'd made a mistake in pushing Erik into waiting for her. As moves went, he conceded, it had taken a pawn. He couldn't waylay her in Washington without creating a spectacle with too many variables to control. He could vanish and have the satisfaction of not conforming to her presumptions, but he was not a child, and since he needed to talk to her, he stayed and marked it down against her, alongside the darker marks.
When she got there, he made sure to be situated behind his desk with Pyro at his shoulder and his Newton's cradle clacking. Pyro, when he'd heard of her betrayal, had launched a string of invective Erik found delightful, not least because it matched the very character of his own outrage but blurted with a vigor that was pure teen spirit. Now, Pyro glared daggers as Mystique sauntered in, while Erik assumed his chairman's face.
He cracked at smile at the way her eyes kept flicking back to Pyro. She wanted Erik alone for whatever speech she'd been rehearsing, but she couldn't pin down the best approach for getting rid of the boy. Ultimately, she picked a straightforward one.
"Erik, we need to talk."
He could have played it out. Certainly, my dear, talk on. But suddenly the game was getting old. "Pyro, would you be so good as to give us a moment?"
Pyro never glanced his way but bent an impressive swivel-headed glower on Mystique almost to the doorway. (For a moment, Erik was worried he'd bonk into the frame.)
She took the big, steel interviewee's chair, crossed her legs and sprawled an arm across its back in a facsimile of nonchalance, pretending that she didn't mind that the chair was set uncomfortably far from the desk and, of course, too heavy for her to shift.
He leaned forward, crossing his hands on his desk. "So what's all this about Senator Kelly?"
"The best way to get rid of him is to arrange to have him martyred for his pro-mutant change of heart. I could stage that within a week and time it to the vote on HR 326."
"Really. And since, I believe, we're talking about a senator, wouldn't it be more logical to wait the bill reaches the Senate?"
She kicked her ankle a little, still playing blasé. "I'm not waiting that long. I'm done. I'm leaving."
He gave his displeasured look. She stared back with cold, yellow eyes. He should have seen this coming. To say things had been strained since they'd gotten the news would be to misdescribe it. Charles's letter, naturally, had shaken them both. It had been blunt and impossible not to commit to memory:
Erik, Raven,
Jean is dead. She died expending her power to hold back the flood while simultaneously levitating and operating a large aircraft. If you had not abandoned us, she would still be alive. I will not forgive you for this.
C.
His accusation was irrefutable. If Erik had been there, he could have lifted all of them off in the Blackbird and saved everyone. Easy.
Mystique had already been back in Washington when the letter came; he'd forwarded it without comment. They exchanged no words about it, though they emailed several times a day about the Senate. And after Charles's update lightened the pall just a little, he'd assumed it would blow over.
Instead, here she was saying, "I don't know who you are anymore. Or me, for that matter. I stood by and let you leave Charles in that place, and I smiled about it. We abandoned our people, and I smiled, and Jean died--"
"Charles thinks she's survived," he reminded her of the second, clipped letter.
Mystique ignored him. "We've been at this for decades. We're going to die of old age--well, you are--and things are worse than when we started. The only thing we've accomplished is making enemies of our own family, my family. Do you have any idea what's involved in impersonating a senator? I spend so much time in other people's damn bodies I barely remember the sound of my own voice. I'm sitting here talking, and it sounds like someone else is talking because I don't remember what it's like to talk. When I rescued you from prison, you didn't even say thank you. You almost killed the entire human race; does that even register with you? We left them there, and it--we killed Jean. I am disgusted with us. Your expression is unimpressive."
It damn well was impressive and he kept it up. In the silence, the spheres of the cradle clacked, persistently failing to run down in response to friction.
At length, she couldn't help but glance at them, fleetingly but it was enough. "Look, Erik," she said with a true actor's pretense at composure, "you can kill me; you can lock me up. But you can't make me go back to doing Kelly. You could torture me into submission, but if you did that, I'd be way too shaken up have the nuance to pull it off." She crossed her arms. "So if you're planning to kill me, why don't you just get on with it?"
The words chafed. She'd correctly assessed his limitations, and some part of him was disappointed that she believed he'd do those things, the more so because she was close to right.
Still, he'd be damned if he was going to present himself as infantile enough to assault her from mere spite. He knew how to cut his losses, and wait, and rise again. He assumed a bright demeanor. "Well then, it seems there's nothing left to say." He got up, waving his chair back behind him, and came to sit on the edge of his desk. "Where do you intend to go? To Charles?"
