Erik
“Try not to do anything too—you know, just anything, don’t do anything until I get there—”
Erik hung up in the middle of Raven’s sentence. He had explained the situation, delivered his ultimatum; any further time spent in conversation with him was better spent packing. Raven was more herself than ever but there were still flashes of Charles’s baby sister sometimes—both Xavier siblings had that compulsion to get in the last word.
Silence settled in the musty air as Erik braced his arms against the mahogany desk and bent his head over them. Low-level paranoia had kept him alert all day, half-expecting to see that phantom Charles with his burning blue eyes and insidious promises every time he turned his head, but Raven’s voice had settled him and he began to realize that he was exhausted. The adrenaline rush that had filled him after the events in the lab the night before had kept him awake until nearly dawn. He had paced restlessly for the first hour or so, then read the same few pages over and over before going down to the Danger Room to reduce several plastic mannequins to piles of neatly severed limbs using the now-unnecessary hinges from the door he had welded shut behind him. The metal had cut into his thumb when he tested its new sharpness and the smell of blood had reminded him of Cuba, how Charles’s blood had stained the sand, and of those days beneath the Pentagon when he had punched the white walls to remember color. Blood meant things were real. He could trust it not to lie to him.
He had slept for an hour around sunrise on a couch in one of the many rooms that would one day be a classroom but currently seemed to serve no purpose at all. His dreams had been disjointed and disturbing. They felt like outtakes of reality, possible futures he had erased when he plunged that syringe into Charles’s arm. In the last one he had let Charles take his soul with a kiss like in fairy tales; the last thing he had seen before it all went dark was the Charles on the bed waking up with eyes that looked like his own.
Shaken, he had gone up to the roof after that and stayed there for hours, back against one of the countless chimneys and legs stretched out in front of him. Tried not to think about Charles and thought about him anyway. He had felt hopeless and then hopeful and then nothing, for a while. If that—conversation, for lack of a better word, had continued another thirty seconds, what might have happened? Raven had told him to sway Charles to their side and he had missed his best chance. They were equally susceptible to the lure of the other, half-convinced already for wanting to be so badly, but Charles had been bolstered by some dark will and Erik had been too entranced and then too alarmed to take advantage.
He thought of the helmet and wondered how much of Magneto existed without it. There was no answer that wouldn’t evoke some type of self-hatred so he tried to forget the question.
After awhile he had locked away those thoughts and gone downstairs where with ferocious precision he had devoted half his energy to pretending everything was normal and half to avoiding Charles for the rest of the day. There was a thinness in him that felt ominous, like he had his back to that wall again but this time the pressure would only increase until he was crushed to the width of atoms. His hands trembled slightly and he kept close mental watch on his powers for fear of his anxiety leaking into the metal around him but by the evening he had nothing left and the temptation to contact Raven, which had been percolating since the Danger Room that morning, became overwhelming. If she had sensed the desperation behind his commands she had been tactful enough not to mention it.
Now he wanted more than anything to sleep.
“Be careful,” he had told Hank. He repeated it to himself but heard it in Charles’s voice.
There were dozens of empty bedrooms in the mansion and any one of them would be safer than the one down the hall, where the right side of the bed was his and the nightstand held copies of Olsen’s Maximus Poems and Heller’s Catch-22 alongside French editions of Notre-Dame de Paris and surrealist poetry anthologies. Even if his current exhaustion rendered his panic abstract, Erik remembered that not twenty-four hours ago Charles had offered to kill him the way neighbors offered to water each other’s plants during vacation, like it was nothing. But for ten years, on countless rock-hard pallets in prisons he couldn’t name, he had dreamed of sleeping and waking next to Charles, and there was very little that would make him give that up now that he had it. His voice of self-preservation had always been more of a whisper, after all.
Still he breathed a sigh of relief when he stretched out his powers and found the wheelchair in the study next door. The metal was cool; Charles must have transferred to the sofa. On a normal night they would have found each other for a game of chess by now. He would have poured Charles a drink; Charles would be telling him some story about the children’s antics that Erik would pretend to be unamused by.
But they could play tomorrow, talk tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow for as long as Erik allowed this charade to continue before guilt or Raven reminded him that he wouldn’t deserve this until he’d fought for it.
