XMFC Fic: Four times Raven pretended to be Charles and the one time she learned never to do it again
FOUR TIMES RAVEN PRETENDED TO BE CHARLES AND THE ONE TIME SHE LEARNED TO NEVER DO IT AGAIN
(for Clara.)
Author: amaliak
Rating: G
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Characters: Charles Xavier, Raven Darkholme
DISCLAIMER: Not for profit. All characters belong to Marvel. The typos are mine.
1
They both gasped just before the sound of the porcelain vase shattering into a thousand pieces filled the room.
Raven hadn’t meant to startle Charles, but he had turned so quickly his elbow had knocked it off the end table in the library, the sound louder than anything she could remember at the moment.
She heard the heavy foot falls of Olga, the maid that hated her and she ducked to hide behind the couch just as the large woman made her way into the room.
“What have you done, child?” Olga exclaimed just as another person walked into the room, her eyes zeroing in on the white pieces on the dark wooden floor.
“What happened here, Charles?” his mother’s quiet tone surprised them all and Raven cringed, glad she was out of sight.
“It was an accident, Mother,” Charles’ voice answered. Would he rat her out, as so many others had done before? She’d only been here a month, and she liked Charles and his mother, but she knew the woman could be harsh and cold when she was angry.
There wasn’t any yelling as Olga tisked and walked away to fetch a broom and dust pan. Paven peeked around the back of the couch, catching sight of the blonde woman she’d once impersonated as she stooped to pick up a piece of the vase at her feet.
“This belonged to your father,” she was saying to Charles, and something cold ran down Raven’s spine.
“You’ll have to explain it to him.”
With that, she walked out leaving Charles standing by the disaster, his shoulders slumped.
Raven jumped out of her hiding place, running up to Charles, her blonde curls bouncing. “I’m so sorry, Charles. I really am.”
“It was just an accident, Raven,” Charles replied forcing his features into a smile for her sake. He didn’t have to. She knew already what a stern and often physical person Charles’ stepfather could be. He would not escape this unscathed.
The sound of Olga coming back into the room seemed to get Raven to spring into action.
“Raven, don’t!” Charles exclaimed even as she shoved him down to her previous hiding place. Shifting her skin into his likeness.
Olga walked into the room, dustpan and broom in hand and looked expectantly at who she believed was Charles. “Off with you to the study, then. Your father is waiting,” Olga shooed.
Raven did her best to hold her head high as she walked away, ignoring Charles’ protests in her head.
===========
2
“Will you lay down?” Raven asked, an exasperation in her tone as she pushed a still struggling Charles into the pillows of his bed. “You can’t go like that, you’ll pass out on the spot,” she continued, truly becoming concerned for the feverish look of misery on his face.
She knew that this was important to him, as the last presentation of his first college term. Charles had been preparing for days on the speech. He’d also been fighting off the flu since two days ago, but now it had finally done him in.
“Raven, this needs to be done, I’m sorry,” he was saying, once again attempting to get out of bed. “It’s the final exam of the term. The most important one.”
“But you can barely move!” Raven argued and as if to validate her point, a particularly painful sounding round of coughing followed. “If you’re going anywhere, it’s to the doctor.”
“Unfortunately, I cannot be in two places at once,” he said, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and steadying himself into a sitting position. He noticed her grin.
“You can be in two places at once,” she said, shifting into his likeness before he had a chance to reply.
“How is that going to help me, exactly?” Charles inquired. She knew it made him uncomfortable when she made herself look like him.
“So you can be both here and there,” she explained, using the same gently condescending tone he used with her sometimes.
Evidently, he found it as infuriating as she did.
“I’ll just take your mind with me,” she went on. “I know you can project that far.”
“No, not all the way to the south hall, I’m afraid,” Charles said, but he seemed to be thinking about something else. “But I can if I’m in the library.”
Raven frowned, shifting back into her usual form, tossing her blonde hair back. “That defeats the point.”
“No, I can lay down there, in one of the private study rooms,” Charles was syaing, dragging on a sweater. She reached over and helped with his shoes when he had trouble with them.
He stood and leaned heavily on her shoulder as they walked from the room.
“Just don’t make me do anything embarrassing,” he said as they moved along.
“That was one time.”
“My reputation is still recovering.”
==============
3
There were days that she lost all her patience with Charles.