Her eyes narrowed. She stood. It was, of course, where she'd go, even though they hated her. She had nowhere else, unless she wanted to wander the country alone and in disguise, and she didn't.
She made for the door, a little stiffly, as if expecting a heavy object to come hurtling at her back. At the door, she paused. "I missed you when you were in prison. God, I missed you so much." Then she was gone.
***
A week later, after Kelly had resurfaced and duly been murdered, he followed her to the school. Pyro, having just escaped it, had no desire to return, so Erik left him with some associates, less from fear he'd get in mischief than fear he would get lonely.
Entering Charles's establishment, of course, was not so straightforward. Mystique, no doubt, had disguised her way in, but Erik didn't have that luxury. Finally, as much as he favored the theatrical flair of an unannounced appearance, prudence made him phone ahead.
"I'm coming to visit, Charles," he said. "And if I end up lasered in half, I will be very incensed with you."
"I'll see to it no one lasers you," said Charles and hung up on him.
***
He took off his helmet at the gate and, his presence thus announced, was met by Scott (Precision planning, Charles, to deputize Scott), who glared out of his Cylon eye and managed to escort Erik up the drive in silence for approximately twenty seconds before coming out with, "One of these days, I'll eviscerate you."
"That's the spirit," said Erik dully in what was probably some half-unconscious attempt to quote Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner. Whatever it was, it fizzled.
As it happened, the one who couldn't refrain from nudging her powers against him was Storm. It was a token resistance, an atmospheric crackle, a little shock through his fingers. He barely saw her walk past, ghostlike.
He counted it a blessing, anyway, that Wolverine did not appear: out ranging around Canada probably.
***
Raven ("Raven"?) was in Charles's study, and despite himself, Erik was impressed. She'd put on the old disguise she used to wear as Charles's sister, but it took him a moment to recognize it because she'd aged it up. She made quite an elegant sixty-five, character lines accentuating her bone structure, gray hair swooped into a loosely pinned swirl, a figure improbably exquisite in a lacy white blouse and jeans. It was a politic move. Though everyone surely knew who she was, she knew better than anyone that appearances swayed. I come as Charles's sister, she was saying, and her worst enemies couldn't help but be mollified, if only a little.
"You've outdone yourself, my dear," he said sincerely.
Charles pressed her hand. "Raven, Erik and I have some things to discuss."
"Yeah." She got up and brushed past them. "Good luck with that."
He spent the next six hours having the most difficult conversation of his life. It boiled down to Charles, in his most proper, sermonizing voice, reiterating a thousand different ways, "You left me to die; you let my child die; you left me to die; you let my child die; it is only the sheerest good luck--for you--that she probably isn't really dead." It came to him he had never seen Charles enraged until now. His rage was cool and venomous as an adder coiled in the shade of a rock. And this, moreover, was rage already significantly softened: Good luck for me if she isn't dead.
Erik figured he contributed about 40 percent of the dialogue, but he couldn't for the life of him keep track of what he said. There was something about "desperate times," and a certain recurrence of "I'm sorry," which he was: he'd been angry; he'd been raw from months in prison, months of drugs; he'd seen a chance to end the problem once and for all; he'd taken it. He'd assumed Charles's children would save him; they always did. But the truth was he had barely cared. He'd been so angry at Charles, so angry at all of it. And he'd left him helpless and out of his mind, left him to die. He'd let Charles's child die. There were also sandwiches, though where they appeared from he couldn't say.
At some point, he thought he said, "I'm tired," or something along those lines, or maybe he'd thought it. With Charles, it could be hard to tell.
Then, Charles was by his side, arms around him. Erik clutched the fabric of Charles's jacket and let his forehead sink on his shoulder, which smelled more of Tide than it used to.
"You can stay the night," said Charles in a distant tone that clearly appended, not with me.
"How certain are you she's alive?"
Charles hesitated. "I'm certain her presence persists somehow. How much, in what form, it's hard to say. But I think that she'll return to us... in some way. I have no choice but to believe in that."
***
It was already dark. He made his way to Raven's (Mystique's) room, not that he knew exactly where Charles had installed her, but it had to be up near the attic, as far as possible from the children. From there, he simply scouted for the locked door, unlocked it, and went in. Sensing a bedside lamp, he clicked it on and saw her watching, herself again, curled up in bed.