He was too tired to think anymore. It was the kind of exhaustion that transmuted easily to sadness. Shadows gathered at the edge of his vision, creeping skittering things that weren’t there and human-shaped spectres with blue eyes. He went down the hall, already peeling his shirt off, barely remembered to throw his clothes over the armchair so they wouldn’t impede the movement of Charles’s wheelchair later, fell into bed, fell asleep.
“Oh fuck bugger damn it all,” accompanied by the sound of a wheelchair hitting at least three pieces of furniture, woke him four hours later.
Erik came awake reluctantly. He’d been so deep in sleep that his eyelids felt cemented shut. His mind was fogged over. The longer he stayed at the mansion the more rarely he came awake in an instant, the more often his nightmares were amorphous, a sense of unease, and not vicious monsters with teeth that haunted him throughout the day. He felt the body-warm metal of Charles’s wheelchair and watch approach the bed, heard Charles cursing under his breath again. Erik’s body turned toward him instinctively even as his mind whispered a warning. Half-asleep, he couldn’t remember the threat.
“Erik, if you moved the bloody furniture—”
“Yes, that’s certainly my priority at 3 a.m.,” Erik mumbled. “Please stop crashing into things.”
Charles crashed into the nightstand, which at least meant he’d made it to the bed. Erik managed the barest flick of his wrist and the wheelchair reshaped itself, one arm sliding down and the other up, then lifted into the air and tilted toward the bed, dumping Charles unceremoniously on his side of the mattress.
“I hate it when you do that,” Charles pouted, making a production of arranging his blankets and pillows. In the rustling of fabric Erik heard his silk pajamas, smelled toothpaste overlaying alcohol. Getting ready for bed was a laborious process for Charles now, long and convoluted no matter how tired he was, and nothing Erik could have imagined when he’d sent the bullet into his back or condemned him for the serum. With Charles’s current clumsiness, the amount of knocking about he must have done, only the sheer size of their room and adjoining bathroom had let Erik sleep so long.
“I’m very sorry, won’t happen again,” Erik said in the same drowsy monotone.
He wasn’t but he had learned that it cost so little to say things he didn’t mean. Simple things, apologies, compliments for the children, sharing thoughts or feelings he would once have hoarded for no other reason but that they belonged to him. Charles saw through him in an instant but didn’t care. Not all gestures had to be grand.
“You’re not sorry at all, you lying bastard.” There was no heat in it; affection, if anything.
Charles used his arms to move himself further down the bed, settling on his back the way he always slept before turning himself over periodically throughout the night, and Erik automatically molded himself into the curves and corners he now claimed as his own, when at first they had only registered as negative space. Wild, echoing caverns had existed in the inches between them at night, as impossible to breach as the distance that separated them ideologically, but Erik had been caged for ten years and knew now that freedom of movement was reason for hope in itself. Now he slept curled around Charles like a comma. There was tension in him tonight; his fingers pressed into the arm Erik had wrapped around his waist like they were searching for something.
After a few minutes of silence, just when sleep was close again, Charles said, “I am, though. Sorry. I didn’t—I wouldn’t—you didn’t have to stay. Did I make you stay?”
Erik sighed. “Charles…”
“Would you even know? Would I? If reality is what I make it then the only test is one of rationality and it makes no logical sense, you being here—”
His voice was a shade too loud, tone oddly staccato, like they were speaking from across the library and not while lying in the same bed. It grated and Erik tightened his grip just enough to shut him up.
“It’s always been within my power to leave,” he said. “I’ve thought of it every day since I came here and I remain because I choose to. You haven’t brainwashed me, Charles.”
“Why aren’t you angry? You were always so angry before. The mere thought of—and now I’ve done it, you should be furious.”
Erik had thought the same. He had even tried to be. Down in the bunker disassembling mannequins, twenty-four hours ago exactly now, he had searched for that old friend within himself, had imagined its heat warming his blood as the rage that had kept him fighting all those years reignited. Charles had violated him. It should have been unforgiveable. He had pictured metal walls between them. The walls had become molten copper that bubbled and resembled flames, but there was no heat to them, they were illusory and ineffective. He had gone back to Dallas and felt again the fury and hatred that had consumed him when he had gone to his knees with the force of a ceramic bullet to the shoulder and looked up to see the SWAT team already surrounding him. They hadn’t even told him the president was dead until the charges against him were made public and he had been the last to know. He had earned his first prison transference that day after wrecking the facility beyond his plastic cell. Nothing had worked; the distance between then and now felt like the distance of eons. He had been nearly desperate enough to venture back in memory to the moment when Charles had said those fatal words in Cuba and triggered an anger that was irrational, obliterating in its force, but that memory was poisoned with shame and guilt. The purity of its rage was impossible to recapture.
