Chapter Text
The house on Graymalkin, it was said, belonged to witches.
Children would whisper about it to each other as they passed: they’re witches, they’ll get you, they’ll catch you.
The parents weren’t much better. ‘All sorts go on in there,’ they would say, giving each other dark, significant looks. They wouldn’t say anything further than that; then again, they didn’t have to. It was common knowledge: there was something unnatural about 1407 Graymalkin Lane.
Strange things occurred in that house. Odd whispers were carried over in the wind, ghostly figures appeared at windows, eyes would watch you from behind curtains pulled close during the bright light of day … It was a strange, unwelcoming, unnatural place.
Much of that, it was agreed, was down to the children.
The children. The Xavier heirs. It was difficult to even know how many of them there were. Sometimes there looked to be twins; other times, one appeared older than the other, or there were two boys and later, a boy and girl.
In general, it was thought that there were two of them. A girl – a sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued hellion, more like a wild thing than a girl – who was a terror to any mother with a little daughter, a manifestation of the worst possible outcome for their child. Grown-ups would never look at her too closely: if they did then they might have to rationalise the way that her eyes, which a moment ago had been blue, were now green as grass, or how her short, jet black hair was, two minutes later, long and scarlet red.
And as for the boy … well, the boy was, if possible, even more unnerving, with his strange, eerie eyes and his habit of answering your questions before you had even opened your mouth, and the way he seemed to know things that no one let alone a child should know.
The Xaviers, it was clear, were witches, and witches, the stern mothers of Graymalkin Lane told their wide-eyed children, were most definitely to be avoided.
And so it was: the Xavier house became the odd little house at the end of the lane, the one that one Just Didn’t Talk About if it could be helped, with the inhabitants that you Just Didn’t Mix With, even it couldn’t.
It might have been lonely, for the Xavier siblings, had they cared very much.
Luckily, they didn’t.
The Xaviers had always kept themselves aloof from the rest of the neighbourhood, and the children had been brought up to think that this was a perfectly natural state of affairs. The avoidance of their neighbours, therefore, meant very little to them.
They also very much preferred their own company.
Charles Xavier was almost frighteningly self-sufficient and was perfectly happy tucked away in a corner with a book on his own, and Raven Xavier was equally happy to play by herself, running around and whirling about and crawling into every nook and cranny the vast old mansion possessed. Many a day could be spent in this way, and more could be spent together, wrapped around each other, heads bent together, the two of them against the world, with no need for anyone else. Not for their father or mother and certainly not anyone from out there, with their goggling eyes and cruel mouths and silly, stupid ideas.
At least, that’s what they’d both tell the other. If the elder of the two, Charles, ever felt a pang of wistfulness when he looked at the groups of other children playing together then he never spoke of it. Raven, however, always seemed to know when he was feeling such a way and would always emerge from whatever hiding place she had found and would cuddle up to him, wrapping her tiny arms around him, and he in turn would wrap his arms around her and hold her tight.
I’m okay, he would tell her, twining his mind around hers. Don’t worry about me.
And then to distract her he would take her into his mind and show her all of the wonderful things he had dreamt up there: castles and butterflies and dragons and jungles and unicorns and magic and all of the other things that she liked best.
Raven would be filled with wonder and would clap her little blue hands with delight, enraptured by the magic taking place in front of her.
‘Charles,’ she would often ask at such times, sounding breathless. ‘Are we witches?’
Charles’s answer to that question would always be the same. ‘We are not witches, Raven,’ he would tell her reasonably, affectionately, tightening his arms around her. ‘It’s all just science, you know. Our abilities stem from our genes, our DNA, not from spells and sorcery.’
But Raven always merely shrugged, unconvinced and uncaring. ‘It’s practically magic,’ she would say and Charles would shake his head, disapproving, but unable to wholly disagree.