A/N: To give credit where credit is overdue, I must thank Gevaisa, whose Fantastic Four/ Doctor Doom fic Minion inspired this one. She has also given me invaluable plot help, and even made me read The Seven Daughters of Eve so I would understand the genetics. Thanks, Gevaisa. May your life straighten out and your muses return.
This chapter gave me fits. Please, if you think it works--or if it doesn't--let me know.
"Why this one, Erik? And don't give me that 'Because I want to' bull, because you never do anything like this merely on a whim. Why Grace Engstrom?" Mystique slipped into a closer seat on their copter, and leaned closer still.
"My answer requires a lecture on genetics. Are you in the mood for one?" he queried.
"Try me." She gave him her most seductive smile, white teeth flashing against cobalt blue lips. Her eyes did not match it—they burned a sullen sulphur.
"Very well. The mutant gene is passed on by the male parent, and only the male parent. The mother's genes may determine in what form that gene expresses itself, what powers the child may develop, but without the gene for mutantism—it doesn't matter whether she is a mutant or not."
"Spare me the middle school material, Erik. I'm beyond that."
"As you wish. At this moment, Sapient scientists are hard at work looking for a way to block that mutant gene, to inoculate against it in men, much as if it were smallpox. Once they find a way—and I believe they will do it, for they can be very determined—there will be no more mutant children born to 'normal humans'. Do you know what percentage of mutants are born to normal parents as opposed to mutant parents, my dear?"
"The majority." She shrugged.
"Not merely the majority. An overwhelming majority. 97 percent are born to two human parents. That leaves three percent who have one mutant parent, most usually male. None—none at all—have yet been born alive to two mutant parents. Not one."
"None?" Her brow furrowed.
"None. Now, for a lesson in Mendelian genetics. Roughly half of all children with a mutant father will be male, and roughly half will inherit the mutant gene. Not the same half, mind you—half the girls will inherit it, and half the boys. On average, mind. There are always variations.
"Since only a male can pass on the gene, and he can't pass it on if he didn't get it in the first place, only twenty-five percent of all children with a mutant father will be able to pass on the gene for mutantism. Still with me?"
"Yes!" Mystique snapped.
"Just making sure. Of those twenty-five percent, providing they have children in turn, twenty-five percent of their offspring will be able to pass on the gene. Do you see the math involved? How many children would a mutant have to father before we become self-perpetuating as a species? It could not be done.
"We will be exterminated as a species without firing a shot, without gas chambers, without raising a hand in violence, once they come up with their vaccine. They will render us extinct within a generation. Unless…" He waited again.
"Unless what, Erik?"
"Unless we can come up with a way to improve those odds--to ensure that mutant males father only mutants, so that all male children will be able to pass the gene along in turn. For that, as a species, we need a very special mutation: a genetic divergence which ensures all children with a mutant parent are also mutants."
"Is that possible?" she asked.
"Oh, yes. It happened before—fossil records with DNA and living DNA in every human, Sapient or Mutant attest to it. There really was an 'Eve' once—a single woman from whom we all descend. Not a biblical 'Eve'—an evolutionary one. She lived in Africa, untold millennia ago. She was not the only woman alive at the time--there were others. There would have had to be others, else congenital deformities due to inbreeding would have killed them all.
"But she was the only one whose descendants thrived. She had some adaptation which made her daughters more fertile, and they in turn had daughters, until only her mother-line remained. Thus the world was peopled." He looked out the window for a moment, then went on.
"I have been awaiting the emergence of a woman, a mutant woman I called 'Maeve'—for 'Mutant Adaptation-Eve'. The divergence she would exhibit, the characteristic necessary to the survival of the mutant race would be this: to conceive and bear only mutant children."
"I can see some flaws in your plan right there, Erik." Mystique put in. "As you said of the original Eve, it would take untold millennia for her addition to the gene pool to make a difference—and mutantkind doesn't have millennia."
"That is where science is our friend. Once identified and isolated, the gene can be cultured—and spliced into the DNA of every mutant on earth. Within three generations, every mutant born could carry the relevant gene."
"And you think Grace Engstrom might be this 'Maeve' you're looking for. Even though she only found out she was a mutant yesterday."
"She might be."
"Why would you think it could be her?"
