If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? - Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

That life and death were so close together, and love and hatred, and right and wrong, said something to me which I did not want to hear concerning man, concerning the life of man. - James Baldwin

Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain, shared with no one. - John Steinbeck

Coda

It might have been very easy, in the weeks and months following Kurt's birth, for Mystique to avoid Emma's sick room almost entirely.

The others would not have held it against Mystique – quite to the contrary, in fact. Most of the Brotherhood had learned to keep their distance from Emma long before her illness had become common knowledge, and this was a status quo which Emma had gone out of her way to reinforce since that night in the hospital. She was bitter and vicious and emotionally unwell, and nothing about the cancer had done anything to change that.

Still, in many cases a sincere effort had been made to provide her some sort of comfort or support, especially by the newer recruits, the ones who hadn't been around long enough to really understand what Emma was. With few exceptions, only Mystique's overtures were met with anything short of complete rejection.

Fred had come bearing gifts of food meant to strengthen or comfort or distract, and Matthew and Luke had brought advice and sympathy hard won during their sister's protracted and ultimately futile battle with leukemia. Toad came to stare, mostly, taking in the new situation, measuring the mood in the room and between the adults with those great glassy eyes and keeping his evaluations to himself. Of the four, only Toad was received with any degree of tolerance, and even that was extremely limited. It hadn't taken the other three long to take the hint. They stopped coming.

Erik did not bother. He seemed to have written Emma off completely, and Mystique supposed that was fair; she did not believe that Erik was obligated to forgive her. Sometimes he would drop loaded comments about Mystique's visits with Emma in the middle of conversations, but he left her free to make her own choices and her own mistakes.

Mystique supposed that she had chosen her affinities wrongly, that the amount of time she was spending with Emma had made her extremely suspect in the eyes of some of the others – especially Janos, and through him, Angel.

It is only temporary, she wanted to tell them all, but how could that make up for the very personal ways Emma had tormented Janos, for her knowing complicity in everything Shaw had been? Mystique did not want to find herself caught in the trap of making excuses for Emma's sins.

But someone has to be with her, she thought, in her own defense. Emma can't be left alone with this, but was that even true? Emma was like a sick animal, withdrawn into its lair. Most of the time she acted as though there was nothing she would like more than for Mystique to leave her alone.

It was only rarely, in the weak moments when Emma let her shields slip, that Mystique got a sense of how hideously lonely Emma really was.

So Mystique sat with Emma, barely tolerated, tolerating the insults and abuses, but they both knew that she wasn't driven to do so out of pure pity or kindness or a sense of Mutant solidarity. Her motives were more complex than that.

"Your problem," Emma told Mystique from her sick bed, after this all had been going on for a number of months, "is that you expect answers." Weak as her body might have become, Emma's voice remained light and airy, almost gentle in its detachment, but the words were calculated to cut.

Mystique didn't bother to vocalize a denial. She frowned.

"Oh, you don't think that the others are entitled to answers – not automatically, at least. That's why you kept quiet about my little problem as long as you did," she went on, her lilting voice quick and light and dripping careless poison. In Emma's arms, Kurt cooed worriedly, and a thin smile spread across her parchment lips as she looked down at him.

That was something, anyway. The baby had a way of getting through her defenses – at least sometimes – so that meant she couldn't be entirely bad, right?

It was only for a moment.

"The others haven't been patient like you have, have they? They haven't kept secrets the way you have, as self-serving as your reasons might have been. But you've put in the time, you've waited patiently, so you think that you deserve to know why.

"Worse than that, you think I want to tell you. You think that if you're patient and helpful enough, if you just wait for me to come around, to feel safe enough in your presence or desperate enough to talk to someone, eventually I'll spill my guts to you."

Mystique didn't argue with Emma's assessment. There would have been no point. She waited.

"Take him back," Emma commanded imperiously, and Mystique stood to do so. "Infants are vile," Emma added, as Mystique settled back into her chair with Kurt resting in the crook of her arm, and Mystique felt herself bristle.

"Oh lord. Not yours specifically," Emma added dismissively. "They have gray minds – it's almost as bad as animals. He wants to feed."

