[fic] Their Mouths Always Lie 3/9
Jun. 8th, 2012 01:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keire_keCHAPTER THREE – curve of a bullet
The station was understaffed, the staff underpaid and the whole thing just teetered on the edge of financial disaster. Like a clown, really. You had to have clowns, obviously; you didn’t want them there, the kids didn’t want them there, but a clown was the thing to have, so you hired the poor bastard anyway. The police force in Westchester was that sad clown on your birthday party, the one who persisted even though everyone was praying that he went away and took the misery with him. Yet, despite the overall mess, below the main building there was a complex underground system worthy of a note, or eight. It held, among others, two gyms, a shooting range, a mortuary (Emma’s indivisible kingdom, the weird snow queen) and a burned down laboratory.
Hank was doing the forensic work in his broom closet, which didn’t close properly when he stretched his legs, even though the laboratory was usable and free, most of the time. Whatever happened there destroyed most of the equipment, and to rebuild it would have taken more money than the station could spend in a decade, but there were enough electric outlets to make do. That wasn’t why Hank avoided it, though. Everyone claimed the place made their skin itch, but Raven was fond of the blackened tables and singed walls. She would come there sometimes to think, while she was waiting for Charles to finish browsing through the files and come take her out to dinner.
Raven liked basements in general. She liked this one in particular, despite, or perhaps because of, the small, brown stain near the door. The rooms have been cleaned, but that stain remained, largely hidden by the shadow.
“Creepy,” Raven said to herself, and shuddered. Then shuddered again when she heard a gunshot. Someone evidently shared her disposition on this fine afternoon. Curious, she poked her head out of the lab and followed the corridor to the shooting range.
“Charles!” she said before she could stop herself, but the mufflers were on his ears, so he probably hadn’t heard.
She slipped into the room and watched Charles pick up a gun and hold it out. He shot with an unwavering certainty and he shot well, but his back was stiff in a way that would be imperceptible to anyone but her. She was glad she hasn’t been noticed yet. She liked watching Charles handle guns, especially when he wasn’t aware he was being watched. He was different then. He was focused and physical, none of the “invading your mind as we speak” bullshit. In the shooting range he was almost normal. Raven appreciated that and hated herself a little bit for liking to watch him shoot.
Charles hated guns.
“Not bad,” someone said.
Raven started. She didn’t notice his new partner, Erik, was also there. Unlike Charles, he must have noticed her – his eyes darted her way briefly, acknowledging her presence, then returned to her brother.
“Thanks,” Charles said. He pulled the mufflers off his ears, leaving them circling his neck, and turned to face Erik, which brought Raven into his field of vision. “Raven! What are you doing here?”
She beamed and detached from the doorway, flicking her hair over her shoulders. “You promised me dinner.”
“I did?” Charles raised a brow. He didn’t move much. He never did, when he had a gun in his hands. It was like it anchored him in place. Anchored him to reality, even. In her less charitable moments Raven thought about making him carry it around the house, just because. Luckily, this was not one of them.
“Well, no, but I had a fight with Joe today and I really need a drink and fancy food.” And then some, she thought, scowling inwardly. “Or fancy drink, with greasy food to follow.”
“As you wish. Will you wait?” A soft, earnest look fluttered her way; an apology for the delay, no doubt, and the indulgence he was participating in.
“Sure,” she said, resisting the urge to hug him.
Charles beamed and turned to his scary partner, who increased his scariness, oh, a millionfold, by holding anything obviously designed to hurt people with. As if his face wasn’t enough, Raven thought with a subtle roll of her eyes. Not that he looked bad, or anything.
“Come on, Erik, bragging is good for the soul,” Charles said. “How good are you with that gun?”
“How good do you want me to be?” Erik asked in return, slamming a clip home. He pulled the mufflers off Charles’ neck and shoved them one-handed onto his own head, before taking a place in the booth.
“Supernaturally good,” Charles said with a cheeky grin. “Live up to your file, at least.”
The cardboard target was clipped to a slide some fifty away. Raven watched, barely daring to breathe, as Erik walked to the console, pushed the target another fifty yards back, until it kissed the back wall, and fired six shots in rapid succession.
The target returned with a perfect circle around the head’s center point.
“Wow,” she said. “That’s fantastic!”
“It is,” Charles agreed, nearly bowling Raven over. Charles, admiring someone’s skill with a pistol! Whatever was coming next, a nuclear apocalypse? Raven cast a nervous glance over her shoulder, because if he really was enthusiastic about a gunshot, then the zombies must be close. Hopefully not, but anyway.
Charles’ phone rang in that moment, distracting them all with the cheery tune, most unfitting the grim surroundings. Normally a ringtone wouldn’t clash with the décor, but the basement of the police station was so ugly, that anything nicer than a fresh corpse, belonging to a person who died of natural causes, clashed with it horribly. Raven often wondered if she shouldn’t volunteer to paint the range some other color. Puke green complimented no one and nothing – everyone looked dead here. Except for the corpses, curiously enough. Emma let her into the mortuary once or twice, and the patients who didn’t have their insides hanging out for the world to see looked like they were a kiss away from walking off the slabs. It was very nearly magical.
“So soon? Oh. Well, thank you. No, I’ll come. Two minutes, yes.” Charles flipped the phone shut. “Raven, will you wait a little longer? Hank has finished with the samples and he needs me to sign for them and put them into storage. I won’t be long, quarter of an hour maybe.”
“Sure. Can I shoot?”
She knew what he was going to say even before he winced, but she was so used to it she wasn’t even angry. “Raven…”
“Oh, come on! You know I can handle a gun, besides, Erik can watch out so that I don’t shoot anything vital.”
“You assume Erik will agree?”
Raven turned to Erik, who was standing to the side with a cool expression and fluttered her eyelashes. “Please, Mr. Erik, sir, I promise I know what I’m doing,” she said to him, bringing her clasped hands in the vicinity of her bosom, for added effect.
She achieved a definition of a partial success so perfect she should frame it and hang it on her wall. He said, “I don’t mind,” but didn’t so much as blink otherwise.
Charles put the phone back in his pocket and devoted his full attention to dismantling the gun. He put it away and handed Raven the keys to the gun rack with visible reluctance. “All right. I’ll sign for you, too. Try not to shoot anything vital, either of you.”
“No promises!” Raven called over her shoulder, already snatching the mufflers from their rack and striding to the collections of firearms hoping her glee didn’t manifest as skipping. “Awesome.”
“You know how to shoot?” Erik asked, once Charles was gone.
Raven snorted, tied her hair off in a messy ponytail and fixed the mufflers on her head. She picked a nine-millimeter Berretta, assumed the stance and fired three shots. All three went through the target, which was only twenty yards away, but they were all within the black silhouette, and one got it around the middle. Raven considered the cardboard suspect sufficiently stopped. “Not bad, eh?”
“Not bad for a schoolgirl. Did Charles teach you to shoot?”
“As if.” Raven scoffed. “Charles despises gun. He needed to be talked into carrying one into work and he’s a policeman in Westchester. I mean, that’s just a little crazy.”
“I fear the day when I get to see Charles go insane,” Erik said, quite possibly winning Raven over forever. Unlike his other partners, Erik didn’t raise to the bait. He was staring at the gun in her hands, as though the clear invitation to complain about Charles and his utter crazy went unheard. Raven, exercising caution and restraint, awarded him seventy-eight points on the Arbitrary Judgment Of Men I Know scale of a hundred and three, for smirking fondly at the mention of her brother’s idiosyncrasies. Everybody else got at the very least condescending at this point, or even, memorably, panicky (final score: seven. That guy had a really cute nose). “How did you learn, if not from Charles?” Erik asked.
“My father was a detective. He taught me to shoot when I was little.”
She nearly missed the sharp look Erik shot her. She wasn’t Charles, but she could wager a guess what caught his attention. “Charles is my half-brother.”
“You said your name is Raven Xavier.”
“Sounds better than Raven Marko. I really wanted to be called Raven Darkholme, when I got around to changing my name. Too much E.A. Poe, Charles said and he might have had a point. I didn’t think so at the time. I still think it would sound cool, but I don’t think anyone would take me seriously. Teenage girls are so weird, right?”
“I wouldn’t know. I never was one.” Erik picked up another firearm, a heavy revolver that looked like it remembered the shooting of buffalos, swung it as though it weighed nothing and fired. He turned on his heel and fired again, turned and fired, then again, and again, until Raven’s head was spinning, the clip was empty and the target full of holes.
“How old are you?” he asked casually, as though he hadn’t just done five complete circles.
“Twenty-three.”
“Shoot again,” he said. “Stand sideways this time. Both elbows bent. Gun in front of your face.”
Raven thought about commenting, but decided against it. The first shot went a little off, leaving a hole five inches from where she hoped it would get. She adjusted her stance and the second was better. The third felt perfect, even if she was still an inch or so off perfect accuracy.
She felt giddy. Getting inside a shooting range without Charles was an unexpected treat, and being inside one without Charles was a whole another ballgame. She always liked guns. She always liked shooting. She always hated letting Charles in on the fact formally, lest he look at her with wounded blue eyes of doom. It wasn’t like he didn’t know for god’s sake, he knew everything else, but still, shooting in front of him was awkward.
“Bend your knees.” Erik slid into the booth to stand before her, not bothered by the pistol, which was now pointed at his chest. Raven couldn’t get the gun out of the way fast enough, but he, as if he didn’t even notice the danger, nudged her foot until she stumbled.
“Hey! I am holding a gun here!”
Erik deigned to look at her. “So?”
“I could have shot you by accident!”
“Your gun, your problem. You are responsible for what it does,” he said and went right back to nudging her feet until she was tap-dancing in place to avoid getting stepped on, all the while waiving a loaded fucking gun in the air. Good thing she managed to thumb the safety on, at least.
“Jesus, you can’t do that!” she yelled when he kicked her ankle, even if that particular kick was more or less an accident. “There are rules! Who let you in here, anyway?”
“Do you want to learn to shoot paper targets, or do you want to wield a weapon?” Erik asked. He was standing far closer than it was necessary, certainly closer than regulation should allow.
Part of her wanted to twist it into an innuendo, because it was perfect, wasn’t it? She was blonde, slim, wearing a pleated skirt, and he was tall, acceptably dark, for a certain value of blond, and handsome, and so fucking hot, especially when he held a gun. A little innuendo and they could be making out – god, she would so love to wield his weapon, she thought with the appropriate virtual giggling sound – or screwing, because at this point it was less a romantic comedy and more cheap porn.
The other part of her, the part that took growing up with Charles to heart and therefore learned that details matter, saw in him a soldier who knew the difference between a gun and a weapon.
