Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language... In a like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue. - Karl Marx
Chapter Thirty-Six
She and Azazel stayed up most of the night, just talking. There were a thousand good things, after all, to talk about, and all of them related to the baby.
But for all their talking, they did not discuss the difficulties and dangers that were sure to come. There were a thousand of these threats, too, more than any human parents had ever faced, but Mystique put those fears away in a dark corner of her mind, refusing with almost superstitious dread to grant them any credence.
If it occurred to Azazel to worry about anything he didn't show it; he was all excitement and easy-going male conceit, endlessly pleased with himself and with her and with the idea of the child.
They talked about bright potentialities, about tails and scales and coloration, and they wondered together if their abilities might be hereditary or if the baby would have an entirely unique gift. The child in Mystique's belly was in all likelihood an unprecedented phenomenon, quite possibly the first offspring of two Mutants to ever come into existence, and he or she could be absolutely anything.
She tried not to worry about practical concerns, about who would deliver the baby or treat it if it was ill, or what they would do if it had a mutation that made it a danger to itself or to other, nor did she dwell on all of the things that a child with a visible mutation would be forced to miss out on growing up. The entire world would be aligned against her family, she knew, but for the moment she had no desire to think about the rest of the world.
At the moment, Mystique only wanted to be happy. And she was, propped up in the bed with Azazel, the back of her head resting against his shoulder, his arms curled around her waist.
There was only one thing, really, one nagging though that continued to intrude upon her mind even after she'd put all the other fears aside for the night. It would not leave her alone, that thought, but it was only toward dawn that she found the courage to speak the fear out-loud.
Azazel's hands were still folded over her belly, two parts protective and one part possessive, and Mystique placed her own hand over his, fingers splayed. She was afraid, she supposed, that he might take his hands away after he'd heard her question.
"Azazel..." she began, and though she didn't look up at him Mystique could tell from the way his body tensed beneath her that he had heard the worry in her voice, and that he was listening. "What if the baby isn't a Mutant?"
She could feel the rumble from his chest against her spine when he tried to laugh that off, but when he spoke she could tell that the question had troubled him. "How could baby not be a Mutant?" he said. "It is ours."
"But what if it isn't?"
He was silent for a long moment. Mystique felt rather than saw his shrug. "Still it is ours," he said.
"Still ours," she repeated, and not long after that she drifted off into sleep.
When Mystique woke they were still in the same position, and light was leaking into the room from between the blinds. She was glad that there seemed to have been none of the violent dreams that Azazel had spoken of during the night... She had been so confused and frightened by what Azazel was telling her during last night's conversation that the fact that she had hurt him physically had not really penetrated her mind, but now when she looked down at the scratches on his arm her stomach constricted with shame.
She untangled herself from Azazel's arms and went over to the window, putting a human coloration to her eyes and to her skin before she peered out between the blades of the blinds. The city below was awake and active.
Mystique shook Azazel awake and sat on the edge of the bed, watching him while he dressed. He did not wear the same thing every day – there were variations to Azazel's collection of suits – but for him it was always black with slashes of red, always formal and fastidiously neat.
She was not sure what they looked like to the rest of the Brotherhood, or what the others would think about the baby – what Charles, for that matter, would think about any of it. But watching Azazel now, Mystique was pretty sure that she'd made the right choices.
The dinning room was empty when Azazel and Mystique went downstairs, so they put together a quick breakfast and sat down to Mystique's Russian lessons.
She could remember the first time that they had sat across from one another at this table, alone. That had been the night that Erik released Azazel to put down Shaw's remaining Nazi allies. At the time, the matter had disturbed her, not because she cared anything about the fate of the those Nazis, but because it seemed so far outside of the realm of legality to simply take it upon themselves to kill those men – it was not the done thing, Charles's mother might have said, and Mystique had not yet truly understood how completely cut off from the norms and values of the rest of society the Brotherhood would be.
Now, she comprehended more clearly that they were making their own rules here, that human laws and standards didn't apply because they would never protect Mutants. The point was looking out for other Mutants, and that had meant – quite apart from their crimes against humanity – that Shaw's Nazi friends needed to die, because they'd known to much about the old Hellfire Club to be safely left to their own devises.
Mystique thought now if Erik had set her against one of those Nazis instead of some feckless New Orleans prison guard, she might not have had any of the difficulties that she'd had a few days previously. But she remembered now how uneasy it had made her at the time, to find herself trading small talk with someone who had been engaged in the business of killing only a few minutes earlier, and who would be busy with killing again before very long. The very normality of that short exchanged, a moment of calm in the eye of the storm of terror that Azazel would unleash elsewhere, had been part of what made the entire thing seem so surreal.
