“So….what do you think?” A female voice spoke from the door, causing the man standing in front of the mirror to turn his head and look in her direction.
“The black one….” She asked as she modeled the black spaghetti strapped gown, its cut sticking to and flowing along her voluptuous curves as the scooped neck showed of quite a bit of her generous cleavage.
“Or this one?” She twirled around, her gown changing to an orange strapless creation, a beautiful ruby studded necklace gracing her smooth neck as her flowing flame colored hair kissed her bare shoulders and back.
“I like the blue one,” the man complemented as his steel-hazel eyes caught her yellow ones. Even through the her skin hue, he caught the blush coloring her cheeks.
“I know you do,” she shot back as she turned around to step into the bathroom, her gown once again changing, this time to a embroidered white creation, her hair gaining extra length, while losing some their previous waviness to become straight styled.
“We’ll play ‘Dirty Old Man’ later,” she spoke from across the closed door. “Are you….”
-----
“Raven….Raven…”
“Uh-what?” Hearing her name jarred the woman in question out of her silent musings. Looking up she saw the face of her leader and current lover….Magneto.
“Yes Magneto,” the blue skinned Mystique lifted her hand to her shoulder, covering her lover’s hand with her own.
“You seemed lost,” Magneto’s voice carried a concern that very few people ever heard, not now, not for several years. Not since, the end of Erik Lehnsherr started….with the birth of the Magneto.
“Nothing,” a forceful sigh and Mystique’s cold, calculating exterior was up. “Just thinking.”
“Hmmm,” that explanation was accepted. “Have you given any thought to…?”
“I am sorry Erik,” Mystique lowered her head, her auburn colored locks falling forth and curtaining her sides. “But I cannot help you this time. Not against him….not against Wolverine.”
-----
Earlier,
“Hey Blob,” the mangy looking mutant known as Toad called out from his monitoring post in the control room. “Did you order for a delivery or somethin’. You know how the boss hates it.”
“No man,” the nine hundred pounds plus Fred Dukes, better known as Blob, spoke in a garbled tone, his mouth filled with a humungous bite of the two foot long sub he was currently munching on. “It wasn’t me.”
“Then who could it…” Mortimer Toynbee aka Toad’s words were lost as the pizza-boy lifted his free hand to the hidden keypad situated next to the front door. Seconds later, the door opened. Not only that, but the entire base’s security system went into passive mode towards the newcomer.
“Its her,” Toad leapt of the table at the deep voice. Blessed with some sort of a skittish personality, he was often the target of practical jokes for the rest of his teammates, something which even the naturally scary Magneto seemed to partake in. “Its Raven.”
--
Within a minute, the door of the inner sanctum of the Brotherhood of Mutants’ base opened and the pizza-boy who was in fact a girl stepped through, a soft smile playing on her lips as she started to change into her natural form….starting with the yellows of her eyes.
“Hello my love,” she greeted as the transformation advanced to her hair.
“Mystique,” Magneto’s all business tone and helmet hid the twinkling of his eyes and the smile beginning on his lips.
“The eyes may be fooled by a woman’s disguise…” Mystique began crooning, her shift into her natural form almost complete. “….but the heart never fails to recognize.”
“Do you have to go through this routine every time you two see each other?” Commented the man standing just behind Mystique.
“Shut up Forge,” Magneto’s bark silenced him instantly. Nodding meekly, Forge, the mutant with the power of genius, able to make anything…well mechanical, slithered off to the control room. He had been assigned to Mystique by Magneto to assist her in her covert missions for the Brotherhood. It was one such mission that he had been on, when the emergency call to return came in from the Big-M himself. One word from the big cheese, well from Forge’s point of view at least, and Mystique dropped everything and ran like a lovesick puppy to her master.
--
‘I used to be that way,’ he remembered a time when someone had caught his eye too. ‘Too bad it didn’t work out,’ he mused further. ‘I coulda shown that Ororo Monroe a thing or two. But noooo, she had to be an X-Man, help the world, until mutants and mankind…..had to keep herself safe for someone special.’ He gritted his teeth at the memory of a teenaged Ororo turning him down.
