Interview with a Sabretooth
Don't own them, wish I did and this time - a cameo by the owner just for fun.
A/U A writer in a small office stares at the story boards in front of her, trying to hear the voice of the maniacal serial killer in front of her, but he was flat in her mind. This was her dream job, writing for the comic books she'd grown up reading, and now she just couldn't focus on what she was assigned to write.
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"How's it coming?" The elderly gentleman asked from the door way, his lined face familiar to millions, beloved by comic readers.
"Stan, I just dont...I wish I could...I don't know, hear him, maybe?" She rested her head on her hand leaning on the drawing table in front of her. She just had to put the words in his mouth, not draw him, but somehow the words just wouldn't come.
"You'll get it." He gave her a grin and a thumbs up. "I'll see what I can do to help." He left down the hall and she sighed. Working here, with him, was a dream come true and here on her first week she couldn't even get the monster in front of her to issue a convincing threat to the cowering heroine in front of him. Her torn uniform left very little to the imagination and the dark hair with white streaks were plastered in the pouring rain drawn with grey streaks on the board.
She looked at the clock and tried to decide if she should try to go to lunch, or just sit and stare at the boards some more and hope something came to her. She knew the basic plot, the 'Brotherhood' trying to take over the world for 'mutant kind' the heroic X-Men trying to stop them, but she still couldn't come up with something convincing.
She looked up as her idol walked by her office door again, and decided that at least looking like she was trying to solve the problem was better than taking off for lunch to clear her head. She knew some of the background on the character, but she still couldn't bring herself to try to think like him, to try to become too familiar with him. He'd been something terrifying as a child, and here she was, assigned as his "writer" for future generations.
It was her own fault, she'd sent in a horrific story about a child serial killer, and that had been what landed her the job, but now, she had to try to keep him in character and not destroy what several writers before her had created in the minds of millions. It was a horrible responsibility.
She jumped as Stan said from the door "Let me introduce you to someone." She glanced up at the clock. She'd been lost in her own self-pity for over an hour. She looked over as an attractive man with dark steel grey eyes, short cropped blonde hair, sharp features and a ready smile walked into her office, followed by Stan.
"Kaitlyn, I'd like you to meet Victor." He reached across the drawing desk and she stood and held out her hand. As he reached across the suit jacket he was wearing dropped back and she caught sight of the butt of a gun under his arm in a shoulder sling. She held her hand out and he shook it with a firm handshake. She noticed his long fingers and well manicured nails.
"It's a pleasure to meet you, Kaitlyn." He said with a lopsided grin. She gestured to the one empty chair in the office, and Stan grinned.
"I'll leave you two to talk." He said and waved, wandering off down the hallways again.
"I'll catch you later, Mr. Lee." Victor said to his retreating back.
"I really don't understand why..." She started. He laughed softly and looked at the drawing on the desk. Sabretooth's furred uniform was gone, no more rips and shreds hanging away from his overly muscled form. She'd never thought he needed to be that overdone, it made him less menacing, and more a caricature in so many ways. She brushed a strand of auburn hair back behind an ear as turned to watch her guest as he looked at the drawing. The new drawings were cleaner, less overdone, and made him seem more dangerous for being closer to something human, much like the man standing in her office.
"Well, they've changed the uniform again. I kinda like the cleaner look." She shook her head puzzled as he took her earlier proffered chair and sat down. He looked at her, and smiled again, but this time it was calculated, almost as if he knew what was going through her mind.
"I know Stan introduced us, but for the record, my name's Victor Creed. First of all, most of what's in the comics is crap, but some of us are - well - real." He waved a hand at the board, indicating the frames showing the other characters, even pointing at one or two, in particular the girl in the frame she was trying to dialog, along with another with a distinctive yellow and blue uniform and familiar hair style. "There are other mutants, most of us hide ourselves as much as possible. Stan can be quite persuasive and - well those of us who agree to go into the comics, we get a little royalties from them, and it does help pay the bills."
"You mean you're...no, you can't be..." She sat back down in her desk chair hard, one heel catching on her chair mat. She winced at the shot of pain that ran up her ankle.
"Not like that, no. But most of the physical details are correct. I can heal faster than most, I have heightened hearing and other senses, and well I get a manicure every day or my fingernails would be too thick to live with."
