"Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. We have seen the future, and the future is ours." - César Chávez
"Sometimes if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up." - Huey P. Newton
Chapter Twenty-One
Things began moving in earnest the next morning, and they would not slow down again for another four years, when everything they would build in the interim would be torn apart completely.
The guns were the first thing.
The morning after the phone calls, Erik took Mystique up to his room. There were half a dozen handguns laid out on his desk, each of a different type, and Erik said to her, "I thought we'd start small. Pick one up."
She didn't want to. None of the guns looked exactly the same – some had stubby barrels, others had muzzles that were long and slim, some were all sharp angles and others were shaped with smooth, flowing curves, some were black and some gray, some had wood-finished grips and others of plastic – but each and every one stuck her as being horrendously ugly.
Nonetheless, Mystique picked on up, choosing almost at random a medium-sized gun with a brown grip. It looked something more like a toy than some of the others, and she would think later that was why she had picked it up, but once it was in her hand she was astonished by the weight of it. Not a toy.
Mystique looked back to Erik, questioningly, and found that he was grinning widely, like a boy at show-and-tell. "What?"
"Oh, nothing. It's just a little funny that you picked that one. That's a Makarov. It's a Russian gun." She snorted, rolled her eyes at him, and he went on, more seriously now, "It's a fine enough weapon. Not elegant – there aren't many moving parts to it – but it has reasonable stopping power.
"That one's yours now. You keep it."
She wanted to argue with that. She wanted to tell him, I don't want it. It's ugly and mean-looking and so are all the others. It feels like a snake in my hand, and I'm afraid that I'm the one that's going to get bitten. But instead she heard herself say, "Charles abhors guns."
"Of course he does," Erik said, and she heard the condescension in his voice, and was glad that she had not said, I'm frightened of this thing, though she supposed he knew anyway. "Do you know what he told me, back before Cuba? He told me that there was no reason that we should concern ourselves with self-defense. He said that the government would not move against us, because we had 'common enemies' in Shaw and the Russians."
"I think Charles spends a lot of time living in his own world."
"It must be a pleasant place."
"I guess. I'd like to visit there someday."
And Erik laughed at that, but then they got down to business. He'd given her the names and models of the other guns on the table, "Colt 45 and "Walther PPK" and others, discussing their strengths and weakness. He explained the difference between a revolver and a pistol, and about different calibers and types of ammunition and their relative merits.
Then showed her how the safety worked on the Makarov, advising, "Keep the safety on this one unless you're goddamned sure you aren't going to drop it. The firing pin is free-floating."
"I don't understand what that means."
"If you drop it on its muzzle it may go off. So don't drop it."
"Oh," she said, and began to wish that she'd picked a different gun.
`Finally, he showed her how to load and unload the Makarov, and watched while she repeated what he had done. "Is it unloaded now?" he asked, and when she told him that it was he said, "Wrong. There is no such thing as an unloaded gun. You will treat all guns at all times as though they are loaded, you understand?" She told him that she did, and puzzled for a moment where this caution had come from - at the mansion he had handled his guns with almost frightening carelessness - but then the answer was obvious when she thought about it.
After that they went to a gun range. At some point while she and Azazel had been away the Brotherhood had acquired a car - she did not ask when or how, but simply got behind the wheel when instructed to do so and followed Erik's directions to the range.
Once there, she watched Erik fire the gun at the target, studying the way he held his body and the way he held the gun. When it was her turn, she aped his stance as perfectly as she could while wearing a smaller, feminine body, and stared at the distant target. But she hesitated to fire, afraid of the noise and of the kick-back, convinced that it would hurt though it had not seemed to hurt Erik. Afraid also of the raw power of the gun, a dead weight in her hand that yet possessed a terrible potentiality. The target at the end of the range was man-shaped, the outline of a body with the bulls-eye placed where a person's heart would be.
And while she was still rallying the nerve to pull the trigger, the gun went off in her hand, and she let out a squawk of surprise and she didn't just nearly drop the damned thing - she almost flung it away before she remembered Erik's warning about the firing pin.
It was with that thought of Erik that she realized what must have happened, and outraged she whirled on him. She did not forget the gun in her hand, but was mindful of it, keeping it pointed at the ground; Erik's power was, after all, no guarantee that the gun was safe to mess around with.
"See?" he said. "It's as easy as that. You do it yourself this time."
"You go to hell," she said, and the small section of herself that was seething was distantly shocked by her own words. "If you ever do anything like that again, Erik, I swear to God -"
He put his hands up, palms out as though in surrender, but she didn't think he looked especially repentant. She turned away from Erik, still fuming, and took reckless aim at the target, and before she could talk herself out of it she pulled the trigger, five times in quick secession, and saw a compact cluster of holes blossom around the bulls-eye.
