A/N: While there isn't a candlelight dinner in this chapter, careful readers will find a lot of romance in this one!
"Why?" Magneto echoed. "Because you would do far better to break her neck than to take her as your wife. Or," he hastily amended, because Victor's body language suddenly suggested that he would disregard the fragility of old bones, "at the very least, call off the wedding, and not marry her. This marriage will bring about the end of the world as we know it."
I had been too busy before this to give that prediction any real thought. To me it could mean only one thing: that I would succeed in eradicating super heroism (but not the heroes themselves) from the planet. Super villainy would be wiped out as well, because the two went together, as thunder follows on the heels of lightning. No longer would people settle disputes by hitting each other with buses, and leveling city blocks in the process. The humans, mutant and otherwise, who had special powers would find peaceful, constructive applications for them.
It fit the prediction, because it would be the end of the world as they knew it, making way for a better world, a saner, stronger one.
Perhaps someday I would even be able to point out to Victor that none of the other world leaders went around in armor, and if he were to wear a well-tailored suit as he had for dinner last night, the United Nations would give his statements and ideas even more weight than they already did. I dreamed of that day…
"Magneto," said Victor with exaggerated patience. "The world as we know it comes to an end twice a year on average. Nothing ever comes of it but several weeks of upheaval before the status quo is restored. Sometimes one is left with two sets of memories before the multiversal split is mended and the timestream returns to normal, and then the secondary set is subsumed."
I nodded, and added, "It's as inevitable as the truth that whenever the world is imperiled, someone or other always manages to save it at the very last moment—except, of course, when the peril is something entirely mundane. Those take a lot of time and money to correct."
"That is entirely in keeping with your usual acuity, my dear," Victor told me. "It is worthy of more discussion."
"But this is not the time? I understand." I said. "I interrupted. Do go on."
Victor turned back to Magneto. "Furthermore, my chosen companion of my future life has no powers nor the capacity to develop them. I can only assume you have taken leave of your senses. Again. I must warn you that mere insanity does not exonerate you in my eyes."
"I know she hasn't any powers." growled Magneto. "That was the first thing I checked for. That makes this even worse. How can it be fought or prevented, if she—"
Victor interrupted. "Say, rather, she and I. If this fate is dependant upon our marriage, then it is not she alone who is responsible for it."
Magneto went on. "If this change, this end, is accomplished without the use of any powers? The fabric of the universe is strange—that which is done using powers is writ in sand, it takes but little to erase it, and the faster it is done, the quicker and easier it is to undo. But without powers—without them, it is writ in stone."
Magneto really was intelligent. Some of his observations were surprisingly similar to mine—but he didn't seem to know why, whereas I did.
"May I ask, first of all, where you got your information, and second, exactly how the world as we know it is supposed to come to an end?" I inquired. "If anybody has a right to know, I do."
"And I insist on hearing this as well." Victor added his authority. "I heard nothing of this until this hour."
"Yesterday morning—no, the day before yesterday, now, every seer who I know woke with an unfocused premonition of something that would shortly happen. Then came your announcement, and the vision came into sharp definition. The three to whom I spoke were Destiny, Apocalypse, and Kang the Destroyer." Magneto stated.
"I thought Destiny was dead—that is, if you mean the elderly mutant woman who called herself Irene Adler, after the character in Sherlock Holmes." I replied.
"She was cloned!" snapped Magneto.
"Uh-huh." I said, dripping with sarcasm.
"Kang the Destroyer claims that he is a future version of Doom, which he most assuredly is not." said Victor. "Two of your three would-be sources are spurious. And as for the third, I think but little of him either. What form will this end take—in fire or in ice?"
"In mundanity." Magneto told us. "With law-suits, regulations, constraints, accountability. There will be an end to honest battle. There will be an end to many freedoms. Those who call themselves heroes will dwindle away, until they become little more than missionaries who deliver public service announcements, and give performances of their powers for charity. Those who call themselves villains will diminish into jokes. Mutants—mutants will be no more than anyone else. Their gifts will be squandered on forty-hour-a-week jobs. They will never take their rightful place in this world as the natural leaders of it."
