Memories
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The article was in the papers two days later, entitled most commonly "Day With a Dragon", despite it being closer to two and a half hours.
After being dragged through eighteen security checks, I'm finally allowed into the room where Dragon is held. She's sitting in a chair reading a book in Russian and when I enter, she apologises for not getting up. When I've walked around to the front of the chair, I see why as she's held in position with a metal band around her waist. When she notices me looking at it, she explains in a cheerful tone that if she attempts to break it, one of the numerous smart guns around the wall will shot her with enough tranqs to kill an elephant. I introduce myself and she calmly tells me to call her Tora. I sit and a young SHIELD agent brings in drinks. Dragon thanks her by name and then inhales deeply.
"Sorry, I have a psychosomatic addiction to coffee. It's a peril of working on a team. There's always the team leader who makes it their business to wake you at two for an emergency, unscheduled training exercise."
She laughs and I feel slightly surprised that a woman in her situation –charged with numerous counts of brainwashing, embezzlement and espionage- can be so calm. She obviously senses my discomfort.
"They treat me well here. Bring books, stuff to do. I can still teach via a web link. They let me move about enough. Being held at the waist isn't too bad."
I ask her if she refers to her childhood as an experiment-cum-weapon. She frowns, then starts talking swiftly, in a very emotionless tone.
"The room was tiny. If I stood in the centre and held my arms out, I'd be able to touch both walls. There was a thin iron shelf for me to sleep on and when I sat there, I was expected to raise my hands above my head, for the cuffs, which were anchored in the wall. If I didn't heal, my wrists would have been worn to the bone with sores. I was there for years. Nothing to see, nothing to do, no idea of the concept of 'imagination'. There's no real doubt that's why I started to go crazy."
I ask her about this 'craziness'. In return, she hold out her arms, palms up, for me to examine. When I look closer, I find old scars on her wrists, very faint but apparently quite deep. She quickly shakes her sleeves over her wrists again and fixes me with an unreadable stare.
"That's what happens when death seems a better option than living. They think nothing wrong with cutting you open, but when you try it yourself, they punish you."
She refuses to go further into detail but pointedly picks up her book to continue reading. When I ask her what she's reading she smiles.
"War and Peace. Never quite got round to it before. It's been one of those things I keep promising myself I'll read."
When I ask if it's actually in Russian, she nods.
"I used to speak fluent Russian but after an incident that resulted in a major loss of knowledge, I had to relearn it. This is the biggest challenge I've tried so far."
I ask about the memory loss and she taps the side of her head, grinning.
"Best thing left by the Weapon Plus (here she uses a French word I'm not going to repeat). Tiny microprocessors with backing storage. Results in eidetic memory. But there was an…incident… which resulted in most of my memory chips being wiped. Luckily, I'm responsible and kept regular backups."
She seems remarkably relaxed and then I ask her about her tenures on the X-Men and New Avengers. She seems embarrassed.
"Don't get me wrong, I get on well with the New Avengers –I count them as close friends, very close friends, because we've been through so much together- but the X-Men are family. We don't have the major team shifts that the Avengers used to have. We've always defined ourselves as X-Men first. I always feel you have a certain kinship with those who you've shared Dr Doom's torture chamber with. It's usually rather amusing as we all volunteer to be tortured first to protect the others. I miss that…"
I ask her if she is referring to the well-publicised split between Cyclops and Wolverine and whether she could shed light on the reasons behind it. She sighs.
"We ended up torn between how we started out –as a school, training young mutants how to control their gifts or as a separate species, kept apart and forever living on the edge. There were…other variables…but I don't feel they should be shared. Family feuding should stay inside the family, don't you think?"
Finally I touch on her outburst at the trial, where it was revealed that she has children. She sighs and touches her head, inhaling deeply as if to calm herself.
"Yes, I have kids. No, I don't like talking about them. They've been attacked before by people trying to hurt me. The closest I've ever come to killing someone was when they hurt them."
She hangs her head down.