Both she and him, they had just arrived at the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters and were being shown the ropes by the cripple. Forge hadn’t been impressed at all by the whole idealist outlook which Xavier seemed to carry around and which Ororo adopted almost instantly, helped…brainwashed no doubt by the three stooges, Jean, Scott and Warren.
Deciding not to stay on in the school and strike out on his own, using his mutant power to make money, Forge had approached the African Sex-bot and awarded her the chance…the opportunity of a lifetime, to join him in his great, rich destiny.
“You give me what I want and I’ll make you a real queen, a real Goddess,” he had offered her.
“Give you what you want?” Ororo had arched an eyebrow at him, making him think that maybe the tribal bimbo didn’t understand English too well.
“You know baby,” he reached up and laid a hand on her shoulder, slowly sliding it down. “Gimmie some sugar or whatever they say in your jungle tongue. Roll in the hay, horizontal mambo, ugga-bugga, whatever.”
Stepping back to make some space between her and him, Ororo crossed her arms at her chest. Although still new to the Western world, she had discerned what *sugar* Forge was talking about. Forcing down her first instinct to fry his metal leg, she decided to try out what the Professor had taught them… try to handle matters by talking. Fighting only leads to sorrow and destruction.
“I am sorry, but I cannot,” she shook her head. “I don’t think of you in that way, and even if I did, it is not possible for me to do so.”
“Why babe, the plumbing not ok,” he pointed to her waist. “You don’t have a dick, do you? Don’t worry, I’ll make do with the other hole. You know, the one you have between your ass ch…Aaaggghhh,” any further words or actions were lost as a solid lightening bolt lit up his circuits, overloading them until they burst.
“I had heard of men like you.” It was no longer Ororo who was speaking. She had been replaced by the Windrider, Goddess of the Storm. “I tried to reason with you, but it seems people like you do not understand the spoken word. They have to be….”
**Storm** Xavier’s mental boom caused her to lose her concentration…but only for a moment.
**Stay out of this Professor** The teenager lashed out, both because he was an older authority figure, and because she was not used to taking orders from anyone.
**Storm…Ororo** The telepath adopted a more calm tone. **I know what Forge has said has angered you, but damaging him won’t serve to remove his ignorance. All you are doing right now is maybe killing him** That particular line was a stroke of genius on Xavier’s part. Ororo had vowed never to take a life, not even that of scumbags like the one frying before her.
The next instant, the storm ended…..and at the same time ended Forge’s stay at Xavier’s.
--
Lost in his thoughts Forge missed out on Magneto’s revelation of the upcoming mission to Mystique and her unexpected and seemingly impossible denial to go on it.
Luckily for Magneto, no one else had heard it either, nor had anyone paid much attention when he stormed away towards his private suite, with Mystique silently following him. ‘Just going to get one for the road,’ had been the general consensus.
----
Present,
“I am sorry Erik, but I cannot do this,” Mystique repeated once again. “Please don’t ask me to do this. I can’t.”
“Raven,” Magneto had tried both the soft, lover and hard, leader approach and neither had worked. The usually enthusiastic to do anything against anyone Mystique was not only denying but closing off…right before his eyes.
At her silence, he sighed, mentally calculating whom else he would have to take in her place, before finally asking just one question. “Why?”
After a few seconds of silence, Mystique started. “The man, mutant known as Wolverine aka Logan aka Weapon X….and me, we used to…work together.”
“Work together?” Magneto repeated, his brow crinkling at the hidden message in her words. “What do you mean? When? Where?”
“In SHIELD, about fifteen years ago,” was the answer. It didn’t surprise Magneto all that much. He knew that his younger lover was maybe in fact as old or even older than he was. He also knew that she had spent some time as an operative for SHIELD. What he didn’t know was that Wolverine had no only worked for SHIELD but worked alongside Mystique. They were teammates….and from the look on her face and her concrete denial to go against him, maybe even more.
“And?” He asked, expecting her to go on, which she did.
“Erik,” Mystique looked up at him. “You know I love. I love you more than any other man I have ever loved before…..”
“….except him,” Magneto gritted out the rest of the sentence.
