"Charles?" Raven's voice echoed off the metal walls inside the jet. Charles didn't answer. He hadn't answered before, either, when a shadowy figure had fallen from the underside of the jet and disappeared into the trees. Raven had called out to him mentally then. Now, she spoke out loud. "You okay in here?"
She should never have let him come on this mission. No matter how much they'd needed a pilot, with Hank out with the flu—she was the leader of the team, she had veto power over everything that happened, and she'd let Charles come.
If something had happened to him, it was her fault.
She found him by the cockpit, slumped forward in his chair. His back was to her. For a second, she couldn't tell if he was breathing; then, he groaned, a low, painful sound.
She rushed over to him. "What happened? Where are you hurt?"
She bent down, reached for his shoulder. His T-shirt was warm and damp, his muscles tense beneath the fabric. She thought, fleetingly, I should have made you wear a flight suit. She should have ignored all his stupid barbs about what had happened the last time he'd worn one. He could say what he wanted about everything else that happened there—at least in Cuba he'd never been in danger of bleeding out. "Can you straighten up for me? Keep pressure on, but I need to see it, okay?"
"You don't... don't want to..." Charles gasped. "To see it, you... don't want that."
He was still bent forward, so far that she couldn't see what was going on with him. "Just do it. Come on. Up you go."
As Charles straightened up, Raven patted him down, looking and feeling for where he'd been shot, or stabbed, or something else...
Something really else: He wasn't bleeding. He wasn't hurt. The only thing wrong with him was the obvious bulge in his trousers.
She stopped touching him.
"See? Told you. I... I told... you didn't..." Charles lost his train of thought somewhere in there. He stopped talking and reached for his fly, fumbling it open right in front of her.
"You didn't tell me anything.What's going on?"
Charles didn't answer for a minute, too busy with his zipper. His face and the top of his head were getting redder and sweatier by the second. He looked like he was about to have a heart attack.
"Charles. Listen to me." Raven grabbed his hands, pulled them up, away from his half-open zipper. "You need to tell me what happened."
"It's a... compulsion, I need, I... I have to..." The sound Charles made then was more like a sob. Raven let his hands go, tried not to look as he reached into his underwear and hunched over once again.
Compulsion. They'd first talked about this during one of the briefings Charles had insisted on three years ago; it had been brought up with various other sort-of-but-not-that-likely scenarios on a more or less regular basis ever since, whenever Charles decided they needed to be 're-certified.'
The basic idea: not all mutants they'd come across would be friendly; not all would be in control of their powers. Some of these, a small percentage compared to the ones who'd try to kill you the old-fashioned way, could compel you to do things, want things—so badly you'd die if you didn't, or if you put up too much of a fight.
The moral: the only way to break a compulsion was to either take it to its conclusion, or to get an experienced telepath to remove it. If it ever happened to anyone on her team, get them back to Westchester right away so Charles could help them.
Well, Charles wasn't going to be able to help this time. There was Jean...but although she was a lot better than she'd been a few years ago, there was no way she was ready for something like this.
"You never said anything about sex compulsions." The main example in the slide-show was 'a desperate desire to jump off a cliff.' "Thanks for that."
"Sorry. I'm... I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry. Give me information. Do you think this is really a sex compulsion? Or could it be more like a masturbation compulsion?"
It had been more than twenty years since Raven was that teenage girl who worried so much about Charles' opinion. Sometimes, though, things still threw her back there for a second or two, for way less reason than saying the word 'masturbation.' She was glad he wasn't looking at her; it meant he didn't see her flush, even if that had always been way less obvious in her blue skin.
"I don't... I don't know..." She couldn't see what Charles was doing exactly, but the motion of his arm made it pretty clear. "I think..."
He was so red now he was almost purple. He sounded like a freight train. He was going to have an aneurysm or a stroke or something.
Raven could waste time debating what to do, but in reality she'd already made up her mind. It was her job to protect her team, she'd have done what she had to do for any of them—but even more, Charles was her brother. She'd spent years thinking she hated him, there had been times in the last three years he'd pissed her off so much she'd come this close to walking away from from the difference she'd finally been able to make, but in the end—
In the end, he was her family, the first real family she'd ever had.
"Okay," Raven said. "Okay."
She touched Charles' shoulder again. He groaned, and groaned even louder when she ran her hand down his chest and stomach again.
This time, she didn't stop there.
"Sit up a little more," she said. "This isn't a great angle."