"It changes how you see the 'hero' game. Before, it was all or nothing. Now, it's what keeps the kids safe. I don't take as many risks now. I'm always terrified that something will happen and I won't be able to get home to put them to bed. There was a period when they'd refuse to go to bed unless one of us was home to tell them a story."
She looks tired and presses her fingers to her eyes.
"I always feel guilty if I leave to do X-Men or Avengers stuff, despite knowing the babysitters are more than capable. And then I feel guilty for wanting to spend more time with my kids instead of stopping Thanos or Galactus or whoever's attacking Manhattan or Washington today."
She shrugs.
"I know I've not been the best parent. I know I've often had to run off in the middle of birthdays or important milestones. I missed my daughter's first steps because I was running around the world trying to find Cable and Hope, to protect them. My son… He was taken from me by those who wished to hurt me and he ended up…changed… I lost a baby. He came back a teenager, forcibly aged. He was trained to be a killer. That's what I'm trying to protect children from. I failed."
She hunches herself into a small ball and refuses to talk for a while. I begin to gain an idea of the immense stresses she lives under. When I later talk to the Avengers psychiatrist, he almost gleefully points to three shelves which he claims are his file notes on Dragon. According to him, she is a highly complex individual with a great deal of responsibility on her shoulders.
"And that's all I'm allowed to tell you without breaching client confidentiality."
When she eventually starts talking again, we mainly discuss 'safe' topics until I get onto Magneto. To my surprise, she smiles fondly.
"He's a good man. 'The dream was good. The dreamer was corrupted.' He was trying to prevent the next Holocaust –not many people know this, but he has a tattoo on his arm. 24005. And I can see from your face you know what that means. Do you know what they made him do, when he was twelve? He was a Sonderkommando. He shovelled his family's bodies into the furnaces. And now he tries to prevent that happening to our kind. And somewhere, he lost his way. It is good to have him on our side now. He was always kind to me. Even when we were enemies, he treated me better than others have."
She smiles again.
"He is a good man. A good man…"
She lapses into her own thoughts for a while then looks at me, obviously waiting for the next question. As she does, her fingers play with the two rings on her left hand. When I ask her about her husband, she shakes her head.
"We've never gone public. There's a reason behind that. We'd been defined as one of a set. To us, our private life is private."
We talk some more, mainly me attempting to get onto another subject. Then I ask her further about her outburst at the trial, where she accused Jennifer Walter of betraying her trust. Surprisingly, she smiles then recites, in a sing-song tone;
"But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same;
And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.
She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity—must not swerve for fact or jest.
These be purely male diversions—not in these her honour dwells—
She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else….
She is wedded to convictions—in default of grosser ties;
Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him who denies!—
He will meet no suave discussion, but the instant, white-hot, wild,
Wakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child.
Unprovoked and awful charges—even so the she-bear fights,
Speech that drips, corrodes, and poisons—even so the cobra bites,
Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw…
And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him
Must command but may not govern—shall enthral but not enslave him.
And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,
That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male."
She smiles at me a trifle disturbingly before cheerfully asking me if I have any other questions about anything interesting she said. I ask her about the Dragon and she whistles.
"Why did you have to pick the question I can't answer without having to use 12 dimensions for the dummies version? Right, the Dragon is like… like an embodiment of the past. Old life, old ways, old things. The Phoenix is like an embodiment of the future. New life, new ways, new things. But you have to have a balance between them. I'm going to have to use the medieval metaphor, aren't I? Right. You have a town with a lot of old, 15th/16th century buildings. You don't want to tear them all down, because they're an important cultural mark. But you don't want to live in them like you are a medieval person. You need balance."
When I ask her why the Dragon couldn't simply stop the Phoenix from ever destroying anything, she asks me if I am familiar with Robert Frost's poem 'Fire and Ice'.
"It's kind of like that," she explains, moving her hands in a circular motion.
"Too much Phoenix is like a never-ending summer. You burn to death. Too much Dragon, never-ending winter. Everything freezes and dies. You cannot move on and forget the past but you must not live there."