"I'm going to have to...uuuhhhh...see some...proof..." She was still stunned, not really knowing what she was asking for. Who was this man? He couldn't really be...?
"Well for starters...here's my ID." He pulled a flat leather wallet out of his jacket pocket, slightly bulging and flipped it open. Inside was a federal identification card with his photo, name and the symbol of the U.S. Marshall service, and a round shield with a star in the center, the words U.S. Marshall raised over the brass of the circle.
"You're a..." She looked at him, and then at the drawing of the snarling monster on her desk. Her mind was spinning. What she was supposed to write was a vicious monster, and this guy was a...
"Yeah - a cop." He shrugged and grinned again and she noticed the elongated canine teeth. She was seeing more differences than similarities between the two images in front of her, but there were enough that she had trouble thinking. She felt the blood pounding in her ears, blocking out sound for a moment. When it cleared he was talking.
"...that or stay in the military and after almost seventy years of continuous service, and being un-promotable as a Major, not my fault but with some of the things on my record..." he shrugged "I decided to retire and take up another line of work." He was saying.
"You were in the military for - how long?"
"Seventy years - give or take...this time. I was in about five years when I was a kid, they called that one the War Between the States, did another stint with Teddy, but got out and played in the east some. By that time I was a pretty loyal American, even though I was born in Canada, and came back and did a stint for the Big One...then took a break and re-upped when the Big One II came around." He was leaning back in the chair, his long legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles. The leather boots under his slacks were not what she expected a cop to wear, even a federal one.
She just shook her head, she was talking to him, the human...or...something...inspiration for what she was supposed to write and all she could think of was that he was wearing expensive boots? Suddenly what he'd said sank in. "You...that part is true too?"
"Yep, darlin' most of the background is somewhat exaggerated, but accurate." He raised an eyebrow at her and folded his hands behind his head and leaned back in the chair further as if to stay a while.
"Exaggerated?"
"Well there's about six different 'origin' stories, but the reality is pretty damned boring so...they do what they have to - to sell the magazine." He ran his hand back along his hair, his eyes laughing and she wasn't sure if he was amused by what they'd written about him or her shock and surprise.
"So what is the truth?" She grabbed a pad of paper and a pencil, and turned her chair to look directly at her guest. If she really had the inspiration for her character in front of her she was going to take full advantage of it.
"My dad met my mother at a church social, they courted for a few months and then got married, I came along, dutifully, eight and half months later." He winked at her with a grin. "They were happy, and my younger years were good...at least I don't have any of the horrific memories they've made up over the years."
"My mother and I both were caught in a typhoid outbreak. She didn't make it, and I was sick for months. I honestly don't remember much about her, I was only about three when she died. My father took me to live with a friend of his, and his wife, and she nursed me, took care of me until I could stand on my own feet again." His eyes grew solemn, even though the smile didn't leave his lips. "My father's friend - he wasn't able to have kids and knew it, and I didn't know it for a long time later, but they worked out that my father would give her the baby she wanted, and that taking care of me made that wanting so much worse."
"So - the Wolverine?" She asked.
"Yep, Jimmy's my half brother, only we didn't grow up like master and servant, like in that movie, but as brothers. I mean we always knew we were brothers, no one ever tried to hide it from us. My father and John, they were close - the three...were close, and no one was angry or upset. We all lived together, they all three raised us."
"Well that is certainly different." She commented. He scowled and she felt a low rumble through her feet. "I mean from the background information I've read." He seemed to relax again and continued his story.
"I started noticing things were different about the time I turned twelve, I didn't get hurt when I fell from the roof. If I cut myself, it didn't bleed for very long, and was healed up by the next morning or the morning after that. I could see and hear things - and smell, scent became my primary sense, and I noticed Jimmy coming behind me, and watching him I realized that these things had really been there a long time, I was only just noticing it."
"I was fifteen when some men attacked the house, thinking to rob it. I was upstairs playing with Jimmy when I heard the noise. By the time I got down there, John was bleeding on the floor, one of the men hit Elizabeth, the woman I called my mother, knocking her to the floor hard. My father was struggling with one of them and I ran down the stairs to help him. I heard James behind me screaming something and he came flying and attacked one of the other men. I heard the gun go off and watched my father drop to the floor. I lost it, and that was when I saw the fingernails on my hands grow, and noticed the long bone extensions on James's hands. Both of us finished them off, it wasn't clean, wasn't pretty -hell it wasn't even effective, one of them took hours to finally die, but it was all too late. John and my father were dead, and she died the next morning from the concussion. The village tried to split me and James up but we wouldn't have anything to do with it, so we ran away, so we could stay together."