"You don't... don't have to..." He sat up enough for her to slide her hand into his underwear. Her fingers wrapped around him. His dick twitched in her hand, and Charles sobbed again and said, "Please. Oh, God."
"We're not going to talk about this. Not now, not ever." A hand job. It was just a hand job. It wasn't like she'd never done this before. It didn't mean anything, even if this was Charles. Especially if it was Charles. This was applying a tourniquet, splinting a broken leg, whatever she had to do to get everyone out alive. To get her brother out alive. "Got it?"
"I... yes, I..."
Five minutes. She'd forgotten how fucking long this could take. Ten. She was surprised no one had come looking for her yet. They were both lucky Pietro wasn't on this mission, flat on his back with the flu instead, just like Hank. Fifteen. Her hand started to cramp, and she was starting to itch inside her head, a creeping, yawning need.
"You're projecting," she said. "Stop it."
The itching got a little better, but didn't go away completely. That was when she knew for sure that this wasn't working. Ever since she'd agreed to lead the X-Men, he'd been really good about staying out of her head unless he was invited. Whenever he slipped, he stopped as soon as he realized it. But now it was like he'd forgotten a layer of himself inside her—something he never would have done if he wasn't slipping away.
She let go of his dick, stepped back to give herself room to get out of her flight suit. Once she was naked, she went around Charles' wheelchair to stand in front of him. He was hunched over again, looking no less miserable than he had when she'd started.
"Charles," she said. "Charles, look at me."
He looked.
It wasn't the first time she'd ever been naked in front of him. Every other time, he'd always looked at everything but her, like he thought seeing her breasts would make him go blind or something. Now, he still wasn't looking at her breasts. Instead, his eyes were fixed between her legs, his free hand gripping the rim of his wheel, his other hand inside his underwear, jerking himself off again.
"You don't have to," he said. "You... you don't... oh, God."
She leaned down again, to get his trousers and underwear out of the way this time. It wasn't the first time she'd undressed a man. It was more awkward than the other times, only partly because he wasn't with it enough to help her lift his hips.
Raven had had his dick in her hand for a quarter of an hour, but this was the first time she'd seen it—blood-red and stiff, straining back and forth now that it was out in the open.
She climbed into his lap. Charles reached for her as she did, his sweaty hands settling on her waist.
If Raven thought about this any longer, she wasn't going to be able to do it at all. She grabbed his dick again to steady it, lowered herself onto it without any fanfare. Charles groaned, his hands tightening on her waist. There was more of a burn, more stretching than she'd expected; it had been years since she'd had anyone's fingers in her, never mind someone's dick. Who had the time? Not her.
Not that this counted as getting laid. It couldn't count when it was your brother, when he had something in his head that was making him.
Once again, she found a rhythm. It wasn't long until Charles found her breasts, fumbling at them with his hot damp hands. Then he tried to kiss her, and there really wasn't any way to avoid it unless she wanted to fall backward off his chair—
Kissing Charles wasn't what she'd used to imagine it would be, back when it was the two of them, back when she'd thought she was in love with him. It was too messy, too unfocused—even back then, he'd have been smooth, he'd have been experienced. If this was anything like the old Raven's fantasies, it was less like the ones where he agreed to to teach her everything, and more like the others. The ones she'd had in the middle of the night sometimes, when he'd had a wet dream and projected it through the house, and she'd played dead, kept her mind still until she was sure he had to have gone back to sleep. If this was anything more than first aid, it still wasn't sex; if it was anything else, it was masturbation in the dark, her face in the pillow and her hand between her legs, hoping and hoping Charles really had gone back to sleep, that he wouldn't know what she was doing, who she was thinking about while she did it.
He'd been her brother then. He was her brother now. She hadn't thought about him like that in decades, and yet now she realized—she was probably going to come.
She'd no more than thought it before it happened. She clenched around Charles again and again, even as she kept moving, now saying, "Come on, come on, let's get this over with, come on."
Several minutes later, Charles grunted, the lowest sound he'd made so far. He pulled her flush down onto his lap, and finally came.
For a few seconds, they were both still, Raven leaning against Charles' chest, Charles stroking her back. If it hadn't been him, she would have thought it was nice. If they'd had their clothes on, it wouldn't have been so different from the cuddling they hadn't done in twenty-some years.
Then Charles' hands paused against her skin, and began to tremble. The itch inside her head was gone; the sense of Charles in there was retreating, too.
