Sorry this took so long. My computer's internet is down and my family hogged the other computer.
***
Kurt sat on floor in his strange prison. The boy wore the loose black cotton pants that had been in the tiny closet and nothing more. It was a small piece of defiance, he supposed. The shirts and pants were all the same. Not wearing the white shirt was his only way to have a choice and not go naked where it counted. His original clothes were gone. His captor didn't believe in boxers.
He looked around. It hardly seemed a cell at all, but like a luxurious apartment. It had all the necessities of life –cable TV and an overlarge food pantry that refilled itself constantly. He was free to wander about the spacious rooms. The door out was clearly marked and unlocked. There were only three things that reminded the Nightcrawler that he was a captive.
The first lay on his bedside table. It was connected to the wall by a short but sturdy chain. It was a gun of sorts. Kurt knew both the firearm and the chain were made of adamantine. Logan had slashed at him so many times in the Danger Room that the image of the metal was permanently seared into his brain.
The Nightcrawler turned his head away from the terrible futuristic weapon and looked at the walls and ceiling of the bedroom. They -and the rest of the apartment- were also adamantine. How Mystique had amassed so much of the space metal was beyond even his fantastical imagination. Kurt slid backwards and felt the biting chill of cold metal on the relatively furless areas of his back and neck. He slammed his head back and made a tinny clunking noise. He didn't care about the headache it would give him and smashed his head into the wall again. His cell's walls were seamless and unbreakable except for the grates that fed the rooms air. Kurt had the sense of being deep underground, being surrounded by tons of solid rock on every side.
There was a wheezing noise and Kurt refocused his bleary eyes to look at the third thing. He looked at a television screen set into the wall opposite him. The sound had come from its speakers. The show playing held him in morbid fascination. He couldn't bear to turn it off. Wagner wouldn't take his eyes off it for a second. He had good reason; it starred a very good friend of his.
Kitty lay in a bed, hooked up to the dozens of machines that prolonged her life. She looked so fragile, as if she would crumble to dust if she were touched by a moth's wing. Yet she lay in a monster's jaws. All Mystique had to do was swallow. Kurt could never forget when the Demoness had shut off Kitty's life support to make her point. The screen had split in two to show the blue woman's cruel face and Kitty as she began to die. There had been horrific convulsions and then a terrible silence before Mystique had relented to his begging and allowed the girl to live a while longer. Her voice, so hollow and cold, had echoed harshly around the metal cell. "Do not leave this place and do what I say and the girl will be kept alive. Clean up that mess." Kurt had stared at the two ladies on the screen, on his knees surrounded by a pool of vomit.
Kurt looked at that spot on the floor, now meticulously clean. The floor was wooden, but he knew it was only a cover for the metal below. An earthquake -the size of which the world had never known- could have ripped through the area and Kurt's prison would have gone undamaged. Assuming the air vents that sent air into the cell were lined with adamantine as well, he would survive until "rescued."
The lights dimmed and Kurt sighed. He had been dreading that moment. Slowly, he stood up and padded to the bed. Reaching for the strange gun, he took a deep breath and raised it to his neck, pressing it onto the hollow to the left of his voice box directly under the chin. Such a good little boy he was being, follow orders so well. Kurt put his finger on the trigger. It didn't have the little loop of metal around it and the gun fit his unique hand perfectly. "Made just for me? You shouldn't have," Kurt muttered. A flicker of blue caught his attention and he turned to see Mystique on the screen. She replaced Kitty and Kurt snarled. How dare she think herself more important than his friend? He studied the monster's face long and hard. She would die a thousand ways in his dreams and he wanted the dream Mystique to be an exact replica of the real depravity.
He punched the trigger and felt the needle's jab. The world began to shiver in front of his eyes and then warp. He stumbled backwards onto the bed, dropping the tranquilizer gun. Kurt fought to stay awake just a little longer, to stare hate into the tranquil face of the enemy for just a moment more. He lost the battle and darkness took him.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Mystique watched her son curl up on the bed. His tail twitched one final time, and then he was still.
"My son," she whispered, a tear flowing down the groove between her nose and cheek. The baby that had slipped from her arms was still alive. Glancing back at the wonderful computer screen, she reread again and again the glorious sentence, 49.68% DNA match. Kurt was half her; he was hers.
She laughed gaily at her thoughts. In normal circumstances, the child was of the mother. If a baby was half her, she was its mother. Mystique, because of her unique amorphous genetic material, always threw out wild cards when it came to the DNA she gave her children. Kurt had been no different from the others. He was entirely different from other humans, not at all like the form Mystique had been during the pregnancy. So, to be closer to her baby, she did what she always did. She became the baby, and then changed this and that until she was half him and half something else. In a way, Mystique was Kurt's daughter.
That was what ancient theories of the creation of children had taught her –throwing out the pompous male idiots that said women were just vessels for their manliness to do all the work. Part –typically half- of each parent's physical self was combined to create a new life. If she was half someone, she was his child. Genetics had only proved the theory.
A smile quirked over her midnight blue face, the "default setting" she had worn since Kurt's birth. 'Ah genetics,' she thought, hearing the myriad of voices that had been hers over the years say it all at once. Unlike the rest of the modern world...that wasn't doctors and Sexual Education Teachers, Mystique loved science and the way it explained things. She loved precise words, despising nicknames and the like. All those "modern" terms she had embraced fully the first time had heard them. Genetic mutation was so much easier to bear than body snatcher, demoness, and monster.
When she first heard that wonderful set of scientific words, Mystique had thought of a future where she could go out and live with the world instead of being hidden from it. After a few decades, she learned she would never live to see that shining day. Unless the exotic and freakish became the majority, no mutant would either.