She’d been itching to go out, the summer evening beckoning with it’s balmy heat, so rare in this part of England. She had this Saturday night off but Charles had just started the new term and was buried in his books, refusing to take the night off for some fun.
He was such a stick in the mud.
She had left the flat, her boots making angry stomping sounds on the pavement as she made her way through the twilight lit streets.
Normally, she didn’t like to venture out alone, especially when she was upset as it meant that she could lose control of her abilities and expose herself publicly. The times it had happened before, Charles had covered for her, even as far as doing a quick memory wipe.
But it had been years since an incident. And besides, she told herself as she walked along, she didn’t need to be attached at the hip with Charles for the rest of her life. Lord knows that he was quick enough to brush her off, choosing instead to direct his charm and smiles at the vapid girls that hung around the nearby pub, looking to pick up Oxford boys.
Like they were any fun.
Raven paused for a moment. Where they? Maybe that’s what the problem was: she was boring.
She frowned at the thought.
What did they have that she didn’t?
Her eyes fell on the pub that was a favorite of theirs and suddenly she smiled as the thought crossed her mind. She would answer her questions and have some fun at Charles’ expense at the same time.
She ducked into a small space between buildings and emerged transformed, running her hand through her shorter hair and confidently using Charles’ swagger while entering the pub, the bar-keep’s “Hi-o Charlie” making the smile she bore genuine.
Her eyes caught sight of a pretty brunette leaning against the bar, yelling her order at the bar-keep in order to be heard over the roudiness of the patrons, standing on the tip toes of her knee-high boots. She was just Charles’ type.
Raven walked over to stand beside her and flashed Charles’ grin.
Tonight, she was going to have some fun.
============
4
Raven was going to get even with Sean for doing this. And Alex.
Just because.
Really, there was no call to be singing at that volume so early in the morning.
She wondered briefly how likely it would be that Erik would be willing to shove Sean off the satellite again. It probably wouldn’t work in her favor, she thought darkly.
Finally, after the third morning of dealing with them and their chanting of “Home on the Range” before 7am, Raven had enough. She opened the bedroom window, leaning just enough out of it to be heard but not seen from the grounds.
“Will the two of you kindly shut up?”
She knew that Charles’ voice would do the trick and she smiled at just how effective it had actually been. The boys actually looked sheepish and she decided to twist the knife a little.
She opened the window fully, poking her head out, making sure that she used the best of Charles’ disapproving looks.
“And since you seem so intent on waking the whole house, you could at least make yourselves useful and help move the equipment from the shed,” she had Charles instruct, getting back inside and shutting the window firmly before bursting into giggles. The looks on their faces!
She had no idea if there was anything in the shed to be moved, but the look of exhaustion on both Sean and Alex’s faces at dinner told her they’d found something.
It was all she could do but giggle a bit into her napkin, making Hank tilt his head at her, an adorable smile of both confusion and bemusement crossed his features.
She would tell him later.
===============
5
It felt strange, being on this island that had belonged to Shaw as a base of operations. Everything was cold and dark and she really missed the lawns and the woods of the manor. She missed home. But she couldn’t think about that now.
That wasn’t home anymore.
It was even stranger, being around Azazel and Janos, people she’d seen kill dozens of CIA agents right in front of her. Angel did her best to be friendly, but they were all still very cautious around each other. More often than not, she’d end up near Erik, the only person she felt close to.
But even he was different now, distant and quieter than before. Occasionally, she would catch him lost in thought, staring into the distance.
Slowly, he was sinking more into himself, more like the person she remembered first meeting. Raven tried to bring up conversation, tried to coax and tease him out of himself, but all to no avail.
Really, there was only one person who’d ever really managed that.
So she approached him one day, in the middle of another one of his distant stares.
“Something is troubling you, my friend,” she said, Charles’ crisp clear voice breaking through the reverie.
Erik’s head had whipped around so fast that she wondered if it had been painful.
Something sparked in his eyes and for half a second, it gave her hope. She smiled and walked closer to him.
But whatever had sparked there was extinguished the moment she stepped forward. For as much ease as seeing Charles’ face in the mirror brought her, Erik did not seem to be affected the same way.
She saw his jaw set dangerously and she froze in place.
He stepped closer to her, his eyes cold and piercing, his mouth close to her ear.
“Don’t ever do that again, Raven,” he said quietly, but at this distance she could feel the barely controlled emotions radiating off him.
