Disclaimer: Callisto, the Morlocks, Storm and the X-Men, belong to Marvel Comics. Callisto is the only actual canon Morlock in this story; all the rest of them were created for this story (so they belong to me – hahaha!!). No copyright infringement intended, and no money being made, so thank you in advance for not suing me. (Not like you'd get much money out of me anyway…)
Author's Notes/Comments: This story is pretty much a Morlock story (the X-Men get only a peripheral mention), just cause I felt like writing one. It's set in the pre-Mutant Massacre timeframe.
The Last Naming Day
by Lady Kate
The hallway rang with laughter. Happy and excited, a crowd of children ran through the corridors, shouting and arguing and giggling with each other.
"I'm going to get a new name!" one childish voice crowed with excitement, "A new name!"
"Don't do it, Billy! Lori'll try to name you Bobblehead! She said she would! She will – she's mean!"
And another voice chimed in, "I'm gonna be Jumper! I'm gonna! You'll see, you'll see!"
"You're too young. Next year—"
Marianne couldn't help but smile as they passed. Children were children. No matter what they looked like; no matter what they called themselves.
The sound of their light footsteps — or, in some cases, heavy thumping, and even occasionally an oozing shuffle — echoed as they passed by and quickly faded. Quiet once more. Quiet to concentrate, to soothe, to ease. She knew she should seize the moment and finish tidying up her things, but found she could not.
She was not old by any means, but she was no longer carelessly young. She was not a child. Today wasn't a day of excitement, of jubilation. It was, rather, a nagging discomfort at the back of her mind — the dull promise of confrontation. A yearly ritual she had grown almost perversely proud of. That had alarmed her to the point that she had nearly let herself be cowed down into hiding, hiding away in her own safe little corner of the world. Almost. But then she'd end her days hiding in shadows and avoiding people's eyes.
Much the way she had spent most of her life so far.
No, today would be different. Today would be the last time. She had made up her mind to leave. Therefore, she could ignore the groaning reluctance within her and go, face up to whatever it was she might need to face today, and then be free. For ever.
Willow Wisp popped his head in the door. He was gangly, awkward and painfully thin, but today he wore a smile. "They're gathering in the Alley already. Are you going to come?"
She smiled herself — showed her teeth, because really, that was what her smiles looked like now — and replied, "Of course. I come every year."
And he laughed at her joke.
Callisto stood on the dais, surveying her people with flinty eyes. Perhaps they sparked a little when she sighted Marianne; perhaps not.
Callisto was well-named. She was fierce and hard, a huntress at heart. She could descry the smallest weakness from afar and was ruthless in exploiting it. She 'knew' what was best for her people with the utter conviction of a leader. She was the backbone of the Morlock underworld; her word was law.
At least, it had been, up until that debacle with the X-Men. Up until she'd grown so arrogant that she thought she could pluck one of them for herself, catch herself a beautiful winged man and dare to think that she could keep him as her own. That her powers had grown strong enough for her to challenge the powers above.
She hadn't been thinking at all. She hadn't seen a thing past that pretty face she'd been so infatuated with.
The X-Men had come, and the woman called Storm had done the impossible: She had defeated Callisto.
A momentous event. For a startlingly brief time, change had visited the stagnant Morlocks.
It died too quickly. Storm was full of fire and fury for the opening act, but she had quickly proved to be an absentee landlord, content to let Callisto rule in her absence. Her extended absence.
And so the Morlocks settled back into the old routine, back into complacency, back into what was familiar and safe and expected.
"So you're here to try your luck again!" a jocular voice laughed, next to her ear, and she looked away from Callisto.
"That's right, Gustav."
"Prybar," he insisted with still greater amusement at her use of his former name, waving his misshapen hands before her, "it's been Prybar for years!"
"Oh, not again!" another voice groaned. "Don't you ever get tired of this, Marianne?"
