— У меня правильнописание хромает. Оно хорошее, но почему-то хромает...(с) Винни-Пух.
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(Анонимно)
2011-08-05 23:58 (UTC)
Behavior like that obviously needs to be rewarded, and Charles curls a fist around Erik, sighs into his mouth, and loops his other arm over Erik's shoulders, dragging him down until Erik is a breathless weight against Charles, pinning him to the bed.
"I only want you," Charles gasps, grinding them together as much as he could with them curled toward one another on their sides, the light of the digital clock and the street lamps the only illumination in the room. "I've only ever wanted you."
"Such a fucking liar," Erik accuses, but he's still laughing, voice shaking. He wraps his hands around both of them, jerks them off together so roughly it almost hurts, but that intensity — where it balances on that knife edge between sharp and too-sensitive pain and lavish pleasure — sparks behind Charles's eyes, going off like fireworks along his brain where it's hooked into Erik's building orgasm, too, tangling together.
And Charles says, "But I want it to be true," because he means it, he wishes sometimes that he could dissolve himself into Erik and live there forever. He feels overcome, rapturous, all the Harlequin bingo words strung up like carnival lights inside his head, and Charles gasps it all into Erik's mouth, the heady rush of gratitude and affection and how it hurts like a constantly deepening wound to love someone the way he loves Erik: with pathetic desperation, without regard for dignity, needful and begging.
"God," Erik swears, and it sounds like it's getting scraped out of him, ripped out of the marrow, "I fucking love you," and that's it, that's all Charles needed. He makes a sobbing noise as Erik jerks it out of him, chanting, "Yeah, yeah — just like that, let me see it, Charles, let me have it, open up, just like that," and when Charles comes, it feels like it blazes out of him, Erik's hands and his mouth and the weight of his body keeping him grounded, keeping him from flying away completely.
***
TBC
Fill: Limited Release (51/?)
(Анонимно)
2011-08-23 23:01 (UTC)
(A/N: ...Yeah that was some major numbering fail from the last section. BUT I AM JUST GOING TO HAVE TO LIVE WITH IT FOR NOW. Sorry guys. Hope it's not too confusing!)
When Raven gets to the house in the morning, there's a familiar, distinct, and terrible awkwardness in the air, thrumming between Hank and Alex, who are situated at far opposite ends of the massive kitchen counter in the massive kitchen. Previously, Raven hadn't ever seen them more than an arm's length apart unless there was incarceration involved, which of course means she smirks, helps herself to a cup of coffee, and asks:
"So let me guess — nobody's ever taught you guys how to shield before."
Hank drops his face into his hands. "No," he mumbles into his palms. He's so red Raven bets you could see his face from space.
"There were…dreams," Alex says, awkwardly, hands clutched around a mug.
Raven stirs in some creamer and two packets of Splenda, which Charles keeps in the house exclusively for her use. "Trust me," she assures them. "You're just lucky you didn't have to survive his adolescence in this house. Both is telepathy and his horndog tendencies were peaking simultaneously — we had to have a lot of fucking awkward discussions about what exactly counted as incest."
"Thank you for that, Raven," Charles says, zipping into the room on silent wheels, looking flushed and only a little irate, which means Erik was kind enough to preemptively fuck the bitchiness out of him last night.
Alex, who Raven has always suspected of being made of stronger stuff, recovers admirably from being by-proxy-orgied by Charles and Erik enough to say, "Hey! You knocked me out yesterday!" pointing an accusing finger at Charles.
Charles arches a brow. "You were going to burn down a government facility."
"You invited me there specifically to piss me off, didn't you?" Alex asks, voice tight.
"Well, yes," Charles admits. "But it was more to see how finely tuned your existing control is and less to be a bastard."
Alex's expression when he turns an appealing stare at Raven makes it pretty clear he doesn't see the difference there. Most of the time, neither does Raven, except for in cases of emotionally unstable cons with massively destructive mutations.
"He's trying to teach you a life lesson," Raven explains. "It all feels shitty and invasive and sort of wrong now, but if you just let him have his way with you, eventually you get used to it."
At this point, she gets clipped by a stack of magazines that must have come overnight in the mail, and Raven's still squawking, "Fucking — God damn it!" and trying to claw her mussed blonde curls out of her face when it's Erik's turn, this time, to say, "Thank you for that, Raven," followed by wet noises and palpable disgust from Alex, which makes Raven momentarily glad she can't see her brother sucking face with her boss at the moment. She's endured them as a couple for so long already, this newest scar would be lost in the ocean of others.