Instead of angry he simply felt cold, and Charles’s skin warmed him more than those futile attempts ever had. There were no words for any of this so after a long moment he simply said, “Don’t tell me how to feel. It’s presumptuous even for you.”
“But last night—”
“Last night happened. It’s over.”
Charles laughed in that condescending way he had, again with greater volume and pitch than usual. “You know that’s not true, my friend.” He was silent for a moment, grew somber, and Erik had just enough time to hope that this uncomfortable conversation was over before Charles ruined it by adding, “You’re everything to me as you are, you must know that.”
“You hate the way I am,” Erik reminded him. Rolling his eyes would have taken more effort than he was willing to expend so he tried to convey his exasperation tonally instead. “I won’t play nicely with your little human friends and I’m given to wanton destruction of property and you’ll be convinced that I’m your enemy until the day your real enemy shows up at your door and you invite them in for tea like you have a hundred times before. And you hate my clothes.”
“The capes, darling,” Charles said, hiding his smile in Erik’s hair.
Erik noticed that he didn’t disagree with any of the rest of it. Charles had never enjoyed lying outright; he was guilty mostly of lying to himself in a way that was more wishful thinking than outright falsehood. He was naïve but not entirely delusional, though Erik never intended to admit that out loud. It came too close to complimentary.
He also noticed that Charles clung to him tightly tonight and allowed himself to cling back, telling himself it wasn’t for his own comfort and had nothing to do with the need to replace the memories of that cold, powerful creature with ones of a warm, vibrant Charles who would tame his own bloodlust, not match it. Part of him wanted to cling still tighter, to roll on top of Charles and prove with fingers and lips and tongue and cock that they were real to each other even if the rest of the world was entirely senseless. After the eschatological horror of last night he needed to know that they could bare themselves to each other in every way and survive the fallout. But the rest of him had catalogued the clumsiness and odd speech and alcohol still on Charles’s breath and concluded that he was perhaps not entirely in his right mind.
Erik thought of making a dry comment about past bad behavior and stopped himself, considering. It was odd. He had seen Charles in a wide range of altered mental states and this resembled a serum high more than anything else, but the legs entangled with his own were limp and unmoving.
“What have you done to yourself, schatz?” he murmured.
But Charles apparently wasn’t done with their earlier conversation. “It won’t happen again, Erik, I promise. I won’t put you in that situation again, I’ll control my powers better than that.”
“That would mean admitting you have them,” Erik said.
“I’m confused, darling, not crazy. I do know that I’m a telepath, but it would be safer for everyone if I wasn’t for awhile.”
“What does that mean?”
Charles was growing lax in his arms and didn’t respond, because of course conversations were over when Charles decided they were. Weeks and weeks later and he was still too thin; Erik could trace the up-and-down slopes of ribs under his fingers. He sighed and closed his eyes too. They could come back to it in the morning.
But when he opened his eyes again it wasn’t morning. It was midafternoon and he was standing on the front steps of the mansion watching himself turn the satellite dish as a much younger Charles looked on with unbearable pride.
Erik blinked. He put his hand out and the mansion’s stone walls were cool under his fingers; he pinched himself, feeling absurd, and left white half-moon marks on his arm. The screech of metal filled the air as it had the first time, only this was the first time…
This was the birth of Magneto. The strength to control those missiles had lain dormant until this moment—the serenity that had anchored him as he’d bored that coin into Shaw’s skull hadn’t existed until Charles had unearthed it. Everything Erik had become had its inception here, now. He began walking down the steps, strangely mesmerized, watching the smile grow on Charles’s face and the tears in his eyes and wondering if he knew, if he had known, what he was unleashing. A power no one can match, not even me, he had said, like it wasn’t quite literally the worst thing that could have befallen humanity. Like it wasn’t a fucking tragedy. This memory was one of Erik’s brightest; he wondered if it was one of Charles’s darkest, one he had played over and over again in the darkest depths of self-loathing.
