"Teach me how count in English," Azazel asked Kurt, folding his lanky frame down onto the couch beside Raven and Kurt and haling the boy into his lap.

Raven recognized the question as being fictitious; Azazel's grasp of English might not have been entirely flawless, but certainly he could count much higher than the three-year old. But he often posited questions to the boy in this way: I don't know how. Show me.

It was a good tactic to use with Kurt, who was so eager to be helpful but desperately shy, and Raven wondered how Azazel had come up with it. Something he'd learned during his brief formative years in a top-secret Soviet "orphanage," maybe?

In any case, it worked now… or at least, right up until Kurt ran out of fingers and found himself stuck on what came after six.

"I don't have enough…" Kurt said, looking down at his hands.

"You have the right number for you," Azazel said, easily, without the slightest hesitation.

Raven was grateful - and a little jealous - that Azazel could field the problem that easily. When Kurt said things like that to her - asked why there were no blue people on the TV, or why he was the only one in the house with fur, why his eyes were different from everyone else's eyes - Raven had trouble answering without letting anger or hurt come into her voice, and she was very worried that Kurt would believe that these bad feelings were directed at him.

How could you explain your own insecurities, your own fear and rage at a world that punished difference, to someone that small and innocent? It was entirely impossible, and not only because she didn't want Kurt to understand that type of pain.

But Azazel spoke with the confidence of someone who'd never doubted that it was good - best, even - to be a Mutant. And then he moved seamlessly to a new question. "What else can we count?"

"Toes?" Kurt suggested tentatively, wiggling his.

"Da, good!" Azazel told him, beaming as though he found this idea to be brilliant. "How many all together?"

And so it went.