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"You will never love me like you love Charles, will you?" Raven's smile is soft and a little cruel.
Erik sighs and does not answer. He drops his gaze from her reflection and finishes drying his face after shaving. "Charles isn't here," he points out sourly.
He isn't looking so he doesn't see her reaction to this particular point. By the time he's done putting his razor back in the travel kit and turning around to look at her through the bathroom doorway to where she's perched at the end of the hotel room bed, he can see the calculating look behind her eyes.
She always struck him as soft, beautiful in the pampered way that any sister of Charles would have to be, but now she doesn't strike him as soft at all. She is sharp edges and cold steel and hunger when she flashes him a truer smile. Its genuinity takes him flat-footed. She is not the small, hurt thing he took her for.
"No, Erik," she says, pleasure flashing through her eyes at his reaction to her. "Charles isn't here."
—
They both love him. Charles that is. Erik never asks if he is like a brother to Raven, though for years, he assumed that was so.
She attends synagogue with Erik at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, then puts on her things to go on the anniversary of a day in the sands when Charles lost the use of both his legs.
"Erik," she says softly, impatiently. The only thing soft about her is her voice. "It's yarzheit."
He looks up sharply. "He's not dead, Raven."
She looks at him in disgust. "Is that who you thought died there?"
They do not light the candle, but for whatever reason Raven has adopted the custom, Erik does her the respect of attending synagogue with her as she does with him.
—
She lights a candle at home and studies its flickering light.
—
"You should receive instruction if you wish to convert," Erik points out to her once in the evening.
Something has been brewing beneath her red hair. He's seen the calculation in her eyes. Blue fingers glide across the page of a report Angel lost her life to retrieve. It would seem odd timing for him to bring it up again, his Jewishness, her returning to synagogue that third day every year, but he wonders if she will celebrate another yarzheit, not understanding it is for family only.
She sits up on the bed and sets the report aside, climbs over his lap, and pushes him down to kiss him as though he loves her because he does love her. She cannot be Charles but she is her own kind of beautiful.
"So," she says softly, "instruct me." And there is that smile again, a little cruel, a little sad, a little gentle, with a little wistfulness that belongs to the girl Charles used to know.
"I am not a rabbi."
She shrugs. He is a Holocaust survivor, but he is hardly a practicing Jew.
—
She keeps visiting synagogue with him and he visits with her on one day a year. If she visits the rabbi, he does not know of it.
She keeps working and fighting, infiltrating the Department of Defense and bringing down those hostile to mutant interests. She grows stronger and more beautiful.
She tries to recruit Kitty Pryde, but Erik tells her to let it go when Charles gets her instead.
Raven snarls at him and says, "You're a terrible Jew."
Katherine "Kitty" Pryde is Jewish.
—
Charles is dead.
Erik watches Raven's features, hardened by war and life or only honed: she has never truly been soft.
She has no clothes to tear, but for one evening, she wears a human form he hasn't seen in years.
—
It shouldn't bother him to see it, this human sentiment. Charles was her brother, for all that he wasn't.
"Who died that day?" he asks because he is bothered and this isn't the same as her annual vigil by the light of one candle, a Gentile keeping a Jewish practice in her own way.
She looks at him and sighs. "I saw the rabbi that first year."
It takes him aback.
"I asked help to pick a date for my mother. She was a Jew and she never even hated me." Raven's blonde hair glows as she leans forward to light a candle. "I lost Charles, and I had no one left but you."
And he was a Jew, even if he only goes to synagogue twice a year for his own sake. "Raven…"
She does not look soft as she shakes her head. "You're not dead, Erik."
He is old now and has somehow survived. He sits beside her and they stare into the light together.