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Charlotte is sitting at her desk in the study, a glass of brandy by her elbow. She is reading something, forehead propped up by three steady fingers, and none of them touch her temple. Erik takes a second to pause, to watch her eyes as they flick across the page, the way her mouth purses and she makes the shape for some of the words, as though savoring the physical sensation. She goes over the same word three times—meticulous, meticulous, meticulous—and then reaches for a pen.
“A little light reading?” he asks, after he has settled himself against the doorframe in a properly languid pose. He’s been keeping this thoughts light and quiet, and achieved his end—Charlotte jumps a little, and almost elbows the brandy off the desk.
“Yes, very light,” she says wryly, and lifts the book so he can see that it is the bound copy of her thesis. “In light of the past few months, I thought some editing could be done.”
Erik stares at her. Unbelievable. “How incredibly maudlin you are,” he says. “Do you honestly think you won’t get another chance?”
She shrugs and tosses the book back onto her desk. “Who knows how tomorrow may go, my friend? There are many physical feats that lay beyond me, and surviving death is one of them.” The look on her face is wry, acknowledging the banality of her words, and she rubs at the crease between her eyebrows. “Perhaps I should have practiced dodging bullets with you.”
Most of Erik knows that she is joking. There is a tiny, practical part of his mind that says she probably should have joined him on more of his morning runs. It must not be very tiny, though, because Charlotte grins. “You have the legs of a giant, and I those of a mouse. Those runs were uncomfortable for both of us, I think.”
Many aspects of his relationship with Charlotte are uncomfortable, but runs fall very low on the list. Living with her is like living with his mother again, a little, feeling the comfortable presence nearby at all times. When Charlotte sleeps, her consciousness is round and fuzzy and it curls up so only the very edge of it overlaps with Erik’s mind, and the children’s. He wakes in the morning hours before her, and lies in his bed, tentatively stretching his mind’s fingers towards it, usually too cowardly to make full contact.
Awake, Charlotte is never far away. You’re drifting, she tells him now, as he lets his head rest against the wood of the doorframe. It’s lovely when you do that; your mind is very brilliant and complex and spotted, like the night sky, and when you drift you light on some of the stars, and they glow brighter. Her mind-voice is thick and sleepy; some of the words slur, and she shows him pictures instead of enunciating them entirely.
“You should sleep,” he tells her, and shows her how he imagines her sleeping consciousness, like a hedgehog rolled into a ball on the very edge of the yard behind his childhood home in Poland. He’s learned that it is easier for Charlotte to float in and out of what he wants to show her—and harder for her to get into what he doesn’t—if he keeps his projected thoughts grouped together in a visual place.
“I don’t look like that,” she mumbles, rubbing her eyes with closed fists like a child. “Raven tells me I’m a terrible bed hog and I steal all the blankets.” Her hair is mussed into rivets, from fingers raking it back from her face, and it curves like the wing of a raven, dark and textured along the line of her head. “Why must you always associate me with animals, Erik? It’s because I’m shorter than you, isn’t it?”
He must be tired as well; normally he’s better at keeping his thoughts from parading across his consciousness. “You’re shorter than everyone, Charlotte.” He shows her herself, in those hideous pinstripe pajamas, sitting cross-legged in the grass.
“Don’t insult my pajamas,” she says crossly. “They’ve very English, I’ll have you know. We English like pinstripes, and tea, and brandy.” Having said this, her eyes alight on her glass, and she brightens. The tendrils of her mind closest to Erik sharpen, and he feels them, like the knives he used to warp when his mother didn’t have enough money to take them to the butcher’s. She downs most of the brandy in a single gulp, and shudders slightly.
“Something else they taught you at Oxford?” asks Erik dryly.
