Read My Mind ↳ charles xavier

8. The Last Night

"It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile crossing the embargo line that surrounds Cuba as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union..."

We watch the president make his speech on the television, and I am beginning to fully understand what is happening.

"That's where we're gonna find Shaw," Erik says, standing near the couch where the rest of us sit.

"How do you know?" Alex asks.

"Two superpowers facing off and he wants to start World War III," Charles says from beside me, "he won't leave anything to chance."

"So much for diplomacy," Erik comments, "I suggest you all get a good night's sleep."

•••

What with only one night left here at the mansion, I decide to go talk to Raven. I find her room easily as her thoughts are like a beacon. I stop in front of the door before knocking three times.

"Come in." I reluctantly open the door and step inside the room, taking in the surroundings. It looks similar to my room, with a fireplace accompanied by two tan chairs, plants in the corner of the room, the bed made nicely. Raven is wearing her bathrobe.

"Hey," I greet. She smiles a little as she acknowledges my presence. Thank god, she doesn't seem to mad at me. "I just came here to apologize. I should've told you I was a mutant before." She furrows her eyebrows and waves her hand.

"It's okay," Raven says, and I tilt my head to the side. "I mean, I didn't tell you either, so I really have no right to be mad at you." Something doesn't seem right. Raven is acting strangely; she seems sad. I furrow my eyebrows and turn my head, noticing an open box on the small table in front of the fireplace.

Before Raven can stop me, I step forward and take a look inside the box. There is a needle inside, filled about a third of the way with some kind of green liquid. "What's this?" I ask, touching the needle. Obviously, there was originally two in the box, but one is now missing.

"Something Hank made," she answers, fluffing her pillow and avoiding my eye contact. "It's supposed to control our appearance."

"Appearance?" I question. What's she talking about? She looks fine to me.

With a pause followed by a strange, almost clicking sound, Raven's skin, hair, and eyes change. Her eyes have turned a bright yellow, her skin a scaly blue, and her hair a vibrant red.

"Hank designed the serum to control this, and the way his feet look," she explains, though I don't know what she means by the way his feet look. However, I don't ask.

"And...you changed your mind?" I ask, trying to put the pieces together. I imagine Hank was here before me and explained this to Raven, but at the last minute, she changed her mind. So he left, taking the serum with him.

Raven sighs and finally turns to me. "We shouldn't have to hide, Blake. We shouldn't try to fit into society." My blank stare is what caused her to stop talking. "Never mind, you wouldn't understand."

"Excuse me?"

"You're a mind reader, like Charles," she explains. "You don't have to worry about this." I look at the floor in silence and think about the odd feathery things protruding from my back. She's wrong. I do have to hide.

"Yes, I do," I mutter, entirely accidentally. At hearing this, the still-blue girl turns to me again, this time in confusion. I reluctantly shed the tan trench coat around my shoulders, letting it fall to the floor to reveal my now clean and pearly white wings. I cleaned them up a bit as I realized I will probably be stuck with them forever.

Raven's eyes widen. None of us speak for the longest time, as she is speechless and I am slightly embarrassed.

"You're beautiful," she says finally, voice barely above a whisper as she eyes my wings carefully. Involuntarily, they fold up, as if to hide behind my back from the eyes that are trained on them. Raven's response is her eyebrows furrowing.

"Sorry. It's like they have a mind of their own."

•••

Later that night, when it's still early enough to be awake, I find Erik and Charles playing checkers downstairs and call next game.

"We're actually finished," Erik says, tone of voice indicating that the two of them just had a not-so-nice conversation. I'm weary of my movements as I sit down across from Charles and look at him in confusion.

When asking the telepath about it, he surprisingly explains it to me while making his first move.

"Shaw has declared war on mankind, on all of us," he says, "he has to be stopped. But Erik doesn't want to stop Shaw, he wants to kill him."

"And that's a problem?" I ask, moving one of the pieces randomly across the board. I've never even played this game, but I don't think that really matters now. Charles looks at me in confusion, so I explain myself. "Tomorrow, mankind will know that mutants exist. Shaw, us, they won't differentiate. They'll fear us, and that fear will turn to hatred."

"Not if we stop a war," Charles argues, furrowing his eyebrows in the cutest way that almost makes me forget what I'm saying. "Not if we can prevent Shaw, not if we risk our lives doing so."

"Would they do the same for us?" I ask.

"We have it in us to be the better men."

"We already are," I say, "we're the next stage of human evolution. And after tomorrow, they will turn on us. But you're blind to it, because you think they're all like Moira."

"And you believe they're all like Shaw. You and Erik, both. But killing Shaw will not bring him peace." I cock my head and quirk a little smile with the shrug of my shoulders.

"Was peace ever really an option?"