Before he could respond, Mystique drew back her arm, slowly, as if she were simply getting more comfortable. Then she landed an uppercut to his jaw which snapped his head back and made his skull ring. "I'm not stupid, Erik. You think you're the father of her child. That's the only way you would know all that about her. By sleeping with her."
I wish I had my helmet on for that, he thought, and caught her ankle in his hand before she could land a kick to his midsection. "You have no right to react so violently—not when I never said a word about the child Sabertooth fathered on you."
It seemed to him that she turned a paler blue. "You knew about that? You couldn't have!"
"My dear girl, of course I knew! I was married. I lived with a pregnant wife. You were vomiting in the morning and putting on weight. Then you disappeared for months. Of course I knew." And she never told me. She never entirely trusted me. To this day I don't know her favorite color, or favorite food, or her first memory. One could barely dignify this with the word 'relationship.'
"And it didn't bother you?"
"Not nearly as much as the fact the child turned out to be an ordinary Sapient. I knew the timing was wrong for it to be mine. The whelp even looked like Sabertooth—if he were shaved." Brutal honesty is called for here. "I doubt there's one of your indiscretions I don't know about, yet never did I say one word of reproach, much less offer you violence."
"So that is what I mean to you." she marveled, venom in her voice. "So little you can't be bothered to get angry at me for betraying you."
"I never doubted your attachment to me. You always came back, after all. Your loyalty to the cause of mutantkind meant more to me, and so I forgave you for your more intimate betrayals."
"I don't know. I don't know if I can forgive you. You don't care about me, do you? Not for myself. Only as a soldier in the cause."
"How could I, when all you give is your body? Mystique, I knew more about—Grace Engstrom," I nearly said 'Lucy Jordan' by mistake, "after ten hours than I know about you after nearly twice as many years. Don't claim I didn't ask. You take great pride in your powers; you delight in being anyone and everyone. But in doing so, you run the risk of being no one. And if I betrayed you with her—that is the only time I had ever been unfaithful to you." The truth. Let her believe it or not as she chooses.
"Interesting choice of words, Erik. Not 'have been unfaithful', but 'had been'—meaning it's over."
"After this, could it be anything else?" he asked her, and finally let her ankle go.
Grace shut and locked the bathroom door behind her, closed the seat, took a handful of tissues, and sat down. As she had told her doctor only the day before, she didn't actually throw up when morning sickness hit—she only felt as if she would. Strongly. But it made a good excuse to get away by herself for a moment. She buried her face in her hands, and wept as silently as she could into the tissues. Erik…
I'm not really crying over Erik, anyway, I know that. I just need to cry right now. About everything that's happened in the last twenty-four hours. The least little thing would have made me cry.
I'm too experienced, too old, to feel like this.
She could still count her lovers on the fingers of one hand: five.
Her ex-husband hadn't been her first lover, nor had she been entirely celibate in the twelve years since their divorce. After a while, she had started dating again. As Erik had commented to her when they met, she was very good-looking, and knew it; any number of men had been interested in her, and she in them. She had gone out with at least twenty. But in all that time, only three of them had achieved the goal of getting her into bed: Aaron, who she lived with for five years, Jeremy (the rat). And Erik.
She had been in love—Colin, her first—yes, she had loved him. Then Jack. And Aaron. She had loved him, at least for a while. Not Jeremy—he had been her greatest mistake.
She had thought she was mature enough to have a one-night-stand, and walk away.
Then she had one, and found it wasn't that easy. In the morning, she wanted to look over at Erik across the muffins and eggs, and say, "I want to have breakfast with you like this every morning for the next twenty years. At least."
Of course I didn't—nothing would have killed the glow faster than if I turned into Glenn Close's character from Fatal Attraction, and I didn't want to know about the faithful wife of 40-plus years, the sons and daughters, the curly-haired grandchildren he probably had waiting for him at home.
She had not imagined leaving him would hurt as much as separating from the man to whom she had been married for ten years, but it had. Ten hours with the one man, ten years with the other. Funny, isn't it? Once she was back in her own hotel room, she had cried until she had to get out her biggest sunglasses to cover the ravages.
Talking about Erik with Eleanor, speaking of him so casually, had brought everything back, like ripping the scab off a partly healed wound; she bled again.
I've got to get hold of myself. There's too much to do. She washed her face and went back to work.
A/N: Next chapter, the X-Men arrive.