She shifted back into her true form, afraid to meet his eyes again but doing so anyway. They were blank now, and she only caught them for a moment before he side-stepped her and walked away.
================
END
now with a companion piece.
(for Clara.)
Author: amaliak
Rating: G
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Characters: Charles Xavier, Raven Darkholme
DISCLAIMER: Not for profit. All characters belong to Marvel. The typos are mine.
1
They both gasped just before the sound of the porcelain vase shattering into a thousand pieces filled the room.
Raven hadn’t meant to startle Charles, but he had turned so quickly his elbow had knocked it off the end table in the library, the sound louder than anything she could remember at the moment.
She heard the heavy foot falls of Olga, the maid that hated her and she ducked to hide behind the couch just as the large woman made her way into the room.
“What have you done, child?” Olga exclaimed just as another person walked into the room, her eyes zeroing in on the white pieces on the dark wooden floor.
“What happened here, Charles?” his mother’s quiet tone surprised them all and Raven cringed, glad she was out of sight.
“It was an accident, Mother,” Charles’ voice answered. Would he rat her out, as so many others had done before? She’d only been here a month, and she liked Charles and his mother, but she knew the woman could be harsh and cold when she was angry.
There wasn’t any yelling as Olga tisked and walked away to fetch a broom and dust pan. Paven peeked around the back of the couch, catching sight of the blonde woman she’d once impersonated as she stooped to pick up a piece of the vase at her feet.
“This belonged to your father,” she was saying to Charles, and something cold ran down Raven’s spine.
“You’ll have to explain it to him.”
With that, she walked out leaving Charles standing by the disaster, his shoulders slumped.
Raven jumped out of her hiding place, running up to Charles, her blonde curls bouncing. “I’m so sorry, Charles. I really am.”
“It was just an accident, Raven,” Charles replied forcing his features into a smile for her sake. He didn’t have to. She knew already what a stern and often physical person Charles’ stepfather could be. He would not escape this unscathed.
The sound of Olga coming back into the room seemed to get Raven to spring into action.
“Raven, don’t!” Charles exclaimed even as she shoved him down to her previous hiding place. Shifting her skin into his likeness.
Olga walked into the room, dustpan and broom in hand and looked expectantly at who she believed was Charles. “Off with you to the study, then. Your father is waiting,” Olga shooed.
Raven did her best to hold her head high as she walked away, ignoring Charles’ protests in her head.
===========
2
“Will you lay down?” Raven asked, an exasperation in her tone as she pushed a still struggling Charles into the pillows of his bed. “You can’t go like that, you’ll pass out on the spot,” she continued, truly becoming concerned for the feverish look of misery on his face.
She knew that this was important to him, as the last presentation of his first college term. Charles had been preparing for days on the speech. He’d also been fighting off the flu since two days ago, but now it had finally done him in.
“Raven, this needs to be done, I’m sorry,” he was saying, once again attempting to get out of bed. “It’s the final exam of the term. The most important one.”
“But you can barely move!” Raven argued and as if to validate her point, a particularly painful sounding round of coughing followed. “If you’re going anywhere, it’s to the doctor.”
“Unfortunately, I cannot be in two places at once,” he said, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and steadying himself into a sitting position. He noticed her grin.
“You can be in two places at once,” she said, shifting into his likeness before he had a chance to reply.
“How is that going to help me, exactly?” Charles inquired. She knew it made him uncomfortable when she made herself look like him.
“So you can be both here and there,” she explained, using the same gently condescending tone he used with her sometimes.
Evidently, he found it as infuriating as she did.
“I’ll just take your mind with me,” she went on. “I know you can project that far.”
“No, not all the way to the south hall, I’m afraid,” Charles said, but he seemed to be thinking about something else. “But I can if I’m in the library.”
Raven frowned, shifting back into her usual form, tossing her blonde hair back. “That defeats the point.”
“No, I can lay down there, in one of the private study rooms,” Charles was syaing, dragging on a sweater. She reached over and helped with his shoes when he had trouble with them.
He stood and leaned heavily on her shoulder as they walked from the room.
“Just don’t make me do anything embarrassing,” he said as they moved along.
“That was one time.”
“My reputation is still recovering.”
==============
3
There were days that she lost all her patience with Charles.
She’d been itching to go out, the summer evening beckoning with it’s balmy heat, so rare in this part of England. She had this Saturday night off but Charles had just started the new term and was buried in his books, refusing to take the night off for some fun.