"I know that," Mystique said, an edge to her voice. Kurt squirmed uncomfortably in her arms. She draped a light tea towel over her shoulder to cover herself, manifested a nipple, lifted Kurt up to nurse. The back of his head ballooned the thin square of linen outward.

In some ways, Kurt was precarious. He was only two months old, yet he seemed hyper attuned to the moods of people around them, to the point that Mystique had begun to wonder (incorrectly, as it would turn out) if he didn't possess some degree of telepathic or empathic ability. He hated to be put down, preferring to have someone to cling to hands and feet, like a small monkey, and his grip was powerful. Yet he remained small. Fey. Fragile-seeming. It seemed to Mystique that he was not putting on weight the way he should have been. And he cried only rarely, a weedy and particular mewling. He worried her.

Emma was watching her. "Most of the men here think you're naked all the time," she informed Mystique.

Mystique snorted, rolled her eyes to show what she thought of that.

Underneath the heavy layer of blankets, Emma crossed her legs. She took up the thread of the previous conversation without preamble. "You think that it will be like it was with Janos, that some dam will burst and in the end I will tell you everything. You think that I will go on and on and one until I give you some excuse to like me despite yourself.

"Sorry to disappoint, hon."

After a long moment, Emma went on. "Janos lied to you about quite a lot, you know – he lied to make himself look better and because he's not brave enough to face up to the truth." Mystique shrugged the shoulder opposite of Kurt; she had guessed as much for herself. It didn't bother her more than a little.

"The most egregious lies concern the death of Colonel Hendry, whose name he hasn't even managed to remember correctly. First of all, Janos overestimates Azazel's attachment to the man; Azazel makes friends with surprising ease for a man of his habits and appearance, but he doesn't usually become close to people... Congratulations on making it over that barrier, by the way." There was a note of resentment in Emma's voice – directed at Azazel or Mystique or them both, she couldn't say – but Mystique chose to ignore it. Emma looked her over shrewdly and upped the ante. "Though I imagine that has more to do with the color and texture of your skin than anything else."

"What is with telepaths?" Mystique asked rhetorically. She matched Emma's tone, which was like an icy scalpel, with prefect precision, though she used her own voice. "You're worse than Charles. You have actually no idea what's going on with the people around you at any given time, do you?

"You're inching up on a line you don't want to cross, by the way," she added, with a dangerous sort of carelessness.

Emma moved on to her next point without comment, which, Mystique thought, might even mean that Emma had taken her threat seriously.

"Janos might have pitied – related to, you could even say – that greedy little sapiens man. Certainly, the feelings are complex, and Janos' mind is quite the tangled mess. But do you know what Janos did when Hendry pulled his sad little weapon on Shaw, as though he thought Shaw was someone who could be intimidated by something as silly as a hand grenade?"

"Of course I don't," Mystique, who had never so much as met the late Colonel, said, politely neglecting to mention that it had been something far less impressive than a hand grenade – a small silver coin – that had brought Shaw down. Backed, of course, by all of Erik's force of will.

"Well, first he became scared, because Janos is in his center a coward. But after that he smirked – he almost laughed! Don't doubt me, I was there.

"And none of that was an act for Shaw's sake, though very often he tried to match his reactions to Shaw's. He believe Shaw was actually paying attention to him – very self-important, our Janos is – and thought that he would be less likely to find himself in trouble if he did so..." Emma paused, frowning; often these days she seemed to loose track of her train of thought. "It was pure schadenfreude. Relief at seeing that the person who had fucked up so badly wasn't him.

"The world makes people hard," Emma said, and that was the closest to an admission of anything that she would ever come. "You've learned a little bit about that. You'll learn a great deal more, I suppose, or else you'll die." She spoke as though she had very little investment in the matter one way or the other, and Mystique supposed she didn't; it wasn't Emma's look-out, after all. She wouldn't be there for that bit.

Arguing felt like the best course of action. "It wasn't the world that pushed Janos to that point. It was Shaw."

"Don't be stupid. Shaw was reflective of the world."