“Yes,” she said, breathless in a way that had nothing to do with Erik’s aftershave.
“Lower on your knees. This is not a toy. This is you, now. Whatever it does, is on you. Do you understand that?”
Raven rolled her eyes. “Yes, Master Shakespeare. I’m not a moron.”
“Good. Nothing worse than a moron with a gun.”
“Oh, fuck you,” she said lightly. She bent her knees. She relaxed, took a deep breath, squared her shoulders. Erik didn’t move, so she sidestepped him, brought the gun up, thumbed the safety off and fired.
“Better.” He didn’t even look at the target. She told him as much. “I don’t need to, I see you.”
The shot had gone through the heart of the cardboard, more or less, which was pretty neat. “Cool,” Raven said. “Do they teach you that spiel in the army?”
“If you’re smart, you learn.”
“Very poetic.”
“Very poetic,” Erik agreed. “Especially shooting a man at close range in the gut. Then you can feel his blood and shit spilling all over your shoes. As far as poetry goes, that one is worthy of a Pulitzer.”
Raven was rather grateful they left that out of the movies. “Gross!”
“You wanted to learn.” A shadow of a smile crossed his face. “When I say whatever it does, I mean whatever. The person you shoot, their blood is on you. The person you shoot at and miss, their life is on you. The moment you aim that gun at anything living, you are responsible for whatever it does next.”
“I’m not stupid, you know. I heard you the first time.”
“You’re not.” Erik shook his head. “Sorry. I’m not much of a teacher, unless I’m allowed to run them into the ground. Probably not even then.”
Raven begged to disagree. “So, did you shoot a lot of people?” She made sure to look extra innocent when she asked, just to see the look on his face. Sadly, Erik disappointed. Or fortunately, he didn’t disappoint; she wasn’t yet sure how she felt about his weird reactions.
“More people than you know,” he said without much of an emotional output.
“Do Facebook friends count?”
Erik stared at her blankly, like she slipped into another language without a warning.
“You can’t tell me you don’t know what Facebook is.” Raven let the gun drop a few inches and stared, until he shook his head and dispelled the weirdness of such magnitude Charles looked normal in comparison.
“I know what it is, I’ve seen The Social Network. I was unaware Facebook friends were something separate from people you know.”
“Theory, practice.” Raven fired again, and this time she hit the target an inch closer to the bulls-eye. “Awesome. I wish Charles would let me come here more often.”
“I thought you were an adult.”
“This is the police range. I need supervision, and I get that you’re all super-busy most of the time, this being Westchester and all. He doesn’t like it when I handle guns, anyway, and it’s not like there’s a whole lot of other people I can ask to let me in here. There’re only a few shooting ranges around, and this one is the best.”
“Few shooting ranges in Westchester?” Erik parodied Raven’s accent and the two of them grinned. “Is Charles waiting to inherit your trust fund?”
“I have a black belt in ju-jitsu, I’ll have you know. Kurt picked it out for me when I was a kid, and it’s pretty vicious. It’s not like Charles wants me to be completely helpless.” Raven sighed and stroked the smooth, dark metal surface of the gun with her fingertip. “He just doesn’t like guns.”
“He does have a number of curious idiosyncrasies,” Erik said, with an expression best described as fond. Raven stared at him in disbelief.
“Dude. You’re sure you were in the army?” At Erik’s blank stare she stuck her tongue in her cheek, briefly, then added, “That was a multi-syllable word. Next you’ll be telling me they taught you to read, too?”
Erik looked at her, his face serious, but his eyes twinkled. “You are an insolent brat,” he said matter-of-factly. He folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the wall of the cubicle.
“I know!” Raven beamed. She always thought this was one of her better qualities: the ability to look anyone, anyone at all in the eye and say something she knew they wouldn’t approve of. It was, simultaneously, one of her worst traits. She had many bruises, even scars (though that was an honest to god accident, and the perpetrator was sorry as hell. Then he met her brother, and oh boy), which indicated this was not always the right course of action. Sometimes she learned better, sometimes she didn’t; the point was that she tried and sometimes, like now, she scored.
Erik closed his eyes and smiled. “Again,” he said. “Gun steady. Don’t let it do the thinking.”
“What am I, a guy?”
“You don’t want to know what a gun is thinking.” His voice was coming from a faraway place, but since he wasn’t a small, green goblin-thingie, Raven felt justified in snorting.
“Guns are things. They don’t think.”
“I’m always looking for a handy source of truisms, thank you Raven. What I mean is you can’t shoot with the gun alone. Shoot with your head.”
Raven rolled her eyes, because how was she the one spouting truisms? She had Charles for that. “Boom, headshot!” she crooned when her bullet pierced the already mangled paper silhouette.
Erik’s lips quivered around the Cupid’s bow. “Not bad at all.”
“Not bad? That was awesome!”
“That was okay for a shot in a shooting range. Try drawing and shooting.”
“What?”
Erik dropped his own gun on the board before them. He stood with one hand hanging loosely at his side, with his head cocked in Raven’s direction, while his other hand played with the joystick, adjusting the target’s position. “Draw,” he said as his palm wrapped around the handle of the gun, “and shoot.”
It was a single move – his fingers closed around the gun, just as he was taking a step back, pulling it off the desk, and then the hand flew up, he turned his head away from her for half of a second, the gun aligned with the target and barked three times. Raven closed her mouth, but it stubbornly fell open again. Must get those loose hinges looked at, she thought. The three bullet holes were in the very center of the head, like a very unlucky three-leafed clover.
“You barely looked at it!” she said, stabbing Erik around the solar plexus with her index finger for emphasis, but all she got for her trouble was a winning smirk.
“I cheated. I put it in place.”
“Yeah, but you weren’t looking!”
“The joystick translates easily. I knew it went back about five yards. Hardly a trouble to adjust. That’s not the point.”
“It still moved, and you just got it dead center, perfect headshot, without looking!”
“I’m a career military man, Raven.”
She tried to make sense of this, if this was guy-code for “I shoot people for a living, fuck yeah I’m good at it,” which it probably was. It was a good headshot. Triple headshot. She scrambled for words, but most took the day off, so in the end she settled for, “Fucking hell. Can I learn to shoot like that?”
“You can try.”
“What do I do?” Other than the obvious, but Raven wasn’t stupid, thankyouverymuch for asking. She attended enough gun safety lectures from the world’s leading expert on hating firearms to know that unless a gun’s safety was on, the gun must be firmly held and pointed where it would do the least possible damage when discharged. Charles was very peculiar about that.
Erik, as it turned out, wasn’t. “For starters, don’t shoot yourself in the foot. The safety must be off for this, so don’t touch the trigger. Finger on the guard, until you’re ready, and not even there, until the gun is pointing away from body parts. Try it with the safety on, first.”
Raven placed the pistol where Erik’s had been and tried to mimic his move. A dance; pick up, step back, up and fire. Again. It was a waltz, one, two, three, four, almost like ju-jitsu only with a little less hitting the mattress. Pick up and fire. Boom.
“Now fire,” he said, and Raven did. Not terribly well, but she didn’t shoot herself in the foot. “At least you hit the target.”
There was a clipped edge to the paper. Raven bit her lip and narrowed her eyes. “Let me try again.”
The next shot missed it entirely. So did the following three. The fourth fared a little better than the first, narrowly clipping the silhouette of a man. The fifth missed the fourth by a hair’s breadth. Raven was on the verge of demonstrating how poorly bred she was, by letting out a stream of curses, when Erik said, “Okay, stop.”
Raven turned to him with a question, but he had vaulted over the pulpit and walked to the target with a fresh sheet of paper in hand.
“You know, there’s machines to do that for you!” she yelled, because speaking just wasn’t an option.
“They are slow.” He returned crumpling the paper in his hands and threw it in the wastebasket. “Close your eyes.”
Raven stared. “You’re joking, right?”
“Do you see the target?”
The three-by-four sheet of cardboard, hovering in a tantalizing manner twenty-five yards away? “Duh?”
“Good. Now close your eyes and fire at it.”
That was far and beyond subverting a little of Charles Xavier’s Gun-wielding Protocol For Dummies, And Also His Beloved Sister, Who Isn’t a Dummy, Asshole. This was taking the whole thing and setting in on fire while dancing naked around its ashes. “What is that supposed to accomplish?”
“Always be aware of where the gun is pointing, whether you see it or not. Shooting blind helps you understand that.” Erik stared at her and in his eyes Raven saw the jungle gleam with the poisonous green and fluorescent predators. This was a bad, bad idea, her brain told her. This was awesome, said everything else.
“You are a little crazy, did you know?” she said, just to make sure he knew that she thought he was a few barrels short of a wagon and everything.
“I know. I also know you are still here.”
“Yeah, well, I like a little crazy.” She grinned.
He grinned back. “Charles will want to have words with you about that.”
“Charles wants to have words with me about everything, my skirts included. I like my skirts. I think they are really awesome.” To demonstrate she lifted her leg back in a graceful attitude derrière, which would have been very indecent if there was a small child behind her, and made her skirt slide up her thighs anyway.
“I don’t have an opinion,” Erik said, staring unabashedly at, if Raven was not mistaken, the curve of her ass.
“Good, ‘cause I wasn’t asking for one,” Raven said haughtily. It was only partly a lie. She did care for his opinion, she discovered with some surprise. More specifically, she wanted Erik to look at the skirt and tell her he liked how it covered her to mid-thigh, less when she moved really quickly.
Erik pointed to his right. “The target is getting old.”
Raven stuck out her tongue. The target was twenty-five yards away and untouched, directly in front of her. She closed her eyes and tried to visualize. Twenty-five yards. Cardboard representing a man a little taller than her and a lot broader. A lot like Kurt, in fact. She raised the gun, easily, effortlessly. The weight was familiar, weighing her hands down, weighing her mind down, too, because Charles had a way of lecturing that stuck, no matter what. She let the weigh ground her, like Charles did, let it center her. The index finger of her right hand slid smoothly from the guard and onto the trigger applying only the barest hint of pressure, until the gravity of the gun pulled it back towards Raven.
The shot was almost a surprise. She let out a yelp when the gun jerked in her hands, her eyes flew open and–
Erik was standing directly before her.
Raven screamed.
*****
“Jesus Christ, Erik!” Charles was across the room in a flash, wrapping his arms around Raven, pulling her head down so that he could tuck her face into his neck. She shuddered against him, gasping for breath, and he felt the shock in the lines of her body; bone-deep regret and panic. “What the hell was that?”
“A lesson,” Erik said nonchalantly, considering his lack of manicure.