“No,” Mystique instantly denied that. “More than anyone…even him. But Logan, he was the first man who just didn’t make me feel loved as a woman, only to betray me later. In fact, it was the other way around. It was me who did all that…to him.”
“What do you mean?” Magneto had settled down in front of her, his attention completely on her and he story she was about to tell.
--
“It all started about seventeen years ago….”
With that she started telling him how she had been running away from a mod of angry villagers, who were trying to kill and had even managed to shoot her, her injuries preventing her then less developed powers to help her in changing her shape. What she avoided telling him, hoping that he would take it as another mutant lynching, was why they were after her. They were trying to kill and her newborn ‘demon’ son, whom she had in an act of desperation had through off the edge of a waterfall, his pleading cries striking shards of pain through her heart. Avoiding all that, she straightaway went onto the part where a masked, claw toting Wolverine saved her, slicing open a couple of the attackers before the others ran off for their lives.
“After that, he took me to the hotel he was staying at, dressed my wounds and fed me,” she carried on the explanation. “It was him who brought me into SHIELD. Soon we became partners, and even before that lovers. He had a whole life of memories that had been taken from him by the Weapon X people, from whom SHIELD had rescued him only a couple of years before I came in, and I….I had a lifetime of memories I wanted to forget. We were the perfect couple…..that is until I destroyed it….destroyed us.”
Seeing a side of Raven that he had never seen before and becoming privy to a part of her life that he knew she had closed off, silenced Magneto as he waited for her to carry on.
“Two and a half years after I joined, they rescued another of Weapon X’s subjects from one of their labs,” she emphasized the word rescued. “His name was Victor Creed….Sabertooth.”
“Sabertooth!” That got an exclamation out of Magneto. He had never known that Sabertooth could be a secret agent…not with his rage and his lust for killing and torture. He was more of a serial killer than a specialized killer, an assassin.
“Yes,” Mystique seemed to grow cold yet again. “Wolverine and him, they never got along, not from day one. According to Wolverine, Sabertooth had not been a subject but a willing participant, and had been in charge of dealing out special treatment…torturing several of the experiment subjects, including him. They only tried to work on him when he started going overboard and taking his tortures to such an extent that the subjects started dying. They moved him from place to place, until the time SHIELD found him.”
“But, what does it have to do with you?” Magneto was really interested now. He had decided that he would take his human-mothered progeny the worthless Quicksilver and his slightly better sister, Scarlet Witch with him. Hopefully they wouldn’t botch it up.
“Wolverine was away on a mission…” Mystique sighed dejectedly. She was coming to the end of her story…at least the one she was telling to Magneto. “…when I made a mistake that sounded the death knell for both our partnership and our relationship as lovers. I slept with Creed.”
Magneto did not say anything. He knew that Mystique and Sabertooth had been lovers at one time, a fact that Sabertooth used often to taunt her, that is until Magneto suggested that he stop, unless he wanted to loose the Admantium coating his claws. It was before Mystique became intimate with his private suite, his bed…him.
“Knowing Wolverine, I knew that no matter how hard I tried, he would smell it out. That is if Creed didn’t throw it in his face first.” Magneto knew about Wolverine’s enhanced senses. They were similar to Sabertooth’s. “I thought I would be able to assuage him, somehow make it up to him, and I am sure I would have. I am sure he would have forgiven me….had what happened next, not happened.”
“What?”
“I got pregnant…and even before I knew both he and the father detected it.” The way Mystique spat out the word father left no doubt, as to who the father of that child was. “I knew then that whatever chance I might have had was lost with that. I think, had it been anyone else’s child, Logan might have accepted it…..even cared of it and brought it up as his own, but not Sabertooth’s. As soon as he came to know, he left….left not only our room, but left SHIELD, disappearing completely. After that, I left too. I didn’t go after him. I knew that if he didn’t want to be found, he wouldn’t. So, I tried out on my own, going into freelance work….until I met you,” she ended, grasping the hand lying on her thigh.
“And the child…” Magneto had to question.
“Oh, that,” she flipped her hand. “Lost it. Miscarried the thing. Pained like hell, but I got better.”
