3
“I want this one.”
Raven Darkholme, Charles’s adoptive sister, exquisite in the gold hemmed dress.
They were in one of the more popular parts of town now, a few hours down from Erik’s flat via a limousine had seen Charles dressed in fresh clothes (fabric softened), the minty perfume of Silicone Valley CEOs exuding from his form. There Raven had run up to him and kissed him on the cheek: two days of flying after, Charles was seeing her for the first time in three years, wondering why he hadn’t visited sooner.
Charles looked up from The Death of Ivan Ilyich to regard her. Hours of shopping had whittled him down to his basal needs, which were books and warm hands. Admittedly it hadn’t been a great idea going around Conneticut on his own, trying to remember every street and landmark the way it’d been when he was working as a lecturer here on a brief work exchange program.
Things changed quickly. The old Da Vinci Club that used to play Rolling Stones and other old music that made him purr had become a marked-down antique store. Detective Erik Lehnsherr, who he’d last seen at a cozy bungalow at the edge of town (alone? With family? He never found out, but only assumed from his ring) had drifted into that horrendous rat hole of a flat. Life never seemed quite so finicky back home, in the English countryside, but this wasn’t an omniscient opinion. At least East Rock Park hadn’t changed much at all.
“No, Raven. It’s too gaudy, I think, for the occasion. Try the blue one over there—no, not that, the backless one.”
She returned to the changing room and emerged again. After a moment of spinning in front of the mirror, Raven nodded thoughtfully at Charles. “Yeah. You’re always right when it comes to dresses.”
Charles buried his face in his book and grinned to himself. Being around her lifted his spirits, especially when after the purchase she took him to Library Café just next door. Raven wasn’t one to spend more time or money than was necessary in affairs of appearance, and it had been Charles’s suggestion in the first place when she mentioned an upcoming charity gala.
The money was Xavier’s, the face was Raven’s. She skirted around people and politics the way Charles’s mother had taught her, knowing perhaps from Charles’s blocky childhood, swathed in blankets and chess pieces and Rubik cubes that he wasn’t going to go anywhere pass basic table manners. Raven, ever eager to please, to learn, to be the ambassador, though—she learned the foundation, turned ideas into events with concrete dates and times and Charles had always watched in awe, wide rim glasses askew on the bridge of his nose.
It didn’t help that he had a possessive streak towards his mother. It did that they both enjoyed books. While Raven ordered for the both of them, Charles got up and sifted through the books on the nearest shelf. He ran his fingers across their spines, always with a gentle flutter in his heart. The café had an ethereal visage to it, shelves so high they raced towards the vaulted ceiling. Each shelf had a different subject carved into it, from Science to Politics, Fiction to Military. Ladders were propped up next to the cash register for employee use and buzzers had been placed on each table should one wish to sift that far up. At the time only they and an aged woman occupied the store, but it wouldn’t be long.
“Can I get the newspaper, please?” Raven called out to the ponytail waiter just as Charles set down two books on molecular biology on his side and one on nuclear physics next to Raven’s tea set. Raven turned the book around and raised a condescending brow, which wasn’t truly her fault. Everything about her face was shaped in a way that put her in parliament (she had been there for a stint).
“Mark Fox? You know I’ve read them at Dundee.”
The mere mention of Dundee gave her glassy eyes. Raven touched the ankh cross on her neck, an act driven by habit. She’d completed her degree and found her first love there, one Ororo Munroe who had dressed up in a silly kilt and kissed her wholeheartedly under a rainbow flag.
“Never hurts as a refresher,” Charles said genially as he flipped open one of his own books. His eyes widened in wonder. “Oh look, it quotes my thesis…”
Raven rolled her eyes. “Yes, Professor Xavier, like you didn’t totally know that.”
They both tossed their heads back in laughter. Brother and sister reunited.
The waitress came by a few minutes later with the requested newspaper and lunch. Club sandwich special for the lady and something more concrete for Charles, who dug fervently into the gloriously meatball-mounted spaghetti. There was an art to looking good while eating, one which Charles never did pay enough attention to. In the end hunger was hunger and he was rather famished, as one might say back home.
“Oh dear,” Raven murmured. She turned the paper around and slid it over to Charles, who’d set the books instead of his napkin on his lap.
MAPLE SHRIKE STRIKES AGAIN.
5 YEAR OLD KILLED AT EAST ROCK PARK.
Charles read the article to the very last line.
“It’s a lot more genial this time,” Raven remarked.
She wasn’t wrong. The kid hadn’t been impaled on a tree or anything of the sort. But the trademark maple was there, dry and crinkled around the edges. The kid’s face had been blurred out.
In another photograph two detectives stood by a tree, one with an arm on his hip and the other smoking, fleeting clouds of grey just visible. Neither of them were Erik to be sure, but it made Charles wonder if he was there. No, of course he was there. It explained the laundromat and his grave sobriety, the wakefulness that followed him to the last minute before he closed his eyes.
When a detective got too caught up in their work, it was an innate kind of weakness that made them bad at the job. Empathy could drive them so far in the pursuit of justice, pure white justice, that they couldn’t see its nonexistence. Charles had known from the start that this was what constituted Lehnsherr, who’d never be a great or brilliant man. But he was a good one, and that was what Charles liked about him.
“The world’s a bloody mess now,” Charles sighed and dabbed the bottom of his lip with the napkin. Raven sat back on her couch, chewing slowly with her eyes closed.
“I miss home,” she said, when the first gulp was done and she washed it down with a cup of Jasmine. “Things are normal there. Murders with Tetrodotoxin, .22LRs. None of this maple rubbish.”
Charles cleaned his reading glasses, clouded by the steam of his meal. The tip of his tongue stuck out just slightly as he went over the lenses. “And that’s what defines us, sister. Your penchant for peace, and mine for…”
“Adventure?” Raven offered, raising her cup of tea.
Charles smiled and clinked his against hers.
“Euphemistic, but good enough.”