Raven shuddered against Charles. “Raven? Raven, sweetheart, are you okay?”
“Am I okay?” she lifted her face from his shoulder. Her blue mascara was smudged and leaking down her face. “Is– I shot him!”
“No, you didn’t. You didn’t. It’s okay, I promise, it’s fine. I’ve been here, remember? You didn’t shoot anyone, I promise you, darling, no one was shot.” He tried to sound soothing, he did, but he was finding it suspiciously hard to think in straight lines. His perception of the universe curved around that point in time-space, until every thought and fact pointed back towards the three of them, huddled in a shooting booth in the basement of the station.
Raven huffed and her moist lips brushed his neck. There were tears on her face and the gun was still in her hand, the gun that just seconds ago she had pointed at Erik’s chest, a gun that, had it fired, would have winked a human life, Erik’s life, out of existence, and it would have been Raven, his little sister, who’d have had the blood one her hands. A cold wave of anger flared up throughout Charles, burning all in its wake, reason and manners included. He reached out and gripped the shirt at Erik’s throat, never letting Raven go. When he spoke, his voice was even, finely tuned, modulated to the last sound wave. “So help me, if you ever pull such a stunt again, I will hurt you. I will rip you open and feed you to the wild dogs, do you understand? I don’t care how tough you are; you will die screaming. Do you understand me?”
Charles was himself surprised that he could sound so cold. This wasn’t even glacial; if vacuum had a voice, this was what it would sound like. Raven started trembling, and he held her tighter in response. Erik, on the other hand, was grinning. Charles saw his excitement; he heard the rush of adrenaline and dopamine as keenly as he felt it in his own body. Perhaps it was just an echo, brought up by Raven’s terror, but there was no mistaking the shaking of his hands.
“This, my friend, is passion,” Erik said, with a mocking British lilt at the word friend, staring into his eyes not in the least bothered by the very sincere threats.
Raven hiccupped into Charles’ neck and clung tighter for a second. “Can we go? Please?”
“Of course.” He pressed a kiss to her head and glared at Erik. “You haven’t heard the last of this.”
“Didn’t think so.” Erik took the gun from Raven’s hand and saluted them. “I’ll lock up.”
Charles managed one final glare in his direction, promising in no uncertain terms swift and verbal retribution for harms rendered. “Come on, Raven.”
“I’m good,” she said, but her arm remained wrapped around his waist, gripping at the fabric of his jacket like it was her lifeline. “I’m fine.”
“I know. I know you are.” But he held her closer still until their hearts were beating in unison and he knew, he felt, she was fine, that she was calm. “What do you want to eat?”
“Vodka.”
“Raven…”
“Vodka,” she repeated firmly. “Like, a bottle of. Then greasy, doughy food, with bits of bacon.”
Charles could take a gentle hint. “Polish, then? Zapiecek is nearby.”
“Whatever.” She straightened and fished out a small mirror and a wet wipe out of her bag. “You partner is insane,” she said, fixing her ruined make-up by smearing it around to her satisfaction. “I don’t want you working with him. I don’t want you near him!”
“He’s not that bad, really. I’ll be fine.”
Raven stopped and started shaking him by the lapels of his jacket, pushing them both into the burned down laboratory, before the spectacle drew any onlookers. “Charles. He is batshit fucking insane. He stepped in front of a loaded gun and I had my finger on the trigger the whole damn time!” Charles closed his eyes and tried to avoid the questions that swirled through his brain and fought for a place on his tongue. Erik was quick, but not that quick – how could he have stepped in front of the gun without Raven knowing, when she only started screaming a second or two after she fired, half a second after Erik swung in front of her. How could she not have seen him? he wanted to ask, but didn’t, because it didn’t matter.
“He didn’t. Raven.” He cupped her shoulders and very gently pushed her back. “Look at me. You couldn’t have shot him. How many shots did you fire?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She tried to count, he saw her eyes flicker, as she tried to make sense of the bullets and the clip and the gun. “I’m not sure.”
“He knew your gun was empty. You fired fifteen times.”
“You don’t know that.”
Charles’ fingers tightened on her shoulders. “Erik is insane. I know. I’m not arguing against it. But he is a good person and a better soldier. He would never let you shoot him like this.”
Slightly more sobering was the thought that he might have let Charles do it, though. Raven was still a child, still too innocent, but Charles… He had no doubt that Erik wouldn’t risk harming Raven, in whatever way, but the fact remained the man had a death wish and, given enough time, he would get himself shot, by Charles’ hand, if he had no other option.
God knew: this skill he had sometimes felt like precognition, like magic, like mind reading. It wasn’t. Every fact he spouted he could trace to the source he gained it from, whether it was an amalgamation of details, forming a picture, or a straight up piece of knowledge. He knew people’s thoughts by the stance of their bodies, by the minute adjustments of their facial muscles, by the scraps of paper, of trifles and food they left behind, by the lies they told and lies told to them. He could pick out a culprit from a line up by the cuffs of his shirt; he could tell a murderer from a thief by the way they printed their names. He could guess the future, because the future was always set to be another now. If he assumed nothing new would surface, it was no hardship to predict where the current patterns would carry the world. It was a little different with the future events that fell outside the scope of normal – given enough data of course he could tell that a woman would poison her unfaithful lover within the year, if he had time and opportunity to observe her for long enough to see her patterns. Of course he knew Erik would eventually break, it wasn’t a precognition, it was fact. Just because it hadn’t happened yet, it didn’t mean it wasn’t true.
Because he was acutely aware that he had no foresight whatsoever, it was a shock when the thought arrived into his mind, the thoroughly poetic, completely unbidden, illogical idea, which nevertheless bordered on certainty: that when Erik broke, he would be with him.
“Yeah, I’m not so sure.” Raven dabbed the last of the mascara off her cheeks, smeared the little that remained on the eyelids, until her honey-brown eyes were framed by incandescent blue and black kohl and grinned. “How do I look?”
“Lovely, my darling, as always. Shall we?”
“I meant it about the vodka.”
“And you will get it,” he said and kissed her temple.
He made good on his word. Within five minutes of setting foot in Zapiecek Raven had a line up of three shots in front of her. “Na zdrowie,” she said, lifting the first to her lips, a sentiment Charles echoed heartily, filching one of her shots.
“How did it go?” Charles asked as the vodka burned its way down his throat, indicating the barkeep with a nod of his head, meaning the other barkeep, the one Raven worked for.
“The fight? Ah, the usual. Joe just needs to work out that I’m right.”
“It’s not going to come easy.” Joe was a little set in his ways.
Raven relaxed as the alcohol hit her system and a little color returned to her face. A few minutes later she was shaking her head and making faces as only she knew how, and they were both giggling helplessly, in relief and as means of easing themselves gently down the slope of the adrenaline high.
“You have to admit, it was pretty funny,” Raven said eventually, dipping her pinky in the shot glass and licking it clean. “Yeah, I lost track of the bullets. It makes sense he wouldn’t. Serves me right for not paying enough attention.”
Charles disagreed. If he was any less certain of his own health, he would have been sure his heart had stopped in his chest when he saw Raven point the gun at Erik. Then he heard her scream and, well, if a heart attack could get any worse, there it was, a textbook case of a self-detonation within a body cavity. “I still hate that he did this,” he said, summing the vestiges of the cold rage that shook him in the puke-green shooting range. It was a fairly ineffective exercise in the warm, wooden interior of a restaurant which smelled of bacon, onion fried in butter and parsley.
“He did have a point.” Raven’s pinkie dipped into the glass again. She did away with the fancy nail polish yesterday, leaving her nails a healthy pink, lightly scraped on the middle and ring fingers of each hand.
“No point is good enough to justify what he did.”
Raven laughed. “Now you’re exaggerating. Some points would be.”
“Name one.”
“Pay attention when you point your gun?” She leaned back in her chair, no doubt remembering all the times he lectured her about the importance of doing just that. Charles winced.
“There are better ways.”
Raven smirked. “Name one.”
“Raven.”
“Come on, it was effective. I’m never going to try not looking when I hold a gun. It freaked me out like you wouldn’t believe. Then again, what am I saying. You totally know, don’t you?” She grabbed a shot glass and licked the last drops of vodka from it, then she waved her hand high, to get the barman’s attention. “Three more!”
Charles hummed something, which might have been an agreement, or might not have been. Raven was genuinely disturbed by the experience, but nowhere near as much as he thought she would be. It was a sharp shock to the system, but no worse than a sudden douse of cold water. Raven was already up and running, like she hadn’t pointed a loaded gun at an acquaintance, a friend even. Perhaps not a friend, they’d only known each other for – well, they hardly even knew each other. Raven liked Erik, of this Charles was certain. Was attracted to him, it was evident in the flush of her face and the excitement in her voice when they spoke right before she shot that last time.
“Stop it,” she said sharply.
“Stop what?”
“You’re doing the mind reading thing. Stop. You know I hate it.”
“I’m sorry.” Charles closed his eyes, took a deep breath. Look, but don’t look, he told himself for the hundredth, thousandth time, don’t get angry. She doesn’t know what she’s asking of me. Don’t make connections. Don’t think. Don’t… Just don’t. “I’ll try.”
Raven deflated, smiled, huffed, sighed and patted his hand. “Well, just don’t say it. It’s creepy.”
Drop me in the middle of the forest with no map nor compass to guide my way, why don’t you, Charles thought. He wasn’t angry, or even peeved, just lost. He missed Erik, all of sudden. “I don’t mean to.”
Raven said nothing to that and Charles perused the menu. It was brand new; gleaming with fresh laminate and strings which held it together, though the last customer to touch it left greasy smudges on the pages containing the pierogi selection.
“Did you figure what you want to eat?” Raven said, tugging the menu out of his hands. Charles looked at her, then at the thin watch on her wrist. He’d spaced out for several minutes.
“Hm? Oh, anything.”
Raven had already forgotten the brief episode from earlier in the day. She waved the waiter over and proceeded to order at least three dishes that would feed Charles for a full day, if not two – from experience he knew she would gobble them up without a second thought. She never worried about her weight once she outgrew the pudgy stage of puberty, and while her metabolism kept up with her demands and her training paid off, the stored calories contributed to a healthy glow of her skin and glossy hair, and a bright grin to make his career worth the gloom.
Sometimes it scared Charles how much he loved her.
It scared him more that today, when he saw her point the gun at Erik, he wasn’t sure whose plight made his heart convulse more.