"You may look now, Raven," Charles says at long last, sounding huskier than before.
Raven does, but at Alex instead, who looks haunted. "Prison's looking better and better in comparison, huh?"
Hank goes momentarily distressed, and Raven feels a beat of apology for that before Erik interrupts to ask, "Raven, do you have anything for us from yesterday or are you here specifically for the free show."
"Your show is gross and terrible and has been stuck on reruns for at least three years," Raven quips in response, and reaches into her Mary Poppins bag, returning with a stack of files an inch deep, sliding them across the counter and into Erik's waiting hands.
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2011-08-23 23:02 (UTC)
Xavier House has always felt to big — the less said about the Westchester Mansion, the better — and even with Hank shyly reading the paper and eating toast that's fairly sagging under the weight of the peanut butter, even with Alex scowling darkly enough to fill up an entire room, Erik creating OCD-neat piles of documentation across the tiled breakfast counter in his shirtsleeves, cuffs unbuttoned, and Charles making himself tea, it's only barely beginning to scrape away at the space. It's a leftover cobweb from childhood, their youth and adolescence spent trying to carve smaller spaces out of the enormous ones they'd been dumped into. Charles's parents weren't neglectful, exactly, so much as forgetful, distracted, and Charles has always known too much about everybody to ever be angry with anyone, and even when Raven had gotten angry, Charles had only ever gotten quiet, gotten apologetic. The breadth of what Charles knows is a blessing and a curse, and Raven thinks that if loneliness wrote on her skin — underneath her skin, where she can't change it — and stayed with her longer than her milk teeth, then she hates to think what it's like when Charles is afraid, when it's too quiet in the house.
"You guys should have some kids," she says, extemporaneous, because it's both true past time. "You prime child-bearing years are going to hit the twilight stages in the next half-decade or so."
"Ignoring the complete insanity of your statement, thank you for reminding me I need to make a phone call," Charles says to her primly, and heads off for the old fashioned wall phone, its long and curly cord a source of endless delight for her brother, and for no particular good reason.
When she turns back to the criminals at breakfast, they look plainly speculative. Erik, fine piece of goal-oriented German engineering that he is, appears to have completely ignored the detour and has his Crime Solving Frown on, the piles growing more and more complex, some shunted off to the side as they lose their immediate utility.
"If it was a secondary mutation, I'm pretty sure we would have known about it by now," Raven assures them. Alex looks slightly mollified, and Hank looks sort of disappointed, which explains why her brother's so head over heels for Hank, Raven guesses.
She'd pulled his file, too: kid genius, early screw-up, runaway from parents who had missed him, but who'd pretty effectively moved on. Hank's got two younger siblings he probably doesn't know about, and Raven figures if she tells him and makes him cry at breakfast, reflector or no, Alex Summers is going to set her on fire. Mutant files are, as a whole, getting slowly less and less sad, but it's a glacial pace — Raven knows she's lucky, that not everybody found Charles as a best friend and brother. It's selfish but she's glad. Learning to share him with Erik had been horrible enough, and she'd already been an adult by then.
"What, so we're absolutely sure the professor's not going get knocked up," Alex retorts, snotty.
"I mean, trust me, he and Erik have been trying," Raven tells him seriously.
"…Gross," Hank says delicately.
In the background, Charles is saying, "Good morning, Edie," and "I know, overslept — it's all been very exciting recently. I've met two brilliant young mutants in Erik's charge," because of course that is how he would describe a kid that they handwaved out of supermax in sympathy and his sketchy best friend, who has a semi-shady history of helping people set up meth labs for money. It's not like Raven doesn't understand; McCoy clearly doesn't have it in him to trick for a living.
"This is bad," Erik says suddenly, grim. "It means — "
"They probably already have enough to have some sort of Cerebro prototype, yes," Raven says, turning her attention back to Erik, who's face has gone stoney.