Erik felt a sudden urge to step between these two young, stupid men and stop the scene from playing out as it had. He wasn’t prepared for Charles to move first—he’d thought himself invisible.
“Erik? You’re not supposed to be here.”
Puzzlement flashed across his young face. His pride and contagious joy had vanished in an instant. He was practically a child and Erik suddenly felt older than his years, with none of the wisdom that age was meant to engender.
“So what am I doing here?” he said.
Charles looked away like he was running calculations in his mind. He didn’t seem pleased with the answers. Erik had forgotten how disconcertingly adorable his displeasure was; there was an innocence to it, as if every problem was a mere inconvenience, that Erik had long since robbed him of. “I don’t know. But I think you should leave.”
Erik had a surly retort at the ready, but the mansion grounds evaporated before he could speak and he found himself in a room he’d never seen before. Oxford, from the view outside the window. The air smelled overwhelmingly of cigarettes and cheap women’s perfume. Making himself at home—he had given up on trying to make sense of this, felt oddly relaxed about it—Erik wandered around, picking up various anatomical models, flipping through the papers on the desk, running his hand along the back of the cheap leather couch. The room was an awkward combination of classical and modern furnishings. None of the fabrics matched. What was expensive was worn; the rest of it was ugly, an assortment of chairs and lamps that might have been picked up at thrift shops. There was a tendency to warm colors but that was the only unifying factor. He could read Charles and Raven’s entire history in this catastrophic attempt at interior decorating.
He registered the voices in the hall as he was going through their medicine cabinet. There was nothing of Mystique in Raven’s girlish peals of laughter, but he’d recognize Charles’s dismissive drawl anywhere; he’d used it for mocking impressions of the CIA agents often enough.
Erik wasn’t posing, precisely, but the deliberate nonchalance with which he leaned against the bathroom doorway as Charles came into the apartment wasn’t entirely natural either.
“Hello, Charles,” he said dryly.
Charles’s eyes widened and he turned around and blurted, “Raven, if you could just—for a moment—” before slamming the door in her face. Then he stormed across the room, livid, and actually poked a finger at Erik’s chest. “Again? What the devil do you think you’re playing at?”
Erik was sorely tempted to laugh—young Charles was just too short and baby-faced to pull off physical intimidation—but he figured that would get the conversation off on the wrong foot, and he didn’t want a repeat of the scene at the satellite dish before he had his own answers. He did his best to be calm, soothing. “Before you send me away again I’d like to inform you that I’m not doing this. You’re the one in control here. I assume we’re dreaming?”
“But…but that’s impossible,” Charles stuttered.
“That you’re in control or that we’re dreaming? I’d prefer an explanation for this that doesn’t involve time travel again, that’s all I’m saying, Charles.”
“No, of course we’re dreaming, it’s just—we shouldn’t be dreaming together. It shouldn’t be possible, our minds should be completely separated.”
“How could you know that?” Erik said, frowning. “Your powers aren’t functional. You can’t know what’s happening between our minds without using your telepathy.”
Charles looked suddenly shifty. He backed away a few steps and went to the window, pulling aside the ugly tricolor curtains with their geometric patterns and looking down on the lamplit street. His nails tapped a nervous rhythm against the wood casing. “What if I couldn’t use it? What if I knew our minds were separated because I couldn’t join them if I wanted to?”
Erik remembered how oddly Charles had behaved when he came to bed, the strangeness of that phrase it would be safer for everyone if I wasn’t for awhile. With ominous calm he followed Charles to the window and repeated his own question, with what he considered an entirely justifiable slight variation on the endearment. “Charles. What have you done to yourself, you utter idiot?”
“Good Lord, you have been talking to Raven,” Charles said, and somehow managed to wriggle out from under the arms Erik had raised to box him in. As he made for the door he threw over his shoulder, “Don’t worry, Erik, I’ll fix this.”
It was hardly a surprise when the Oxford apartment vanished too and another room he’d never seen materialized around him.