He felt wrung out, as he had the first time Schmidt had pulled him out from the other children and brought him to his study. He dropped his travel bag on a chair, changed into sweats and a t-shirt and rolled into bed with his back to her. After a moment, she switched off the lamp.
He awoke in the night, fuzzy and feeling somewhat better. His hands found Raven, then his mouth and all of him. Wordlessly, she wrapped him in her unchanging softness. They made love with a simple, quiet urgency that blossomed out of the blind dark. It pleased him to think that Charles could feel him taking the woman that Charles had given him. It reminded him of his first time with her. Yet it differed vastly from the past one hundred.
At some point, their vocabulary had shrunk to two languages: work and games. Sex had been one of the games, a series of polished techniques whose object was to prove proficiency. Nakedness, he reflected, could be its own armor. He remembered that scene in Histoire d'O when she'd entered the party naked and shaven and pierced, self-encased as if in iron. How long had it been since they'd touched unarmored by the light?
***
In the morning, she donned her sisterly disguise and watched him, in his slower fashion, don his: knit trousers and sweater, like any old, retired man. They walked the grounds, again well away from the children. Yet Raven retained her disguise, and Erik began to wonder if the message ran deeper than expedience.
At last, he asked her the obvious question: "So have you come around to Charles's view?"
"No!" She pulled up short and faced him. "Erik, you have always been correct that mutants and humans cannot live together. There will be war or chaos or some bloody thing that will end in the extinction of one branch or the other. That's just a fact--like global warming." They resumed walking. "Charles certainly hasn't done anything to prevent it. Though, ironically, he may have outstripped us in preparing for it. That's the thing. Besides gathering mutants and munitions and waiting, I don't see what we can do. None of our large-scale plans ever work; people get killed--"
"And yet you say that having thrown away our trump card in the Senate? It's a bit much, wouldn't you say, to expect a plan to work if you don't execute it."
"Senator Kelly was not going to change the world. In fact, having alienated most of his constituency, he wasn't even going to win the next election."
"Mystique." It took a slight effort to call that face by the other's name, like speaking a foreign language. "These operations rarely take the form of a single definitive strike. They're an accumulation of particles: ideas, resources. You should know that."
His schoolmaster tone won a narrow glance. "Our accumulation of particles is... insufficient recompense for the cost."
That sort of high abstraction was not her usual diction--and yet he'd be a little pressed to say what her usual diction was. It seemed suddenly a long time since they'd had a real conversation.
After a moment, she went on, "I don't want to go on making enemies among my own people just to get nothing done."
Of course, they hadn't gotten nothing done. Erik had a mental list of accomplishments: allies, materials, technologies. But she wasn't in a mind to listen, and truly, he wasn't in a mind to defend. He let his list splinter like rust. "Capitulation is hardly a solution."
"No," she agreed.
"So if you're not with Charles and you're not with me, what exactly do you propose to do?"
"I don't know. I need to figure it out." They passed under the boughs of a maple; it seemed a gentle, momentary darkening of life. "Charles and I are talking about spending a few days at the cabin in Wyoming. We have some catching up to do."
"And then?"
"Then?" Her brow was creased in thought, the young Raven's careful eyebrows framing the old woman's brow. "Maybe I need to rewrite my premises."
"He's been in your mind."
"He always has been."
They paused again, gazing down across mown and manicured hill, twenty years maybe since he'd last stood in this spot.
"You have some things to rewrite too," she added.
Well, he wasn't going to stand there and take that, so he took the cue to smile and start back toward the mansion.
Her hand caught his arm before he'd finished a step. "I still love you, Erik."
All the loves of his life had ended qualified by "still," in spite of all you've done, all that you have become. In spite of leaving him helpless in that place. A love that waited expectantly for him to find the sacrifice he could offer to atone for the fallen daughter. But what could he possibly offer?
He wasn't sure how to respond to her. After too long a pause, he said merely, "I love you too," raised her veined hand to his lips, and continued down the hillside, feeling her eyes watching him go. He tried the taste of a reality where she would not come back; it tasted of desert wind scoring an ancient column. Yet, again, came the trivial and profound consolation that even when the edifice fractured these loves somehow endured.
***
***
More A/N: I am not best pleased with this fic, maybe it wanted to be in Raven's POV. Or maybe it just covers so much territory, touching on so many characters' lives that it needed to be a novel. Or maybe I've come up against the fundamental ideological conundrum that drives The X-Men: there is no easy solution and thus no real space for narrative closure. Or maybe I just need to revise more...
