Disclaimer: I do not own anything in this story
Rating: PG
The late afternoon sunlight pulled the shadows of the trees across the grass and made dappled patterns on the water of the pond, where half a dozen ducks were bobbing and diving. On another occasion Charles Xavier would have enjoyed the scene. As it was, he was too preoccupied with wondering if the woman he was here to meet was this jogger or that man walking a dog to take it in. Raven had always been difficult to track telepathically, her brain signals shifting as constantly as her skin did. He'd never been able to decide if there was a coherent entity inside of her skull at all, or if she just managed to give the impression of one.
"If I find out that there's a squad of X-Men surrounding the park waiting to take me in, I'm going to be very disappointed."
Xavier didn't give her the satisfaction of seeing him jump, although he had to be impressed with the way she – a young man of about sixteen, at the moment – had crept up on him. Impressed, and a little unnerved at the novelty.
"If I was going to give your identity away," he asked, "would I warn you first?"
She strolled closer to him, deliberately standing too close so that she loomed over his chair. It was a cheap tactic, and one he was so intimately familiar with that it was no trouble to ignore it.
"Your sense of fair play might require that of you," she said. "I thought you might be offering me a chance to get away."
Given the current location of her superior, she must have know better than that. "Actually, I called you here to tell you that I have no intention of telling the authorities who or what you are." It had been simple enough to contact 'Senator Kelly' and suggest that they meet, although he hadn't been sure that she would come, even to such a neutral location.
She smiled her own smile, an expression that was entirely out of place on her current callow features. With her gelled hair and black t-shirt proclaiming an allegiance to some rock group, she could have been one of his students if it weren't for that.
"It would fuel the hysteria, wouldn't it? People finding out that Senator Kelly is a mutant. I assume that you have no way of proving now that there ever was a human called Robert Kelly to begin with?"
"Thanks to what Erik did to his DNA, he dissolved." The horror of it still made Charles shudder inwardly. When he read Kelly's mind, he could feel it happening, the man's organs and muscles liquefying under his skin. "You almost inflicted the same unpleasant death on half of New York City."
"Your X-Men slaughtered two of my colleagues, fellow mutants."
Charles had been wondering about that. The authorities found Toad's body where it landed in the bay, but Sabretooth was never accounted for. A search with Cerebro turned up nothing, but that didn't mean he wasn't out there to be found. "I'm not completely sure that Victor Creed is dead. Perhaps he simply chose not to return to the Brotherhood fold."
"Don't split hairs, Xavier. We're fighting a war, however much you like to pretend otherwise, and you trained your students to kill. I only wish you'd trained them to kill the right people."
"I taught them to defend themselves against lethal force. You can hardly compare what they did to Erik's casual disregard for the inhabitants of one of the world's largest population centres."
He half expected her to argue that the process wouldn't necessarily have killed all those people, but she stepped away from him and stooped to pick up a stone instead. Perhaps Raven didn't care one way or the other.
"Is he all right?"
Charles thought of Erik wasting away inside his plastic prison, playing chess against himself and reading the books Charles brought him, and found that he couldn't lie to this woman. Whether he liked it or not, she loved him too. He's never needed to read her mind to learn that much.
"He could never be alright in a place like that. I am sorry."
She skimmed the stone across the pond, scattering the ducks. Charles frowned, but he knew that she wasn't really trying to hit them. Raven was lethally accurate when she wanted to be.
"Not sorry enough to get him out."
"No." There wasn't anything more to say. He hated seeing Erik locked up, but he could have killed millions of people. He deserved to be in prison, and inevitably that meant keeping him from his powers.
"If you loved him, you wouldn't be able to leave him there."
It's a ploy so obvious as to be unworthy of her. "Don't be ridiculous, Raven. Regardless of my personal feelings, I can't let him walk free."
"Yet you won't turn me in?" she asked, raising an eyebrow coolly.
"If I thought there was a way out of this position that wouldn't result in a dangerous panic, you wouldn't be at liberty."
"You lack imagination," she said. "Senator Kelly wouldn't need to be exposed. If you weren't so squeamish, he could disappear instead."
"That isn't the way I do things."
He hadn't forgotten that Raven was the instrument that almost destroyed his mind when Cerebro was sabotaged, but he wasn't the kind of man to hold a personal grudge about a thing like that.
"Or perhaps you find having a high profile pro-mutant convert in the Senate too convenient to waste the opportunity?"
He certainly wasn't going to admit to that, even if there was a degree of truth in it. "You can rely on us not to expose you, provided you do us the same courtesy."
He knew that he can trust Raven and Erik – and any of their close associates - that far. They might know where his school was, and perhaps Raven would even relish destroying it, but no Brotherhood ideologue would risk harming so many young mutants by exposing him.
"I suppose that's it then," she said, watching the ducks settle fussily back onto the pond. "Détente."
It was not something that would last, but for now a truce is best for both sides. "Détente," he agreed.
"Give my love to Erik," she said, walking away with no further pleasantries. Charles watched her until she vanished behind a tree, and nobody who looked like the boy she was just impersonating came out the other side.
The End