Perhaps there is no greater love than that of a revolutionary couple, where each of the two lovers is ready to abandon the other at any moment should the revolution demand it. They do not love each other less than the amorous couple bent on suspending all their terrestrial links and obligations in order to burn out in a night of unconditional passion - if anything, they love each other more. - Slavoj Žižek

Chapter Twelve

Nearly four decades from now, when Mystique would rediscover the boy that she and Azazel would start tonight – the boy that she had been absolutely certain was dead – and she would have no desire to claim him as her own. She would find her boy ruined, the soft downy fur that had graced his skin plucked away in vain pursuit of a less inhuman appearance, the bare flesh marred by scars that he had carved into his own flesh, self-loathing masking itself as pious contrition for imagined sins. He was so passive – such an Uncle Tom, such a Quisling – that even Xavier's Mutants had difficulty mastering their disdain for him.

Her boy had grown into something that was only nominally like a man, someone so different from what the three of them had been together that he no longer even knew her. She would look at Kurt and think about everything else that she had lost along the way, all the dead and the gone, and she would freeze inside herself as she had when she saw the Mutant child in the window of that filthy little Argentinian shop.

It was something less like rage than despair, and she had no use for despair, as much as that emotion had wished to impose itself upon her life, and she looked for some way to push it away. She needed unfreezing – needed touch, contact, action – and she had needed to feel that she was powerful, that she had the power within herself and within her body to react and provoke reaction.

She had not gone to Erik. By then the things that bound them together had grown into something far too powerful to be expressed through casual sex. And in all honesty, he'd gotten too old to keep up with her.

No, instead Mystique had gone to the most dangerous man available, the only member of Xavier's sorry crew who was something close to her equal, the one who had marked her twice before; once at Liberty Island and once decades before then, back when his claws were only naked spurs of bone and his name was still Jim. She had not forgotten what he had done to the Brotherhood all those years ago, though he had forgotten all about them; had been made to forget by the perpetrators of the Weapon X program, which was the only reason she'd come into his tent with an goal other than opening his throat and keeping it that way until his healing factor ran out of steam. Jim was dead, after all, murdered by his masters long ago; Logan wore the same body, but he was no more Jim than she was Shaw or Robert Kelley when she took on those likenesses. She was frustrated when he refused her, but she told herself that it didn't matter. Jim had been bad in bed – rough in a way that held no appeal for her, in a way that had been purely petty and selfish – but Logan was so mixed up about himself that he was probably even worse.

There was something predatory about the instinct that had drawn her to Logan, that always drew her to others, and by then she'd owned up to that and had accepted it as a part of herself. The dangerous ones attracted her when she felt the need to be dangerous herself and the wild ones drew her when she was feeling caged. She drew on their essence, as a hunter took power from the beast he had conquered. It was not all bad – she could give back a great deal, after all – but that was the truth of it. Now though, tonight with Azazel, she had not yet admitted it to herself; tonight she only had an idea that they might help each other get through this.

Azazel had taken them back to the Headquarters's common room, and Erik had set the box on the desk, amid all those bars of ugly gold. Then he had stepped away, and they had all stood, staring at the box but not touching it, not wanting to touch it, and Mystique had wondered distantly where Angel and Janos were, who would be stuck with the job of explaining to them what had happened. The four of them had stood there, not speaking, not doing anything, immobilized by the truth the contents of that box held, and the minutes had run on like hours. Emma had been the one to finally step forward. She had reached for the flaps of the box, and Mystique had seen a tremor in those delicate manicured fingers, and in the same instant Azazel had left with a loud crack and more smoke than was usual. And Mystique had turned and went from the room, too, damning herself for a selfish coward but feeling so icy and brittle that didn't think she could look at it again right now; she felt like another blow might break her into a thousand jagged pieces.

Mystique had gone upstairs, racing up the six flights of stairs for the sake of feeling as though she were going somewhere, and had arrived on her floor flushed and winded. She stood in the landing, panting a little, and had looked to right, the which lead to her own room, and then down the hall to the left, where Azazel's room was. She wondered – not for the first time – why, when there fifty empty rooms in this place to chose from, he'd taken up residence so close to her own door.