Fandom: X-Men (movieverse)
Characters/Pairings: Erik/Raven, Charles
Word Count: 3500
Rating: PG-13 for sex and themes
Summary: Set after X-Men: First Class and after X2, implied AU for X3. Erik and Raven: Forty years together, and it does seem a day too much.
A/N: The title is from Tori Amos's "Pancake," my new X2 Erik and Raven song.
"A Dash of Truth Spread Thinly"
1963
Erik was in no rush to sleep with Raven. He could have her any time he wanted, and that made it an interesting exercise to probe his own feelings for the optimal moment, the day he genuinely wanted her, not for her perfectly sculpted breasts or the curve of her thigh or the satin of her indigo scales, not because she was Charles's sister, but the day she had earned her own space in his life.
She had come with him like a child, seeking someone new to lead her. And she stayed with him like a child. When he went out recruiting or gathering materiel, he let her tag along, set her insignificant tasks to test her faces and voices. Her disguises themselves had been spotless for years; it was the choice of which and when and how he honed.
They continued the earlier lessons in self-defense he'd given her at the mansion. He could still (most of the time) throw her easily, because she didn't really believe she could fight. But in raw potential, it began to be clear she was both faster and stronger than he was.
In an endless succession of motel rooms, he let her sleep in his bed, let her nestle up against him, gave her a languorous morning kiss before loading her up with their suitcases. He built her as he was building his new order, by nut and bolt.
***
Yet she proved perhaps most useful in her simple passion for reaching out to other mutants who, like her, wore their superhumanity on their skin. He'd watch her embrace the outcasts with her eyes and, in the tones of a co-ed preaching disarmament, proclaim, "We can create a home where we can be loved just the way we are." That innocent yearning, at least, required no sharpening.
***
In the latest motel, he licked her scales and cupped her breasts until she moaned; then he drew back.
She turned on her side and poked his shoulder. "You are a tease," she told him in that deep, rich voice he could now reproduce exactly in his head.
It was true: he was a tease with her. He didn't play games like that by nature, but this slow dance with Raven he was thoroughly enjoying.
***
Driving down the highway, they talked about birth control.
"And then he looks up from this big, old science journal, all excited, and he says, 'Raven, they've approved the pill; get on it!'" She nailed Charles's tone and accent, though keeping her own register. (He'd cautioned her explicitly never to impersonate Charles.) "And I said, 'You know you said that in exactly the same tone of voice you use when you're telling me to put my face on because someone's coming?'"
Erik chuckled. "And what did he say?"
"He just laughed, like you." She snaked a finger through his hair. "Well, actually harder than you. Charles is kind of a fan of sex puns."
"Yes, I know."
***
There was no revelation, no moment when suddenly things had changed. Those first months soldered them. Divisions of labor grew automatic; looks began to serve for conversations; as he gave her more responsibility, she grew into it; they learned each other's textures and weights. And one night--they were at "home," Shaw's place--he decided not to pull away but lay down on her and let her divest him of his underwear. He rode her a long time, with such contentment that he was more sorry than satisfied when it was over. And she was blue; she was the most perfect blue he had ever slept with.
She flopped over on top of him, studying his face a bit too piercingly. "Jesus, Erik, you made me wait a fucking long time for you."
He brushed his fingers across her cheek. "Was it worth it?"
She kissed him roughly in answer, scraping her teeth against his lip. He met her with an equal roughness of lips and teeth and tongue. Then, he caressed her smooth hair and said against her ear, "This is only the beginning."
***
2003
To: isaacspared@fort.net
From: waterysenator@fort.net
Date: October 18, 2003, 9:44 p.m.
Subject: Change of Plans
M,
I'm going to stop doing Kelly. We can talk about the best way. For right now, K's going on a medical leave. I'll be home soon.
M
***
To: waterysenator@fort.net
From: isaacspared@fort.net
Date: October 18, 2003, 11:19 p.m.
Subject: Re. Change of Plans
Don't be absurd. We will, of course, not throw K away. If you need to act out, go fuck someone. This tantruming doesn't become you.
M.
***
To: isaacspared@fort.net
From: waterysenator@fort.net
Date: October 19, 2003, 12:13 a.m.
Subject: Re. Change of Plans
I'm done with this conversation. I'll see you at home.