*****
Erik was at the station bright an early in the morning. Charles had been silent throughout the night, which was unusual. Erik had been getting used to the frequent texts over the progress of the case, Raven’s humorous commentary on the lives of people frequenting the restaurant she worked at (most of them were conjectures, wildly off the mark, so wildly in fact that she must have been doing it on purpose, Charles assured him, but she had a gift for spotting clues). The silence didn’t really bother Erik: he slept fitfully, but in the morning he took the time to stop at a teashop and get Charles a Darjeeling black tea blend. It wasn’t an apology – he didn’t feel guilty. He had, technically, done nothing wrong. If the girl was stupid enough to listen when someone she barely knew told her to fire a gun with her eyes shut, well, Erik couldn’t be held responsible for her mental state.
Charles though… Charles had been furious with him. He’d wrapped Raven in his arms and shielded her from harm, which was an obvious enough gesture. He shielded her from Erik, however, and that didn’t sit well, which was a revelation Erik had to mull over in private.
Fortunately, Charles arrived chipper, for a lack of a better word. He sat in his usual chair, across from Erik, raised a polite brow at the proffered cup of tea, but when he inhaled, the expression melted into bliss.
“Oh, thank you, Erik. This is wonderful.”
“Glad you think so.” Charles hummed his appreciation into the cup, casting furtive glances over the rim every now and then, a though he was trying to figure out the thought behind the gesture. Because he was Charles, he was likely getting to the appropriate conclusion regardless of Erik’s involvement in the thought process. Nonetheless Erik felt the need to say, “I’m not particularly sorry. I knew what I was doing. She had no more bullets.”
“I figured.”
Now it was Erik’s turn to raise a brow.
“No, truly. Disregarding everything else, you are not the kind of man who causes an unsuspecting girl to commit murder.” Charles looked into the cup, smiled and licked his lips nervously. “It’s not what made me angry. Not after Raven was okay, mind, and she is.”
“Good.”
“She’s strong. She bounces back easily.”
Either it was a figment of Erik’s imagination, but Charles didn’t look too pleased with that. Almost as though he hoped it was more of a shock. “Nothing happened to her,” Erik said. “She needed the shock.”
Charles’ smile was wan and see-through, but it was a smile and it was lovely. “Sometime in the future I might even thank you for doing what you did. She was getting cavalier with… everything. It might do her good.”
“What made you angry, then?” Erik asked, after it became apparent Charles found his tea more engrossing than the conversation. He wasn’t prepared for the skittish look thrown his way, nor the faint glimpse of a wide-eyed person beneath the all-knowing persona. Charles might have seen through everyone, but no one ever got to see Charles, Erik thought and wondered how it could possibly be the revelation it was.
“I don’t want you to die,” Charles admitted under his breath, as though he was hoping only the tea would hear.
Erik very nearly laughed. “That’s it?”
“Isn’t that enough?” Charles looked at him like he looked at the corpses and the flower petals: like he was aligning his universe around him, for the express purpose of figuring out his whole being. “You’ve been chasing death ever since you’ve arrived here. Sooner or later you will catch it and then what?”
“Then I will be out of your hair, for good.” Erik reached for the semi-decent coffee he coaxed out of the vending machine and sipped.
“Yes,” Charles said in the tone of voice every other person would say, “hell no.” “Which may well prove to be a blessing, but I can’t help but wonder what is it you hope to gain.”
“Peace,” Erik said, surprising himself with the honesty of his answer.
“You won’t find your peace that way.”
“Is there no limit to your arrogance?” Erik set the paper cup down, far enough that he wouldn’t disturb it when he inevitably began gesticulating. “You’re trying to tell me you have looked at death and know what is on the other side? Men have died since the world began to answer that question and he’s you, with all the answers, locked in your whirling little mind.”
“There is nothing on the other side,” Charles said evenly, matching his glare with the blank gaze a concrete block would found unnecessary hollow. “Death is no thing; it is an absence of something, not a thing of itself.”
“I’d drink to that.” Erik raised his cup in a salute and thought of the menorah he still lit every Hanukkah, because there was something left from his childhood years, something he didn’t dare forget, even though his logical mind raved at the ridiculousness of the notion. Still it clung, unshakeable, the idea that someone up above was watching him, waiting for him, and that was why he lit the candles, even if they would burn for a few moments only, safely cupped in his palm. The overall religiosity of his daily life was lacking, given his career choices, but he made the effort to observe most holidays, in spirit if not in letter.
Erik’s computer pinged, startling him out of the metaphysical reverie. An icon flashed on the screen, signaling a new email, at the same time Angel got up from her chair and called for detective Xavier. Charles shook his head and went to take the phone from her hand. Erik noted with some amount of pleasure that the cup of tea went with him, and while he wasn’t drinking while he listened, he held it close to his face.
Dear Detective Lensher, the email began. Erik shook his head. Goddamned Marvin; despite numerous hints and highlighted signatures he never learned to spell Erik’s name right. Marvin never seemed to get the blunt message that Erik didn’t yet get to be called detective. I took your advice and took to rifling through my papers. I found my job description! No one could have been more surprised than me when it turned out I’m supposed to oversee a handful of shell companies, though oversee is such a strange word to use in context.
How did he end up as a personal agony aunt to a man he (somewhat) attempted to kill? Erik fired off a short reply to Marvin, just in time to see Charles stride back to the desk with an expression which fought to be grim, but failed.
“We’ve got another murder. Same m.o. Corner of Sunset and Grimme Boulevard.” He tapped his finger on the edge of the desk and continued the tapping on the glass of the window all along the way, drumming equally on the surfaces of the car as he was on Erik’s nerves. A hundred things these hands could be doing and he picked tapping. “It seems too soon,” Charles said eventually, staring at nothing in particular while Erik drove.
“How do you figure?”
“It’s been only a week, hasn’t it?”
“Are you complaining the killer is too fast?”
“Well, I would have liked more time, perhaps we could have avoided this.” Charles seemed confused by the turn of events, and thus angry. It was evident in the crease of his brow, the
Erik rolled his eyes. “Even you can’t solve a murder based on no facts whatsoever, unless MacTaggart prioritizes closed cases over solved cases.”
Charles laughed into his curled hand. “I’m not that arrogant. I was just saying, this is too soon.”
“Oh? Did the killer perhaps leave a calendar and an itinerary? Was there a clue in the petals? Did he send his blackberry to the station and you forgot to tell me?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Charles huffed and pointed at a street packed with all the cars in the city. “There. Take a left here.”
Ten minutes, seventeen raised middle fingers and a brief exchange with a hot-headed taxi driver later Erik was parking at the foot of a skyscraper, next to the more conventional police car.
“Hey Charles,” Summers said with a cheery wave, shoving his cap to the back of his head. He offered Erik a thoroughly inappropriate salute and a nervous grin, which Erik returned without even thinking about it. “Everything cool with you two?”
“Yes, thank you,” Charles said. “How is Scott?”
“Annoying. How is Raven?”
“Radiant. What have you got for me?”
Summers lost the grin and straightened. “Same deal. Housekeeper ran out of the apartment screaming; doorman called the stiff in.”
“That’s awfully convenient,” Erik said, crossing his arms.
“Ain’t it? I thought the same thing. He’s in the bedroom, apartment three-oh-seven.”
“Thank you.”
They took the elevator.
The body was cooling on top of cotton sheets, curled just like Sebastian Tojo had been, and just as peaceful. The petals were scattered much like they were on the other crime scene; the little flower pinned to the door was a daisy, but other than that hardly anything changed. It looks copy-pasted, Erik thought. Fascinating.
“It is fascinating, isn’t it?” Charles’ eyes flickered between the bed, the corpse, the trail of petals leading from the door to their victim and Erik.
“Are you reading minds now?” Erik asked, tapping Charles’ temple.
“Oh, sorry. You just– I’m really sorry, you were being obvious. It shows up on your face. I didn’t mean to.”
Erik shrugged. “I don’t mind.” Actual mind-reading might have been a problem, true. Then again, he thought, considering Charles’ profile and the unfocused blue of his eyes, maybe not even that. “You’re really lucky you weren’t born a hundred years ago, it would have been shock therapy and asylums.”
“Or half a millennium ago, then it would have been the stake. I know.”
Did it really make a difference, Erik wondered, when here you are, well into the new millennium, and you must stay your tongue for fear of offending people by knowing what Cosmopolitan tries to teach them anyway? There was, after all, no great secret to the ability. Erik possessed it, though his skills were meager compared to Charles’, and largely limited to combat situations, but how was that different from singing, or dancing, or painting, really? True talent in those fields was no less rare. Erik looked at Charles, at the slope of his nose, the vivid blue of his eyes. Yes, the corpse was fascinating; laid out like a sacrifice and concealing everything at the same time, but Charles? Charles was the Voynich manuscript, a mystery written down in a nonexistent language, for the world to wonder at and never understand.
A shrill ring of the phone from his pocket cut through his mind.
“Lehnsherr.”
“This is Moira MacTaggart,” he heard. “You ran out of the building so fast, I didn’t get to tell you that you have the psychiatric evaluation this afternoon. You can squeeze it in before the interviews.”
“Someone did just get murdered.”
“Many someones, Mr. Lehnsherr, every day. I did my best to stall, but then you started shooting inside the precinct, and at this point the mayor is threatening me with a typing pool if you don’t supply a psych evaluation. You are so lucky the IA liaison took my word for it so far.”
Erik couldn’t help the incredulity from seeping into his voice. “Typing pool? Really?”
“He’s not very modern,” MacTaggart said. “He doesn’t mean it, in any case.”
“Is there anything in particular I should be looking forward to?” Erik asked, as he watched Charles study the carpet by the bed by lying flat on it with his chin propped on his wrists.
“Wesley is terrified of Charles.”
“Shocking,” he murmured into the phone as Charles rolled back to his feet.
On the other end of the line MacTaggart sighed. “Unfortunately. He has weaseled out of many sessions because of that, but unfortunately I can’t waive them all. With any luck Wesley will be so motivated he will make the evaluation up after just one session.”
“Somehow I don’t think sending either of us to a psychiatrist is in anyone’s best interest.”
“Certainly not Wesley’s.” MacTaggart laughed. “I know that and you know that, but the regulations are, shall we say, uncompromising.”
“I have seen my share of psychiatrists,” Erik said. “Not many wanted to work with me again. If this Wesley is scared of Charles, he won’t like me much, either.”
“Two of the most insane men in the country, and I managed to get them both in my precinct. Whatever was my crime in the past life,” Moira said with a mournful sigh. “Be there. Please. Wesley will be waiting. Be kind to him.”
“Will do,” Erik said and disconnected.
She was dead wrong about Charles, he thought, swallowing back the curse he almost let spill; they all were. Charles was sane. His entire being was defined by things that were real and true, and if that wasn’t sanity, Erik didn’t want to know what was.