"I get tired of a lot of things, Doe." Marianne had never known Doe's real name. The woman had never admitted to having one, not to anyone, as far as she knew. That fact, coupled with the deer-soft brown fur and large dark eyes, had made Doe a perfect name. Standing at her side was a tall man with vaguely feline features and a long, swishing tail. He'd been rather whimsically named Tall Tale, but did not seem to mind.
"Then why do it?" Doe wondered, and the taciturn Tall Tale said nothing at all, but just watched.
She shrugged, and instead of answering, replied, "This is my last Naming Day. I'm going to leave the tunnels."
"Leave?!" The word was an incredulous gasp. "But why? And where will you go? It's not safe—"
"Let's talk about it later," she urged, regretting her candor as she glanced at the many people milling about.
"Well, all right. Good luck with your Naming," Doe sighed. "I hope it goes better than the last time. Although, I suppose you aren't going to worry about trading in a name like Reptilica."
"Says Jane Doe."
The furred woman smiled slightly, bobbed her head delicately. "Says Jane Doe. Say what you will, I like the name. Good luck to you."
"MORLOCKS!"
Callisto's stentorian voice rang out over the crowd, commanding without being shrill, clear and crisp, carrying to the furthest corner of the hall.
"Since our kind has first christened themselves Morlocks, our names have held great meaning. Names have great truth... and greater power. We cast off the upper world, make ourselves true Morlocks when we have found our place and our name. Your upworlder name is nothing: a fit, a fancy your parents held, a dream you cast off when that world cast you out. Here, among your Morlock kin, is your true family. And your true name." She raked her eyes over the crowd, seeming to touch each pair of eyes. "By this Naming, you take your place as a Morlock."
Marianne wondered if it were her imagination that those eyes settled with grim expectation on her own before passing on.
Callisto's face settled into a thin smile. She sat upon the leader's dais, next to the ever-empty chair which now belonged to Storm. As the weeks and months had passed, Callisto's smaller chair had crept sideways and forward, but had not eclipsed the other chair. Yet. She nodded her head, and the Morlocks began to file forward.
"What name for this Morlock?"
The question was addressed to the masses; the gray-skinned boy stood straight and tall, staring only at Callisto seated above him.
A few murmurs from the crowd, and a voice called out, "Spitfire!"
The boy puffed with pride, burped forth an excited flame as if to demonstrate. No other names were forthcoming, and he stepped aside, swaggering back to his friends with all gratified self-honor as the crowd recited 'Spitfire' aloud, as if to commit his name to memory.
The next postulant was no child, but a full-grown man, bulging with disproportionate strength. A valuable asset to any group, but his musculature was so contorted beyond the normal human contours that he had been forced to join the Morlocks.
"Strongarm!" and another suggested, "Hurlyburly!"
Given the choice of offered names, the man accepted 'Hurlyburly', and moved aside as his chosen name was also recited.
And then a young girl who was christened 'Daisy', not for her appearance, or her talents, but for her overt fondness for the flowers, which she had scrawled tattoo-like over her mottled skin, and drawn also over the fabric of her clothes.
Strictly speaking, no Morlock could choose his own name. Someone else must put it forward, before the group. If there were several suggestions, then — and only then — did the postulant have the option of choosing. Of course, most often there were covert arrangement between friends — "call out my name, and I'll call out yours" — and most went away satisfied.
Except for Marianne, also named Reptilica, and before that Snake Eyes, and Frail-Scale, and Slither-Thing, and Thick-Skin, et cetera, et cetera, all the way back to Unnamed.
When Marianne had first come to the Morlock world, she had been much younger, freer with her thoughts, and utterly thoughtless as to where they might lead her.
She was full of ideas, and — in spite of her appearance — still full of optimistic hope. She did not flinch from the deformed children of this under-earth, and they did not flinch from her. She read them fairy tales, told them stories of up-above, stories which didn't end in death and dismay. She wanted to teach them to read. She wanted to share all the things she had already learned in her own short life; books and music and art and dance.
"Whatever for?" Callisto had scoffed.
Those were the only things Marianne knew, the only things she had to offer.