Mocking what Charlotte learned at Somerville must be your favorite game, Charlotte’s mind says, the amusement and affection and offended pride slipping across the grass and whipping towards the trees. I’ll have you know that Somerville taught me everything important I needed to know in life—calculus, investment banking, how to drink, and—she shows him something slick and warm, a sensation of a pearl beaded against her tongue, a heavy smell, her nose tickling crinkled skin. Erik is startled into banging his head against the doorframe, and he swears floridly in German.
I’m not a complete ninny, she whispers, bending blades of grass under her mind-fingers. I know you think me terribly naïve, but a woman doesn’t survive Oxford without at least three licks of sense. There’s a hint of the double meaning behind lick. He catches the faintest nuance of it, pale and translucent, like a photograph of a photograph of Charlotte biting a girl’s inner thigh, laughter bubbling from one woman to the other.
“Naughty of you,” he says. In the mind field, Charlotte’s wind slows for a second and he can feel her archness, the muffled laughter, and a hollowness to the act. This is a caricature of Charlotte; she cannot help it, she caricatures herself in the constant feedback from other minds. He catches a quick succession of thoughts and pictures in what follows, Charlotte in a pink frock on her eleventh birthday, Charlotte teaching an undergraduate seminar on biology with her hair (thick, beautiful, glorious hair, hair that is a little French in its insouciance, its bounce, its deepness of color) pulled tightly against her scalp, Charlotte stretching her mind’s voice to a thin, genderless tenor.
All the things he loves about Charlotte, excepting maybe the pink, pulled back and hidden away and starched from her life. Oh, those halcyon school days of yesteryear, her mind-voice whispers, teasing him. I do not miss them very much, my friend. She shows him the little control she had over her powers then, how carefully she had to step to persuade professors to allow her to work in their laboratories, and not simply force her way in with telepathic persuasion.
He sees himself in a mirror, Charlotte’s face, frowning as she touches the lower curve of her lip—there is a moment where the figure in the mirror trembles and shifts, the hair shortens, the face broadens, and there is the Charlotte who might’ve been Charles, attended Baliol, said chap, not have faced a single day of opposition in his goals of scholarship.
Erik finds this Charlotte—Charles—lovely, but the firmness in Charlotte’s chin, the ambition that brought her to her doctorate, they are gone and all that is left behind is softness, a little boy whose conceit and arrogance are checked only by the broadness of his innocence. His strength is in love.
So is mine, observes Charlotte, or so you consistently insist. It would have been very easy to be Charles; by the time I was fourteen, there wasn’t anyone here or in England who would be capable of telling the difference. But I think perhaps my stubbornness kept me from doing it. There is a flash of blue, white teeth in a full grin.
“And Raven?” prods Erik. He feels enthralled by this, the dissembling of the many walls Charlotte has kept erected around her memories. The house tells its own story, of two little girls and an absent mother with a fondness for Chanel No. 5, but Charlotte is better at twisting Erik’s own secrets from him than sharing her own.
And Raven, perhaps, Charlotte agrees. How much of a hypocrite would I be, to tell my sister that she is beautiful and then hide my own self? This is a bit rich, and Erik immediately floods with field with as many memories as possible, of Charlotte telling the children to learn their limits, Charlotte advising Erik to get some sleep from her position hunched over her desk. The last one slips in almost without conscious intent, and he tries to bury it—Charlotte’s arms firmly wrapped around his shoulders, her calm mind-voice, you are not alone, my friend.
The effort of suppressing the thought is tiring; Erik is used to physical exertion, the press of metal on his skin and the burn in his muscles, but pushing his mind is not the same as pushing his legs in a last set of sprints. In acknowledgement of this, he finally moves his body into the study and lets the brass lock pull the door shut behind him.
I wasn’t lying about that, my friend, she whispers into his field. You will never be alone again, if you do not wish it. His perspective has shifted—she’s guided him so that, as his body falls, slack, onto the leather of the couch catty-corner to her desk, his mind’s eye sees the stars spread above the grass. This is what I see, she tells him. Your mind, the brilliant stars. Even when you are distressed and angered, they shine so strongly.
