Repose
v. to lay to rest; to lie or be at rest
n. peace; tranquility; calm

"Mystique, I didn't expect to see you,"

She's not Mystique any longer, Raven grits her teeth behind a snarl as she glares the glass windows of Erik's prison. She's not Mystique any more than Erik is Magneto, but it's a small victory but Mystique will take what she can get.

"I need to know," She says, her voice is short and clipped. Raven refuses to be deviated from her purpose. Erik is baiting her and she won't fall for that. She won't be fooled, not again.

"Need to know what?" Erik asks, mildly. He's toying with a chess piece in her hand. The seat across from him looks empty.

"You were there," She says, refusing to play coy. Erik knows, he doesn't need telepathy to know what she's asking about.

"Do you deserve to know?" Erik asks her, "You've hardly seen him at all in the past decades."

She's silent. She's not even sure why she's here, perhaps because Erik's the last link she has to Charles. The only witness, besides that crazy Phoenix, to Charles' last moments. But she's not mourning the death of Professor X. She's mourning Charles. She is mourning the man who got drunk and hit on co-eds, who smiled and laughed, who ran marathons; the one who would read her his thesis so she could fall asleep.

The little boy who saved a little blue girl.

She gave up Raven to be Mystique, for Erik, and when Mystique was gone and only Raven remained he threw her away; a tiger turned house cat and left on the streets. She wonders if the choices she's made have led her here, estranged from the only family she had ever known and discarded by the family she had chosen. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but she realizes that she would never have chosen any differently. She would have still taken Magneto's hand.

But perhaps she would have held tight to Charles' too.

He's not going to tell her. She can see it in his face; all those years standing by his side worth something after all. He's going to keep that memory to himself, hoard it, and store it away like he could never keep Charles. She knows, she's not oblivious, she's always known what lay between her brother and her leader.

"Maybe not," She replies, and her bitterness and anger are evident in her tone, but so is the triumph. She can do one thing that Erik will never be able to do, never so long as he held within the white walls of his prison (and they will never let him out).

"But I can visit him," She says, "I can go and stand above his grave, which is something you can never do, Erik."

She whirls away, and she knows that no matter how much Erik denies that that is anything significant. Although he will say that Charles is not really beneath the earth, that there is no body, that nothing within the coffin means there is no worth in a patch of land; there is one thing that he will never admit aloud.

And that is, that Erik wants this too.

So at the end of what they began in 1962, Erik has something of Charles that Raven will never have, and Raven has something that Erik will never have. It's as bitter a triumph as seeing Magneto become Erik with the prick of a needle.

But Raven will take what she can get.

A/N: May also be posted to tumblr. Thanks for reading!