But Callisto was at the height of her power and her ideas of Morlock life well entrenched. She had not been interested in teaching reading, writing or other niceties, but had been consumed with the gritty business of survival. Nevertheless, she had made a show of listening, even though her eyes had wandered and her ears stopped hearing long before Marianne had finished speaking.
No matter. Marianne tried again. And again. And again.
And finally, Callisto's non-too-tolerant temper had finally broken. "What is wrong with you, girl? You're not settling in here the way I'd hoped. The way you have to if you want to stay. If you can't accept Morlock life, then go."
Marianne had blinked with surprise. "I just thought—"
"No, you didn't. You don't think! Cause if you were thinking, you might be thinking about how that ugly hide of yours would get you killed up above, and you'd stop stuffing pretty little ideas into those children's heads! They can't have any of that. They're ugly. I'm ugly. You're ugly. We're all ugly. And that world above would kill any one of us just to be able to stop looking at us. That's what makes us Morlocks."
She'd been defiant. Still full of confidence in those days, so sure of her convictions. "That's what makes you full of hate."
And Callisto had moved a dangerous, menacing step closer, her huntress voice dropping to a throaty growl. "You think I'm full of hate, girl? You're just a child. A stupid little child. You haven't seen even half of the horrors that the world has to offer! How can you be so starry-eyed, living down here in the dark?"
"I haven't given up hope." So blithe and easy to say.
"Oh? Then what are you doing here? How'd you come to be here? Come on, tell Auntie Callisto why you're living down in the sewers."
Because one day she'd sprouted scales. First a small patch, and then more. And more. Until it couldn't be hidden. God, it had taken no more than a week. Hiding under the covers, muttering about a fever, and dashing out and standing before the mirror once her parents had gone to work. She'd gone so far as to look through a cookbook, read the section on cleaning fish, and then try to scrape the blue-green-gray scales off with the edge of a knife. She'd lost enough blood to make her woozy, but within two days, everything she'd ripped out had grown back again.
Cold and dry and scaly.
And when she'd finally given up hope, come out of her room and presented herself to the world, her parents had freaked. She couldn't blame them. She'd freaked out herself.
There were no ultimatums, no threats, no disavowals. Only those awe-struck, awful screams. Grief and disbelief.
She went back into her room, and — thinking she was sparing her parents, saving them from something — she went out the window and out into the night and into the big scary world. And that was where she'd found herself in danger. People running from her in terror, and she running terror-struck from those who were alarmed enough to take up weapons.
She'd run into the park, hoping to lose herself in the trees, and Darkeye had found her there, cold and miserable, and brought her to the Morlock tunnels. She'd been all of fourteen years old.
"I came here because I was afraid," she replied.
Those predator eyes flashed again. "You came here because you had nowhere else to go."
"Because I didn't know of anywhere else to go," she corrected, and she should have known that Callisto could not abide correction. "But that doesn't mean there isn't some place somewhere..."
"There is nowhere else for our kind. You forgotten already how Darkeye found you screaming in the park, five gun-toting men coming after you?"
"They aren't all evil. My parents—"
"You forget your parents. They've forgotten you. Cast you aside. The Morlocks are your family now. This is your home. If you don't believe that, then get out. Get out and see how the surface dwellers deal with you."
"Hiding down here doesn't solve anything."
And though it had been a long time coming — though the older, wiser her would have known too well how her words would be received — Marianne had finally crossed a line Callisto could not pardon, no matter her age and inexperience. The back of her hand cracked fierce and hard against Marianne's face, sending her spinning to the floor.
"WE ARE NOT HIDING!! WE FEAR NOTHING!! WE ARE THE MORLOCKS!! I AM CALLISTO!!" she roared in outraged wrath. "AND YOU ARE WITH US, OR YOU ARE AGAINST US!!"
And when Marianne had jumped to her feet and struck back in childish fury, Callisto had given her a beating to remember.
Four days later, Marianne had presented herself before Callisto in view of all the Morlocks on Naming Day, limping and defiant and full of all possible bitterness.