The station was understaffed, the staff underpaid and the whole thing just teetered on the edge of financial disaster. Like a clown, really. You had to have clowns, obviously; you didn’t want them there, the kids didn’t want them there, but a clown was the thing to have, so you hired the poor bastard anyway. The police force in Westchester was that sad clown on your birthday party, the one who persisted even though everyone was praying that he went away and took the misery with him. Yet, despite the overall mess, below the main building there was a complex underground system worthy of a note, or eight. It held, among others, two gyms, a shooting range, a mortuary (Emma’s indivisible kingdom, the weird snow queen) and a burned down laboratory.
Hank was doing the forensic work in his broom closet, which didn’t close properly when he stretched his legs, even though the laboratory was usable and free, most of the time. Whatever happened there destroyed most of the equipment, and to rebuild it would have taken more money than the station could spend in a decade, but there were enough electric outlets to make do. That wasn’t why Hank avoided it, though. Everyone claimed the place made their skin itch, but Raven was fond of the blackened tables and singed walls. She would come there sometimes to think, while she was waiting for Charles to finish browsing through the files and come take her out to dinner.
Raven liked basements in general. She liked this one in particular, despite, or perhaps because of, the small, brown stain near the door. The rooms have been cleaned, but that stain remained, largely hidden by the shadow.
“Creepy,” Raven said to herself, and shuddered. Then shuddered again when she heard a gunshot. Someone evidently shared her disposition on this fine afternoon. Curious, she poked her head out of the lab and followed the corridor to the shooting range.
“Charles!” she said before she could stop herself, but the mufflers were on his ears, so he probably hadn’t heard.
She slipped into the room and watched Charles pick up a gun and hold it out. He shot with an unwavering certainty and he shot well, but his back was stiff in a way that would be imperceptible to anyone but her. She was glad she hasn’t been noticed yet. She liked watching Charles handle guns, especially when he wasn’t aware he was being watched. He was different then. He was focused and physical, none of the “invading your mind as we speak” bullshit. In the shooting range he was almost normal. Raven appreciated that and hated herself a little bit for liking to watch him shoot.
Charles hated guns.
“Not bad,” someone said.
Raven started. She didn’t notice his new partner, Erik, was also there. Unlike Charles, he must have noticed her – his eyes darted her way briefly, acknowledging her presence, then returned to her brother.
“Thanks,” Charles said. He pulled the mufflers off his ears, leaving them circling his neck, and turned to face Erik, which brought Raven into his field of vision. “Raven! What are you doing here?”
She beamed and detached from the doorway, flicking her hair over her shoulders. “You promised me dinner.”
“I did?” Charles raised a brow. He didn’t move much. He never did, when he had a gun in his hands. It was like it anchored him in place. Anchored him to reality, even. In her less charitable moments Raven thought about making him carry it around the house, just because. Luckily, this was not one of them.
“Well, no, but I had a fight with Joe today and I really need a drink and fancy food.” And then some, she thought, scowling inwardly. “Or fancy drink, with greasy food to follow.”
“As you wish. Will you wait?” A soft, earnest look fluttered her way; an apology for the delay, no doubt, and the indulgence he was participating in.
“Sure,” she said, resisting the urge to hug him.
Charles beamed and turned to his scary partner, who increased his scariness, oh, a millionfold, by holding anything obviously designed to hurt people with. As if his face wasn’t enough, Raven thought with a subtle roll of her eyes. Not that he looked bad, or anything.
“Come on, Erik, bragging is good for the soul,” Charles said. “How good are you with that gun?”
“How good do you want me to be?” Erik asked in return, slamming a clip home. He pulled the mufflers off Charles’ neck and shoved them one-handed onto his own head, before taking a place in the booth.
“Supernaturally good,” Charles said with a cheeky grin. “Live up to your file, at least.”
The cardboard target was clipped to a slide some fifty away. Raven watched, barely daring to breathe, as Erik walked to the console, pushed the target another fifty yards back, until it kissed the back wall, and fired six shots in rapid succession.
The target returned with a perfect circle around the head’s center point.
“Wow,” she said. “That’s fantastic!”
“It is,” Charles agreed, nearly bowling Raven over. Charles, admiring someone’s skill with a pistol! Whatever was coming next, a nuclear apocalypse? Raven cast a nervous glance over her shoulder, because if he really was enthusiastic about a gunshot, then the zombies must be close. Hopefully not, but anyway.
Charles’ phone rang in that moment, distracting them all with the cheery tune, most unfitting the grim surroundings. Normally a ringtone wouldn’t clash with the décor, but the basement of the police station was so ugly, that anything nicer than a fresh corpse, belonging to a person who died of natural causes, clashed with it horribly. Raven often wondered if she shouldn’t volunteer to paint the range some other color. Puke green complimented no one and nothing – everyone looked dead here. Except for the corpses, curiously enough. Emma let her into the mortuary once or twice, and the patients who didn’t have their insides hanging out for the world to see looked like they were a kiss away from walking off the slabs. It was very nearly magical.
“So soon? Oh. Well, thank you. No, I’ll come. Two minutes, yes.” Charles flipped the phone shut. “Raven, will you wait a little longer? Hank has finished with the samples and he needs me to sign for them and put them into storage. I won’t be long, quarter of an hour maybe.”
“Sure. Can I shoot?”
She knew what he was going to say even before he winced, but she was so used to it she wasn’t even angry. “Raven…”
“Oh, come on! You know I can handle a gun, besides, Erik can watch out so that I don’t shoot anything vital.”
“You assume Erik will agree?”
Raven turned to Erik, who was standing to the side with a cool expression and fluttered her eyelashes. “Please, Mr. Erik, sir, I promise I know what I’m doing,” she said to him, bringing her clasped hands in the vicinity of her bosom, for added effect.
She achieved a definition of a partial success so perfect she should frame it and hang it on her wall. He said, “I don’t mind,” but didn’t so much as blink otherwise.
Charles put the phone back in his pocket and devoted his full attention to dismantling the gun. He put it away and handed Raven the keys to the gun rack with visible reluctance. “All right. I’ll sign for you, too. Try not to shoot anything vital, either of you.”
“No promises!” Raven called over her shoulder, already snatching the mufflers from their rack and striding to the collections of firearms hoping her glee didn’t manifest as skipping. “Awesome.”
“You know how to shoot?” Erik asked, once Charles was gone.
Raven snorted, tied her hair off in a messy ponytail and fixed the mufflers on her head. She picked a nine-millimeter Berretta, assumed the stance and fired three shots. All three went through the target, which was only twenty yards away, but they were all within the black silhouette, and one got it around the middle. Raven considered the cardboard suspect sufficiently stopped. “Not bad, eh?”
“Not bad for a schoolgirl. Did Charles teach you to shoot?”
“As if.” Raven scoffed. “Charles despises gun. He needed to be talked into carrying one into work and he’s a policeman in Westchester. I mean, that’s just a little crazy.”
“I fear the day when I get to see Charles go insane,” Erik said, quite possibly winning Raven over forever. Unlike his other partners, Erik didn’t raise to the bait. He was staring at the gun in her hands, as though the clear invitation to complain about Charles and his utter crazy went unheard. Raven, exercising caution and restraint, awarded him seventy-eight points on the Arbitrary Judgment Of Men I Know scale of a hundred and three, for smirking fondly at the mention of her brother’s idiosyncrasies. Everybody else got at the very least condescending at this point, or even, memorably, panicky (final score: seven. That guy had a really cute nose). “How did you learn, if not from Charles?” Erik asked.
“My father was a detective. He taught me to shoot when I was little.”
She nearly missed the sharp look Erik shot her. She wasn’t Charles, but she could wager a guess what caught his attention. “Charles is my half-brother.”
“You said your name is Raven Xavier.”
“Sounds better than Raven Marko. I really wanted to be called Raven Darkholme, when I got around to changing my name. Too much E.A. Poe, Charles said and he might have had a point. I didn’t think so at the time. I still think it would sound cool, but I don’t think anyone would take me seriously. Teenage girls are so weird, right?”
“I wouldn’t know. I never was one.” Erik picked up another firearm, a heavy revolver that looked like it remembered the shooting of buffalos, swung it as though it weighed nothing and fired. He turned on his heel and fired again, turned and fired, then again, and again, until Raven’s head was spinning, the clip was empty and the target full of holes.
“How old are you?” he asked casually, as though he hadn’t just done five complete circles.
“Twenty-three.”
“Shoot again,” he said. “Stand sideways this time. Both elbows bent. Gun in front of your face.”
Raven thought about commenting, but decided against it. The first shot went a little off, leaving a hole five inches from where she hoped it would get. She adjusted her stance and the second was better. The third felt perfect, even if she was still an inch or so off perfect accuracy.
She felt giddy. Getting inside a shooting range without Charles was an unexpected treat, and being inside one without Charles was a whole another ballgame. She always liked guns. She always liked shooting. She always hated letting Charles in on the fact formally, lest he look at her with wounded blue eyes of doom. It wasn’t like he didn’t know for god’s sake, he knew everything else, but still, shooting in front of him was awkward.
“Bend your knees.” Erik slid into the booth to stand before her, not bothered by the pistol, which was now pointed at his chest. Raven couldn’t get the gun out of the way fast enough, but he, as if he didn’t even notice the danger, nudged her foot until she stumbled.
“Hey! I am holding a gun here!”
Erik deigned to look at her. “So?”
“I could have shot you by accident!”
“Your gun, your problem. You are responsible for what it does,” he said and went right back to nudging her feet until she was tap-dancing in place to avoid getting stepped on, all the while waiving a loaded fucking gun in the air. Good thing she managed to thumb the safety on, at least.
“Jesus, you can’t do that!” she yelled when he kicked her ankle, even if that particular kick was more or less an accident. “There are rules! Who let you in here, anyway?”
“Do you want to learn to shoot paper targets, or do you want to wield a weapon?” Erik asked. He was standing far closer than it was necessary, certainly closer than regulation should allow.
Part of her wanted to twist it into an innuendo, because it was perfect, wasn’t it? She was blonde, slim, wearing a pleated skirt, and he was tall, acceptably dark, for a certain value of blond, and handsome, and so fucking hot, especially when he held a gun. A little innuendo and they could be making out – god, she would so love to wield his weapon, she thought with the appropriate virtual giggling sound – or screwing, because at this point it was less a romantic comedy and more cheap porn.
The other part of her, the part that took growing up with Charles to heart and therefore learned that details matter, saw in him a soldier who knew the difference between a gun and a weapon.
