Now, anyone who has ever been compelled to think about it – anyone, for example, who has ever been in love – knows that the one face that one can never see is one's own face. One's lover – or one's brother, or one's enemy – sees the face you wear, and this face can elicit the most extraordinary reactions. We do the things we do and feel what we feel essentially because we must – we are responsible for our actions, but we rarely understand them. It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less. But the barrier between oneself and one's knowledge of oneself is high indeed. There are so many things one would rather not know! We become social creatures because we cannot live any other way. But in order to become social, there are a great many other things that we must not become, and we are frightened, all of us, of these forces within us that perpetually menace our precarious security. Yet the forces are there: we cannot will them away. All we can do is learn to live with them. And we cannot learn this unless we are willing to tell the truth about ourselves, and the truth about us is always at variance with what we wish to be. - James Baldwin
Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them. - Jean-Paul Sartre
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Azazel laid on his side in the bed, watching Mystique sleep. She looked peaceful in sleep, and somehow much younger, and more beautiful even than when she was awake. For the last two nights – since the discussion of the child – the nightmares had not come to her, and he had a vague (and ultimately, futile) hope that the matter of the baby had somehow changed things, that now the bad dreams would no longer bother her.
As for himself, Azazel could have counted the number of nightmares he'd had in his life on one hand, but tonight he didn't sleep so easily. There was a deep restlessness in him, a sense of disquiet, and it only grew as he studied Mystique, so vulnerable in sleep. There was a desire to run, to take her and go somewhere very far away – somewhere safe.
But where was safe?
The Savage Land had always been his sanctuary, but it was a wild and cruel place – it suited him well, in large part for those very reasons, but it was by no means safe. Azazel would not have dared to leave Mystique there alone for even a minute, even taking into account her astonishing physical strength and growing proficiency with weaponry. There were no answers to his problem there.
Azazel rolled over and climbed out of the bed, dressing silently in the dim light that filtered in through the window blinds. He left through the door, so not to wake Mystique with the sound of his leaving, and walked downstairs.
He could feel most of the other members of the household around him, warmly glowing silhouettes in his mind's eye, only Emma hidden from him by some quirk of his ability. Fred was in the kitchen, Toad curled up inside a cabinet in the laundry room, and Angel and Janos, Matthew and Luke were in their beds. Remy was on the far end of the roof, awake and pacing, as restless as Azazel himself.
Azazel was not sure why he headed for Erik now, but perhaps it was something to do with what Mystique had said – that he should ask Erik about Shaw and the Nazis – that lead him out into the courtyard.
Emma had argued once that Azazel possessed a type of low-level telepathy, and that this was how he found others, but Azazel did not believe that this was exactly correct. He could visualize where other people were, yes, but his ability told him nothing of what they were thinking or feeling.
Azazel did not know, for example, that it was perhaps a bad time to be approaching Erik until he saw him, sitting crouched over on the bench in the courtyard, a green bottle and a tumbler sitting beside him. By then it was too late to change course.
In the bright light of the full moon, Erik turned to look at him. He picked up the bottle by its neck and shifted to the end of the bench to make room, and Azazel sat down beside him.
Azazel looked down at the unmarked grave, where they had buried the Mutant child from Argentina. Fallen leaves had carpeted much of the courtyard, but these had been cleared away from the still raw earth of the grave. A small pile of pebbles sat on the surface of the grave.
"Who keeps putting those there?" Azazel wondered out-loud, motioning to the stones with one hand.
Instead of answering the question, Erik said, "It's late, Azazel. Why are you still awake?"
"It's afternoon in Australia," Azazel observed. The joke drew from Erik a short-lived smile that was as much a grimace. "I can't sleep," he went on, truthfully. "My mind is too busy and my stomach..." he paused, hunting for the correct word, "is tender."
"You mean you have a stomachache?"
"Not exactly," Azazel said, searching for the right expression. "But there are bugs in it."
"Butterflies, Azazel. You mean that you have butterflies in your stomach."
"Yes," Azazel agreed. "I think that I must be scared."
Erik's smile now was rueful. "You think you're scared," he repeated, "but you aren't sure?"
"I'm not used to this," Azazel, to whom fear was an almost completely alien concept, said defensively. "I'm not usually afraid of anything, you know. More usually, I am the thing that other people are scared of – the thing that makes them be frightened. Fear is for our enemies, not for me." And he said again, "I am not used to this at all."
Erik tipped back his glass. From the label on the bottle, Azazel saw that he was drinking Irish whiskey.