Taking in his new surroundings, Erik immediately felt out of place. It was the opposite of Charles’s student digs: everything was antique and luxurious, made of wood hewn from medieval trees, silk and damask and velvet and leather so old it felt like butter. The air smelled of burning logs from a new-lit fire and beeswax candles and the complex flower arrangements in vases on the desk and bureau. There were tapestries on the wall, not paintings or photographs. Necessity in his life of hunting had made him a kind of chameleon—he could feign belonging in any place or among any kind of people, and he had never been intimidated by old money or fine manners. In the right clothes he could pass for aristocratic. But he was still Jakob and Edie Lehnsherr’s son and he preferred simplicity over grandiosity. When he couldn’t have that he chose sterility—interchangeable hotel rooms with loud air conditioners and rough towels and the same bathrobes for all guests. This had none of that. It was grandiosity disguised as simplicity, and done so perfectly he was almost fooled.
There was a whistling noise from outside and he had nothing to do but wait for Charles, so he went to the window and peered out. Whiteness, blinding, filled his vision; he could feel the cold permeating through the glass. The wind was so strong that the snow blew horizontally. So much of his childhood had been frigid, but even he had never seen a storm like this. He wondered what was beyond it—not a city, they must be either in the country or on the coast, but he had no way of knowing where or when. The howl of the wind was so loud that he almost missing the soft click as the room’s door opened and closed.
“When did you come here?” he asked.
“I didn’t,” Charles said. “I always wanted to but it’s not to Raven’s taste—not enough to do, she said. I thought we might come here together one day. It’s very remote, I thought you might find it…peaceful.”
Erik glanced over his shoulder, eyebrow raised, and Charles shrugged with something like embarrassment. He was his current self now: too-long hair, clean-shaven, but standing. Even after all these years, Erik realized with a stab of guilt and pity, Charles walked in his dreams.
“We’re on the French coast. You could see the dunes and the ocean from here if the storm wasn’t so severe. There’s an old lighthouse and a lift with one of those metal cage doors you pull shut, you know the kind?”
“I can feel it,” Erik said. Actually he’d felt it before he’d even registered the warmth from the fire. The metal in the elevator sang to his senses in that way common to all old, well-preserved mechanisms. “It goes below ground and up to the attic. It’s good metal, strong. The iron in the lighthouse too.”
“It’s an old hotel. Used to be the manor of some French aristocrat, I think.”
“That’s very educational I’m sure but what does this have to do with our…predicament?”
Erik saw the moment Charles went from uncertain of his welcome to firmly ensconced in professorial pedantry. It was a shift in body language, tone of voice, an overall brightening of his whole presence. “Well, not to sound too Freudian, but I think my subconscious has placed us here because it’s tired of pushing you away. Some part of me must want to talk to you after all, so we have comfortable surroundings, positive associations, a place I’d thought of us coming together—quite obvious, really. And that—” he pointed to the snowstorm outside “—would seem to indicate that, surface tranquility aside, my mind isn’t entirely at ease.”
“Because you’ve…” Erik trailed off deliberately, making a gesture that invited Charles to complete the sentence himself.
“Look, I’d like to make it very clear that my intentions were benign, arguably even noble, and I certainly didn’t mean to drag you into this whole mess—”
“Charles.”
Sorely tempted as he was to take Charles by the shoulders and shake him until the answers flew free, Erik had to consider the possibility that he was right, that Charles’s subconscious mind was in control and would almost certainly interpret violence on his part as good reason for another escape attempt. Considering their personal histories, there were far less pleasant places they could end up next. He took several calming breaths, looked around, and nearly laughed out loud with relief when he spotted a service trolley with crystal tumblers and a full decanter of amber liquid. If this conversation was doomed to be circuitous, at least it would also be well-lubricated. He poured them both glasses and sat down on the leather sofa; Charles did the same, more distractedly.
“I sealed it off,” he said finally, abruptly. “You shouldn’t be here because I built my shields up as high as they’ve ever been so I couldn’t do what I did again, to you or anyone else. What if it was one of the children next? So I sealed it off. It should be entirely confined to my own head. Yet here you are.”
There was a moment of silence. Then Erik made a sound that might have been a laugh or something far sadder. He raised his glass and echoed, “Here I am.”
It made sense now: the clipped speech, the lack of depth perception, the way Charles had clung to him like his body was the only real thing in the world. Erik knew what it was like to have his mutation taken away. The disorientation was staggering. He’d felt vertigo, the bizarre conviction that he was looking at the world through dirty glass, a complete inability to orient himself in space; he’d fallen over repeatedly until his brain learned to compensate. Losing any of the other five senses would have been easier. He couldn’t imagine what it had felt like for Charles to do that to himself, or how frightened he must have been for it to seem like a good idea in the first place. His eyes burned the way they did before tears came and he rubbed his hand across them quickly and took another drink.