Mystique clicked her teeth together in odd patterns, an old habit she had picked up somewhere. It meant she was thinking too deeply about nothing important. Sighing, she pulled the keyboard from her bedside desk. She snapped her fingers to take her son off the large flat screen and make it a computer monitor.
49.68% DNA match. She smiled sadly and shut down the program. Idle fantasies of a relationship with her son were just that: fantasies. He hated her from the bottom of his heart now. If Mystique had not been forced to think on her feet -something she did terribly and avoided at all costs, it would have been only a matter of time. She would have dropped her loose bargain with Magneto, switched sides entirely if necessary. The best way would have been to insinuate herself into the Institute as a professor. The Wolverine wouldn't have caught her scent as his current disguise of Logan. Mystique doubted he remembered even something as memorable as her smell from their earlier encounters.
She wouldn't be herself of course, but would play some physically altered mutant that would draw her son to her. There would be an obvious kinship because they were both "freaks." No one would think it odd for her to act motherly towards the boy. When Mystique had gotten close enough to Kurt, the...Wagners? Yes, that was the name. An unfortunate accident would befall the Wagners. Her offer to adopt would be taken and everything would be as it should be.
Mystique was clicking her teeth again. "Idle fantasies again, monstrous mother? Darker -yes, they are- but still pointless. The Wolverine knows you now and will track that scent to any guise you take. And now I'm talking to myself. Be on task, there is work to be done."
She glanced at the screen and studied the information. Katherine was in New York, at the train station. The girl was almost two hours early, and Mystique appreciated the meaning behind the gesture. It meant she was blackmailing a competent, mature person. She pulled up a different program and hacked into the train station's surveillance system.
It was one of the surprisingly simple things that technology allowed her to do. As the world grasped new technology, everything became connected in a great web that she -the spider- only had to crawl along the strands to reach the juicy moth and drain it dry. The camera system normally ran through a company server in modernized buildings. Companies and others who used surveillance that had something to hide didn't make that mistake and were trickier to reach. The NY Train Depot was an open book and Mystique had no trouble commandeering the cameras.
The Blue woman watched the screens for a while, looking for the right angle. When she found the camera she wanted, she wrested it from the system, rerouting it to send its data through the net to her computer. The person paid to watch the screens would think nothing of it. One camera malfunctioning was normal and nothing to be concerned about.
Mystique studied the black and white Katherine Pryde. She didn't mind the lack of color. In fact, it gave her nostalgia for the days when moving pictures had first delighted her. The girl whiled away the time watching various young children. She sat on a bench, showing teeth in a bright grin whenever a little one particularly mortified his parents. Every now and then, she toyed with a glinting object on her left ear thoughtfully. Katherine glanced at her watch. Mystique looked at the computer's clock. She abandoned the depot surveillance system, grabbed a laptop and left the room. She had a train to catch.
Thinking back on Katherine as she rode in her limo to the depot, Mystique's ever-present amused smile disappeared. "Poor child. Whatever innocence she harbored with that bubbly, cheerful shell is going to die. You can't put a girl into the LeBeau snake hole and not have it happen. But they can come out again, alive. I will get both of them out."
With that adamantine promise ringing in her mind, the ancient thief of all trades stepped into the station. Her newest pupil awaited her.
***
Bum Bum Buuummmmmm! The plot thickens...again...I think. I can never tell when I've been too subtle. And if Mystique's logic/thoughts sound shaky, I have my reasons.
There, another chapter. I've really got to work on my other fics. They're dying from want of attention. My poor babies! I mean, maybe I would update more if people read them...*makes two-year-old's version of puppy eyes (kryptonite for the entire human species).* I hate to sound like an advertisement, but if someone would please look at them. And review, that's good too. Tell me how much you hate them if nothing else. ("Stoic" is actually a cruel...cool story, just give it a chance)
Review Responses
Flamekiller: You had some questions I didn't expect to get.
When did Kurt get kidnapped? … How did she manage to get a hold of Kurt? Uh…I thought it was obvious but okay. In "De Filles Wake Up" chapter, we all know the tomb crashes down on poor exhausted Katherine (I like that name so much better than Kitty). Kurt and Hyena-Mystique are in the tomb as well, but the morphing woman bites the barely conscious Kurt, who ports them out. He does it without thinking and we may only assume Mystique knocked him out again when they were safely out of the collapsing mausoleum.
What does Mystique want Kitty to do? Again, I thought this was a given. I'm not going to tell so just wait for the next few chapters to let you know.
Why did she pick Kitty?
1: Katherine is recuperating from massive injuries and VERY VERY VERY guilty about losing Kurt. She is the least likely to think straight and ask for help. She wants to prove to herself that she can get him back, that she isn't a failure.
2: I could see Jean doing this too, but then Mystique would have taken Scott. I don't want Scott anywhere near this fic. He's only going to get a few lines and appearances in the background if anything. Jean just isn't the right character for this part in my fic. You'll understand why as the chapters pile up. Also, I'm playing on the Kurtty relationship hinted at the point in X-Evo time when this story takes place.
3: All I'm going to say is: EV knows somet'ing dat You don't know! ;-D
Gothic Cajun:
I could have explained the cell phone's appearance better. I guess the in the same way that backpack got there...hold on. You just gave me an idea. Thanks. I was going to say some little drudge of Mystique's slipped them there when Katherine (Kitty) wasn't looking. This new idea is so much cooler. Read on and find out what it is. (See, I told you nitpicking helped me.)
There's more and they were helpful but I think you appreciate the update more than a little mention.