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2011-08-23 23:03 (UTC)
Yesterday hadn't all been dramatics and feelings. While Charles had been playing with Cerebro and scaring the shit of Erik and fucking with Alex to see if he could be trained, Raven and Armando and Angel and Sean had background research going, returns coming in slowly at a snail's pace. Alex had talked about a couple of blow-shit-up and grabs he'd done with Shaw in the early days, and the crime profile, once fed into a computer, had spit out a couple of hundred similar cases. The winnowing had taken days, Sean complaining bitterly the entire time and humming at just the right pitch to give everybody in the office a headache until they'd all capitulated and joined in to help. They'd turned up two dozen cases, ultimately, seemingly random until you traced all the locations all the way back, scoured the contemporary building manifests. There were office parks and universities and coffee shops and banks, and all of it seemed like dry runs for terrorism until she'd started going through witness and office listings: names of people involved in the Cerebro projects, independent contractors. Little pieces here and there, a slow and painstaking accumulation of the building blocks of the machine that had begun with Alex's help and continued after his incarceration. Even the Tenleytown line explosion on the D.C. redline — Dr. Mark Asheburg, head electrical engineer on the project, who'd been authorized that night to take home a thin file on circuitry patterns. Asheburg and the briefcase were presumably killed in the subway fire, and among more than 100 casualties, nobody had ever considered that to be suspect.
Now Raven thinks everything's suspect.
"I called and screamed at everybody but nobody could give me a compelling reason how nobody drew the proper connections between the break ins," she goes on, low and tense, feeling Hank and Alex's eyes on her skin, anxious and curious. "And to be fair, these were scattered years apart, not necessarily at military installations or government targets, and, well." She shrugs. "I guess this gives us a bit of an idea how high Frost should rate on the OCP scale."
Erik says, "Let's hope it's lower than Charles."
"Everybody is lower than Charles," Raven replies, distracted.
"We need to — " Erik starts.
"Everybody is meeting at the office in two hours," Raven interrupts.
Erik asks, "And — ?"
"We're making progress on the metal interference front," she tells him, because there are only a handle of smelters with the technical ability to make psi-dampening metals, and even fewer with the level of skill to make anything capable of shutting out Charles. "Our contacts in Russia are making progress, too. We should have some possibilities for you, or at least original end-delivery locations by tonight."
Erik stares at her for a beat, and there's an uncomfortable knowing in his look.
Erik lives in painful proximity to Charles, the ugly aftermath of the shooting. He's given Charles baths and wiped his ass — literally — and they've had fucking terrible conversations about whether or not to hire a pro to intervene in their sex lives in this early days, when they (and the doctors) hadn't been sure about what would or wouldn't work again. They've had every possible conversation about Erik's guilt and grief and fury and helplessness because there's nowhere to hide from it, they breathe the same air and share the same psychic space. And as miserable and exposed and relentlessly exhausting as that is, Raven wonders if it isn't preferable to what she as — enough room to run.
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2011-08-23 23:04 (UTC)
aven knows that Erik thinks she and Charles were spoiled. They were, by one another, by money, by things that money could buy, and if you erase the ugly beginnings of her life, and the ugly moral vacuum that brought her into the Xavier family, then ages ten and up were fucking charmed. They were stolen champagne giggle years, of Charles's awkward dance lessons and changing skins to fake out their nannies. They were soggy hot secrets during the depths of summer on Cape Cod and summers in Paris and Prague and waiting impatiently for Charles to finish up at the library. It was always knowing, the way you can only know this if you are very fortunate, that there is injustice in the world but that it can be righted, and that you are the person who can help.
None of her FBI training — and it had to be the FBI, because rumor had it the NSA was too interested in recruiting mutants, that the CIA was still fucking experimenting on them, and the FBI had a long history of affirmative mutant hires — had prepared her for that day at Columbia. It was Charles's closing keynote, and beautifully written for maximum effect. Raven had gone through and dutifully redlined anything boring, since reporters would be there that day, and Charles had been wearing a white shirt and slate-colored slacks, the suit jacket abandoned somewhere, and Raven had been idling on the left side of the stage, watching Charles in the spotlight with long-suffering affection with the first shot had gone through the air like a snap and the world had fractured in two.
She'd thought he was dying, under her hands, when she'd pressed her palms down onto his gut and screamed for someone else to do the same with the bullet wound on his thigh. All she'd been able to think was that it would nick an artery, that he would bleed out in her hands, blue eyes wide open with absolute dead psychic air between them for the first time ever: no fondness, no irritation, like a room with all the oxygen sucked out. And Raven had cried and cried and kneed in an ever-widening pool of Charles's blood that day until the paramedics had ripped him away from her and she'd looked down and realized everything below the chest on her was dark red, blood smeared and beginning to dry brown up her shaking arms.