"So its close, but not accurate?"
"Along with most everything else. I won't deny that some of the things in there might be true." He pointed to the bound background material on her desk. "But the reasons were probably different than what they came up with in there."
"Give me an example of when you did something attributed to 'Sabretooth?" She was past shock and well on her way to fascinated curiosity."
"Well sometime after the Civil War, James and I took off for silver country in what at that time was called 'Mormon' country.' We fell in with one of their communities up there."
"You're Mormon?"
"Na, well not anymore, at the time it was fun to have three wives." He gave her a very rakish grin and she couldn't help but grin back. "Anyway we lived with them for several years. I had three wives and four children."
"What were their names?" She asked.
"Sarah was my first, wife that is. Her younger sister Seline was my second, I married her so Sarah would have help when she found out she was pregnant the first time. The third was Mary. I loved all three of them." His expression was wistful. "The children, Daniel was the oldest, Rose came along a little less than a year later. They were Sarah's. Mary had John, and Selene had just given birth to Elizabeth a month before the attack."
"The town was attacked by a band of men, you might have heard of them, the Younger Gang. I was out on a hunting party and James was in the smithy workin' on some wagon parts. Both of our families were slaughtered in the attack. I made sure I knew every single scent of every man there...and hunted them for...well I caught the last one in nineteen twelve...would have killed him too, if he hadn't been hit by a damned bus right in front of my eyes."
That made her stop and stare at him. It couldn't be... "Where did this happen?"
"A little podunk town in Oklahoma somewhere, he was an old man, in his nineties. I'd tracked him for years, but he was always one step ahead of me. Watkins was his name." She shuddered.
"And he was hit by a bus before you could kill him?" He chuckled, then his eyes darkened, and not just in expression, the color seemed to bleed from the irises.
"Exactly. I'd finally tracked him to this town, was watching him cross the street. I wanted him to remember them, I wanted to look him in the eye and demand that he remember Daniel nailed to my cabin door with a knife through his tiny belly...Sarah's beautiful face a bloody mess, beaten to death for trying to protect little Rose, who's head was smashed in against the wall. Seline was stretched out in the yard, several of them had..." He blanched, and she heard metal bending in the arm of the chair he was sitting in. "Mary had been shot, the bullet going through her body and into that of the baby she was carrying."
He took a deep breath, and looked at her. " I watched that old man cross that street, watched the last one of them, the very last one of their murderers walking in front of me. I remembered the feel of their blood on my hands, in my mouth as I ripped their throats out. I was merciful...I killed some of them in front of their families, but never held what they'd done against the innocent, not like they had. I watched him...and rushed forward as I saw the bus, I actually tried to save him, if only to have the ability to kill him, but I was too late. He died there in the middle of that street, one of the first automotive buses in the damned territory rattling over his crushed body. I never did get to avenge Mary and John. It had been his bullet, his gun, his finger on the trigger that killed them as they tried to run away."
She couldn't stop the tears running down her face. She also couldn't stop the words from tumbling out of her mouth.
"He was my great-great-great-great uncle." She whispered. "We always used to laugh that he was an outlaw as a young man and died being hit by a bus. I guess we never thought about the lives of the people he hurt...about what it was like for them. We were always proud of him, and right now, I'm nothing but ashamed."
"It's not your fault. You didn't do it. And I got most of them...he was the only one that escaped my claws." The fierce look on his face made her glance at the forgotten sketch on her desk. She could see it now...see how to write the scene, write him.
"I still..." She started.
"Don't. It's really okay. It was a long time ago, I've moved on, several times over." He was twisting a band on his finger and looked down at his watch. "And on that note. I have to be home for supper." He dropped a small piece of paper on her desk.
"If you have any more questions...call me." He walked out the door with a nod. She looked at the clock and smiled. She had about ten more minutes and knew she could come up with something now.
"Frail, either get the hell out of my way, or I'm gonna take great pleasure in your blood on my face." Sabretooth snarled in frame as Rogue cowered in front of him. She pulled herself slowly to her feet, one glove half ripped from her hand. "Not if Ah drain you first."