Disclaimer: I own nothing X-Men.
Diversion – Storm
Calculating mind awhirl with instruction, question, and apprehension, my heart couldn't help but send my eyes astray. While other eyes stared, bewitched in concentration, into the steady flicker of the campfire, mine travelled sensually and uncontrollably over her stark body.
The sight brought back so many memories – and so much pain. Yet still I couldn't bring myself to tear my eyes from Mystique, even when she glanced my way with a sheerly blank look.
My heart stopped then in utter sadness, and I felt my eyes glaze over in a stupor of whiteness. The shining blue of her skin blurred together with the intricate golden patterns on her forehead, and when a spark of heat in my head indicated I was involuntarily conjuring a lightning storm, I had to force my eyes shut and sweep it away to the west.
Determined not to make my thoughts known, I rested my gaze back on the fire and solemnly listened to the others' voices: Jean, Erik, Logan…of the adults, of those of us who'd been there through it all as we "mutants" tried to come out in society, only Mystique and I lay silent. And I couldn't help but wonder if she was thinking about me, too. About me, her best friend, and her, my only friend, about how we fell in love and tried to fight the hardest battles together.
We were young, once, together. We were black, young black women, with secret feelings for other women. With secret, untamed powers. With sad, tired, and overworked mothers trying to give us the best lives they could. The counts against us in life were uncountable. In one sense we were lucky to be mutants, because our activism in their world eventually led us, young lower class black women, to prominent political positions in a way that may have proved impossible had we been relegated to the cruel human world.
Still, I couldn't help but feel queasy, remembering that once Mystique and I had led a movement together, a movement that failed in many ways yet succeeded in enough to make it worthwhile, and seeing now that we held ourselves back under the authority of older white men. In fact, I saw the way Mystique preened herself in the glory of being Erik's second-in-command, and lamented at the thought that second-in-command really meant bitch. The way she absolutely purred under his attention – did she even still like women?
I shook my head to clear it of the heavy thoughts, and realized with a start that the others had scattered to their tents.
From a few yards away, Jean called to me. "You turning in soon, Storm?"
"Oh…yeah, I'm coming I guess," I replied non-committally. The sky was perfectly clear, and my stormy heart was drawn by the stark beauty, the strangeness of the twinkling stars, embedded in endless darkness. I wasn't really alone when I was with those stars.
Jean smiled sadly through the darkness – I heard it in her voice. "Well, put out the fire when you come in, if you don't mind."
"No problem." I found a somewhat dry grassy spot and sat down there as I tried to ignore Jean's disappearance into Logan's tent. I drew my knees up and under my chin, and gathered a tiny raincloud gradually over the fire pit. When it grew heavy enough, it began to cry.
And as the cloud's teardrops sizzled against the logs' heat, a teardrop of my own rolled down my cheek.