These Voices
1. Rouge
Before she feared contact, her skin was coarse and rough: marred by thick calluses and angry blisters. She was a blur of auburn and ivory, leaping down the staircase, her fleshy wings reaching back to catch the air. Her speed and agility were apparent as she darted through the giant archway of her mother's legs.
Back when her skin resembled grungy sandpaper, she had a voice of silk and honey. Not even her mother's sharp yellow eyes could resist the glossy appeals and lustrous bargains.
But her life, her mother, her semblance of normal was wrenched away from her. They took her past, and gave her a half-broken present. Irene layered her with dark clothing and dark secrets and fear and doubt. Protected from harm and guilt and love and comfort, her skin grew soft and supple and shed its imperfections.
Fractured, yet unwilling to cry, she poured glue in her mouth and into her throat and down to her very heart, where her words form. She ate gravel and rocks and let them sit inside of her until they fastened to her soul.
Now her words are clawed at and torn apart on their way up. Emotions that feel so genuine inside—love for her brother, shame for her poison skin, fear of the many minds within her own—are shredded until no one can recognize them when they tumble from her lips.
And when she makes someone beloved to her cry, she hates that nothing she says is ever what she means.
2. Kurt
His words are often acrobats. They exist for the pleasure they bring, the laughter, the shrieks of fear and delight when one flips across the tightrope. But the reason they wear flashy costumes and perform mind-bending acts is to distract the audience from the fear that he struggles to suppress.
If someone were to take a microscope to his soul, they would find it is made up almost completely of fear. Fear of solitude, fear of rejection, fear of fuzzy blue fur that hurts no one. And most of all, the fear of being unwanted.
His mother, consumed by goals and obligations and the balance of power, is unable to love. She does not see him, she does not need him.
But sometimes, his words are not just for show. They are for those he loves. When Rouge is not looking, they pull of their frenetically fashionable guises and slide past her stony walls. They chip slowly away at the charred shell encasing her heart.
Because she is all he has, and he wants her to be whole.
3. Mystique
When they handed her the perfect baby boy, she forgot everything she meant to be. She forgot about Magneto, she forgot about the mission, the cause, the endgame. She forgot about her pain. Only he existed, only she existed, only a mother and son, time and everything else swirling around them, insignificant, unimportant.
When they handed her the perfect baby boy, she forgot everything she meant to be. She forgot about Magneto, she forgot about the mission, the cause, the endgame. She forgot about her pain. Only he existed, only she existed, only a mother and son, time and everything else swirling around them, insignificant, unimportant.
And then the time came to give him up.
She came into possession of Rouge, a wildcat with the sweetest emerald eyes. When Irene asked for Rouge, when Irene told her to give Rouge up or let them all suffer, her heart did not want to let go.
But she had determination, and willpower, and pain and a knowledge of the danger, and stomped down on her heart as hard as she could. It was all for the best, but it completely ravaged her ability for genuine emotion.
She has two voices, now, as she has two selves. She is a terrorist, and she is a mother. As a terrorist, she is the best there is, and she has a voice of glinting razors to go along with it. As a mother, she is a failure, and occasionally she is able to use a voice of fragile paper hearts.
Rouge has hundreds of razors, hundreds of lies and betrayals, cutting into her flesh. Kurt has a drawer full of paper hearts, locked tight so they don't blow away in the breeze. She does not know how to fix it.