“I think perhaps you expect better of me that I deserve,” he says, attempting for wry and falling into a trap of bitterness. “You are so naïve at times, Charlotte, it truly shocks me.”
There is an immediate backlash, Charlotte’s quick temper, which she tries to dampen. Some of the stars vibrate and one falls, many miles away. You dismiss me, Erik, and he sees a blur, stepfather-professor-advisor, men who have called her naïve. I think your pain, my friend, too easily distracts you at times. The world is full of its cruelties, but they are made by men and fixed by better men. And women, she adds a moment later.
There is a thoroughness to her words that indicates she has thought over them many times, refined away the implications and connections each would normally evoke, and left simply the message itself. There are many ways to hurt a person, Erik, and mutants are fully capable of committing atrocities, vulgarities, and petty cruelties. We should not strive to separate ourselves when we are just as guilty. I am rich. You are a man. These are human conceits. We are human.
His consciousness twitches, and he tries to clear her thoughts from where they crowd him against the grass. “Stop thinking so loudly,” he says irritably. “Your feminist theory is shining through when you should be thinking as a mutant sister.”
The point of feminist theory, you philistine, is that we are all sisters.
For the most part, her thoughts have been devoid of psychic content, but sisters cannot be contained and it envelopes both of them, shattering across their minds with fragments of Raven and years at school and faces Erik recognizes from newspapers, Barbara McCormick and Rosalind Franklin and Lise Meitner. There is
Oh god Charlotte, he won’t give me the lecturer position even though he knows I’m qualified, I’m better qualified than any of the other graduate students, and I think my mum was right—maybe I should take my 200 words a minute to a solicitor’s office in London
and
They don’t think I’m beautiful, they think I’m ugly, they want me to be blonde, maybe I should be blonde, maybe I should stop, but Charlotte says I’m lovely—Charlotte wouldn’t know, she’s got the fashion sense of a dead grandmother, she’s wrapped up in her science
and
I can’t tell anyone
and
They’ll take my children away
and
Love the smell of her skin, how smooth our skin is we rub together, there are no squares and angles, just her curves against mine and her smell and we can’t tell anyone, they’ll lock us up
and
It hurts
and
Don’t make me do this, please, I don’t want to touch it, please, please
and
Charlotte snaps control over the words. Erik feels the way he does in the kitchen, surrounded by the icebox and the drawers of cutlery and the knife block and appliances in the cabinets—the entire structure is rattling around him. Charlotte firms his mental space, nudges some of the trees into flowering, and as a gentle apology, she puts dew on the grass and the smell of his mother’s baking into the air.
Not all of the thoughts are Charlotte’s—in fact, none of them are, simply surface fears and frustrations skimmed from exposed minds. They still taste like their originators, one blue and smoky like Raven’s jokes. Most of them are small. They wriggle away at their exposure, and scramble back into hiding. Charlotte is solicitous of his history, and she feels awkward at the plaintive note of the word, sisters, as though she is dampening his own pain by showing him hers. She may be trying to shield that, but she is not doing a good job.
Erik licks his lips and considers many responses. Finally, he finds the star where it fell, and he fixes it back into its position in the sky, completing its constellation. After a few moments, Charlotte joins him in the field. He can feel her weight in the air.
Charlotte is easily exhausted, and when she is too tired to speak, she uses her mind’s voice. Erik has willing to let her do it since she taught him the trick with the field. Rarely, however, does Charlotte take on a form other than the warm breeze of her laughter, or maybe a small rabbit nibbling at his mother’s vegetables. As he surveys the stars of his mind—he wonders how they are organized, are the stars his strongest memories? the best of them? the ones she accesses for his serenity?—she falls as a warm lump against his side, wriggling in the grass.
I am very tempted to never leave this place, she says, both an apology and a refusal to regret her actions. They talk about many things, but this she will not let them discuss. Would you mind terribly if I stayed?