Raven jumped off his lap, started pulling her flight suit back on. More importantly, she started shoving back every thought, every memory and sensation, everything she didn't want Charles to know. She shoved them back, buried them deep, prayed like she hadn't prayed in many years that he hadn't come up in time to catch any of it and that he wouldn't go looking.
"Raven," Charles said. "Oh, my God."
"Don't start," Raven said, and if her hands were shaking a little, too, at least her voice wasn't. "I told you, we're not going to talk about this."
"Raven, I'm so—"
"Don't you dare say you're sorry." If he started with that again...there was a reason she'd stayed away from him for so long. She couldn't stand Charles when he started on how sorry he was. It was too close to begging, and there was nothing that was more likely to make her want to run again.
He'd changed, after Cairo—before it, to be honest. He'd become someone she could actually talk to without feeling like every conversation was actually about how much he missed her. He could be casual around her now, and if he was still freaking out on the inside, at least she didn't have to know about it. If he fell apart about this, blaming himself, groveling for her forgiveness when she was the person who'd made the decisions in the first place—there would be no way she could stay.
Charles shut up. Raven kept dressing. Every time she glanced at him, he was a little less red; every time, he was carefully looking at the same place on the wall. At some point, he tucked himself back in and zipped up, which made glancing at him way less hazardous.
She had no idea if he was reading her mind or not, how deep he was looking if he was. In case he was in there, she kept thinking about how much she wanted him to act normal. She didn't let herself think about how she'd liked it. She didn't think about the past, when he'd thought of her as a sister and she'd wanted to think of him as anything but a brother. Most of all, she didn't think about the way it somehow still hurt, though she hadn't even thought about those feelings in years and years—since before Cuba, at least.
Finally, when there was no danger he'd have to look at the breasts he'd been fondling five minutes ago, Charles said, "Very well. No apologies are forthcoming, I assure you."
"Good."
"Is it all right if I thank you for saving my life? Or is that out of bounds as well?"
He'd have done it for her in a heartbeat, Raven knew. Even if it meant she did leave, forever this time—he could be casual with her now, but he'd been pathetic and clingy for too long for her not to know how he felt about her, that he'd have done anything, if it had been her.
There was no way she was saying that.
"Don't think you're special," she said. "I'd have done it for any of the others. And now we're done talking about it."
"Why, of course."
Be normal, be normal. Better yet, change the subject. "So what did you do to that girl to make her blast you, anyway?"
Charles had to know what she was aiming for. He was smart enough to go along with it anyway. "I didn't do anything to her!"
"You didn't do anything, and that's why she went running out of here so fast. I'm buying it."
"I did nothing," Charles protested. "I merely told her not to be frightened, that she'd be safe here—why are you laughing?"
Because they'd fucked less than ten minutes ago, and because some things never changed. "Good going."
"What? What's wrong with that?"
"You can't just corner people and tell them their lives are going to be perfect now. That's not how it works."
"I didn't corner anyone."
"Sure you didn't."
"I only corner people who don't listen the first time, and I only had the chance to tell her once. So there."
"Whatever."
"You shouldn't knock it. You of all people know it's worked for me before..."
"Uh-huh." And that was her cue to go see how everyone else was doing with cleanup, and find out whether or not the police had gotten here yet. The facility they'd broken a dozen mutants out of was located deep in the mountains, more than an hour away from the nearest city. The isolated ones were always the worst, in as many ways as you could count. It could be days before they could get everything straightened out enough to go home, bringing along whichever former prisoners wanted to go with them.
"We should probably send a search party to find her, you know," Charles said, before she could go. "Just to make sure she's all right. It would be easy to get lost out here, especially as panicked as she was..."
"Well, I'm not going," Raven said, though she would if she had to—she didn't even know that girl's name, but that didn't mean they weren't sisters.
"Me neither."
"Yeah, like that was ever going to happen anyway."
"What are you implying?"
"Mostly that you don't stand a chance against the Rockies when you get stuck in holes in your backyard."
Charles laughed. "Fair enough." He chewed his lip, looked like he was about to say something serious and stupid and ruin everything, but then said, "The others are starting to wonder where we've gotten to."
"Let's go, then."
Charles gave her another serious look, and then said, "You're sure we're all right?"
"We're fine." It was probably true. If he would stop bringing it up, so she could stop thinking about it...then it would definitely be true. She was pretty sure. "Come on, let's go."
And so they left the jet together, and went to see how the others were doing.