"It was the Lord that knew the impossibility every parent in that room faced: how to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child – by what means? – a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself... which also raised the question of whether or not such an antidote existed; raising, which was worse, the question of whether or not such an antidote was desirable; perhaps poison should be fought with poison." - James Baldwin
"Being told you are a worthless piece of shit and not believing it is a form of resistance." - Kathleen Hanna
Chapter Twenty-Five
It was late by the time Erik and Azazel returned with the new Mutants. There were four of them; a huge man named Fred, a pair of Siamese twins called Luke and Matthew, and a weedy little boy with a greenish-gray complexion whom Fred introduced as Todd. When prompted to say hello Todd only looked at her with slightly buggy eyes which were about three sizes too big for his face. He didn't speak.
"Heavy work," Azazel whispered confidentially into her ear, and Mystique understood then at least part of the reason why he and Erik had gone alone. Azazel could transport people more easily than inanimate objects, but he did have limitations and taking too many trips or transporting too much weight could wear him out.
Erik and Azazel disappeared upstairs almost as soon as they arrived, muttering conspiratorially with each other in low voices. She was able to catch just enough to know that they weren't using English, but nothing else. Mystique wondered what it was they were hiding, and from whom.
That left her alone to settle the five – counting Remy – newcomers in for the night. This shouldn't have been an especially difficult task – several spare rooms had already been prepared – but when she'd paused to check in on Todd for one last time before going to bed herself, she'd found that he had disappeared.
So she'd gone back to Fred's room to enlist his help in finding the boy. It was only after an hour's fruitless search (during which time she came very close to going to ask Azazel for help, but did not out of fear of interrupting whatever he and Erik were up to) that Fred located the boy on the top shelf of a third floor linen closet, just outside the reach of his blunt fingertips.
It took another half hour to get him down. Fred tried in quick secession reasoning and pleading and yelling, all to no effect. The boy simply watched them with those big, still eyes, and remained crouched just out of reach. They also tried bribery, but when Fred held up a cookie to show it to Todd the boy's tongue lashed out, as quick and long as a whip, and snatched it from Fred's hand, drawing the entire thing into his mouth and seeming to swallow it without chewing.
Finally, Mystique simply told Fred to lift her up so she could pluck the boy from the shelf herself, and he'd hesitated but did as she instructed. The grip of his huge square hands around her waist was surprisingly and painfully strong. She glanced down to tell him to loosen up, and saw that he was blushing a furiously embarrassed beet-red. Mystique opted for silence.
In any case, they got the kid down that way, but not easily. Todd was like a frightened animal, cowering crouched in the shelf's corner while she spoke softly to him, trying to convince him not to be scared. "It's okay," she said, making things up as she went along – she could not remember the last time she had spoken to a child and wasn't at all sure that she was saying the right things. "I know it's scary to be in a new place with all these new people, but no one here is going to hurt you. It's all okay."
He didn't respond, and finally she'd simply reached out to pick him up. He'd gone wild, kicking and clawing and bucking to get away. She'd pulled the boy toward her as gently as she could, and he'd landed one hell of a good strong kick to her nose before going as still as a rabbit in a snare, a shivery and clammy-skinned bundle of taunt sinews and pointed bone.
They'd put him back to bed, though Mystique didn't have much faith that he would stay there, and Todd watched her every movement with those huge mossy green eyes that never seemed to blink. She was beginning to wonder if he was capable of speech.
When she and Fred were on the other side of the bedroom door, she asked him, "Do you know what happened to him?"
Fred shrugged. "Same type of things that happened to all of us, I guess," he said. It was remarkable, Mystique thought, how quickly Fred latched onto that us, that idea of a collective Mutant identity; he said the word shyly yet with great ferocity. "I didn't want to worry him with too many questions right off – maybe it's better if he don't think about it more than he needs to, you know?" Mystique thought of all the blank and black spaces in her own childhood, and knew that she would never take up Emma up on her offer to retrieve those memories. To Fred, she nodded.
"Other thing is," Fred went on, "he don't talk so good, so sometimes I can't understand what the hell he's even trying to tell him. He's sort of got a lisp or something, I don't know the right word for it. You saw that tongue of his, I guess it must make it harder to talk right in the first place, and I don't think anyone's been trying to teach him anything anyway.
"It's good you guys found us. I've been trying – like I told those other guys, Erik and Azazel, right? – me and Matthew and Luke have been trying to look after him, but we aren't doing so good, you know? I don't even know how to teach him the normal stuff, never mind about being a Mutant and all that, and he's so scared of everything. Someone's been hurting him – anyone can tell that – and..." he trailed off.
"No one else is going to hurt him," Mystique said, wanting to make it true even if she didn't believe it, wanting it to be true for the sake of her own lost child-self, and for the sake of the dead Mutant child they'd found in Argentina, and for all the other Mutants out there – young and grown – that they couldn't help today but might yet someday. When she was honest with herself, she would know that she never really liked Todd, but she would put a tremendous amount of her hopes and ambitions into bringing that kid up right. "And when he's big enough, we'll teach him not to let anyone else hurt him."
"Good," he said. "That's the main thing, I think."
There was something in his voice that made Mystique look up at Fred, nine feet tall and five hundred pounds at least, solid steel beneath the fat, all big heart and short fiery bursts of bad temper, and she heard herself say, "Who hurt you, Fred?"
His smile was evasive and strangely sad. "Aw hell," he said. "Nothing hurts the Blob."