The chess set had started rough, an exercise in shaping metal to his will. He’d coaxed it into classic lines when he gave it as a gift, and warped the pieces into stark modern columns with the wave of a hand when it came back in the mail. Later came an ornate sculpted fantasy to please Mystique, who loved beautiful things, if not chess.
Now he thought of chess in a prison cell, and reshaped the pieces to his liking.
Pyro picked one up a few days later, and yelped, sucking on bleeding fingers.
“What a dangerous game,” Erik said.
Charles taught Jean to waltz, when she was an awkward teenager convinced she’d always be graceless. He remembers the endless count to three, turning her slowly around the conservatory in the golden afternoon sunlight. It’s one of a thousand things he hasn’t forgotten how to do, even if he can’t.
Now Kitty meets his eyes with a laughing plea where he sits at the edge of the crowd; Piotr is bending over her hand seriously and urging her onto the dance floor, and for once she doesn’t want to be taught, she wants to know.
If you’re sure . . .
“Oh, please,” she thinks, and as she steps only a little awkwardly into Piotr’s arms he’s there to guide her and her feet move smoothly; she sways to the rhythm of the music and looks up at Piotr with confidence.
Piotr brushes her forehead with his lips, and there’s something in the accent, the old-world gesture . . . his control falters, but Kitty’s got it now; she’s sweeping steadily across the dance floor, and he smiles.
She ran into him in the halls of the Senate building.
“Dr. Grey,” Senator Kelley said with a smile. He didn’t hold out his hand.
“Senator.”
“Fighting the good fight?”
Jean shrugged.
“I’m just here to speak to some people about mutant rights.”
“Of course.” Kelley started walking again, and Jean paced him.
“You’ve certainly had a change of heart,” she said.
“Well, it happens, Dr. Grey. We all make mistakes. Don’t you think?”
“Absolutely,” Jean said. She waited until the hall around them was empty. “We know,” she said.
Kelley shook his head.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Jean smiled despite herself.
“Is that ‘spin’?”
“That’s the truth, Dr. Grey.”
When they reached the door of his office, he paused, one hand on the doorframe.
“What you think you know,” he said, “I wonder what you’re planning to do about it?”
“I’m not sure,” Jean said.
“You must be pretty happy I’ve had a change of heart.”
“Overjoyed.”
“A shame about what happened on Liberty Island,” Kelley said. Jean looked at him in disbelief. “I’d like an opportunity to talk to the poor, misguided souls involved.”
“I don’t have that kind of pull,” Jean said. “And besides, not a chance.”
“It might help me to understand what people like you really need.”
“Just . . . keep fighting the good fight,” Jean said.
“You know I will,” Kelley said. “Good afternoon, Dr. Grey.”
“Good afternoon,” Jean said, and shook her head as she walked down the hall.
Mondays worry Mystique lately.
If the computer crashes, the coffeemaker dies under his hands, the very floor warps under his feet, whose fault is that? Not Mystique's, as she points out, but she's not quite sure he hears. She walks out when he first raises his voice, and won't come back until he's subsided into silence and grim pacing. By then he'll be willing to accept her arm around his waist, her head on his shoulder.
The radio screams up and down the dial and then dissolves into static. It's the sound of rage. It goes on far too long.
At the time, all Charles cared about was his losing battle against Jason's illusions. But later when the house is quiet he remembers the neural inhibitor and wonders what it would have done to him to live crippled with only five senses, in a world where people looked and sounded but never felt real. He thinks Stryker could have broken him with that alone eventually, enough to welcome the touch of Jason's invading mind.
Of course, if Stryker had understood that, he would have understood what it was to be a mutant, and empathy was one sense he'd never had.
Whenever she's tempted to jealousy, Mystique reminds herself that she loves Erik for the things lovers have made him. His arrogance, sure at sixty-five that a boy Pyro's age will find him beautiful--that's Xavier's mark still on him. His quiet, the slow wordless way he's stroking Pyro's back where they're lying stretched out in a nest of blankets in front of the fire--that's hers. And his care, the way he touches the boy's hair like he might break--some stranger's cruelty is being repaid as kindness.
She wonders who'll love the boy next for the marks Erik's leaving.
Mystique doesn't feel the cold like humans do. She's perfectly comfortable in the October chill, even away from the campfire, wearing nothing but her skin. It will be colder in the mountains, and she'll harden the soles of her feet and walk barefoot in the snow. Naked and blue, she disappears into pools of shadow, hard to follow for anyone without Wolverine's tracking skills. She's perfectly adapted to survive. A triumph of evolution.
