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On the morning that Erik left, Raven saw it through her window. It was a window just like the window of her childhood, in a room just like the one Charles had given her, but she knew, even as her eyes fell to the deceptively familiar whorls in the stained wood, that it was all new. After the destruction of the old house, there was hardly anything left that was the same.
And so had she been remade since those years growing up. Maybe she looked the same, but life had changed her. Yet here she was.
When Erik left, she almost left with him, to deal Charles the two losses at once, which she had always hoped had been better for him than one and then the other. But when she could no longer see Erik in the thin light of morning, she yet remained.
She did not expect to see Charles in the foyer when she crept down the stairs. Charles' students were still asleep in their new beds, and he usually spent the mornings preparing for the day in his study. But today their paths crossed before sun-up, and she could see already that his eyes were shining, but not with grief.
*****
"Let's practice outside," said Raven. "We can test your range."
"Sure," said Scott, "just point me in the direction of his second favorite tree. Maybe one with a tire swing."
Raven smirked, already leading him out. If she was going to teach, she expected compliance. "Charles doesn't have a favorite tree."
Behind her, Scott sighed, but he was following closely. "Not anymore."
"Don't worry about it," she said. "He probably hasn't even seen the edge of his own property. Nothing sacred there."
But the distance they were putting behind them wasn't entirely for Scott's sake. While Charles' protegee, Jean Grey, was primarily using Charles' memory to rebuild the mansion with Erik's support, they had all more or less agreed to supply an anonymous fount of mental details to fill in the blanks for her.
But Raven knew the mansion at a different time, in almost an entirely different place, growing up. Her memories were all but signed with her name, and even if Jean could still reach her out here, Raven at least felt as though she were stepping out of the searchlight. The trees grew denser as they walked, as they left the path, and Raven breathed more easily.
"Where are we going?" asked Scott, though to his credit he'd kept quiet for the last mile and a half.
"There's a river," said Raven, but within another few steps it was audible, and in another few yards they crested over a steep embankment so that it was visible below them.
She nodded down its length to the south, where it cut a swath through the trees and the shale to create an avenue much longer--and emptier--than anything in or around the house. "You can let loose down that way. Try to hit the water as far away as you can. The spray should make it pretty visible."
He carefully stepped forward, and she back, and lifted his hand to the visor. He let out a pulse, struck a bank, let out another, and clipped a tree. She watched him set his jaw with disapproval though she had said nothing, and he shifted and settled before trying again. This time a distant stretch of water burst out of its course, vaporizing on contact. His lips thinned--he wanted to smile, but he restrained himself.
"Good," said Raven, acknowledging it for him. "Now try again, sustained. Follow the curve."
He nodded with renewed confidence and lifted his hand to his visor again. This time the job went more poorly. His aim started true, but the clod of earth under him gave way, and Raven ducked down to catch him before he could slip down the embankment. Slabs of rock, shorn by his beam from the opposite bank, slid down and toppled, splashing into the river bed and sending shudders through the ground under their feet. The rushing water pooled behind the rock fragments, then went around, on its way to carving out a new angle on the landscape.
"Are you all right?" she said, though as she released him on firmer ground she could see his only injury was his embarrassment. "Don't worry about it. That's why we came out here."
He nodded, and shook out his shoulders, testing the ground and stamping it to be sure. "Yeah. OK."
Raven focused again down the length of the river, anticipating the next impact and ready to track its path. Instead, Scott dropped his hand from his visor.
"Are those bones over there?"
*****
Raven insisted on finishing the lesson, partially to give herself time to mull over this discovery. If those slender shapes poking out of the revealed rock face were what she thought they might possibly be, Charles would be insufferable. It'd been years since she'd been made to listen to his obsession, in no small part because she'd been gone. Had he finally laid it to rest, or had it got worse over those years with no one around but Hank, and nothing to do but talk?
But as Raven made the final approach to Charles' study, she found she wasn't dreading the announcement. In fact she was suddenly a little giddy over it. Charles would be thrilled, and much as she fought for her independence she loved him, and she wanted him to be happy. And she was not often the bearer of good news. Without the hesitation she'd been imagining, she knocked on the partially-open door.