Even though she'd stayed with Charles after the hospital, long enough to know he'd probably be okay, she'd also run as far and fast as she fucking could — to the relative safety of her own apartment, to the uncomplicated arms of being embarrassingly drunk, to the office, where she could pour it all out in the work. It was easier to look for clues, to try and find revenge, than it was to sit with Erik in tense and miserable silence while the physical therapist tortured her brother for an hour three times a week. This is what she does instead. This is what she's best at, and one day when they catch Shaw and he burns for all the people he's killed and Raven's ruined dress and Charles and Erik then all there's going to be is an awkward guilt, the lingering bruise of cowardice.
And of everybody in the world, Raven thinks Erik probably understands it best. That does her fuck all good, since of everybody in the world, Erik will absolve her the least.
"What now?" Erik asks, finally, after an eternity of shared silence.
Raven swallows hard. "Breakfast?" she asks.
"Phone," Charles corrects, and says into the receiver, "He's right here, Edie — ignore him if he's being a bear. He hasn't had any coffee yet."
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... - harborshore - Развернуть
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(Анонимно)
2011-08-23 23:05 (UTC)
So Raven watches the ritual handing off of the Sunday morning phone call, Erik making a pained I send my mother a daily e-mail to prove I am alive why must I call her as well? expression and Charles's reproachful Edie Lehnsherr is a lovely woman and she worries about you constantly, the least you can do is talk to her for ten minutes after I have already updated her on all the inane sundries you find so terrible to discuss look. Then there's an exchange of coffee and Erik perches on a counter, rearranging fridge magnets and saying, "Mmhmm," into the phone occasionally, while Charles eats three pieces of toast with butter, and today, in an interesting twist, does the crossword (badly) with Alex's help, since Hank has already made short, brutal work of the sudoku.
Hank's voice, when it comes, is a surprise. "Do you think we'll catch Shaw?"
Raven looks at Alex, who is arguing with Charles about how exactly to spell Milquetoast, and thinks about Scott and Alex and how she can't bear to watch anybody else's brother hurt. "We have to," she says.
***
TBC
(Анонимно)
2011-08-05 23:58 (UTC)
Behavior like that obviously needs to be rewarded, and Charles curls a fist around Erik, sighs into his mouth, and loops his other arm over Erik's shoulders, dragging him down until Erik is a breathless weight against Charles, pinning him to the bed.
"I only want you," Charles gasps, grinding them together as much as he could with them curled toward one another on their sides, the light of the digital clock and the street lamps the only illumination in the room. "I've only ever wanted you."
"Such a fucking liar," Erik accuses, but he's still laughing, voice shaking. He wraps his hands around both of them, jerks them off together so roughly it almost hurts, but that intensity — where it balances on that knife edge between sharp and too-sensitive pain and lavish pleasure — sparks behind Charles's eyes, going off like fireworks along his brain where it's hooked into Erik's building orgasm, too, tangling together.
And Charles says, "But I want it to be true," because he means it, he wishes sometimes that he could dissolve himself into Erik and live there forever. He feels overcome, rapturous, all the Harlequin bingo words strung up like carnival lights inside his head, and Charles gasps it all into Erik's mouth, the heady rush of gratitude and affection and how it hurts like a constantly deepening wound to love someone the way he loves Erik: with pathetic desperation, without regard for dignity, needful and begging.
"God," Erik swears, and it sounds like it's getting scraped out of him, ripped out of the marrow, "I fucking love you," and that's it, that's all Charles needed. He makes a sobbing noise as Erik jerks it out of him, chanting, "Yeah, yeah — just like that, let me see it, Charles, let me have it, open up, just like that," and when Charles comes, it feels like it blazes out of him, Erik's hands and his mouth and the weight of his body keeping him grounded, keeping him from flying away completely.
***
TBC
Fill: Limited Release (51/?)
(Анонимно)
2011-08-23 23:01 (UTC)
(A/N: ...Yeah that was some major numbering fail from the last section. BUT I AM JUST GOING TO HAVE TO LIVE WITH IT FOR NOW. Sorry guys. Hope it's not too confusing!)