"It is because of the baby," Erik observed, his voice neutral and somehow detached. It seemed to Azazel that he was very drunk – the bottle was half empty – yet he could detect no slur to Erik's voice. "You don't know what's going to happen – if you'll be able to keep them safe. That's why you are scared, Azazel."
Azazel nodded firmly and said, "I think that you're right." He eyed the bottle of whiskey. "It's not good to drink alone."
"That's true enough," Erik said, getting to his feet. He went inside, returning a few minutes later with a second tumbler. He poured and passed the glass to Azazel. "It's completely natural, in any case, that you are afraid. Most men feel the same way, when they're given this type of news."
Azazel downed the contents of his glass and held it out to Erik for a refill. "I can't even say that it's irrational, this fear, especially in our case," Erik went on, and Azazel understood that our case to mean Mutants, and felt the power that was behind it, the strength that came when people recognized their common interests and stood together.
"Frankly, the fact of the matter is that you very well might not be able to protect them," Erik continued, and Azazel deflated as the fear came creeping back. He threw his glass back, trying to drown it in whiskey. "We're living in a dangerous and hostile world, after all, but at least you're not alone. None of you will be alone.
"We're with our people here, Azazel. We're family. We'll look after each other, keep each other safe from danger. It won't be like –" Erik came to a sudden halt. He stared bleary into the bottom of his empty glass. "My apologies," he said. "I believe I've had a bit too much to drink."
"It won't be like what?"
Erik waved the question away. He answered in a voice that was filled with forced joviality, and what he said had no relationship to what Azazel had asked. "I've got to say though, I'm having difficulty picturing you as a papa."
It was meant as a joke, Azazel knew, but he found that he could not treat it as such. "I know," he said, looking down at his hands. They were big hands, heavy and calloused, and he'd never stopped long enough to count how many men he'd killed with them. Soldier's hands, hands that were trained in one trade, meant to weld a blade or a gun. He couldn't see how they might be taught to cradle an infant.
"You aren't thinking of leaving?" Erik asked him.
"Nyet," Azazel scowled, offended, shaking his head sharply. "It's only that I am scared."
He paused, thinking, then said, "Erik, how do you know about baby? It was meant to be a secret... But Emma told you, I suppose."
Erik shook his head. "I guessed it for myself," he told Azazel. "So far as conspirators go, the two of you aren't exactly subtle, what with all the whispering about nappies and cribs."
Azazel held his glass out again, and Erik refilled it. He swirled the liquor in his tumbler, thinking. "Irish whiskey?" he asked, curious.
"Mother's milk," Erik confirmed, and if Azazel had had a finer ear for accents he would have heard the brogue that had come into Erik's voice.
Ask Erik about Shaw, Mystique had said to him, but he was not sure where to begin.
He liked Erik very much, but he knew so little about him, and Erik seemed to prefer things that way. Azazel knew that he was German, from his name and because some of the others had said as much, and because it was occasionally obvious, in the way Erik spoke and moved and sat.
And he knew that Erik was Jewish, because he had made a point of mentioning this to Azazel the day after they had left Cuba, dropping the fact like a hand-grenade into the middle of what had been a casual conversation and then watching Azazel intently, face expressionless but eyes steely, to see if he would make a problem from it.
At the time, Erik's suspicion had felt like an insult, and an outrageous one at that, given that he was the one who had so recently killed one of their own. It seemed Azazel that Erik should be the one to prove himself trustworthy, and he had snapped, "Do I look like White Army to you? We're all Mutants here – this should be all that matters." And if the answer had not satisfied Erik completely – if the argument had struck him as backwards or inadequate – he had at least seemed to accept its sincerity, and things had moved more easily between them after that.
This was the balance of what Azazel knew of Erik's origins, aside from one other thing; this was that the fascists hated Jews even more than the White Army had, and that the Nazis had tried very hard to wipe them out, the same way the humans would doubtlessly try to destroy the Mutant race if they were ever given half a chance. But here he was blurry on the details; Azazel's grasp of contemporary history was weak to begin with, and in the year 1962 the specter of the Holocaust did not occupy the same prominence in the world's collective consciousness that it would in later decades.
"I would have thought schnapps," Azazel said now, awkwardly, trying to make an opening. "Or beer. Because you are German, da?"
Erik spread his hands. "My passport disagrees with you on that matter," he said. "I'm a naturalized citizen of the Republic of Ireland, that's what it says. Even if the bloody thing isn't worth the paper it's printed on, now that the CIA has my name.
"I was only fourteen when the war ended, Azazel, and I didn't stick around afterward."