“And you’ve never met Wolverine again?” Was Magneto’s next question. He still couldn’t get his mind around as to why Mystique didn’t want to confront him. It couldn’t be just because of what happened all those years ago. Could it? ‘What about what happened to your parents?’ A part of him piped up. ‘Did you just forget how they were tortured….murdered? Have you forgiven?’
“Just once, few years back,” Mystique answered. “Funny thing, it was he who detected me first. Still remembered my scent. I’ve got to tell you, for a man who has no memory of his past; he sure keeps everything he has now.”
Her story ended, she once again expressed her regret at not being able to take the mission…said she owed it to him.
As Magneto departed from the room, she stood up and walked to the windows….the one facing North.
‘He doesn’t need to know about that,’ she thought to herself, once again burying the main reason for her not going up against Wolverine. It was a secret, buried so deep that even she almost never thought about it.
It was a secret from seventeen years ago…a secret that right now, was somewhere deep in the Canadian wilderness. A secret that Wolverine had saved from death…just as he had saved her.
It was her son….Kurt.
-----
At the same time, at the X-Mansion, Salem Center, New York,
“Whatcha lookin’ at?” Jubilee spoke between chomps as she settled down next to her sister. At getting no answer, she followed her line of sight to the greenhouse, where a white and blue clad Ororo was busy working her garden. “Laura….”
“Don’t,” X23 grunted angrily, her eyes never leaving Ororo. “Don’t call me that….not here.”
Sighing at the still somewhat people shy X23, Laura X or Laura Logan to the people who knew her and more importantly the people she knew, Jubilee adopted a silent vigil by her side.
-SNIKT- - SNIKT-
The claws popped out, only to return a second later.
Jubilee knew….or could guess what was going through the other girl’s mind.
“X...” she kept her hands to herself, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Don’t do anything ok….we don’t hurt or kill anyone.”
Getting a nod from X23, Jubilee amended herself.
“At least not until Wolvie gives us the green signal.”
Note: New characters introduced and their descriptions (In order of mention/appearance)
Raven Darkholme (Mystique): Mentioned in the last chapter, Mystique was fully revealed in this one. Although physically she is from the Ultimateverse, and so is her relationship with Magneto, her past is a mixture of House of M, normal Marvel timeline and a few twists of my own. While in the normal 616 timeline, her pregnancy from Sabertooth gave rise to Graydon Creed, in this fic. she miscarried. As for the other differences, they are clear enough. This Mystique is a little different from the one I usually write. Although she is as hard as nails and cold as ice, she does have some…well a couple…uh, one redeeming quality. (Age: Unknown….in lieu of her mutation)
Fred Dukes (Blob): Mostly from comics (both 616 n’ Ultimate) with a little of Evolution thrown in. (Age: Mid twenties…24-27)
Mortimer Toynbee (Toad): Similar to Blob, except this one has more of Evo-verse and less of Uncanny. (Age: Early twenties…..22-24)
Forge: As he is with the Brotherhood, the inspiration obviously comes from the Ultimate X-Men. However, as you have read, he does have a past with the X-Men, although not a good one. (Age: Mid twenties….24-26)
Special introduction,
Kurt Wagner (Nightcrawler): Physically and attitude inspired by Evolution cartoon series. However, instead of the Xavier, it is Wolverine, who got hold of him first, as clear by the three *probables* Xavier mentioned in the second chapter (Da Big Easy). More on this character soon. (Age: Given Mystique’s story….approximately seventeen years old)
Spoiler and other information: The starting scene is between Mystique and Wolverine and is from Wolverine #33 (House of M tie-in – 1 of 3)
The Mystique-Magneto meeting is from Ultimate X-Men #64. (Magnetic North – 4 of 5) So is Forge’s comment.
[Reviews - 107]
-
Table of Contents [Report This]
Chapter or Story |
Chapter or Story |
Chapter or Story |
Has been viewed 1208 times
- Text Size +
-
Table of Contents [Report This]
Chapter or Story | Chapter or Story | Chapter or Story | - Text Size +
You must login () to review.