Callisto's own temper was slow to cool, and she had more opportunity to rise to the occasion. "This one," she pronounced, the words ringing with mortifying clarity over the gathering, "this child does not deserve a name. She has not yet earned the right to be Morlock; she has not found a place where she belongs. You will be Unnamed, then."
"I'm Marianne—"
"No upworlder names here! And such a name," she scoffed, "such a frilly, pretentious, pretty name as that one. You have come before us; I say you are Unnamed, and so you are!" her voice carrying with all her powers of resonance. And she smirked, and added quietly to Marianne, "If you've the mettle, come back in a year. Perhaps we'll have made a Morlock of you by then."
Ten years had passed since then. In that time, Callisto had toppled from her throne, Morlocks had come and gone, children grown, and Marianne herself was no longer a young girl, but an adult now, a full-grown woman.
She was going to leave the tunnels. She knew who she was – she always had; she did not need the façade of a Morlock name. As time had passed, no matter what name she was given, she thought of herself always in the name her parents had given her. Always Marianne.
But the ceremony had come to mean more than that. Neither she nor Callisto had ever forgiven or forgotten; both chose to quietly continue in their resentment, and this was the arena where they continued the battle of wills. Their feud was a stupid thing, wrought over such a little matter, a few words of quarrel. Petty and small. And each of them had become likewise petty and small and stubborn in pursuing such trifling vendettas.
Marianne had been slow in realizing this, but the knowledge had finally come. Today, she would step forward, not in the angry wounded pride she had nurtured for so many years, not in defiance of Callisto, but simply to complete the circle and bring the cycle to an end. And then she would leave.
When all the other Morlocks had come forward, when all eyes began to turn toward her, Marianne stepped forward.
The crowded gathering let loose the breath they had been holding. They'd come to expect the tradition, come to enjoy the spectacle. They'd have been sorely disappointed if she had declined to play her part.
Callisto's razor-edged smile curled slightly higher, as if she too had wondered whether Marianne would dare yet again, but she merely asked, "What name for this Morlock?" just as she had for all the others.
There was a brief silence, and then the catcalls began. Most of those shouting bore her no ill will — it was just too good an opportunity to pass up. The pecking order had been established, and all were relieved that someone else was occupying the lowest rung. At times, the Morlocks were not so very different from the upworlders they so stridently opposed.
The names didn't hurt her feelings the way they had once used to, nor did they weigh upon her shoulders. Marianne met Callisto's gaze with unblinking steadiness, listening to the steady stream of names, wondering which she should choose this year, the last time she would be standing here. It ought to be something impressive. And at least vaguely applicable.
Over the din, she heard Doe's soft voice ring out its own suggestion, "Scapegoat." The word was heavy with recrimination. "It is why we keep naming her, is it not? To accept all the ugliness we heap upon her?" Marianne turned and glanced with surprise towards the soft-spoken woman, who was uncharacteristically scowling at those around her, as if she could shame them to silence.
Next to her, Tall Tale, who had spoke no more than twenty words to Marianne this month, offered in his soft voice, "Pilgrim." He offered no further explanation.
Almost without thought, almost by instinct, Marianne repeated, "Pilgrim," accepting the name.
Callisto seemed startled by the suddenness of the events, but she was never taken aback for long. She smiled, completely without malice, seemed almost about to laugh. "So you are named at last, Morlock. Pilgrim. I trust I shall not see you standing before me again next year?"
"No," Marianne replied, with the sound of a smile in her own voice, "you will not."
The day was almost done, and it was growing dark above. Almost time to go.
Marianne packed the precious few pieces of paper into her bag. There was not much – most of her meager belongings had already been given away to friends. She felt as if she were leaving home all over again. But it was time for her to leave.
When she had first come to the Morlocks, she had not yet given up on her old life. She wrote letters to her parents, letters saying "I'm all right, I'm okay, don't worry about me" painstakingly composed on scraps of dirty pages. And then she'd had one of the go-betweens — those Morlocks who were human enough in appearance to wander above — take her letters above and deposit them into mailboxes. But the effort had eventually grown painful — it was like dropping stones down a dark well. Nothing ever came back, no message, no reply; no way to know what effect her letters had, if they were received, if they were even read. And so she had stopped.