When Raven gets to the house in the morning, there's a familiar, distinct, and terrible awkwardness in the air, thrumming between Hank and Alex, who are situated at far opposite ends of the massive kitchen counter in the massive kitchen. Previously, Raven hadn't ever seen them more than an arm's length apart unless there was incarceration involved, which of course means she smirks, helps herself to a cup of coffee, and asks:
"So let me guess — nobody's ever taught you guys how to shield before."
Hank drops his face into his hands. "No," he mumbles into his palms. He's so red Raven bets you could see his face from space.
"There were…dreams," Alex says, awkwardly, hands clutched around a mug.
Raven stirs in some creamer and two packets of Splenda, which Charles keeps in the house exclusively for her use. "Trust me," she assures them. "You're just lucky you didn't have to survive his adolescence in this house. Both is telepathy and his horndog tendencies were peaking simultaneously — we had to have a lot of fucking awkward discussions about what exactly counted as incest."
"Thank you for that, Raven," Charles says, zipping into the room on silent wheels, looking flushed and only a little irate, which means Erik was kind enough to preemptively fuck the bitchiness out of him last night.
Alex, who Raven has always suspected of being made of stronger stuff, recovers admirably from being by-proxy-orgied by Charles and Erik enough to say, "Hey! You knocked me out yesterday!" pointing an accusing finger at Charles.
Charles arches a brow. "You were going to burn down a government facility."
"You invited me there specifically to piss me off, didn't you?" Alex asks, voice tight.
"Well, yes," Charles admits. "But it was more to see how finely tuned your existing control is and less to be a bastard."
Alex's expression when he turns an appealing stare at Raven makes it pretty clear he doesn't see the difference there. Most of the time, neither does Raven, except for in cases of emotionally unstable cons with massively destructive mutations.
"He's trying to teach you a life lesson," Raven explains. "It all feels shitty and invasive and sort of wrong now, but if you just let him have his way with you, eventually you get used to it."
At this point, she gets clipped by a stack of magazines that must have come overnight in the mail, and Raven's still squawking, "Fucking — God damn it!" and trying to claw her mussed blonde curls out of her face when it's Erik's turn, this time, to say, "Thank you for that, Raven," followed by wet noises and palpable disgust from Alex, which makes Raven momentarily glad she can't see her brother sucking face with her boss at the moment. She's endured them as a couple for so long already, this newest scar would be lost in the ocean of others.
"You may look now, Raven," Charles says at long last, sounding huskier than before.
Raven does, but at Alex instead, who looks haunted. "Prison's looking better and better in comparison, huh?"
Hank goes momentarily distressed, and Raven feels a beat of apology for that before Erik interrupts to ask, "Raven, do you have anything for us from yesterday or are you here specifically for the free show."
"Your show is gross and terrible and has been stuck on reruns for at least three years," Raven quips in response, and reaches into her Mary Poppins bag, returning with a stack of files an inch deep, sliding them across the counter and into Erik's waiting hands.
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2011-08-23 23:02 (UTC)
Xavier House has always felt to big — the less said about the Westchester Mansion, the better — and even with Hank shyly reading the paper and eating toast that's fairly sagging under the weight of the peanut butter, even with Alex scowling darkly enough to fill up an entire room, Erik creating OCD-neat piles of documentation across the tiled breakfast counter in his shirtsleeves, cuffs unbuttoned, and Charles making himself tea, it's only barely beginning to scrape away at the space. It's a leftover cobweb from childhood, their youth and adolescence spent trying to carve smaller spaces out of the enormous ones they'd been dumped into. Charles's parents weren't neglectful, exactly, so much as forgetful, distracted, and Charles has always known too much about everybody to ever be angry with anyone, and even when Raven had gotten angry, Charles had only ever gotten quiet, gotten apologetic. The breadth of what Charles knows is a blessing and a curse, and Raven thinks that if loneliness wrote on her skin — underneath her skin, where she can't change it — and stayed with her longer than her milk teeth, then she hates to think what it's like when Charles is afraid, when it's too quiet in the house.
"You guys should have some kids," she says, extemporaneous, because it's both true past time. "You prime child-bearing years are going to hit the twilight stages in the next half-decade or so."
"Ignoring the complete insanity of your statement, thank you for reminding me I need to make a phone call," Charles says to her primly, and heads off for the old fashioned wall phone, its long and curly cord a source of endless delight for her brother, and for no particular good reason.