“I think it’s fairly clear it didn’t work,” Charles said. He was staring into the fire, slumped and dejected. “The shields didn’t stay up in my sleep. Or perhaps I built them wrong, or my telepathy has changed somehow in the aftermath of…everything. I could talk to Hank about a variation on the serum, I could—”
Erik wanted to throw his drink against the wall. He set it down on the table instead, hard enough that the crack of glass on glass made Charles flinch.
“You’ll do none of those things,” he snapped. “Charles, believe me, I’ve been there—you’re going to drive yourself madder than you already are. We’ll talk to Raven, we’ll talk to Hank, we’ll talk to each other but you cannot declare your powers a danger to all of us and make unilateral decisions about them at the same time, do you understand?”
“Last time I checked it was my mutation, Erik,” Charles said stiffly. His anger was an icy politeness.
“It is! It’s your strength, it’s a gift, and you can’t lock it away and hope it never bothers you again because it’s always been a part of you and always will. A beautiful part, Charles.”
“Yes, yes, mutant and proud,” Charles said mockingly. “Are you so devoted to your stump speech that you’ll just ignore the fact that my gift nearly did you irreparable harm last night?”
Erik refused to dignify that with a response, shot back, “Are you so determined to be the headmaster of a school for mutants when you openly loathe and repress your own mutation? What kind of example does that set for your students?”
Charles looked ready to shout back, his color high and his shoulders tense, but he deflated just as quickly. Sullenly he mumbled, “I know you called her.”
Erik stared at him, confused. “What?”
“Raven, I know you called Raven. In the study tonight.”
If he’d still been holding his glass Erik would have dropped it. A gust of panic cold as the wind outside swept through him as he combed through his memories of that conversation, trying to recall if he’d said anything explicit about Charles’s subconscious use of his telepathy. He suspected if he had Charles would have led with that but it had been hours ago, he’d been so tired and overwrought and Raven had sounded so reassuring and capable. He might have said anything in his need to convince her of the severity of their situation. But Charles couldn’t know, not when he was set in his belief that his powers were stronger than he was and the only thing his telepathy was capable of was inflicting damage on people he loved. One unfortunate incident and he’d tried to seal it away permanently—Erik couldn’t imagine what he would do if he found out he’d been unconsciously manipulating them all this time, even if no harm had been done. The same dizziness overtook him that he’d felt in that Florida motel room and he thought again This is happening too quickly, time, time, I just need more time.
But Charles seemed oblivious to Erik’s inner turmoil. He leaned forward, earnest and apologetic. “You went to Raven because you don’t know what to do with me but I can do more, Erik, I can do better.”
“That’s why you did this?” Erik said, disbelieving. “You tried to cut off your own mutation because I was mildly shaken and turned to your sister, the only other person on the planet I care for even slightly besides you?”
“Yes!” Charles burst out. Then he paused, frowned, visibly retraced his line of logic. “Well, no. That would be very childish.”
“Yes, it would.”
“I did nearly rewrite every thought in your head because an unhinged but possibly not terribly exaggerated projection of my worst self thought it would make you happier,” Charles pointed out. “That was also a motivating factor.”
“And I told you, you didn’t, and it’s over.”
Charles sighed but he didn’t disagree this time and he didn’t try to tell Erik how to feel either. There was even a hint of a smile on his face though his eyes were tired now. They had come full circle and both knew it. Charles relaxed back against the couch like his strings had been cut, a marionette who could finally rest, and as he did Erik felt his own inner shudder of relief; they had survived this, he had survived this. Soon Raven would come and they would find a solution together, would ensure that Charles never had occasion to do something so foolhardy and dangerous to himself again. They wouldn’t let him.
“The storm is ending,” Charles said quietly. “Can you see the ocean?”
Erik stood up and went to the window again. The wind had calmed. The snow blew in eddies and not straight lines that would cut bare skin like knives, and between the eddies he thought he could see a pale beach littered with dark rocks. “Not yet.”
“Can we stay here awhile longer?”
“As long as you like,” Erik said. “It’s peaceful here.”
When he opened his eyes again it was morning, and Raven was in the kitchen burning the toast.