“Yes,” she said, breathless in a way that had nothing to do with Erik’s aftershave.
“Lower on your knees. This is not a toy. This is you, now. Whatever it does, is on you. Do you understand that?”
Raven rolled her eyes. “Yes, Master Shakespeare. I’m not a moron.”
“Good. Nothing worse than a moron with a gun.”
“Oh, fuck you,” she said lightly. She bent her knees. She relaxed, took a deep breath, squared her shoulders. Erik didn’t move, so she sidestepped him, brought the gun up, thumbed the safety off and fired.
“Better.” He didn’t even look at the target. She told him as much. “I don’t need to, I see you.”
The shot had gone through the heart of the cardboard, more or less, which was pretty neat. “Cool,” Raven said. “Do they teach you that spiel in the army?”
“If you’re smart, you learn.”
“Very poetic.”
“Very poetic,” Erik agreed. “Especially shooting a man at close range in the gut. Then you can feel his blood and shit spilling all over your shoes. As far as poetry goes, that one is worthy of a Pulitzer.”
Raven was rather grateful they left that out of the movies. “Gross!”
“You wanted to learn.” A shadow of a smile crossed his face. “When I say whatever it does, I mean whatever. The person you shoot, their blood is on you. The person you shoot at and miss, their life is on you. The moment you aim that gun at anything living, you are responsible for whatever it does next.”
“I’m not stupid, you know. I heard you the first time.”
“You’re not.” Erik shook his head. “Sorry. I’m not much of a teacher, unless I’m allowed to run them into the ground. Probably not even then.”
Raven begged to disagree. “So, did you shoot a lot of people?” She made sure to look extra innocent when she asked, just to see the look on his face. Sadly, Erik disappointed. Or fortunately, he didn’t disappoint; she wasn’t yet sure how she felt about his weird reactions.
“More people than you know,” he said without much of an emotional output.
“Do Facebook friends count?”
Erik stared at her blankly, like she slipped into another language without a warning.
“You can’t tell me you don’t know what Facebook is.” Raven let the gun drop a few inches and stared, until he shook his head and dispelled the weirdness of such magnitude Charles looked normal in comparison.
“I know what it is, I’ve seen The Social Network. I was unaware Facebook friends were something separate from people you know.”
“Theory, practice.” Raven fired again, and this time she hit the target an inch closer to the bulls-eye. “Awesome. I wish Charles would let me come here more often.”
“I thought you were an adult.”
“This is the police range. I need supervision, and I get that you’re all super-busy most of the time, this being Westchester and all. He doesn’t like it when I handle guns, anyway, and it’s not like there’s a whole lot of other people I can ask to let me in here. There’re only a few shooting ranges around, and this one is the best.”
“Few shooting ranges in Westchester?” Erik parodied Raven’s accent and the two of them grinned. “Is Charles waiting to inherit your trust fund?”
“I have a black belt in ju-jitsu, I’ll have you know. Kurt picked it out for me when I was a kid, and it’s pretty vicious. It’s not like Charles wants me to be completely helpless.” Raven sighed and stroked the smooth, dark metal surface of the gun with her fingertip. “He just doesn’t like guns.”
“He does have a number of curious idiosyncrasies,” Erik said, with an expression best described as fond. Raven stared at him in disbelief.
“Dude. You’re sure you were in the army?” At Erik’s blank stare she stuck her tongue in her cheek, briefly, then added, “That was a multi-syllable word. Next you’ll be telling me they taught you to read, too?”
Erik looked at her, his face serious, but his eyes twinkled. “You are an insolent brat,” he said matter-of-factly. He folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the wall of the cubicle.
“I know!” Raven beamed. She always thought this was one of her better qualities: the ability to look anyone, anyone at all in the eye and say something she knew they wouldn’t approve of. It was, simultaneously, one of her worst traits. She had many bruises, even scars (though that was an honest to god accident, and the perpetrator was sorry as hell. Then he met her brother, and oh boy), which indicated this was not always the right course of action. Sometimes she learned better, sometimes she didn’t; the point was that she tried and sometimes, like now, she scored.
Erik closed his eyes and smiled. “Again,” he said. “Gun steady. Don’t let it do the thinking.”
“What am I, a guy?”
“You don’t want to know what a gun is thinking.” His voice was coming from a faraway place, but since he wasn’t a small, green goblin-thingie, Raven felt justified in snorting.
“Guns are things. They don’t think.”
“I’m always looking for a handy source of truisms, thank you Raven. What I mean is you can’t shoot with the gun alone. Shoot with your head.”
Raven rolled her eyes, because how was she the one spouting truisms? She had Charles for that. “Boom, headshot!” she crooned when her bullet pierced the already mangled paper silhouette.
Erik’s lips quivered around the Cupid’s bow. “Not bad at all.”
“Not bad? That was awesome!”
“That was okay for a shot in a shooting range. Try drawing and shooting.”
“What?”
Erik dropped his own gun on the board before them. He stood with one hand hanging loosely at his side, with his head cocked in Raven’s direction, while his other hand played with the joystick, adjusting the target’s position. “Draw,” he said as his palm wrapped around the handle of the gun, “and shoot.”
It was a single move – his fingers closed around the gun, just as he was taking a step back, pulling it off the desk, and then the hand flew up, he turned his head away from her for half of a second, the gun aligned with the target and barked three times. Raven closed her mouth, but it stubbornly fell open again. Must get those loose hinges looked at, she thought. The three bullet holes were in the very center of the head, like a very unlucky three-leafed clover.
“You barely looked at it!” she said, stabbing Erik around the solar plexus with her index finger for emphasis, but all she got for her trouble was a winning smirk.
“I cheated. I put it in place.”
“Yeah, but you weren’t looking!”
“The joystick translates easily. I knew it went back about five yards. Hardly a trouble to adjust. That’s not the point.”
“It still moved, and you just got it dead center, perfect headshot, without looking!”
“I’m a career military man, Raven.”
She tried to make sense of this, if this was guy-code for “I shoot people for a living, fuck yeah I’m good at it,” which it probably was. It was a good headshot. Triple headshot. She scrambled for words, but most took the day off, so in the end she settled for, “Fucking hell. Can I learn to shoot like that?”
“You can try.”
“What do I do?” Other than the obvious, but Raven wasn’t stupid, thankyouverymuch for asking. She attended enough gun safety lectures from the world’s leading expert on hating firearms to know that unless a gun’s safety was on, the gun must be firmly held and pointed where it would do the least possible damage when discharged. Charles was very peculiar about that.
Erik, as it turned out, wasn’t. “For starters, don’t shoot yourself in the foot. The safety must be off for this, so don’t touch the trigger. Finger on the guard, until you’re ready, and not even there, until the gun is pointing away from body parts. Try it with the safety on, first.”
Raven placed the pistol where Erik’s had been and tried to mimic his move. A dance; pick up, step back, up and fire. Again. It was a waltz, one, two, three, four, almost like ju-jitsu only with a little less hitting the mattress. Pick up and fire. Boom.
“Now fire,” he said, and Raven did. Not terribly well, but she didn’t shoot herself in the foot. “At least you hit the target.”
There was a clipped edge to the paper. Raven bit her lip and narrowed her eyes. “Let me try again.”
The next shot missed it entirely. So did the following three. The fourth fared a little better than the first, narrowly clipping the silhouette of a man. The fifth missed the fourth by a hair’s breadth. Raven was on the verge of demonstrating how poorly bred she was, by letting out a stream of curses, when Erik said, “Okay, stop.”
Raven turned to him with a question, but he had vaulted over the pulpit and walked to the target with a fresh sheet of paper in hand.
“You know, there’s machines to do that for you!” she yelled, because speaking just wasn’t an option.
“They are slow.” He returned crumpling the paper in his hands and threw it in the wastebasket. “Close your eyes.”
Raven stared. “You’re joking, right?”
“Do you see the target?”
The three-by-four sheet of cardboard, hovering in a tantalizing manner twenty-five yards away? “Duh?”
“Good. Now close your eyes and fire at it.”
That was far and beyond subverting a little of Charles Xavier’s Gun-wielding Protocol For Dummies, And Also His Beloved Sister, Who Isn’t a Dummy, Asshole. This was taking the whole thing and setting in on fire while dancing naked around its ashes. “What is that supposed to accomplish?”
“Always be aware of where the gun is pointing, whether you see it or not. Shooting blind helps you understand that.” Erik stared at her and in his eyes Raven saw the jungle gleam with the poisonous green and fluorescent predators. This was a bad, bad idea, her brain told her. This was awesome, said everything else.
“You are a little crazy, did you know?” she said, just to make sure he knew that she thought he was a few barrels short of a wagon and everything.
“I know. I also know you are still here.”
“Yeah, well, I like a little crazy.” She grinned.
He grinned back. “Charles will want to have words with you about that.”
“Charles wants to have words with me about everything, my skirts included. I like my skirts. I think they are really awesome.” To demonstrate she lifted her leg back in a graceful attitude derrière, which would have been very indecent if there was a small child behind her, and made her skirt slide up her thighs anyway.
“I don’t have an opinion,” Erik said, staring unabashedly at, if Raven was not mistaken, the curve of her ass.
“Good, ‘cause I wasn’t asking for one,” Raven said haughtily. It was only partly a lie. She did care for his opinion, she discovered with some surprise. More specifically, she wanted Erik to look at the skirt and tell her he liked how it covered her to mid-thigh, less when she moved really quickly.
Erik pointed to his right. “The target is getting old.”
Raven stuck out her tongue. The target was twenty-five yards away and untouched, directly in front of her. She closed her eyes and tried to visualize. Twenty-five yards. Cardboard representing a man a little taller than her and a lot broader. A lot like Kurt, in fact. She raised the gun, easily, effortlessly. The weight was familiar, weighing her hands down, weighing her mind down, too, because Charles had a way of lecturing that stuck, no matter what. She let the weigh ground her, like Charles did, let it center her. The index finger of her right hand slid smoothly from the guard and onto the trigger applying only the barest hint of pressure, until the gravity of the gun pulled it back towards Raven.
The shot was almost a surprise. She let out a yelp when the gun jerked in her hands, her eyes flew open and–
Erik was standing directly before her.
Raven screamed.
*****
“Jesus Christ, Erik!” Charles was across the room in a flash, wrapping his arms around Raven, pulling her head down so that he could tuck her face into his neck. She shuddered against him, gasping for breath, and he felt the shock in the lines of her body; bone-deep regret and panic. “What the hell was that?”
“A lesson,” Erik said nonchalantly, considering his lack of manicure.
Raven shuddered against Charles. “Raven? Raven, sweetheart, are you okay?”