When she turns back to the criminals at breakfast, they look plainly speculative. Erik, fine piece of goal-oriented German engineering that he is, appears to have completely ignored the detour and has his Crime Solving Frown on, the piles growing more and more complex, some shunted off to the side as they lose their immediate utility.
"If it was a secondary mutation, I'm pretty sure we would have known about it by now," Raven assures them. Alex looks slightly mollified, and Hank looks sort of disappointed, which explains why her brother's so head over heels for Hank, Raven guesses.
She'd pulled his file, too: kid genius, early screw-up, runaway from parents who had missed him, but who'd pretty effectively moved on. Hank's got two younger siblings he probably doesn't know about, and Raven figures if she tells him and makes him cry at breakfast, reflector or no, Alex Summers is going to set her on fire. Mutant files are, as a whole, getting slowly less and less sad, but it's a glacial pace — Raven knows she's lucky, that not everybody found Charles as a best friend and brother. It's selfish but she's glad. Learning to share him with Erik had been horrible enough, and she'd already been an adult by then.
"What, so we're absolutely sure the professor's not going get knocked up," Alex retorts, snotty.
"I mean, trust me, he and Erik have been trying," Raven tells him seriously.
"…Gross," Hank says delicately.
In the background, Charles is saying, "Good morning, Edie," and "I know, overslept — it's all been very exciting recently. I've met two brilliant young mutants in Erik's charge," because of course that is how he would describe a kid that they handwaved out of supermax in sympathy and his sketchy best friend, who has a semi-shady history of helping people set up meth labs for money. It's not like Raven doesn't understand; McCoy clearly doesn't have it in him to trick for a living.
"This is bad," Erik says suddenly, grim. "It means — "
"They probably already have enough to have some sort of Cerebro prototype, yes," Raven says, turning her attention back to Erik, who's face has gone stoney.
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2011-08-23 23:03 (UTC)
Yesterday hadn't all been dramatics and feelings. While Charles had been playing with Cerebro and scaring the shit of Erik and fucking with Alex to see if he could be trained, Raven and Armando and Angel and Sean had background research going, returns coming in slowly at a snail's pace. Alex had talked about a couple of blow-shit-up and grabs he'd done with Shaw in the early days, and the crime profile, once fed into a computer, had spit out a couple of hundred similar cases. The winnowing had taken days, Sean complaining bitterly the entire time and humming at just the right pitch to give everybody in the office a headache until they'd all capitulated and joined in to help. They'd turned up two dozen cases, ultimately, seemingly random until you traced all the locations all the way back, scoured the contemporary building manifests. There were office parks and universities and coffee shops and banks, and all of it seemed like dry runs for terrorism until she'd started going through witness and office listings: names of people involved in the Cerebro projects, independent contractors. Little pieces here and there, a slow and painstaking accumulation of the building blocks of the machine that had begun with Alex's help and continued after his incarceration. Even the Tenleytown line explosion on the D.C. redline — Dr. Mark Asheburg, head electrical engineer on the project, who'd been authorized that night to take home a thin file on circuitry patterns. Asheburg and the briefcase were presumably killed in the subway fire, and among more than 100 casualties, nobody had ever considered that to be suspect.
Now Raven thinks everything's suspect.
"I called and screamed at everybody but nobody could give me a compelling reason how nobody drew the proper connections between the break ins," she goes on, low and tense, feeling Hank and Alex's eyes on her skin, anxious and curious. "And to be fair, these were scattered years apart, not necessarily at military installations or government targets, and, well." She shrugs. "I guess this gives us a bit of an idea how high Frost should rate on the OCP scale."
Erik says, "Let's hope it's lower than Charles."
"Everybody is lower than Charles," Raven replies, distracted.
"We need to — " Erik starts.
"Everybody is meeting at the office in two hours," Raven interrupts.
Erik asks, "And — ?"
"We're making progress on the metal interference front," she tells him, because there are only a handle of smelters with the technical ability to make psi-dampening metals, and even fewer with the level of skill to make anything capable of shutting out Charles. "Our contacts in Russia are making progress, too. We should have some possibilities for you, or at least original end-delivery locations by tonight."
Erik stares at her for a beat, and there's an uncomfortable knowing in his look.