Those moments came less frequently now, the moments when she would look at Azazel – or at Janos or Emma or Erik – and find herself struck by the fact that she was looking at a killer. Most of the time, Mystique felt as though she had reconciled herself to what the others were capable of and who they were. In point of fact it had been a surprisingly easy thing to get used to.
They'd been at work for almost an hour when Erik interrupted them. Azazel had created nothing as formal as a lesson plan for Mystique's studies. She followed along as he read children's stories out loud – Mystique had never realized that such a profusion of wonderful children's books existed in the USSR – and she copied down letters and words in Cyrillic, and they had conversations, her ability to hold her own in which had improved almost every day. Today the conversation had turned quickly to babies and to the words for baby things – bottle, nappy, crib – and this was the topic that was on Mystique's when Erik stepped into the room from behind her.
"You two look positively conspiratorial," Erik observed, and Mystique wondered how long he'd been listening. She had told Azazel the night before that she wanted to wait a little while before they told the others the news – she wanted to keep the secret between the to of them for the time being – but now she wondered if she'd managed to let the cat out of the bag herself. "What are you up to?" he asked.
"Just studying," Mystique, and hoped that she sounded innocent.
"I noticed," Erik said. "You're making a lot of progress – sounds like you're going to have better Russian than I do before long. My Russian is shit, of course, but you're making progress very quickly, Raven."
"Nyet, Erik," Azazel said from his side of the table. "Your Russian is very good. Ist sehr gut."
"It's not as bad as your German, in any case," Erik allowed, and Azazel barked laughter at that.
"It's not as hard as I thought it would be," Mystique allowed. The Russia was actually coming to her at a startling pace, and she supposed that had quite a lot to do with her ability – it was as easy for her to pronounce news sounds and words as it was for her to copy someone else's voice, and once she'd heard them she never forgot. Syntax was coming to her easily as well, though she was having difficulty making generalizations about grammar.
Mystique thought now about how she had spent her childhood thinking she was stupid because she had never done well in her classes, and how that had weighed on her, limited her concept of herself and what she believed she was capable of. All those years when she had been so terrified of discovery that she hadn't even wanted to go to school, all her energy focused on keeping hidden. She felt cheated – not just of the time wasted in classrooms where she couldn't learn, but cheated out of years of her life which she wasted thinking so little of who she was.
"Kak prohodyat tvoi uletniye zanyatiya s Emmoy?" Erik asked, breaking her train of thought. Mystique frowned, trying to work out the question.
My lessons with Emma in what? she wondered.
Azazel was shaking his head, a crooked half-smile on his lips. "Letniye..." he corrected.
"'Uletniye' is 'pilot?'" Erik said.
"Nyet," Azazel said, and repeated again, "Letniye. Uletniye is something else." He paused, clearly thinking hard, and Mystique had the sense that he was having difficulty finding a literal translation for the word. "Uletniye is meaning like... is like 'groovy.'"
Where does he even learn words like 'groovy'? Mystique wondered, but then she supposed that she was probably the one responsible for that. She had a tendency to pick up and repeat turns of phrase, and Charles's little verbal oddities had always been especially contagious.
But Erik's question made sense to her now: he wanted to know how the pilot lessons with Emma were going. Which was an akward question, because actually they hadn't been going at all.
"My eshe ne bily v aeroportu..." she began, nervously, the English running beside the Russian in her mind's eye as she worked her way through the sentence. We haven't actually gone to the airport yet... "Emma vechno otkadyvaet, potomu chto u neyo... umm..." she continued, but stopped there, stymied. Emma keeps canceling our lessons because she has... she had begun to say, but she did not know the correct Russian word to finish the sentence. "... migraines," she said in English, giving up her hunt. "Emma says she's been getting migraines."
"She's skiving off work," Erik said. He looked angry – angrier, Mystique thought, than was warranted by the situation. "I'll take care of it."
"I don't think that's the problem," she began. "Charles used to get headaches, too. I think it might be related to the ability, you know? But I –"
But she didn't get a chance to finish, because at that moment the sounds of people shouting began to come from the hall, followed by something that sounded suspiciously like an explosion.
Azazel and Mystique stood quickly, and they hurried with Erik out into the hallway.
Author's Note: mefisto-vi from Deviant Art provided the Russian translations and transliterations for this chapter, and I want to thank this person for the help.