"Raven," he said, smiling from his desk and closing the book from which he'd been taking notes. The gesture was a far cry from his college days, when the books came before her, always. "What can I help you with?"
"There's something I think you'd like to see," she said, trying to suppress her smile, but actually failing. "Along the river."
He was not taken by the mystery. He pursed his lips in a frown. "I'm afraid it would be a bit of an ordeal for me to get there. What is it?"
"Well," she stalled, rearranging her plan, "Scott accidentally sliced through some rock--"
"Is he all right? Are you all right?"
"Yeah, Charles, we're fine. I'm trying to tell you there were bones in it." That sounded suddenly very morbid, so she hurriedly spoiled the surprise. "I think they're dinosaur bones."
His expression remained almost politely interested. "Trilobites? Little lobster things?"
"No, bigger. Ribs and things. I don't know."
"More recent, then. Pleistocene, probably. Maybe a mastodon!" But his smile was yet subdued, as though this were her special interest he were entertaining, and not his. "I'll have Hank take the students around for a nature walk to see the site. But if you could," he said, selecting a business card from its holder and scribbling something down, "please contact our state paleontologist. It should be excavated."
She took the note from him and glanced at the name and number with some bewilderment. "Don't you want to do this?"
"I'm really just swamped, Raven, I hope you don't mind--"
"Yeah, no problem." She smiled curtly. "I'll get right on it."
She hadn't meant to be so short with him as she left. But Charles' indifference had been the last thing she'd expected, right after her own disappointment in it.
At the phone in the hall, she looked over the name and number again. Who else kept their state paleontologist's contact information in arm's reach?
*****
Though Hank and a number of students were hanging around on site at most hours of the day, it was Raven who had called, and Raven who received the honor of dealing with the paleontologist. As Charles had done with her, Raven feigned the appropriate level of interest as the paleontologist, a short woman with wavy blond hair wearing boots and a wide-brimmed hat, introduced herself. She was flushed with excitement. "Do you know what you've got here?"
"No idea," answered Raven, still smiling. "Mastodon?"
"That's what we thought at first when you called. The only vertebrate prehistoric fossils ever found in New York are from the Pleistocene--Ice Age stuff. But look."
Wearily, Raven followed her to the exposed rock face. Up close she had to admit the bones had a distinct visual texture that was tempting to touch, though she didn't. The paleontologist pointed to a bit of structure that Raven couldn't really make out until the woman outlined it with her finger. "That's the skull."
"It looks like an ostrich or something."
"Exactly." The woman was beaming at her by now. "We can't tell for sure yet, but we think it's an ornithomimosaur type. Late Cretaceous."
Raven didn't catch much beyond the -osaur. "So this is--"
"The first vertebrate dinosaur found in the state of New York."
I fucking knew it, thought Raven. Now would Charles be interested?
Though she'd said nothing, the paleontologist went on. "On the whole, New York doesn't have the kind of sediment deposits to support this kind of geologic record. We knew dinosaurs had been here--there are preserved footprints in Rockland County--but we never had their remains until now."
"Fascinating," said Raven, though all she could think about now was telling Charles. The paleontologist apparently thought the same as she glanced at the gathered students.
"Is Dr. Xavier not well enough to come out? I'd actually been hoping to meet him."
Raven lifted a brow. "I guess he's a bit of a homebody."
"He's currently our longest standing donor, did you know that? We'd hardly have the paleontology program we do without him. But it's probably too much of a hike for an elderly gentleman to make."
Raven snorted before she could stop herself, then coughed. Of course--Charles had probably been making that donation to the New York State Museum in his own name since he was four years old. Of course he'd be assumed to be elderly now.
"Sorry," Raven said, waving vaguely at the trees. "Allergies. I'll tell Old Man Xavier everything."
*****
"First in New York?" said Charles, hardly lifting his eyes from the papers in front of him. "Outstanding. Do you think Hank's syllabus is a little too intense for fifth-graders?"