"It sounds to me as if you are describing the future of mutants as being contributing members of society, and you talk as if that were a bad thing." I commented. Victor seemed content to let me lead the conversation in the direction I wanted; he was silently following the exchange.
"I call it slavery! To labor for the benefit of Homo sapiens, for mere wages. Our powers proclaim us the superior race!"
"Is it your assertion that all mutants are superior to all humans, then?" I asked.
He walked right into my trap. "Yes!"
"Then how do you explain what I was able to do to your four cohorts, then? As you can see, I don't have a scratch on me. If they're the Evolved, clearly they haven't evolved enough."
Magneto went almost as pale as I am myself. Then he said, after a few deep breaths, with great care and deliberation, "Your gene complex for intelligence—and most particularly for memory—constitutes a favorable mutation despite the lack of more conventional signs of it. Intelligence is a primary survival trait, after all."
"Bravo." I said. "If Hitler had been able to think his way around pitfalls as you do, at the 1936 Olympics, he would have clapped Jesse Owens on the back after the son of sharecroppers and grandson of slaves made a lie of all the Nazi party claimed, and declared Mr. Owens one of the finest Aryans he had ever had the pleasure to have met."
"You—"Whatever it was Magneto might have wanted to call me, he thought better of it.
"Unexpectedly, I find myself enjoying this immensely." Victor observed. "Four cohorts? That would explain the disreputable individual who is curled in the fetal position over there." He gestured toward Mastermind. "Allow me to add my part to this discussion.
"You say that our union will prove the end of the world as we know it. Of course it will. With her by my side, the scales shall be tipped in my favor—my inspiration, my helpmeet, my anodyne, the leaven in the bread which is my life." Victor gave me a look so approving that I almost swayed under the impact.
"Do you imagine I would marry beneath me? I did not know my judgment was as good as this, but I accept it. The world will prosper under the rule of Doom; it is to be anticipated eagerly, not feared. There will be peace. There will be equity in all things. Mutants shall have no higher nor lower a place than they deserve on their individual merits. You sought to prevent this marriage by removing her from my side before the wedding."
"Obviously." said Magneto.
"Tell me, the action I took to prevent you from harming this inestimable gift life saw fit to give me, when I bought up all Genosha's national debts, did it suggest nothing to you in the face of these predictions?"
"Such as what?" asked Magneto.
"Are these not the very tactics of which you complained?"
"I—it." Magneto began. He was not having a good day. Victor and I were playing with his wits like the ball in a game of Ping-Pong.
"Your error was in thinking that preventing the wedding would prevent our marriage." Victor told him. "A wedding is merely a ceremony. A marriage is a relationship. We are already married."
That pretty well floored Magneto. He looked to me for confirmation.
"By the laws of Latveria, yes, we are. And in every way." I clinched it.
"Too late…too late." He staggered.
"Far too late." Victor reinforced it. "And now we must discuss some important matters."
"What is there to discuss?" asked Magneto.
"How you are to repay the money Genosha now owes Latveria, and how you are to become self-sufficient, because otherwise you're just going to sink further into debt—and how you are to repay us personally for the trauma and inconvenience you have caused."
"If this is going to take any length of time, can we go in out of the sun?" I asked.
"I am sure that can be arranged." Victor replied, "Come, my dearest partner of greatness." and he offered me his arm.
The last line was straight from Macbeth, and as it happened, I had a perfect comeback.
"Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" I indicated Magneto.
"I heard that!"
"There will be no actual blood spilled." Victor reassured him. "This pound of flesh will be extracted bloodlessly."
"You're mixing your plays…" I told him, as we went.
TBC…
A/N: Chantrea Savann--I don't mind your asking at all. I live in Maryland, in the United States, near Washington, DC
GothikStrawberry: Well, it bodes big changes for this particular AU of Marvel's...