He was such a stick in the mud.
She had left the flat, her boots making angry stomping sounds on the pavement as she made her way through the twilight lit streets.
Normally, she didn’t like to venture out alone, especially when she was upset as it meant that she could lose control of her abilities and expose herself publicly. The times it had happened before, Charles had covered for her, even as far as doing a quick memory wipe.
But it had been years since an incident. And besides, she told herself as she walked along, she didn’t need to be attached at the hip with Charles for the rest of her life. Lord knows that he was quick enough to brush her off, choosing instead to direct his charm and smiles at the vapid girls that hung around the nearby pub, looking to pick up Oxford boys.
Like they were any fun.
Raven paused for a moment. Where they? Maybe that’s what the problem was: she was boring.
She frowned at the thought.
What did they have that she didn’t?
Her eyes fell on the pub that was a favorite of theirs and suddenly she smiled as the thought crossed her mind. She would answer her questions and have some fun at Charles’ expense at the same time.
She ducked into a small space between buildings and emerged transformed, running her hand through her shorter hair and confidently using Charles’ swagger while entering the pub, the bar-keep’s “Hi-o Charlie” making the smile she bore genuine.
Her eyes caught sight of a pretty brunette leaning against the bar, yelling her order at the bar-keep in order to be heard over the roudiness of the patrons, standing on the tip toes of her knee-high boots. She was just Charles’ type.
Raven walked over to stand beside her and flashed Charles’ grin.
Tonight, she was going to have some fun.
============
4
Raven was going to get even with Sean for doing this. And Alex.
Just because.
Really, there was no call to be singing at that volume so early in the morning.
She wondered briefly how likely it would be that Erik would be willing to shove Sean off the satellite again. It probably wouldn’t work in her favor, she thought darkly.
Finally, after the third morning of dealing with them and their chanting of “Home on the Range” before 7am, Raven had enough. She opened the bedroom window, leaning just enough out of it to be heard but not seen from the grounds.
“Will the two of you kindly shut up?”
She knew that Charles’ voice would do the trick and she smiled at just how effective it had actually been. The boys actually looked sheepish and she decided to twist the knife a little.
She opened the window fully, poking her head out, making sure that she used the best of Charles’ disapproving looks.
“And since you seem so intent on waking the whole house, you could at least make yourselves useful and help move the equipment from the shed,” she had Charles instruct, getting back inside and shutting the window firmly before bursting into giggles. The looks on their faces!
She had no idea if there was anything in the shed to be moved, but the look of exhaustion on both Sean and Alex’s faces at dinner told her they’d found something.
It was all she could do but giggle a bit into her napkin, making Hank tilt his head at her, an adorable smile of both confusion and bemusement crossed his features.
She would tell him later.
===============
5
It felt strange, being on this island that had belonged to Shaw as a base of operations. Everything was cold and dark and she really missed the lawns and the woods of the manor. She missed home. But she couldn’t think about that now.
That wasn’t home anymore.
It was even stranger, being around Azazel and Janos, people she’d seen kill dozens of CIA agents right in front of her. Angel did her best to be friendly, but they were all still very cautious around each other. More often than not, she’d end up near Erik, the only person she felt close to.
But even he was different now, distant and quieter than before. Occasionally, she would catch him lost in thought, staring into the distance.
Slowly, he was sinking more into himself, more like the person she remembered first meeting. Raven tried to bring up conversation, tried to coax and tease him out of himself, but all to no avail.
Really, there was only one person who’d ever really managed that.
So she approached him one day, in the middle of another one of his distant stares.
“Something is troubling you, my friend,” she said, Charles’ crisp clear voice breaking through the reverie.
Erik’s head had whipped around so fast that she wondered if it had been painful.
Something sparked in his eyes and for half a second, it gave her hope. She smiled and walked closer to him.
But whatever had sparked there was extinguished the moment she stepped forward. For as much ease as seeing Charles’ face in the mirror brought her, Erik did not seem to be affected the same way.
She saw his jaw set dangerously and she froze in place.
He stepped closer to her, his eyes cold and piercing, his mouth close to her ear.
“Don’t ever do that again, Raven,” he said quietly, but at this distance she could feel the barely controlled emotions radiating off him.
She shifted back into her true form, afraid to meet his eyes again but doing so anyway. They were blank now, and she only caught them for a moment before he side-stepped her and walked away.
================
END
now with a companion piece.