Later, sleeping under the whir of a ceiling fan in the tropical heat of a country far from the reach of American law, she dreams: she's on her knees again in the base at Alkali Lake, screaming under the weight of a vast, terribly personal presence piercing her soul, like she's being judged and condemned by a God she hasn't believed in since she was a child.
She wakes gasping, and looks down at Erik sleeping, wrapped in a blanket as though it were winter even here. "How can you love that?" she whispers, but he doesn't answer, only stirs restlessly in his sleep, reaching out a hand, but not toward her.
Mystique closes her eyes, and wishes he hadn't taken all the blankets. Tonight she's cold.
Rogue had always slept late on weekends, rolling over at the sound of people thumping downstairs and pulling the covers over her head to hide from the bright light streaming in between the blinds. She didn't know what to do with herself when she woke up early and peered out the window at the alien sight of the sun rising over the dark trees. Or, rather, she did, and that was the problem right there.
She padded downstairs in bare feet, and was curious enough to look outside the front door. The morning paper was where she thought it would be, and she picked it up, although she wasn't sure why she bothered. The New York Times had to be the world's most boring newspaper; it didn't even have comics. She walked very quietly into the kitchen, and sat down in what seemed like the right chair at the breakfast table, and fought the urge to unfold the paper.
Logan stuck his head in the door. "Morning, kid." He grabbed a coffee mug off the shelf and started looking around for something to put in it.
"Let me guess," Rogue said. "You're a morning person, too." "Been up for an hour working out," Logan said. "You?"
"I hate you," Rogue said, and threw the newspaper at him, which an instant later she regretted.
They both watched the pieces of the paper flutter sadly to the ground.
"You know, Professor Xavier is also a morning person," Logan pointed out.
"I think there's a diner in town that has pretty good coffee," Rogue said, looking at the dismembered newspaper. "Or is running away chicken?"
"That's what's called a strategic retreat," Logan said. "C'mon, kid."
Rogue followed him toward the garage. "You know, Scott said he'd kick your ass if you touched his bike again," Rogue said, because she was still mad at him, even if he was going to buy her breakfast.
"He'd have to get up a lot earlier in the morning to try it," Logan said, and Rogue couldn't manage not to smile.
first line by Victoria P.
You've always known you were different. Your aunts gathered around the broad-leafed table, balancing plates and glasses of sweet tea, and talked about sick relatives and taxes and the children who ran around the living room shouting and watching TV. You stared out the window at the street and wondered how far it goes. How far you'd get if you just started driving and didn't stop until you were far away. Your mother played the piano, not well but cheerfully, pounding out Christmas carols in front of the sparkly tree. She always had to make you practice, thudding through beginner lessons, one foot kicking idly, scuffing the old hardwood floor. You loved the radio instead, tuning in stations from as far away as you could reach. Wondering what the music was like in California, Alaska, Mexico. So when you kiss a boy and he falls thrashing to the bed, leaving you sobbing with your back pressed to the wall, there's some part of you that's not surprised. It whispers to you as you throw clothes into a bag a week later because your parents are once again shouting about you downstairs: you've always known what you get for wanting more.
In Ashes Logan dreams Jean is walking barefoot through leaves the color of blood. She stops so close to him he should be able to feel her breath on his face, looking at him like she's sorry about something.
"They always wanted me to be good," she says.
"I just wanted you."
She lays her fingers lightly on his lips and then draws them away when he opens his mouth to taste her skin. "It's too late, Logan. It's always been too late."
"You're here."
She shakes her head. "It's only a dream." She's left the taste of ashes on his lips.
The fallen bridge support was concrete, although Rogue could see where the steel underpinnings had torn themselves free in an attempt to stop its fall. She knelt beside Magneto, not sure why she didn't just walk away.
He opened his eyes, and she flinched; she'd thought he was dead. For once his pale blue eyes looked dark.
"Any last words?" Rogue asked, her voice sounding hard in her own ears; too many innocent people had died for her to have much sympathy for someone who deserved it.
"None for you," he said hoarsely. "But I do have something to leave you." He turned up one hand painfully and raised it toward her, as if it were filled with water.
"I won't," Rogue said. She wasn't sure what would happen if she touched him now, but it couldn't be worth risking having him crawling through her mind forever to have his power crawling under her skin. She wasn't sure what terrible part of her wanted to press her skin to his and drink that power dry before it spilled uselessly into the dirty ground with his blood.
"I won't," she said again, more firmly, but her hand rested on her glove.