Azazel nodded; he'd been fourteen, give or take a couple of years, when he'd first gone to war, though that had been a different war.
Erik looked up at the sky. "What did you come here to talk to me about, Azazel?"
"Shaw," Azazel said, so that was what they talked about.
But first they started at the beginning; with Erik's father, who had disappeared late in 1936, and the neighbors had whispered that he'd run off, abandoned the family, but Erik always knew that was a lie, that his father never would have left them behind, so he must have been murdered; of the ghetto; of his sisters, who – small mercy – had been taken by typhus just weeks before the trains began to roll for Auschwitz, of dancing a sewing pin across the table for them without touching it – the trick didn't always work, he couldn't always make it work, but when it did how they smiled at him; of the train; of the KZ; and of Shaw.
And Azazel listened with a rising horror, because though he had known that humans were capable of great brutality, and had never held himself as being too good to match them on their own terms, he had never conceived of so many of the things Erik was telling him now. Azazel was no pacifist, and he was not inclined to shy away from violence, even on a massive scale, but neither was he a planner; he was a berserker on the field of battle, and there was little that was calculated about his mode of violence. And it was the calculation of the thing that shocked him now, the impersonal and methodical manner in which one group of humans had targeted their own species.
And with the horror came shame; shame that he had followed Shaw, who had been part of this massive mechanized death machine and who had hurt a Mutant child so badly, and shame that he had not somehow seen through Shaw, had not understood and had not believed when Janos and Mystique both had tried to tell him the truth.
"I didn't know of these things," he insisted now. "Erik – I am no fascist. I would have killed Shaw myself if I had known of these things."
"I know it," Erik said. Above them, the sky had gone from black to navy blue; dawn was breaking, slow but sure. "You would have tried, away. That's why I can work with you, Azazel; you're vicious but your heart's in the right place.
"The same thing is true of Janos. He means well, though he's a coward who chooses the most inopportune moments to try to force himself into bravery."
"Emma's the problem," Azazel said, putting it together as he said it; Emma had known everything – she must have known it all and more – but she had still followed Shaw. She had known, and she had not told Azazel.
"Emma was a problem when she first joined us," Erik allowed, "but I think the situation is under control now." There were only two fingers of whiskey left in the bottle, and Erik poured half of it into his own glass and half into Azazel's before going on.
"Emma had me badly off-balance, when we were first starting out," Erik explained, picking his words carefully. "She was very insistent that I needed to be a Mutant above all else; otherwise, none of you would follow me. A Mutant and nothing else – not German or Irish, and not a Jew, and not a homophile." He paused, studying Azazel, and he felt again that he was being tested. "You know what that word means – 'homophile?'"
"I know it," he said, waving the question away with annoyance, though in actual fact he had never heard it before, and was only guessing its meaning from context. "I know about Xavier, and this makes no difference to me. It doesn't matter."
"It absolutely matters," Erik replied coolly, and Azazel understood that he had just made a very bad mistake. "It matters because it's all one thing – I am one thing, and I can't just take myself apart into different pieces – but my error was that I didn't see that at first. For a while I was stupid enough to go along with Emma – to defer to her experience, if you will – to attempt to take her instructions.
"I tried to remake myself completely. It didn't work. Azazel – I didn't know who I was for a while there, and it made me less than useless. That's why we didn't get anything done in those first two months – I didn't have any direction because I wasn't using where I'd been to our advantage. Raven finally snapped me out of it, thank god.
"It cost us time, and I regret that, but I think I'm on the right track now."
"That's good," Azazel said, uncertainly. In actual fact, Erik had said more than Azazel could make sense of at the moment, as distracted and exhausted and drunk as he was. He wondered if usually spoke to his friends in this manner, or if it was the drink that made him so open and so verbose. That they were friends now Azazel did not doubt – they had drunk together, hadn't they?
"You think I'm talking like this to you now because I'm drunk," Erik said, as though he had read Azazel mind. "And I am drunk – I am more drunk than I have any right being right now, and I am going to regret it tomorrow." He stood, a bit unsteadily. "But that has nothing to do with anything I've said here tonight.
"There isn't a shred of cheap pity in you, Azazel. That's why I know you won't use what I've told you against me later. You wouldn't know how to turn what I've said into an effective weapon.
"I actually like beer quite a bit," he went on.
"Guinness?" Azazel suggested.
"Piss water," Erik said dismissively. "Though don't go repeating that, please - Dublin will revoke my citizenship.
"No, Deutsch Bier ist das Beste."
And on that note, he left Azazel alone in the courtyard. After a few minutes, Azazel stood and took himself back to bed.