She went to the left, bare feet silent on the new carpeting, and had knocked softly on Azazel's door. There was no answer, but she felt almost certain that he was there; she turned the door knob and went inside.

The lights were off and the candles were unlit, but it was only dim inside the room, not dark. Azazel had pulled back the blinds, and the fading glow of the city's twilight came in through the window, casting soft shadows.

He was standing in the window, and that was reckless, that was dangerous, that put them all at risk, and she had gone over to stand in the window with him, looking along with him down at the city under their feet, and she had put a hand on his upper arm and had felt the tensed muscled under the stiff cloth of his jacket. Below them the city struggled on, the factory stacks billowed smoke and the cars and trucks and buses plodded along the roads, and people moved between the tightly packed red brick tenement houses which had stood their for a hundred years and which might stand for another hundred, despite all the corruption and rot within their rat-infested walls, and in the far distance she could see the stockyards, the clumps of black and brown dots that were a thousand head of cattle, placid in their ignorance to their fate.

She wrapped her arms around herself. "I'm starting to feel like I understand this city too well," she said, just small-talk, just something fill the space where more treacherous words might have been tempted to take root. "This place sort of gets inside you. You know what I mean?"

"I do not understand it at all," Azazel said thickly, and she knew that he was not speaking Chicago. "I could burn it all down and dance in the ashes," he said, suddenly vicious. "I could. I could do this, and – and nothing of value would be lost!"

Mystique realized with sudden horror that he was precariously close to tears. The possibility that he was even capable of such a thing had not even occurred to her until that moment, and she did not believe she should handle it if it did happen, not on top of everything else. So she did the only thing she could think of to stop it – what she'd come here to do anyway – and put her arms around his neck to pull his mouth down to her level, and she kissed him.

Azazel's eyes had grown wide with sudden surprise, thought she hadn't seen this, and he had stiffened for an instant, which she did feel, and then he had had responded, his hands moving to her hips as he pressed back against her while her mouth worried at the scar that cut his upper lip.

After a minute Mystique had broken away, had taken him by the wrist and pulled him back toward the bed, and he had gone, shocked and delighted by the strength of her grip, by the forcefulness with which she pressed him down onto the bed. He paused on the edge of mattress to kick off his shoes before slipping back across the bed until his back was to the headboard and crossing his legs. She had slid onto the bed after him, kneeling across from him. Mystique leaned in and kissed him again, her mouth wandering this time away from his own, kisses trailing down his neck until she found herself thwarted by his high collar, and then her fingers had gone to work on the buttons of his jacket.

"You are aggressive," he had breathed with a sort of wonderment, and his own hands had begun to undo the buttons from the opposite side of the line, and Mystique had been thrilled to see that his own hands were not entirely steady, that his fingers rushed and fumbled and tore one of the buttons from his jacket. She had known that he was interested but she had not realized that he wanted her so badly, and the knowledge that he did want her – that he wanted her as she was, as all that she was – spurred her own, and when the last button had been unbuttoned she helped him shrug his way out of the jacket. She flung it off the side of the bed then reached under his silk shirt, peeling it away from his skin, and when that was gone too she had paused briefly, leaning back to admire what she had found. His bare arms were sinewy, the well-defined muscle hard and unyielding, and she had run her hands up and down the length of those arms once then twice then again – feeling, touching, taking in – and then she had moved to his broad chest and had done the same, fingertips playing in the swirls of thick black hair.

"Lay back," she said, and shifted herself to the side to give him room to slide down onto his back before moving to straddle his hips, and grinned as she leaned over him, because they had barely even started and he was hard already, she could feel him pressing against her through the fabric of his pants. She'd leaned in closer, rubbing the palms of her hands hard against his chest, astonished when the color did not wear away under pressure, because though she had known intellectually that it would not she had not quite believed. Even as well as she knew her own blue skin, it was hard to imagine that someone could truly be so vibrant a color – such an aggressive brilliant red – and she had wanted to touch that skin since the moment she had first seen it, to prove to herself that it was not paint or dye but only him, the truth of him. His nipples were carmine red, darker than the rest of him, and when she'd run her hands over them he'd drawn in a sharp intake of breath and squirmed under her touch.