M
***
She'd made a mistake in pushing Erik into waiting for her. As moves went, he conceded, it had taken a pawn. He couldn't waylay her in Washington without creating a spectacle with too many variables to control. He could vanish and have the satisfaction of not conforming to her presumptions, but he was not a child, and since he needed to talk to her, he stayed and marked it down against her, alongside the darker marks.
When she got there, he made sure to be situated behind his desk with Pyro at his shoulder and his Newton's cradle clacking. Pyro, when he'd heard of her betrayal, had launched a string of invective Erik found delightful, not least because it matched the very character of his own outrage but blurted with a vigor that was pure teen spirit. Now, Pyro glared daggers as Mystique sauntered in, while Erik assumed his chairman's face.
He cracked at smile at the way her eyes kept flicking back to Pyro. She wanted Erik alone for whatever speech she'd been rehearsing, but she couldn't pin down the best approach for getting rid of the boy. Ultimately, she picked a straightforward one.
"Erik, we need to talk."
He could have played it out. Certainly, my dear, talk on. But suddenly the game was getting old. "Pyro, would you be so good as to give us a moment?"
Pyro never glanced his way but bent an impressive swivel-headed glower on Mystique almost to the doorway. (For a moment, Erik was worried he'd bonk into the frame.)
She took the big, steel interviewee's chair, crossed her legs and sprawled an arm across its back in a facsimile of nonchalance, pretending that she didn't mind that the chair was set uncomfortably far from the desk and, of course, too heavy for her to shift.
He leaned forward, crossing his hands on his desk. "So what's all this about Senator Kelly?"
"The best way to get rid of him is to arrange to have him martyred for his pro-mutant change of heart. I could stage that within a week and time it to the vote on HR 326."
"Really. And since, I believe, we're talking about a senator, wouldn't it be more logical to wait the bill reaches the Senate?"
She kicked her ankle a little, still playing blasé. "I'm not waiting that long. I'm done. I'm leaving."
He gave his displeasured look. She stared back with cold, yellow eyes. He should have seen this coming. To say things had been strained since they'd gotten the news would be to misdescribe it. Charles's letter, naturally, had shaken them both. It had been blunt and impossible not to commit to memory:
Erik, Raven,
Jean is dead. She died expending her power to hold back the flood while simultaneously levitating and operating a large aircraft. If you had not abandoned us, she would still be alive. I will not forgive you for this.
C.
His accusation was irrefutable. If Erik had been there, he could have lifted all of them off in the Blackbird and saved everyone. Easy.
Mystique had already been back in Washington when the letter came; he'd forwarded it without comment. They exchanged no words about it, though they emailed several times a day about the Senate. And after Charles's update lightened the pall just a little, he'd assumed it would blow over.
Instead, here she was saying, "I don't know who you are anymore. Or me, for that matter. I stood by and let you leave Charles in that place, and I smiled about it. We abandoned our people, and I smiled, and Jean died--"
"Charles thinks she's survived," he reminded her of the second, clipped letter.
Mystique ignored him. "We've been at this for decades. We're going to die of old age--well, you are--and things are worse than when we started. The only thing we've accomplished is making enemies of our own family, my family. Do you have any idea what's involved in impersonating a senator? I spend so much time in other people's damn bodies I barely remember the sound of my own voice. I'm sitting here talking, and it sounds like someone else is talking because I don't remember what it's like to talk. When I rescued you from prison, you didn't even say thank you. You almost killed the entire human race; does that even register with you? We left them there, and it--we killed Jean. I am disgusted with us. Your expression is unimpressive."
It damn well was impressive and he kept it up. In the silence, the spheres of the cradle clacked, persistently failing to run down in response to friction.
At length, she couldn't help but glance at them, fleetingly but it was enough. "Look, Erik," she said with a true actor's pretense at composure, "you can kill me; you can lock me up. But you can't make me go back to doing Kelly. You could torture me into submission, but if you did that, I'd be way too shaken up have the nuance to pull it off." She crossed her arms. "So if you're planning to kill me, why don't you just get on with it?"
The words chafed. She'd correctly assessed his limitations, and some part of him was disappointed that she believed he'd do those things, the more so because she was close to right.
Still, he'd be damned if he was going to present himself as infantile enough to assault her from mere spite. He knew how to cut his losses, and wait, and rise again. He assumed a bright demeanor. "Well then, it seems there's nothing left to say." He got up, waving his chair back behind him, and came to sit on the edge of his desk. "Where do you intend to go? To Charles?"