Behind her she heard Erik say, " Well. Huh."
"I just did it the way you showed me," she said, suddenly appalled with herself. She sat the gun down on the counter - carefully - and said, "That's all I did."
"Well done," he said, and when she looked up at him she saw that he was proud of her, maybe – strange to think – even a little awed, so she'd picked up the gun again and they went on.
In the coming days, they would move quickly to deer rifles and shotguns, among other things. In certain cases, such as with the AK-47s and Remington 700 sniper rifles, they avoided the gun range, traveling with Azazel to secluded areas. "No reason to attract unnecessary attention, after all," Erik would say.
She would find, as the weeks began to pass, that she had a startlingly proficiency with each new weapon, and that – like so much else about the life she was living now – was in distressing conflict with the sort of person she had seen herself as before she'd left Charles. She knew that Erik was impressed with her progress, but she wanted to argue with that approval, to say, I'm just copying what you can do. That's all. It really has nothing to do with me.
The same day Erik gave her the gun Azazel had come to her room with the knives. She'd let him in when he knocked, and he'd stood across from her and said, with strange formality, as though it were something he had been taught to say, "For you, a bowie knife and a stiletto," and Mystique took them from him and went to sit on the edge of her bed, and he sat down beside her as she studied the two blades, turning one then the other over in her hands.
The thing he'd called a stiletto was a sender, black carbon blade with a needle-like point. It was a small thing, though vicious-looking. The bowie knife was, on the other hand, almost ludicrously large, nearly a small sword. The clip-pointed blade alone was nearly two feet long, and the horn-handle added another eight inches to its length. The blade was shinning steel, and when she turned it sideways she saw her own face reflected in its surface, as clearly as if it were a mirror.
"I think that they are correct for you. I thought, something small and easily hidden, and so the stiletto. You can kill a man very quietly with such a thing, I will show you. And I thought also something fiercer, but not too heavy to be carried easily, something that can be worn in a sheath, and so the bowie knife."
"Thank you," she said, and wondered at the strange place she'd come to in her life, where the men she loved made gifts to her of implements of murder. But what she said was, "I'm building quite an arsenal," and she motioned with her eyes toward the desk, where the gun rested.
Azazel saw it and chuckled, low and rough. "Did Erik give you a Makarov? He's a funny one." But then he added seriously, "Do not drop this gun."
The matter of the guns drew on (she believed, or at least told her self) nothing more than the basic instincts for mimicry that accompanied her ability, but sparring with Azazel was something quite different, and not a thing that she felt she could afford to have delusions about; in a dangerous way it had something very much in common with making love, two bodies acting and reacting to each other, caught in the dance and in the conflict, seeking to anticipate the other's next move, both entirely given over to the experience and the moment, to the sweat and grunts and pounding hearts and straining muscles, and if sex had not already been permanently linked in her mind with power and with violence it became so over the course of that fall.
The matter of the blades remained theoretical. Azazel could explain in which situations one was better suited than the other, and could demonstrate how they were used, when to thrust and when to slash, and which parts of the human body were most vulnerable to any given line of attack, but intellectually she did not believe in the possibility of really using them against another person.
Azazel, she had known from their first meeting, was a chaos in battle, a whirling dervish, at once everywhere and nowhere. For a time she simply copied his own style, letting him show her how to move her body and how to use the blades, but as the lessons went on she began to understand her own self better and discovered ways of doing things that played to her own strengths. At the same time, she also began to note his weak points, which were especially evident because they had decided that he shouldn't use his ability to teleport during these sessions. He had not been trained in any sense of the word, and relied entirely on instinct and impulse and on the passion of one who considered himself absolutely untouchable.
And the first time Mystique executed a move that would have left him dead had it been in earnest he looked at her like he had on that first night together, like he had found everything he ever looking for, and after that they'd gotten nothing else productive done that day.
The flying lessons with Emma weren't going too poorly either, though this was not coming to her as easily as some of the other tasks Erik had set her to. Emma was not happy at having been drafted into the role of instructor, and was not shy about making that known, but Mystique was learning how to handle her. Sometimes the armistices between them ran for entire days, to the point that Mystique thought that they might even be starting to like each other before Emma opened with some new volley.
Mystique thought that Azazel had been right. There had been something going on with Emma – something going wrong – when she'd first joined them, but it seemed like she had it better under control now. The only thing was that she seemed very tired as of late. Complaints that the other members of the Brotherhood were exhausting to her kept coming, and she'd taken to spending a lot of time alone in her room. Erik said she was shirking, but Mystique wasn't entirely sure of that; when pressed, Emma had once or twice grudgingly admitted to migraines and to stomach aches.