Azazel's hands had come up to cup her face, drawing her mouth down to meet his own, and then his hands had traveled on, broad fingertips exploring the scaling and ridges along her face and neck and shoulders. Those hands were huge and heavy, rough with hard callouses, and they had moved over her flesh with a care that was almost awkward. He was not – as she might have imagined before she'd known him better – incapable of gentleness, but he was unschooled in it, and that made him tentative.

His hands had hesitated, lost along the arch of her collarbone before moving recklessly onto her breasts, and that hesitation, coupled with the hunger that was in his touch and his eyes confirmed what she had only suspected before; he talked a good game, but he'd come into this bed with much less experience than she had, quite possibly none.

So she'd let out a moan – not faking, she would never want or need to fake it with him – but letting herself go in a way she had never dared to do with the human boys who would have been frightened or disgusted had she lost control of her disguise, had just let her body run free. And that had encouraged him – good lord, had it ever – and then his mouth had been on her breasts, lips tracing the swirls on her skin, mapping the typography of smooth and rough, and when she cried out again there had not been the slightest calculation to it.

And while he was doing that, making himself crazy and her crazier, her hand had traveled downward and found that hardness, bulging inside the confines of his pants. And she'd brushed her fingers against it through the cloth, almost tickling while she gauged the size of it, then he had been the one to groan, low and so deep that she had felt his chest vibrate, and his teeth had grazed the skin of her breasts, and that had been the limit of her control.

Mystique had pulled down his fly, pushed the boxer shorts down out of her way, and had drawn him out. And at the same time, she herself had changed subtly below, opening herself to him, making a space within herself to accommodate him.

She'd leaned back to look at him, pressing him back gently against the mattress with one hand on his chest when he had tried to follow her breasts upwards, and found everything she'd hoped for and then some extra. His cock was as red as the rest of him, thick and heavy and very warm in her hand. It was stiff and hard and ready to go in a way that she took as a heartfelt complement. She had waggled forward along his hips, ready to go too, ready to feel him inside her, but she'd felt that hesitation again, had seen something like fear pass across his face.

"You won't hurt me," she said.

It had been meant as reassurance, but Azazel took it as a question. "No," he said, in the tones of a man taking a holy vow. "I will never hurt you."

And then they had slipped together, and for a time she had been lost and completely content to be lost, lost in the rhythm and motion of their bodies, lost too in his eyes, because she had never done this in the light before, before she had always had to turn the lights off first in case she'd slipped up and lost control of herself. She'd always had to remember that she was in hiding, had never been able to discard the fear of being found out to bask in the sensation, and this now was something so different – so good – to see him and be seen, this was how it was supposed to be, this was real when her entire past had been false. And she had crested quickly and broke and had begun to rise again, spurred by the pace of his breathing and the short, inarticulate cries he made between muttered words of Russian, all of which she could somehow still hear over herself, and then his voice had risen to match hers, his notes rough while hers had been high.

And it had been over before she would have liked, but that was okay, that was easy to forgive because looking down at him now – eyes closed, panting with the silliest and most self-indulgent goddamned grin plastered across his face - she knew he'd be ready to go again soon.

After a minute his eyes had opened, and he'd looked up at her with such adoration that she could barely believe it. Got your cherry, she thought tenderly, suspecting already that really that she'd gotten more of him than that, maybe more that she'd counted on.

She'd rolled off him and on to her side, and he'd turned to his side too, to face her. His tail had come out from where it had been trapped beneath him, and the flat of its tip had moved to stroke her leg. She'd caught his in her hands, playing with it as it twitched in her hand, but carefully, because the the tip was sharp enough to cut. When she looked back up at him she found his eyes were still fixed on her with a short of intensity that reminded her of why she'd first been so frightened of him. "You are poetry," he said. "You and I were made for each other."

And she believed that. Even through all the bad that was coming, she would never stop believing that.

Before long they had begun again, Azazel on top this time. He was a solid and reassuring weight, that if not enough to make the world less dangerous, at least left her feeling better equipped to handle that danger.

And so it had gone, into the night.