She starts humming a tune that I recognise as Simon & Garfunkel's "I Am A Rock". When I ask her about it, she shrugs.
"A friend got me onto them. You have to realise I had no idea of their cultural significance. I walked in on her listening to this song. We got talking about the words –we both identified with it; me because that's how I grew up, shielding myself from the world. I cared and was hurt because of it. In her case, she spent so long being aloof then she fell in love. And she lost him. She retreated into herself. Why bother loving, when those you love just wither and die? I think we found out more about each other in that half-hour discussion than I ever found out before or after."
She smiles sadly.
"She was a good woman. Just…difficult to get on with. She was practical. Too good at what we do. She'd get impatient with us all. You could always rely on her. To be there to rescue you and make a sarcastic remark. In fact, I picked up a lot of bad habits from her… Sarcarms, heavy on the irony, a love of classical music played exceptionally loudly at two am, British comedy and sci-fi… She seems to have been the one who introduced me to most of the things my teams despair of. Except coffee. I got hooked on that myself."
When I ask who she is talking about, she points at a photo album set out ready.
"Third page."
The photo is one of Professor Xavier sitting next to a tall woman who at best description looks almost demonic. Ink black skin, huge black feathered wings, long silver-grey hair and totally grey eyes. When I comment on her Angel of Death appearance, Dragon giggles as if I made a joke.
"Yes, you could say that. That's Justice's Shadow. Or Death's Left Hand. Or the Darkwing. Or the Fallen Angel. Or just Etana Bat Aleka. She kind of collected titles. We think she was one of the first mutants. Or at least, one of the longest-lived. Considering her appearance, that was pretty impressive. She claimed to have nightmares about being tied to a stake."
When I ask where this Etana is, Tora slumps.
"She died. She was the mutant who took the Legacy Virus cure. She was already dying. She knew it. I knew it. So she decided that rather than let herself die a shade of what she once was, she was going to die doing what she always did. Saving lives. She was a good person, even if she didn't believe herself to be. She made mistakes when she was younger –back when she was in her fifties- and they haunted her the rest of her life. You'd think after the first two hundred years, she'd have made up for it, but no, she had to keep on being the Lonely Angel for three thousand years. Okay, she kind of terrified a whole geographical area as an assassin and spy for the king, but she owed him her life! She severed all ties with home and left, knowing she could never go back. She became a nomad, who would save lives and flee before she could be killed as a demon."
She sighs.
"And then it turns out she had all these secrets that we're still trying to sort out. I mean, come on! Who spends eight months working with Michelangelo and keeps a detailed diary and doesn't publish it!? She does, apparently!"
She rolls her eyes.
"I could rant all the time about her stupidity. I mean, come on, you fall in love, the guy vanishes for sixty years and when he comes back, you deliberately avoid him! She didn't do emotions properly and always took this creepy 'I know more than you' view on everything. You'd think spending a lot of time with someone from the future so you're pretty good at guessing accurately what's going to happen next would make you cheerful. It doesn't. It makes you depressing and capable of talking in riddles all the time. Why!? Why did you have to be such a sarcastic, ironic, snarky know-it-all!"
She sighs and we're about to go onto another subject when a SHIELD agent informs me that my interview time is up. Dragon says goodbye, picks up her book and then asks, as I leave, when she will be able to see her children.
I'm allowed to stay for a while, talking to others. As I leave, a man stands up, carrying a chess set under one arm and a set of records under the other. I admit I give a double take when I realise it's Magneto. When I later talk to a SHIELD agent, they cheerfully tell me that he's been coming to visit her every day since she was allowed to speak with others. Other frequent visitors include Daredevil, Shadowcat and the White Queen. Captain Rogers is described as 'turning up every day and being ignored for half an hour'. As I leave, I watch the Scarlet Witch attempting to traverse the multitude of security checks. Whatever Dragon may have done, intentional or not, it appears she still has friends.
"Oh, you could always rely on Urich to give a decent spin on things."