"I don't know, Charles. But I do know that when somebody tells you there's a dinosaur in your backyard you should be a little more enthusiastic about it."
Charles sat back and frowned, looking her over with the first real seriousness since she bounded into his study to give him the news. "You're angry."
"I'm not--" She stopped, and she shook her head briefly, looking away to his shelves of books to level her thoughts. "OK, I'm angry. Twenty years ago you wouldn't shut up about this kind of stuff and now you're acting like I don't know this about you. I know I've been gone a long time--I won't apologize for that--but we're not strangers. OK? I don't want to be strangers. What happened?"
He gazed at her for a moment before he sat forward in his chair and folded his hands on the desk and its many papers. She sat down noisily in the chair across from him, but she settled to match his quiet mood, to listen as he spoke softly to her, in her confidence.
"It means the world to me that you remember," he said, and she could see in his eyes that it meant still more than that. "But you are more important. Erik is more important. My students are more important. I can't give myself to these flights of fancy when there is other work to be done, people who need my attention more than old fossils. They don't need me. People do."
"It's not just fancy," she said. "It's actually there this time. You should at least go see it. We've got that four-wheeler somewhere."
He smiled at her, though it was only halfway. "I can't be a child anymore. I was a child for far too long."
She sat back in the chair, unable to stay in his space, unable to share his overwhelming sense of--what? "I think it's sad that you think that," she said. For once she didn't bother wrapping her emotional honesty in anything tougher. It was sad. She was sad about it. That he didn't deserve something nice when it all but fell into his lap.
"There are things far sadder in the world," he said. "I learn about them every day."
What could she say about that? He was right. It was irrelevant--but he was right.
She slowly stood up from the chair. She only needed one last answer before she could drop the whole subject.
"They want to know what you want to do with it."
*****
Erik was already at the site when Raven went to check on it one late evening. There was little likelihood of theft, but curious students could easily be hurt on the unstable descent to the riverbed. After all, that's how the bones were discovered in the first place.
What had already been extracted from the rock was packed away in padded metal containers that shone in the moonlight.
"He said he wants the museum to have it," said Raven. "I thought he would have kept it."
"It wouldn't have been outside of reason to display it here at a learning institution," Erik conceded. "Last time I was here he would have married the first dinosaur he saw."
"Now he won't even talk about it."
They were quiet for a time before Erik spoke again. "It isn't like him to turn his back on something joyful."
"I think he's doing it out of respect," she answered, quietly. "After what happened to you. To Alex. Hell--to Darwin, to Sean. To everyone he has ever wanted to protect. He doesn't have the right to be happy over things like this anymore. He said it's childish. The fancy of his childhood."
Erik turned his head to look at her. He did not seem roused to any particular emotion at her mention of his tragedy, but he was thoughtful. At length he looked to the riverbank again. "Perhaps if he could rebuild his family, he could afford to be childish again. Hank is here. You are here."
"And are you here?"
For a moment, it seemed he would say Yes, but some determination shifted out of his expression.
"I can't stay."
She understood. She understood more than she wanted to admit, but she'd made her decision for now, and she wouldn't challenge it. Not yet.
"I guess we'll never know, then."
*****
The stair creaked beneath her weight. Charles looked up at her from the foyer. "Look," he said.
She came further down. From under the angle of the banister she could see what stood before Charles on a round metal pedestal in the center of the space. She recognized the ostrich-like skull, now contextualized on the neck of the articulated skeleton--a copy wrought delicately in brushed metal.
On the ground floor she circled it. The bird-like creature probably stood about as tall as a man, but it was stooped on its pedestal with its tail lifted and its shoulders low as though inspecting its viewer eye to eye.
But not just any viewer. Its empty gaze rested squarely on someone seated. On Charles.
Charles wiped the moisture from the corners of his eyes.
"Well, it's no T-Rex," said Raven, hoping to make him laugh, and he did laugh.
"It's better," he said. He wheeled himself around to point at the joints of the fossil's legs. "That's one more claw on each foot than it should have," he said to her, with a smile right out of their childhood.
"It's a mutant."