“Am I okay?” she lifted her face from his shoulder. Her blue mascara was smudged and leaking down her face. “Is– I shot him!”
“No, you didn’t. You didn’t. It’s okay, I promise, it’s fine. I’ve been here, remember? You didn’t shoot anyone, I promise you, darling, no one was shot.” He tried to sound soothing, he did, but he was finding it suspiciously hard to think in straight lines. His perception of the universe curved around that point in time-space, until every thought and fact pointed back towards the three of them, huddled in a shooting booth in the basement of the station.
Raven huffed and her moist lips brushed his neck. There were tears on her face and the gun was still in her hand, the gun that just seconds ago she had pointed at Erik’s chest, a gun that, had it fired, would have winked a human life, Erik’s life, out of existence, and it would have been Raven, his little sister, who’d have had the blood one her hands. A cold wave of anger flared up throughout Charles, burning all in its wake, reason and manners included. He reached out and gripped the shirt at Erik’s throat, never letting Raven go. When he spoke, his voice was even, finely tuned, modulated to the last sound wave. “So help me, if you ever pull such a stunt again, I will hurt you. I will rip you open and feed you to the wild dogs, do you understand? I don’t care how tough you are; you will die screaming. Do you understand me?”
Charles was himself surprised that he could sound so cold. This wasn’t even glacial; if vacuum had a voice, this was what it would sound like. Raven started trembling, and he held her tighter in response. Erik, on the other hand, was grinning. Charles saw his excitement; he heard the rush of adrenaline and dopamine as keenly as he felt it in his own body. Perhaps it was just an echo, brought up by Raven’s terror, but there was no mistaking the shaking of his hands.
“This, my friend, is passion,” Erik said, with a mocking British lilt at the word friend, staring into his eyes not in the least bothered by the very sincere threats.
Raven hiccupped into Charles’ neck and clung tighter for a second. “Can we go? Please?”
“Of course.” He pressed a kiss to her head and glared at Erik. “You haven’t heard the last of this.”
“Didn’t think so.” Erik took the gun from Raven’s hand and saluted them. “I’ll lock up.”
Charles managed one final glare in his direction, promising in no uncertain terms swift and verbal retribution for harms rendered. “Come on, Raven.”
“I’m good,” she said, but her arm remained wrapped around his waist, gripping at the fabric of his jacket like it was her lifeline. “I’m fine.”
“I know. I know you are.” But he held her closer still until their hearts were beating in unison and he knew, he felt, she was fine, that she was calm. “What do you want to eat?”
“Vodka.”
“Raven…”
“Vodka,” she repeated firmly. “Like, a bottle of. Then greasy, doughy food, with bits of bacon.”
Charles could take a gentle hint. “Polish, then? Zapiecek is nearby.”
“Whatever.” She straightened and fished out a small mirror and a wet wipe out of her bag. “You partner is insane,” she said, fixing her ruined make-up by smearing it around to her satisfaction. “I don’t want you working with him. I don’t want you near him!”
“He’s not that bad, really. I’ll be fine.”
Raven stopped and started shaking him by the lapels of his jacket, pushing them both into the burned down laboratory, before the spectacle drew any onlookers. “Charles. He is batshit fucking insane. He stepped in front of a loaded gun and I had my finger on the trigger the whole damn time!” Charles closed his eyes and tried to avoid the questions that swirled through his brain and fought for a place on his tongue. Erik was quick, but not that quick – how could he have stepped in front of the gun without Raven knowing, when she only started screaming a second or two after she fired, half a second after Erik swung in front of her. How could she not have seen him? he wanted to ask, but didn’t, because it didn’t matter.
“He didn’t. Raven.” He cupped her shoulders and very gently pushed her back. “Look at me. You couldn’t have shot him. How many shots did you fire?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She tried to count, he saw her eyes flicker, as she tried to make sense of the bullets and the clip and the gun. “I’m not sure.”
“He knew your gun was empty. You fired fifteen times.”
“You don’t know that.”
Charles’ fingers tightened on her shoulders. “Erik is insane. I know. I’m not arguing against it. But he is a good person and a better soldier. He would never let you shoot him like this.”
Slightly more sobering was the thought that he might have let Charles do it, though. Raven was still a child, still too innocent, but Charles… He had no doubt that Erik wouldn’t risk harming Raven, in whatever way, but the fact remained the man had a death wish and, given enough time, he would get himself shot, by Charles’ hand, if he had no other option.
God knew: this skill he had sometimes felt like precognition, like magic, like mind reading. It wasn’t. Every fact he spouted he could trace to the source he gained it from, whether it was an amalgamation of details, forming a picture, or a straight up piece of knowledge. He knew people’s thoughts by the stance of their bodies, by the minute adjustments of their facial muscles, by the scraps of paper, of trifles and food they left behind, by the lies they told and lies told to them. He could pick out a culprit from a line up by the cuffs of his shirt; he could tell a murderer from a thief by the way they printed their names. He could guess the future, because the future was always set to be another now. If he assumed nothing new would surface, it was no hardship to predict where the current patterns would carry the world. It was a little different with the future events that fell outside the scope of normal – given enough data of course he could tell that a woman would poison her unfaithful lover within the year, if he had time and opportunity to observe her for long enough to see her patterns. Of course he knew Erik would eventually break, it wasn’t a precognition, it was fact. Just because it hadn’t happened yet, it didn’t mean it wasn’t true.
Because he was acutely aware that he had no foresight whatsoever, it was a shock when the thought arrived into his mind, the thoroughly poetic, completely unbidden, illogical idea, which nevertheless bordered on certainty: that when Erik broke, he would be with him.
“Yeah, I’m not so sure.” Raven dabbed the last of the mascara off her cheeks, smeared the little that remained on the eyelids, until her honey-brown eyes were framed by incandescent blue and black kohl and grinned. “How do I look?”
“Lovely, my darling, as always. Shall we?”
“I meant it about the vodka.”
“And you will get it,” he said and kissed her temple.
He made good on his word. Within five minutes of setting foot in Zapiecek Raven had a line up of three shots in front of her. “Na zdrowie,” she said, lifting the first to her lips, a sentiment Charles echoed heartily, filching one of her shots.
“How did it go?” Charles asked as the vodka burned its way down his throat, indicating the barkeep with a nod of his head, meaning the other barkeep, the one Raven worked for.
“The fight? Ah, the usual. Joe just needs to work out that I’m right.”
“It’s not going to come easy.” Joe was a little set in his ways.
Raven relaxed as the alcohol hit her system and a little color returned to her face. A few minutes later she was shaking her head and making faces as only she knew how, and they were both giggling helplessly, in relief and as means of easing themselves gently down the slope of the adrenaline high.
“You have to admit, it was pretty funny,” Raven said eventually, dipping her pinky in the shot glass and licking it clean. “Yeah, I lost track of the bullets. It makes sense he wouldn’t. Serves me right for not paying enough attention.”
Charles disagreed. If he was any less certain of his own health, he would have been sure his heart had stopped in his chest when he saw Raven point the gun at Erik. Then he heard her scream and, well, if a heart attack could get any worse, there it was, a textbook case of a self-detonation within a body cavity. “I still hate that he did this,” he said, summing the vestiges of the cold rage that shook him in the puke-green shooting range. It was a fairly ineffective exercise in the warm, wooden interior of a restaurant which smelled of bacon, onion fried in butter and parsley.
“He did have a point.” Raven’s pinkie dipped into the glass again. She did away with the fancy nail polish yesterday, leaving her nails a healthy pink, lightly scraped on the middle and ring fingers of each hand.
“No point is good enough to justify what he did.”
Raven laughed. “Now you’re exaggerating. Some points would be.”
“Name one.”
“Pay attention when you point your gun?” She leaned back in her chair, no doubt remembering all the times he lectured her about the importance of doing just that. Charles winced.
“There are better ways.”
Raven smirked. “Name one.”
“Raven.”
“Come on, it was effective. I’m never going to try not looking when I hold a gun. It freaked me out like you wouldn’t believe. Then again, what am I saying. You totally know, don’t you?” She grabbed a shot glass and licked the last drops of vodka from it, then she waved her hand high, to get the barman’s attention. “Three more!”
Charles hummed something, which might have been an agreement, or might not have been. Raven was genuinely disturbed by the experience, but nowhere near as much as he thought she would be. It was a sharp shock to the system, but no worse than a sudden douse of cold water. Raven was already up and running, like she hadn’t pointed a loaded gun at an acquaintance, a friend even. Perhaps not a friend, they’d only known each other for – well, they hardly even knew each other. Raven liked Erik, of this Charles was certain. Was attracted to him, it was evident in the flush of her face and the excitement in her voice when they spoke right before she shot that last time.
“Stop it,” she said sharply.
“Stop what?”
“You’re doing the mind reading thing. Stop. You know I hate it.”
“I’m sorry.” Charles closed his eyes, took a deep breath. Look, but don’t look, he told himself for the hundredth, thousandth time, don’t get angry. She doesn’t know what she’s asking of me. Don’t make connections. Don’t think. Don’t… Just don’t. “I’ll try.”
Raven deflated, smiled, huffed, sighed and patted his hand. “Well, just don’t say it. It’s creepy.”
Drop me in the middle of the forest with no map nor compass to guide my way, why don’t you, Charles thought. He wasn’t angry, or even peeved, just lost. He missed Erik, all of sudden. “I don’t mean to.”
Raven said nothing to that and Charles perused the menu. It was brand new; gleaming with fresh laminate and strings which held it together, though the last customer to touch it left greasy smudges on the pages containing the pierogi selection.
“Did you figure what you want to eat?” Raven said, tugging the menu out of his hands. Charles looked at her, then at the thin watch on her wrist. He’d spaced out for several minutes.
“Hm? Oh, anything.”
Raven had already forgotten the brief episode from earlier in the day. She waved the waiter over and proceeded to order at least three dishes that would feed Charles for a full day, if not two – from experience he knew she would gobble them up without a second thought. She never worried about her weight once she outgrew the pudgy stage of puberty, and while her metabolism kept up with her demands and her training paid off, the stored calories contributed to a healthy glow of her skin and glossy hair, and a bright grin to make his career worth the gloom.
Sometimes it scared Charles how much he loved her.
It scared him more that today, when he saw her point the gun at Erik, he wasn’t sure whose plight made his heart convulse more.