“Yes,” he says, and has to clear his throat. “I would never get a moment’s rest. You would nag me all the time.” Most of the sensation of the leather has faded; only the warmth in his chest, a remnant of his wine at dinner, follows him into the cool Polish night.
Nonsense.
“You have terrible taste in sweaters,” he says. “You snore. And you have no concept of boundaries.”
As she is currently occupying his mind-space, curling her consciousness around his, stargazing like a teenager, there is little she can say to refute the latter. Their months of touring for the CIA mean that Erik has many, many memories to support the second. My sweaters aren’t hideous. Her petulance is tinged with pure enjoyment—she wears the sweaters to annoy him, then. They are lumpy and hand-knit, mostly gifts from Raven’s intensely feminine phase from thirteen to seventeen, and she looks like a child playing in her father’s clothes in them.
Some of them are my father’s, she admits. Stretched behind father is a thin but tangible thread, tangled into all the thoughts she pulled from her father in infancy, before his death. She was too young to have any physical memories, like hair color (silver) or smells (pipe smoke) or his voice (deep, rough, rounded vowels), but she has whole days of memories, preserved like a fish skeleton, picked clean and pressed between plates. Erik reaches out and tries to touch the thread, and it shivers under his fingers. The wispy ends attach to his fingerprints like cobwebs, greedily sucking at his skin.
The warmth of Charlotte’s consciousness, where it is pressed against his side, hums with apology and faintly, in a very small voice, he hears, I find it difficult to release you, but the words fall away, towards the stars and back across the skies of his memories, into the distance.
“Charlotte,” he begins, and she presses a hand across his mouth, gently pressing his lips shut with her thumb and forefinger. I’m very tired, Erik, she says, show me.
With her this close, legs entwined, he cannot hide the flare that her words provoke, the spurt of fantasies and cold showers and Charlotte’s lazy good mornings in the kitchen, as she burns eggs and tries (and fails) to manage the bacon. He is not domestic, and Charlotte is only passably so, but she is bright, sizzles on his tongue, and encompasses him in the vast interior of her mind. He has wanted Charlotte since the moment she dragged him from the water, spluttering like a drowned cat, her friendly eyes upturned under the wet fringe of her hair.
This is the final image in the trail that blazes from his chest and out into the cool Polish air, arrayed like a film clip on a screen, and their words (who are you) (you are not alone) are drowned by Erik’s relief and possessive glee and his terror, overwhelming, that Shaw will find this beautiful thing that Erik has, and that he will destroy it, like he has destroyed all that belongs to Erik.
Oh, Erik, she murmurs. He hasn’t realized that, all this time, she has been using her actual voice, cultured and feminine and snootily Oxford-sounding; he loves her casual tenor, the way she barks orders and tells him dirty jokes during lessons and mentors Alex, but he also loves that now the voice he hears with his ears he can feel against the skin of his neck, mouthing his name. Oh, Erik, you’re lovely. You’ve given me a lovely gift, and I will ask more of you, I’m afraid.
The return of the physical jolts him, shakes the stars so they tumble from the sky and hiss as they strike the grass. “Erik,” purrs Charlotte’s voice, tandem with the chant of Erik, Erik, Erik as her consciousness rubs itself against him and his eyes open and Charlotte is stretched on top of him, on the couch, her breasts pressed against his chest and her fingertips on his jaw. “Hello,” she says, her voice rough from the long silence, and he sees what she sees, against the burning grass, his eyes closed, skin flushed, the metal of his buttons melting and sliding onto the floor.
Hello, he says, Charlotte, and uses her watch to knock her off balance, and he tucks her into his body so when he rolls onto the floor, he lands on his back. The situation is quickly rectified, Charlotte underneath and flaring, her mind pockmarked and thoughts leaking through the curtains she usually keeps tightly drawn, and she is gasping his name, “Erik,” and he swallows it into his mouth and melts the lock into the door.
The stars that fall onto his skin flare, specks of light that white out his vision, and she presses kisses against the skin that burns.