Her eyes narrowed. She stood. It was, of course, where she'd go, even though they hated her. She had nowhere else, unless she wanted to wander the country alone and in disguise, and she didn't.
She made for the door, a little stiffly, as if expecting a heavy object to come hurtling at her back. At the door, she paused. "I missed you when you were in prison. God, I missed you so much." Then she was gone.
***
A week later, after Kelly had resurfaced and duly been murdered, he followed her to the school. Pyro, having just escaped it, had no desire to return, so Erik left him with some associates, less from fear he'd get in mischief than fear he would get lonely.
Entering Charles's establishment, of course, was not so straightforward. Mystique, no doubt, had disguised her way in, but Erik didn't have that luxury. Finally, as much as he favored the theatrical flair of an unannounced appearance, prudence made him phone ahead.
"I'm coming to visit, Charles," he said. "And if I end up lasered in half, I will be very incensed with you."
"I'll see to it no one lasers you," said Charles and hung up on him.
***
He took off his helmet at the gate and, his presence thus announced, was met by Scott (Precision planning, Charles, to deputize Scott), who glared out of his Cylon eye and managed to escort Erik up the drive in silence for approximately twenty seconds before coming out with, "One of these days, I'll eviscerate you."
"That's the spirit," said Erik dully in what was probably some half-unconscious attempt to quote Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner. Whatever it was, it fizzled.
As it happened, the one who couldn't refrain from nudging her powers against him was Storm. It was a token resistance, an atmospheric crackle, a little shock through his fingers. He barely saw her walk past, ghostlike.
He counted it a blessing, anyway, that Wolverine did not appear: out ranging around Canada probably.
***
Raven ("Raven"?) was in Charles's study, and despite himself, Erik was impressed. She'd put on the old disguise she used to wear as Charles's sister, but it took him a moment to recognize it because she'd aged it up. She made quite an elegant sixty-five, character lines accentuating her bone structure, gray hair swooped into a loosely pinned swirl, a figure improbably exquisite in a lacy white blouse and jeans. It was a politic move. Though everyone surely knew who she was, she knew better than anyone that appearances swayed. I come as Charles's sister, she was saying, and her worst enemies couldn't help but be mollified, if only a little.
"You've outdone yourself, my dear," he said sincerely.
Charles pressed her hand. "Raven, Erik and I have some things to discuss."
"Yeah." She got up and brushed past them. "Good luck with that."
He spent the next six hours having the most difficult conversation of his life. It boiled down to Charles, in his most proper, sermonizing voice, reiterating a thousand different ways, "You left me to die; you let my child die; you left me to die; you let my child die; it is only the sheerest good luck--for you--that she probably isn't really dead." It came to him he had never seen Charles enraged until now. His rage was cool and venomous as an adder coiled in the shade of a rock. And this, moreover, was rage already significantly softened: Good luck for me if she isn't dead.
Erik figured he contributed about 40 percent of the dialogue, but he couldn't for the life of him keep track of what he said. There was something about "desperate times," and a certain recurrence of "I'm sorry," which he was: he'd been angry; he'd been raw from months in prison, months of drugs; he'd seen a chance to end the problem once and for all; he'd taken it. He'd assumed Charles's children would save him; they always did. But the truth was he had barely cared. He'd been so angry at Charles, so angry at all of it. And he'd left him helpless and out of his mind, left him to die. He'd let Charles's child die. There were also sandwiches, though where they appeared from he couldn't say.
At some point, he thought he said, "I'm tired," or something along those lines, or maybe he'd thought it. With Charles, it could be hard to tell.
Then, Charles was by his side, arms around him. Erik clutched the fabric of Charles's jacket and let his forehead sink on his shoulder, which smelled more of Tide than it used to.
"You can stay the night," said Charles in a distant tone that clearly appended, not with me.
"How certain are you she's alive?"
Charles hesitated. "I'm certain her presence persists somehow. How much, in what form, it's hard to say. But I think that she'll return to us... in some way. I have no choice but to believe in that."
***
It was already dark. He made his way to Raven's (Mystique's) room, not that he knew exactly where Charles had installed her, but it had to be up near the attic, as far as possible from the children. From there, he simply scouted for the locked door, unlocked it, and went in. Sensing a bedside lamp, he clicked it on and saw her watching, herself again, curled up in bed.