*****
Erik was at the station bright an early in the morning. Charles had been silent throughout the night, which was unusual. Erik had been getting used to the frequent texts over the progress of the case, Raven’s humorous commentary on the lives of people frequenting the restaurant she worked at (most of them were conjectures, wildly off the mark, so wildly in fact that she must have been doing it on purpose, Charles assured him, but she had a gift for spotting clues). The silence didn’t really bother Erik: he slept fitfully, but in the morning he took the time to stop at a teashop and get Charles a Darjeeling black tea blend. It wasn’t an apology – he didn’t feel guilty. He had, technically, done nothing wrong. If the girl was stupid enough to listen when someone she barely knew told her to fire a gun with her eyes shut, well, Erik couldn’t be held responsible for her mental state.
Charles though… Charles had been furious with him. He’d wrapped Raven in his arms and shielded her from harm, which was an obvious enough gesture. He shielded her from Erik, however, and that didn’t sit well, which was a revelation Erik had to mull over in private.
Fortunately, Charles arrived chipper, for a lack of a better word. He sat in his usual chair, across from Erik, raised a polite brow at the proffered cup of tea, but when he inhaled, the expression melted into bliss.
“Oh, thank you, Erik. This is wonderful.”
“Glad you think so.” Charles hummed his appreciation into the cup, casting furtive glances over the rim every now and then, a though he was trying to figure out the thought behind the gesture. Because he was Charles, he was likely getting to the appropriate conclusion regardless of Erik’s involvement in the thought process. Nonetheless Erik felt the need to say, “I’m not particularly sorry. I knew what I was doing. She had no more bullets.”
“I figured.”
Now it was Erik’s turn to raise a brow.
“No, truly. Disregarding everything else, you are not the kind of man who causes an unsuspecting girl to commit murder.” Charles looked into the cup, smiled and licked his lips nervously. “It’s not what made me angry. Not after Raven was okay, mind, and she is.”
“Good.”
“She’s strong. She bounces back easily.”
Either it was a figment of Erik’s imagination, but Charles didn’t look too pleased with that. Almost as though he hoped it was more of a shock. “Nothing happened to her,” Erik said. “She needed the shock.”
Charles’ smile was wan and see-through, but it was a smile and it was lovely. “Sometime in the future I might even thank you for doing what you did. She was getting cavalier with… everything. It might do her good.”
“What made you angry, then?” Erik asked, after it became apparent Charles found his tea more engrossing than the conversation. He wasn’t prepared for the skittish look thrown his way, nor the faint glimpse of a wide-eyed person beneath the all-knowing persona. Charles might have seen through everyone, but no one ever got to see Charles, Erik thought and wondered how it could possibly be the revelation it was.
“I don’t want you to die,” Charles admitted under his breath, as though he was hoping only the tea would hear.
Erik very nearly laughed. “That’s it?”
“Isn’t that enough?” Charles looked at him like he looked at the corpses and the flower petals: like he was aligning his universe around him, for the express purpose of figuring out his whole being. “You’ve been chasing death ever since you’ve arrived here. Sooner or later you will catch it and then what?”
“Then I will be out of your hair, for good.” Erik reached for the semi-decent coffee he coaxed out of the vending machine and sipped.
“Yes,” Charles said in the tone of voice every other person would say, “hell no.” “Which may well prove to be a blessing, but I can’t help but wonder what is it you hope to gain.”
“Peace,” Erik said, surprising himself with the honesty of his answer.
“You won’t find your peace that way.”
“Is there no limit to your arrogance?” Erik set the paper cup down, far enough that he wouldn’t disturb it when he inevitably began gesticulating. “You’re trying to tell me you have looked at death and know what is on the other side? Men have died since the world began to answer that question and he’s you, with all the answers, locked in your whirling little mind.”
“There is nothing on the other side,” Charles said evenly, matching his glare with the blank gaze a concrete block would found unnecessary hollow. “Death is no thing; it is an absence of something, not a thing of itself.”
“I’d drink to that.” Erik raised his cup in a salute and thought of the menorah he still lit every Hanukkah, because there was something left from his childhood years, something he didn’t dare forget, even though his logical mind raved at the ridiculousness of the notion. Still it clung, unshakeable, the idea that someone up above was watching him, waiting for him, and that was why he lit the candles, even if they would burn for a few moments only, safely cupped in his palm. The overall religiosity of his daily life was lacking, given his career choices, but he made the effort to observe most holidays, in spirit if not in letter.
Erik’s computer pinged, startling him out of the metaphysical reverie. An icon flashed on the screen, signaling a new email, at the same time Angel got up from her chair and called for detective Xavier. Charles shook his head and went to take the phone from her hand. Erik noted with some amount of pleasure that the cup of tea went with him, and while he wasn’t drinking while he listened, he held it close to his face.
Dear Detective Lensher, the email began. Erik shook his head. Goddamned Marvin; despite numerous hints and highlighted signatures he never learned to spell Erik’s name right. Marvin never seemed to get the blunt message that Erik didn’t yet get to be called detective. I took your advice and took to rifling through my papers. I found my job description! No one could have been more surprised than me when it turned out I’m supposed to oversee a handful of shell companies, though oversee is such a strange word to use in context.
How did he end up as a personal agony aunt to a man he (somewhat) attempted to kill? Erik fired off a short reply to Marvin, just in time to see Charles stride back to the desk with an expression which fought to be grim, but failed.
“We’ve got another murder. Same m.o. Corner of Sunset and Grimme Boulevard.” He tapped his finger on the edge of the desk and continued the tapping on the glass of the window all along the way, drumming equally on the surfaces of the car as he was on Erik’s nerves. A hundred things these hands could be doing and he picked tapping. “It seems too soon,” Charles said eventually, staring at nothing in particular while Erik drove.
“How do you figure?”
“It’s been only a week, hasn’t it?”
“Are you complaining the killer is too fast?”
“Well, I would have liked more time, perhaps we could have avoided this.” Charles seemed confused by the turn of events, and thus angry. It was evident in the crease of his brow, the
Erik rolled his eyes. “Even you can’t solve a murder based on no facts whatsoever, unless MacTaggart prioritizes closed cases over solved cases.”
Charles laughed into his curled hand. “I’m not that arrogant. I was just saying, this is too soon.”
“Oh? Did the killer perhaps leave a calendar and an itinerary? Was there a clue in the petals? Did he send his blackberry to the station and you forgot to tell me?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Charles huffed and pointed at a street packed with all the cars in the city. “There. Take a left here.”
Ten minutes, seventeen raised middle fingers and a brief exchange with a hot-headed taxi driver later Erik was parking at the foot of a skyscraper, next to the more conventional police car.
“Hey Charles,” Summers said with a cheery wave, shoving his cap to the back of his head. He offered Erik a thoroughly inappropriate salute and a nervous grin, which Erik returned without even thinking about it. “Everything cool with you two?”
“Yes, thank you,” Charles said. “How is Scott?”
“Annoying. How is Raven?”
“Radiant. What have you got for me?”
Summers lost the grin and straightened. “Same deal. Housekeeper ran out of the apartment screaming; doorman called the stiff in.”
“That’s awfully convenient,” Erik said, crossing his arms.
“Ain’t it? I thought the same thing. He’s in the bedroom, apartment three-oh-seven.”
“Thank you.”
They took the elevator.
The body was cooling on top of cotton sheets, curled just like Sebastian Tojo had been, and just as peaceful. The petals were scattered much like they were on the other crime scene; the little flower pinned to the door was a daisy, but other than that hardly anything changed. It looks copy-pasted, Erik thought. Fascinating.
“It is fascinating, isn’t it?” Charles’ eyes flickered between the bed, the corpse, the trail of petals leading from the door to their victim and Erik.
“Are you reading minds now?” Erik asked, tapping Charles’ temple.
“Oh, sorry. You just– I’m really sorry, you were being obvious. It shows up on your face. I didn’t mean to.”
Erik shrugged. “I don’t mind.” Actual mind-reading might have been a problem, true. Then again, he thought, considering Charles’ profile and the unfocused blue of his eyes, maybe not even that. “You’re really lucky you weren’t born a hundred years ago, it would have been shock therapy and asylums.”
“Or half a millennium ago, then it would have been the stake. I know.”
Did it really make a difference, Erik wondered, when here you are, well into the new millennium, and you must stay your tongue for fear of offending people by knowing what Cosmopolitan tries to teach them anyway? There was, after all, no great secret to the ability. Erik possessed it, though his skills were meager compared to Charles’, and largely limited to combat situations, but how was that different from singing, or dancing, or painting, really? True talent in those fields was no less rare. Erik looked at Charles, at the slope of his nose, the vivid blue of his eyes. Yes, the corpse was fascinating; laid out like a sacrifice and concealing everything at the same time, but Charles? Charles was the Voynich manuscript, a mystery written down in a nonexistent language, for the world to wonder at and never understand.
A shrill ring of the phone from his pocket cut through his mind.
“Lehnsherr.”
“This is Moira MacTaggart,” he heard. “You ran out of the building so fast, I didn’t get to tell you that you have the psychiatric evaluation this afternoon. You can squeeze it in before the interviews.”
“Someone did just get murdered.”
“Many someones, Mr. Lehnsherr, every day. I did my best to stall, but then you started shooting inside the precinct, and at this point the mayor is threatening me with a typing pool if you don’t supply a psych evaluation. You are so lucky the IA liaison took my word for it so far.”
Erik couldn’t help the incredulity from seeping into his voice. “Typing pool? Really?”
“He’s not very modern,” MacTaggart said. “He doesn’t mean it, in any case.”
“Is there anything in particular I should be looking forward to?” Erik asked, as he watched Charles study the carpet by the bed by lying flat on it with his chin propped on his wrists.
“Wesley is terrified of Charles.”
“Shocking,” he murmured into the phone as Charles rolled back to his feet.
On the other end of the line MacTaggart sighed. “Unfortunately. He has weaseled out of many sessions because of that, but unfortunately I can’t waive them all. With any luck Wesley will be so motivated he will make the evaluation up after just one session.”
“Somehow I don’t think sending either of us to a psychiatrist is in anyone’s best interest.”
“Certainly not Wesley’s.” MacTaggart laughed. “I know that and you know that, but the regulations are, shall we say, uncompromising.”
“I have seen my share of psychiatrists,” Erik said. “Not many wanted to work with me again. If this Wesley is scared of Charles, he won’t like me much, either.”
“Two of the most insane men in the country, and I managed to get them both in my precinct. Whatever was my crime in the past life,” Moira said with a mournful sigh. “Be there. Please. Wesley will be waiting. Be kind to him.”
“Will do,” Erik said and disconnected.
She was dead wrong about Charles, he thought, swallowing back the curse he almost let spill; they all were. Charles was sane. His entire being was defined by things that were real and true, and if that wasn’t sanity, Erik didn’t want to know what was.