Erik lives in painful proximity to Charles, the ugly aftermath of the shooting. He's given Charles baths and wiped his ass — literally — and they've had fucking terrible conversations about whether or not to hire a pro to intervene in their sex lives in this early days, when they (and the doctors) hadn't been sure about what would or wouldn't work again. They've had every possible conversation about Erik's guilt and grief and fury and helplessness because there's nowhere to hide from it, they breathe the same air and share the same psychic space. And as miserable and exposed and relentlessly exhausting as that is, Raven wonders if it isn't preferable to what she as — enough room to run.
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2011-08-23 23:04 (UTC)
aven knows that Erik thinks she and Charles were spoiled. They were, by one another, by money, by things that money could buy, and if you erase the ugly beginnings of her life, and the ugly moral vacuum that brought her into the Xavier family, then ages ten and up were fucking charmed. They were stolen champagne giggle years, of Charles's awkward dance lessons and changing skins to fake out their nannies. They were soggy hot secrets during the depths of summer on Cape Cod and summers in Paris and Prague and waiting impatiently for Charles to finish up at the library. It was always knowing, the way you can only know this if you are very fortunate, that there is injustice in the world but that it can be righted, and that you are the person who can help.
None of her FBI training — and it had to be the FBI, because rumor had it the NSA was too interested in recruiting mutants, that the CIA was still fucking experimenting on them, and the FBI had a long history of affirmative mutant hires — had prepared her for that day at Columbia. It was Charles's closing keynote, and beautifully written for maximum effect. Raven had gone through and dutifully redlined anything boring, since reporters would be there that day, and Charles had been wearing a white shirt and slate-colored slacks, the suit jacket abandoned somewhere, and Raven had been idling on the left side of the stage, watching Charles in the spotlight with long-suffering affection with the first shot had gone through the air like a snap and the world had fractured in two.
She'd thought he was dying, under her hands, when she'd pressed her palms down onto his gut and screamed for someone else to do the same with the bullet wound on his thigh. All she'd been able to think was that it would nick an artery, that he would bleed out in her hands, blue eyes wide open with absolute dead psychic air between them for the first time ever: no fondness, no irritation, like a room with all the oxygen sucked out. And Raven had cried and cried and kneed in an ever-widening pool of Charles's blood that day until the paramedics had ripped him away from her and she'd looked down and realized everything below the chest on her was dark red, blood smeared and beginning to dry brown up her shaking arms.
Even though she'd stayed with Charles after the hospital, long enough to know he'd probably be okay, she'd also run as far and fast as she fucking could — to the relative safety of her own apartment, to the uncomplicated arms of being embarrassingly drunk, to the office, where she could pour it all out in the work. It was easier to look for clues, to try and find revenge, than it was to sit with Erik in tense and miserable silence while the physical therapist tortured her brother for an hour three times a week. This is what she does instead. This is what she's best at, and one day when they catch Shaw and he burns for all the people he's killed and Raven's ruined dress and Charles and Erik then all there's going to be is an awkward guilt, the lingering bruise of cowardice.
And of everybody in the world, Raven thinks Erik probably understands it best. That does her fuck all good, since of everybody in the world, Erik will absolve her the least.
"What now?" Erik asks, finally, after an eternity of shared silence.
Raven swallows hard. "Breakfast?" she asks.
"Phone," Charles corrects, and says into the receiver, "He's right here, Edie — ignore him if he's being a bear. He hasn't had any coffee yet."
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Fill: Limited Release (55/?)
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2011-08-23 23:05 (UTC)
So Raven watches the ritual handing off of the Sunday morning phone call, Erik making a pained I send my mother a daily e-mail to prove I am alive why must I call her as well? expression and Charles's reproachful Edie Lehnsherr is a lovely woman and she worries about you constantly, the least you can do is talk to her for ten minutes after I have already updated her on all the inane sundries you find so terrible to discuss look. Then there's an exchange of coffee and Erik perches on a counter, rearranging fridge magnets and saying, "Mmhmm," into the phone occasionally, while Charles eats three pieces of toast with butter, and today, in an interesting twist, does the crossword (badly) with Alex's help, since Hank has already made short, brutal work of the sudoku.
Hank's voice, when it comes, is a surprise. "Do you think we'll catch Shaw?"
Raven looks at Alex, who is arguing with Charles about how exactly to spell Milquetoast, and thinks about Scott and Alex and how she can't bear to watch anybody else's brother hurt. "We have to," she says.
***
TBC
@темы: fanfiction