He's been recovering for three weeks when Raven pokes her head into his room and says, "I have a surprise for you!"
"Really? How lovely," Charles manages—though he actually hates surprises. They're never very surprising, not when the person responsible for them will surely have been projecting their anticipation for days beforehand. Yet people still get so agitated when Charles asks them what's going on before they're ready to admit they're trying to surprise him (much less reveal what the surprise actually is). And God forbid he should snoop around in anyone's head to figure out just what, exactly, the surprise is meant to be; that kind of thing would be enough to make small children cry, or (more relevantly) Raven yell at him. "I had no idea."
"Uh-huh. I definitely believe that," Raven says.
Charles is spared the effort of thinking up a comeback when she walks into the room, blue and thankfully clothed, holding something yellow, white, and wiggling.
"What is this?" Charles asks, as Raven comes over to the bed and deposits said yellow, wiggly creature into his arms.
"It's a corgi," Raven says. "Isn't she cute? You can consider her an early Christmas present. Or, you know, a late birthday gift. Whatever."
"It's a puppy." The puppy in question twists around and launches herself at his face, all the better to lick him. Charles has always been of the impression that, as a general rule, puppies have very large paws relative to the rest of them; this one, however, seems to have inherited the largest dog ears in existence, absurd things that poke out at odd angles to her head. Additionally, she doesn't have much of a tail, just a little nub, and when she tries to wag it, her entire back end wiggles instead. "What in the world possessed you to bring home a puppy? What made you think I wanted a puppy? I don't even like dogs!"
Raven rolls her eyes. "Yeah, right. Try that one again."
Well, all right: Charles does like dogs. He usually stops to pet at least one dog every time they go somewhere; where he used to bend down to pet dogs, now he tries to convince the larger ones to put their front feet in his lap to make his acquaintance (much to the occasional annoyance of their owner). Dogs, and more importantly dog minds, are straightforward. If a dog likes a person, he will show it. If he doesn't, he'll show that. Charles has never had to have a conversation with a dog that disliked him but pretended otherwise.
Dogs are also covered in fur, warm, and nice in general.
"Or. Well. Just because I like dogs doesn't mean I want one of my own." Charles isn't at all sure how convincing this statement is. It's hard to be stern while half his attention is on a puppy.
Raven climbs into Erik's side of the bed, all the better to reach over and pet the puppy. "I thought you could use the company."
She's not talking about the way he's been stuck in his room for most of the day lately, still recovering from a bout of pneumonia. She and Erik are leaving on a recruitment trip the day after tomorrow, the first one Charles won't be able to go on himself. He wants to go, of course, but it's completely out of the question. If he's too tired to transfer over to his chair for more than an hour at a time, he's too tired to sit in a car for eight hours a day. If he's too tired to sit in a car, he's far, far too tired to do a wheelie up onto a curb at the end of the day, or manipulate strangers' perceptions so they won't notice Erik levitating the chair up multiple steps.
"Raven," and he means to go on to say he's not worried they won't come back to him, hasn't truly worried about that for years; he knows her heart, and Erik's, and she didn't need to do anything to convince him. But he really is very tired, too tired to argue, not to mention a little bit in love already, so instead he says, "Thank you." As the puppy starts gnawing on his index finger, he adds, "I suppose."
"Before you start freaking out about it, Erik knows about her already. I even made him come with me to help me pick her out," Raven says.
As the puppy continues to happily lick him, Charles tries and fails to imagine Erik choosing a puppy this mouthy. Erik isn't big on overt emotional displays. Nor is he big on licking. Charles licked him once on an impulse, and Erik refused to speak to him for the next three days. For a man who can be so matter-of-fact and gruffly kind about situations such as the occasional catheter leakage in bed, he certainly did have a hissy fit over a little saliva on his cheek.
But maybe puppies are a different story. "Erik picked this one?"
"Nope. He wanted to get one of her sisters because he thought he was the 'least insipid,' or something like that, but she wouldn't even come to us. Every time I tried to pet her, she would run away." She ruffles the fur on Charles' puppy's head. "This one kept trying to get our attention, then sat on my foot. She wanted to come home with us."
"I doubt her thought process went quite that far," Charles says. He hasn't found that most dogs are all that bright.
"So, what are you going to name her?"
Charles says the first thing that comes to mind: "Sally."
Raven makes a face. "You can do better than that. How about Hermione?"
"I like Sally."
"Okay, how about Charlotte?"
"I'm not naming her after myself!"
Raven rolls her eyes. "How about Elizabeth?"
"It's a dog, not the Queen of England. Good lord."
"I'm trying to think of the kinds of names you'd like," Raven says. "Boring, old-fashioned English names, you know."
"Sally is an English name. It's a diminutive of Sarah, which isn't. It means 'princess,'" Charles says, trying (and, he suspects, failing) not to come across as stuffy or boring.
"Oh, fine. I guess that's sweet," says Raven.
"Yes. Well. I'm sure the children will like her. She'll be quite popular around here, really."
"Oh, sure," Raven says, looking amused. "Well, I'm going to go get all her stuff. I think we bought out half the pet store."
While she's gone, Charles makes Sally's acquaintance a bit more, amused to find himself discussing things with her in an excited, high-pitched voice, much the same as he would with a baby. At one point, she yips at him, runs around in circles on the bed for a minute, tugs at a corner of the sheet, then comes back to chew on his hand some more. He wonders if she's teething.
He then tries to read her mind. She likes him, which he expected, but he still can't help responding to that by liking her a bit more than he already did.
When Raven returns, arms full of items such as tug toys, tennis balls, and stainless steel dog bowls, Charles says, "I hope you bought a leash. She needs to urinate. Someone should take her out."
"And that someone must be me, huh," Raven says, looking slightly less enthused about this whole thing now that it's occurring to her who, exactly, is going to get stuck taking the puppy out every couple hours for the next two days, and who is going to resume doing it upon her return, at least until Charles is feeling a bit better (and, if Charles has his way, until she is pretty well house trained already).
"Oh, yes," Charles says, scratching Sally behind the ear and trying to think of who he should rope into doing it for him while she's gone. Hank, probably. "This was your brilliant idea, after all."