She'd kept a journal instead, writing down the little scraps of her life, detailing the lives of the Morlock children, watched them as they grew and writing it all down. And even that had eventually grown empty and meaningless.
Ten years had passed since she had gone underground, and she could not stop thinking of her family. Her parents would be in their late forties. Somewhere, she had an eighteen-year-old brother. Ten years of grief, ten years of silence. Maybe they had begun to think her dead. Maybe they were dead themselves.
She needed to know, needed to reclaim even those small pieces of her life. Because if the Morlocks had grown stagnant under Callisto, then so had she. No matter what she had said or not said, she had stayed because she was afraid. Because there was despair in her, despite all her words to the contrary. Because she had no 'mutant powers'; she was just ugly. Ugly and tough. A horrible little lizard, suited to dark underground tunnels.
When the last of her golden hair had been choked out by the thickening scales and fallen out, when she had learned to despise her reflection, she had given up even the hope of sunlight.
For a brief moment, she had hoped that Storm would change the world for her, but had been bitterly disappointed that the woman had scarcely altered even the Morlock under-world.
Time to grow up. If life wasn't what she wanted it to be, she needed to change it on her own.
Time to leave.
Take back the sun, take back her name, and pick up some of the pieces of her old life, if she could. She had no reason to believe she could not. Her parents had been good people, had tried always to raise her with a strong sense of right and wrong. She had no reason to believe that had changed. They had reacted with understandable shock and grief, and she had fled before giving them a chance to recover. They had not cast her out – no, she had done that to herself.
"So it's true." Callisto's rich dark voice came from the doorway; she watched with an unreadable expression as Marianne packed away her few belongings. "You are leaving. And Tall Tale is going with you. How sweet."
Marianne herself had been surprised by that, but was glad to have his company. Though quiet, he was companionable and kind, and far more likely to pass unnoticed than she. She would, as he had earnestly pointed out, sometimes require his assistance. And so she accepted.
"What an odd couple you two make," she gibed. "He's almost human-looking, and you—"
"What did you want, Callisto?"
"To see for myself if our new little Pilgrim is leaving."
"I am."
"To warn you, too, but you probably won't heed warnings now any more than you ever did before. Even so, never forget that these tunnels are your haven... your home. If you ever need a place, come back. You'll never be safer than you are here. You'll never belong anywhere else as much as you do here."
"I hope you're wrong," Marianne replied.
Callisto only shrugged, looking at her with a bleak expression as if she knew she was not wrong. And Marianne remembered that Callisto was much older, had been more acquainted with the world than ever she had, and perhaps all that weary, bitter hopelessness came from experience.
"I asked Tall Tale why he named you 'Pilgrim'," Callisto said. "He said it was because you're so full of hope, always looking for Utopia, and expecting to find paradise over the next hill." She chuckled wryly. "Do you know, I think he's half in love with you."
Marianne pulled on a long, heavy-hooded cloak, ignoring Callisto's obvious needling.
"Nevertheless," Callisto murmured, after a moment of silence, "the name suits you. If you and Tall Tale prove me wrong and find that better world, come and let me know. I'll be the first to join you."
But her face was gray and resigned and without hope.
That was all right. For the first time in years, Marianne felt herself bursting with hope and eagerness enough for all of them. Marianne smiled — or rather, showed her teeth, because that's all her smiles were anymore — and said firmly, "Some day it will happen, Callisto. I know it will."
In the end, Callisto was one of the few Morlocks remaining who remembered the day the snake-woman and the cat-man had left the tunnels. It was on Naming Day, after the ceremonies, once daylight had safely sunk into night. The two of them had walked out above, and that was the last she had ever seen of them.
Next year's ceremony would never come. Before a twelve-month had passed, the Marauders would come instead, bringing with them only blood and slaughter, and when they finally left the tunnels, everything would be gone.
That truly had been the last Naming Day.