Title: Happiness (Or Something Like It)
Author: Red Fiona
Fandom: X-men: First Class
Pairing/characters: Mystique
Rating: PG-12
Prompt: X-Men: First Class, Raven Darkholme, It's easy for Raven to pick up women while wearing the visage of a man, but what she really wants is to touch a woman while wearing her own skin.
Notes: I've gone entirely with First Class canon and I'm aware chunks of this are not comics-compliant.
Summary: The Constitution might have given a right to happiness, but it didn't give any hints how to get there.
She goes out to bars sometimes.
It's mostly for practise. There's more to impersonating someone than just looking like them, even if they're just as a face in a crowd. How do they move, how do they stand, how do they interact with the world around them? Clubs are great for studying that, because everyone is looking at everyone else anyway, they're not going to notice one more person watching.
She does the same thing in town squares; she can study a wider range of people there, but in less detail because people are always busily going from one place to another.
That's not the only difference. When she goes out to bars, it's normally in the body of a man. Azazel insists on it, or tries to. If he had a sister, he says, he wouldn't let her go out to bars on her own, and, he adds, you can't trust men.
Erik's opinions on the matter tended towards his usual, saying that it was her choice, and always to remember that she could now quite easily kill someone with her bare hands if she chose to.
Angel was the only one of them to talk the slightest sense when Mystique mentioned it; she offered to come along with Mystique. Mystique had the brains to take her up on those offers.
They must make a pretty couple, judging from some of the suggestions they get. Some of those offers came from other women, which would probably blow Azazel's mind, even if they were mostly in the form of 'so my boyfriend and I were thinking ...'
Still, when she went out on her own, it was normally as a man. It saved arguing.
Often the faces and bodies weren't modelled on anyone in particular, that was part of the game, to see if she could create individual faces that weren't anyone's and weren't distinctive enough to be remembered the day after.
Other times, she'd use a face she'd seen in a crowd, and see how closely she could match the face she remembered, and then whether she could put on a persona to go with it. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. She'd never got into any trouble, oddly enough people's first thoughts weren't that there was a shapeshifter impersonating people, but she'd got some strange looks directed at her.
Understandably, she had better luck when she was pretending to be people of around her own age. She knew that meant she should practise being people who aren't like her, but it was difficult. She still felt like she was growing into her own skin, and she didn't feel like she was ready, or maybe even able, to embrace someone else's identity entirely.
That feeling got worse on lazy Saturday nights, particularly once the humidity started hitting the mid-seventies. On those nights, she threw on a simple identity to go out, one she'd used so often that it was like sitting in your favourite armchair, warm and comfortable.
If anyone bothered to ask, he was a biology student at the local university, because she can fake that knowledge easily enough. She used her own red hair and someone else's blue eyes. He was quite slender for a man, medium height, generally inoffensive, in the hope that no one will want to pick a fight with anyone quite so harmless looking, not that she can't handle herself, but she wasn't looking for trouble when she looked like this. She had no idea what she was looking for, which didn t help the restless anger she felt sometimes.
What she does know is how the night will go he ll sit, quietly, at the bar, nursing a beer. Most times, it's the girls that will come up to him, shy college students just drunk enough to be brave. He ll buy them a beer and they talk, he ll laugh when he's supposed to and, if Mystique is lucky, by the end of the evening they're kissing, at least. This boy who wasn't quite her had seen more car backseats than Mystique could ever claim was necessary for research purposes.
Mystique remembered them all, calling them to mind afterwards, Lucille, who was so impressed by her own daring, Karen, who was more interested in beer, solemn-eyed Mary who'd said 'we shouldn't be doing this' and when Mystique stopped right at the moment Mary had said it, had kissed her senseless.
She felt that she should be warmed by the memories, but instead, she was filled with a cloud of diffuse anger. It would be easier if she could pinpoint exactly what was making her angry.
It wasn't the lying, or not exactly, but she wished it were her those girls were kissing, not some mish-mash figure that shared far too many features with Charles. For goodness sake, she'd even stolen some of his lines, she said them and then she just batted her eyes and watched them swoon.
Then again, she didn't think she'd feel any better if this figment were less like Charles and more like any other man. It wouldn't make it any more her that they were kissing.
She wished she could do that sometimes, just walk into a bar as herself, and still have Mary, Lucille or Karen come up to her, or girls like them, beautiful and vivid. And interested in her.
Or well, maybe not as herself, they were still getting rid of segregation, maybe blue people was a step too far. She'd settle for the face she thought of as Raven's, it might not have been her true face, but at least it was her own bones underneath.
That would have been easier in Westchester. She knew every part of that town, even parts that Charles didn't know about, at least not deliberately. There was a bar, just outside the town centre, down a back street. Not a dive bar by any means, but secretive, you could walk past it quite easily if you didn't know that it was there. But once you were in there ...
She assumed there must have been somewhere similar in Oxford, there had to have been, but she'd never had the courage to look, to afraid that her accent would make her stand out. Of course, she could put an accent on, but that was still lying, when it came down to it.
All she wanted was to walk into a bar and not be the only woman looking at other women, and do it without it being a thing because of who she was. She didn't want to hide any more.
She was starting to think that was a fault with herself. Why did everything have to be a goddamn revolution? Couldn't she ever take the easier way out? As soon as she'd asked herself that, she knew the answer. She'd tried pretending not to be who she was, she'd tried it for years, and it hadn't brought her happiness. It had brought her safety, somewhere to live and food, none of which were to be sneezed at, but not happiness. She knew Charles hadn't thought any the less of her for being blue, and he hadn't meant to make her feel bad, but there was nothing like hearing 'be anything but yourself' over and over to give a girl a complex.
But what was there that she could do? It wasn t like her present way of life gave her much room for action on this. What could you do when you were in hiding, and you couldn t do anything to stand out, because you were still covering up who you were for a greater good later on. The concealment would have worried away at her except she knew that Erik would follow through on his promise, and that soon they d reveal themselves and stop the persecution of mutants before it began. There d be more time for herself, later, even if she didn t know when that would be.
Maybe everything came down to the little things, maybe it was time for another vow. No more lying was the thing, the thing she had to keep to. Mutant and proud, respecting herself, in all the myriad ways that she was no worse than anyone else, and those special ways that she was better.