Things were changing so quickly – she was changing so quickly, in ways that she never would have believed possible – and that was frightening, but it was exhilarating, too. She felt as though she were blowing past all her limits to uncover a person she had never known existed, and the thrill of this self-discovery was endless.
Mystique had changed rooms, too. She did not move in with Azazel, but had taken the room directly beside his own, which were connected by a common doorway. There was hardly a night that went by when she didn't end up in his bed, or he in hers, but they would not have worked in the same room; Azazel had his own aesthetic, as he was so fond of affirming, and though his sense of organization was rigid, the rules of this order were to remain an incomprehensible mystery to her. His room, with its flickering shadows and eclectic sentiments, was so much of him, but she could not have stood the constant need to navigate the candles and stacks of books, the hangings of silk and the constantly rotating section of borrowed paintings and treasures every day. It would have been impossible to study under such conditions, and she had quite a lot of studying to do.
There were the Russian lessons, which took up what little time she had left over after everything else, but there was also the matter of the news papers. Erik had rented an over-sized P.O. box, and every day he came home with bundles of papers, thirty or forty different papers from all over the country and the world. They were all supposed to be reading these papers every day, looking for leads on Mutants; unusual crimes, odd stories of people with uncommon talents or abilities, anything strange or out of the ordinary.
They located a few leads this way, but nothing that had panned out. There'd been a couple of missions, low-key trips during which no one had been badly hurt and nothing especially exciting had happened, but they'd found only one actual Mutant this way, and he had declined to join the Brotherhood. Erik called these missions good practice, but it was clear that he knew that they were starting to spine their wheels again, and that he was frustrated with this.
Almost two months into the new training regiment, Erik came home with the usual load of papers. Mystique knew from having accompanied him on a few of these trips to the post office that he often stopped to use random pay phones, so she was not surprised when he sat his burden down on the table where she and Angel were scanning yesterday's headlines, and said, "I've been talking to your brother."
"Yeah?" she said, without talking her eyes from her work.
"Yes. He and Hank have rebuilt Cerebro at the mansion. He's given me some potential leads on Mutants."
She did look up then, startled and suddenly suspicious. "Why?"
"The reason he gave me or the real reason?" he asked, but this was apparently rhetorical, because he went on, "He said this lot could use some help. I've do doubt of that, but I have a strong suspicion that he gave me these particular names because they aren't the sort that would fit in well at his school, if you know what I mean."
Mystique wasn't entirely sure that she did know what he meant, but things would become much clear later, once she began to meet the individuals that Charles had picked out for them.
"Still, it's something," Erik went on. "We'll get started tomorrow."
Then he said, "Come up to my room when you're done here. I need to speak to you in private for a moment."
When Erik had gone, Angel looked at her and said, "What's that about, do you think?"
"I don't know," Mystique said, but she was pretty sure she did.
So when they'd finished with the papers, Mystique had taken herself up to Erik's room, which was so different from Azazel's, so rational in its organization and in its neatness, and he'd motioned her into a second chair before slinking back into his own.
"You're doing very well," he told her frankly, leaning toward her in his chair, his big hands folded over his knees. "You've made quite a lot of progress very quickly."
Modesty – false or otherwise – only annoyed him, so she said, "I know I have."
"So now, what is next for you?" he went on, and she recognized this as another rhetorical question and did not answer. "I need you to do something for me."
"Okay, Erik," she said. "I will."
"I need for you to kill someone for me," he said, and though a chill struck Mystique when he said that it was not one of surprised. She was not at all surprised. She had known for the beginning that this was coming, after all.
"Who?" Mystique said, expecting to be given specific directions, to be given a target and a reason. She did not think it would be too difficult for her if Erik gave her a good reason.
"It doesn't really matter," Erik said. "A cop. A guard. Whoever gets in your way the next time we're on a mission."
Something twisted in Mystique's gut when he said that, but she believed that her face remained impassive, though she found herself blinking very quickly. She willed herself to stop.
"Do you understand why I'm asking you to do this?"
"Yes," she said. They were all killers here, everyone except her. Even Angel was a killer. She could not expect to hold herself separate in this.
"It will become easier once you've done it for the first time," he went on. "You will not feel the same hesitation that you are feeling now. It's very important that we should get that hesitation out of the way as soon as possible, because it is the sort of thing that could very easily get you or one of the others hurt."
He stopped, watching her. Mystique knew he was waiting for her to say something, but she did not trust herself to speak. After a moment he went on. "The first Mutant on the list Charles gave me is being held in a jail in New Orleans, and that is where we will go tomorrow. It would be best if you did it then."
"You won't tell Charles? I don't want Charles to know."
"Of course not."
"Okay," Mystique said. "Okay, Erik. I will."
But nothing would turn out as simply as that.