He felt wrung out, as he had the first time Schmidt had pulled him out from the other children and brought him to his study. He dropped his travel bag on a chair, changed into sweats and a t-shirt and rolled into bed with his back to her. After a moment, she switched off the lamp.
He awoke in the night, fuzzy and feeling somewhat better. His hands found Raven, then his mouth and all of him. Wordlessly, she wrapped him in her unchanging softness. They made love with a simple, quiet urgency that blossomed out of the blind dark. It pleased him to think that Charles could feel him taking the woman that Charles had given him. It reminded him of his first time with her. Yet it differed vastly from the past one hundred.
At some point, their vocabulary had shrunk to two languages: work and games. Sex had been one of the games, a series of polished techniques whose object was to prove proficiency. Nakedness, he reflected, could be its own armor. He remembered that scene in Histoire d'O when she'd entered the party naked and shaven and pierced, self-encased as if in iron. How long had it been since they'd touched unarmored by the light?
***
In the morning, she donned her sisterly disguise and watched him, in his slower fashion, don his: knit trousers and sweater, like any old, retired man. They walked the grounds, again well away from the children. Yet Raven retained her disguise, and Erik began to wonder if the message ran deeper than expedience.
At last, he asked her the obvious question: "So have you come around to Charles's view?"
"No!" She pulled up short and faced him. "Erik, you have always been correct that mutants and humans cannot live together. There will be war or chaos or some bloody thing that will end in the extinction of one branch or the other. That's just a fact--like global warming." They resumed walking. "Charles certainly hasn't done anything to prevent it. Though, ironically, he may have outstripped us in preparing for it. That's the thing. Besides gathering mutants and munitions and waiting, I don't see what we can do. None of our large-scale plans ever work; people get killed--"
"And yet you say that having thrown away our trump card in the Senate? It's a bit much, wouldn't you say, to expect a plan to work if you don't execute it."
"Senator Kelly was not going to change the world. In fact, having alienated most of his constituency, he wasn't even going to win the next election."
"Mystique." It took a slight effort to call that face by the other's name, like speaking a foreign language. "These operations rarely take the form of a single definitive strike. They're an accumulation of particles: ideas, resources. You should know that."
His schoolmaster tone won a narrow glance. "Our accumulation of particles is... insufficient recompense for the cost."
That sort of high abstraction was not her usual diction--and yet he'd be a little pressed to say what her usual diction was. It seemed suddenly a long time since they'd had a real conversation.
After a moment, she went on, "I don't want to go on making enemies among my own people just to get nothing done."
Of course, they hadn't gotten nothing done. Erik had a mental list of accomplishments: allies, materials, technologies. But she wasn't in a mind to listen, and truly, he wasn't in a mind to defend. He let his list splinter like rust. "Capitulation is hardly a solution."
"No," she agreed.
"So if you're not with Charles and you're not with me, what exactly do you propose to do?"
"I don't know. I need to figure it out." They passed under the boughs of a maple; it seemed a gentle, momentary darkening of life. "Charles and I are talking about spending a few days at the cabin in Wyoming. We have some catching up to do."
"And then?"
"Then?" Her brow was creased in thought, the young Raven's careful eyebrows framing the old woman's brow. "Maybe I need to rewrite my premises."
"He's been in your mind."
"He always has been."
They paused again, gazing down across mown and manicured hill, twenty years maybe since he'd last stood in this spot.
"You have some things to rewrite too," she added.
Well, he wasn't going to stand there and take that, so he took the cue to smile and start back toward the mansion.
Her hand caught his arm before he'd finished a step. "I still love you, Erik."
All the loves of his life had ended qualified by "still," in spite of all you've done, all that you have become. In spite of leaving him helpless in that place. A love that waited expectantly for him to find the sacrifice he could offer to atone for the fallen daughter. But what could he possibly offer?
He wasn't sure how to respond to her. After too long a pause, he said merely, "I love you too," raised her veined hand to his lips, and continued down the hillside, feeling her eyes watching him go. He tried the taste of a reality where she would not come back; it tasted of desert wind scoring an ancient column. Yet, again, came the trivial and profound consolation that even when the edifice fractured these loves somehow endured.
***
***
More A/N: I am not best pleased with this fic, maybe it wanted to be in Raven's POV. Or maybe it just covers so much territory, touching on so many characters' lives that it needed to be a novel. Or maybe I've come up against the fundamental ideological conundrum that drives The X-Men: there is no easy solution and thus no real space for narrative closure. Or maybe I just need to revise more...