Mystique didn't say anything to that. She was perfectly still, waiting. Now she will talk about him – about all of it, she thought expectantly, but she tried to keep that thought very quiet.

There were dead leaves in Emma's laugh, used up and rotting. "You don't have the slightest idea what pushes Janos. Or Azazel, or Erik, or any of the people here – probably yourself most of all.

"You want exonerating evidence, mitigating circumstances, something to make the fact that I went to such extremes understandable and – most of all – forgivable. You want me to tell you about a ruined childhood, you want me to say that I was abused or manipulated or raped, or that Shaw tricked me somehow, played me for a fool, pulled one over on me. You want me to say that I turned my back on the world because the world turned against me. You want me to be pitiful.

"But I'm not like Janos, and I'm not like you, or Angel, or even Erik. I'm not the victim – I'm not the one who gets hurt, I'm the one who makes other people hurt. I've more in common with Azazel than any of you in that –"

Emma stopped suddenly, with a sharp intake of breath. Until recently, the pain had not been very bad for her – she had ways of managing it, of shutting off the parts of her brain that insisted that pain mattered – but more and more, as the weeks had gone by, her ability had begun to fail her. When that happened, the pain was very bad, though perhaps not as bad as her fear and confusion in the face of the sudden silence of any other mental voices.

Emma clutched with clawed hands at her blankets, and Mystique waited for her to recover herself. She did not comment on any of the sad ironies associated with that last, unfinished thought.

When Emma spoke again, it was to say, "We have to be pitiful for you so you can love us, because that's the only way you can remember why you need to hate them."

She thought about Agent Platt, who'd been so happy to know them and who'd died so badly at Azazel's hands, of Erik's uncle Kurt, who'd done his best to do right by the hurting boy that Erik had been and in so many ways still ways, about the doctor who'd looked down at her little blue wisp of a baby and said, He's lovely. Weighed that all against possibility of her own destruction, or of Azazel, or any of her comrades. Weighed Kurt's life against the few decent humans she'd come across, on a planet of six billion.

It was, all and all, a simple equation, if not entirely painless. It did not matter, really, that it proved Emma's point exactly.

"I don't need you to remind me of anything," she told Emma, and she had gotten up and left very quickly, before she could say something cruel. She understood by then that the war was coming, and that peace would not be an option given to them, but she was unwilling to throw her own life away the way Emma had, trying to force an early confrontation.

Mystique had debated on staying away after that, as it was very obvious that no answers would be forthcoming, and she now felt that even desiring them left her compromised, but in the end she had returned. She felt that she had very little choice in the matter; Emma needed someone, as much as she pretended that she did not, and by then it was becoming quite impossible for her to take care of herself.

Eventually, Azazel began to come around as well. He'd approached Emma in his forthright way, bearing a gigantic pure white feather the length of his arm – an object which obviously had its origins in the Savage Land – as a peace offering. But Azazel was as inexperienced with forgiveness as he was any complex social interaction, and Emma had been disinclined to smooth the way for him. Azazel only had to be told to leave once.

It was impossible to tell what – if anything – Emma regretted.

The feather had somehow ended up in Toad's possession – though if he had stolen it or Emma had given it away Mystique was never sure – and he had not been able to resist playing too roughly with the lovely thing. It had ended up in tatters, its silky filaments scattered around the headquarters' courtyard.

The weeks went by, every day with Kurt was a new discovery, and one morning she had gone up to Emma's room with him, but Emma wasn't there anymore. There was only an empty body.

After that, there had been two unmarked graves in the courtyard.

And things went on.

END.

Author's Note: DEVIL is finished, but it was only the first of three stories dealing in the history of Mystique and the Brotherhood. The first chapter of the next story, which will begin a few years after DEVIL left off, will be appearing on my account as soon as possible under the title FATE.

Thanks for sticking with this for so long. Now that we're done (for now), I'd love to hear your closing thoughts. What did you like, what did you hate, what do you think could have been done better? What are you interested in seeing more of in the next story? I'm still outlining this, and am open to integrating suggestions if they fit, though obviously I can't make promises.