Mystique was standing in the kitchen, staring dejectedly out of the window at Chamelea training her cell.
The slight, lizardlike girl had really come into her own since Mystique had first met her. Under Erik's tutelage, her power had increased, and her body had corded with muscle. She had learned to fight so swiftly and so well that Erik had put her in charge of training her own cadre of seven recruits. Erik was impressed by her, proud of her, saw in her the possibility of generating a real army from the gaggle of rescues and strays he was gathering to him. And Mystique did too, after a fashion. She just wasn't sure she was happy with what she saw. The girl was growing strong, yes; but she was also growing hard.
Chamelea worked her cell without mercy: hand to hand combat, weaponry, powers, surprise night drills. She had shaved away her pale hair, revealing the scaled ridges running over her scalp, giving her a predatory aspect. Her cohorts obeyed her, but were mostly terrified of her.
Mystique had offered the girl an eyepatch to put over the livid scar where one of her cone-shaped, oscillating eyes had been cut out by her erstwhile captors. Chamelea had refused it with an abruptness that bordered on rudeness.
"No. Why should I cover it up?"
Mystique had tried to persuade her.
"It might make it easier…"
"For whom?" the girl had shot back, and Mystique found she didn't have an answer. She always found Chamelea hard to talk to, try though she might to form a bond with her. The girl seemed to have taken against her, and Mystique was certain that she knew why: Chamelea resented Mystique's place as Erik's second in command.
That unexpected state of affairs had come about so quickly that Mystique still had a hard time getting used to it. After their confrontation on the beach, she had fully expected Erik to shun her, maybe even insist that she must leave. In fact, the incident seemed to have cemented her place by Erik's side.
While this mystified Mystique, to Azazel it seemed obvious. Mystique had described the whole incident to him after he returned from his recon mission – after a suitably vigorous welcome home. Curled against his back, her blue fingers trailing idly through his silky hair, she told him her concerns. He had dismissed them out of hand.
"He only tests you, siniy ved'ma, to see if you can be hard. You hurt him, even though you did not want to. And you hurt him in a way that he did not expect. You pass the test. He knows now you are hard enough to fight."
Mystique shook her head, the shame she still felt burning her cheeks. "But to do that – to use Charles against him like that… it was the worst thing." Azazel had shrugged, reached behind him to brush his calloused hand down her spine.
"In a fight, in a war, sometimes it is needed to do the worst thing. Erik knows this. He respects this. He is not taking it – what do you say? – personably?"
"Personally," she corrected him absently, hooking her toes into the back of his knee while she pondered what he had said. Could Azazel be right? Could Erik really look on what she had done to beat him as some kind of perverse badge of honour?
It certainly did seem that way from his actions. Erik recognized her strengths – her quickness to learn, her strength and agility, her knowledge of hand-to-hand combat techniques –and made use of them on missions and in training. And he had taken personal responsibility for upskilling her in those areas in which she was lacking and he was so gifted – languages, espionage, deception, and weapons. He had even taught her how to drive, something that in her pampered life with Charles – all chauffeurs and taxis – she had never had cause to learn. He praised the speed with which she could go from observing to enacting a new skill, speculating that it must be part of her mutation. She was still getting used to the admiration with which he would say that, to her or to one of the new recruits. Whenever Charles had attributed the exhibition of a more traditionally human skill or talent to a mutation, it was always with an almost dismissive air, as if it didn't count or was somehow cheating. Whereas for Erik, anything touched by mutation was the better for being so.
Most significantly, Mystique was always included in Erik's select councils, kept abreast of all his plans (those that he shared with anyone). Erik was not the sort of man to govern by committee; he rarely consulted with his army about what their next step should be – he would simply inform them of the next facility to be taken or prisoner to be sprung or official to be quietly dogged or disappeared. But now, whenever he did take it upon himself to make a proposal or seek a second opinion, it was always to Mystique that he turned.
Mystique had been flattered by this rise in her status, but at first she had worried that Azazel – Erik's lieutenant from the first – would be jealous. As it turned out, he wasn't at all – at least, not in the way that she had feared. Azazel was still Erik's indispensable dog soldier, acknowledged as his best fighter by the whole group, held in awe and fear by anyone who had ever seen him in action. But he cheerfully recognized his own limitations: he was uninterested in fine detail, unable to plan into the future in anything but the most abstract way. Moreover, his total lack of fear or self-doubt made him frankly useless at strategy - whatever tack they took, he was unfailingly confident that her would come out covered in blood and glory. He was more than happy to let Mystique and Erik worry over schematics and schedules, to let them point him at the enemy, then do what he did best.
Azazel had no problem with Mystique superceding him in what passed for the hierarchy of Erik's Brotherhood. Surprisingly, what did seem to preoccupy him was how much time Mystique was spending with Erik, and how close the two had become. Mystique would never think of insulting him by suggesting he was jealous of Erik; the mere idea of Azazel – easygoing, amiable, will-o'-the-wisp Azazel – as some paranoid mutant Othello was patently absurd. But she was every now and then aware of him observing the two of them closely, with a curiously blank expression on his face, as if trying to make a fine calculation.
She didn't really know what to make of it; nor could she think of any way to bring it up – what was there to bring up, after all? Mystique screwed her face up at her own reflection in the window pane. She had nothing to accuse him of, and nothing to feel guilty about. And nothing had changed between her and Azazel – if anything, they were growing ever closer, their daily contact giving her little glimpses into the character and habits of the lover who had once been so inscrutable to her.
She found that he loved to read, and could in several languages, but got quickly impatient with anything character-driven like a novel – the impulses that drove the protagonists were mostly not ones he could understand. For someone so rakish-looking, he was bizarrely diligent about neatness and order, with a place for everything and everything in its place – but then, paradoxically, he would was careless of even his most treasured possessions, discarding them or giving them away on a whim. Once, while both of them were somewhat the worse for vodka, he had even tried to press one of his two short swords – the ones so ubiquitous to him that they seemed like extensions of himself - onto a protesting Erik, "as symbol of our comradeship, tovarisch!" Mystique still didn't know whether to classify this trait as generosity, or simply another symptom of his total self-sufficiency. Perhaps there was no distinction to make.
She had seen him in action on a couple of missions – nothing large-scale like the New Mexico raid, just some simple smash-and-grab jobs to rescue individual mutant prisoners, and one incident that should have been a simple cat-burglary of some medical files got messy when some unexpected security showed up. Of course, she had seen Azazel fighting before; but when he was on your side, the absence of soul-shrinking terror really allowed you to appreciate his virtuosity at dealing death. Watching her lover fighting - spinning like a dancer, swords gleaming as they went into flesh; flickering between bullets with contemptuous grace; muscles rippling as he twisted his enemy's neck broken with one hand; flashing her a savage smile – it was at once familiar and yet completely different.
He was a murderer; and he liked it. But he was also a man, a man who liked to drink and eat and laugh and to make love, who swore in Russian when he lost at cards, who did magic tricks for the amusement of the youngsters in their little clan, who stroked her hair with hesitant gentleness at night, in bed, when he thought that she was asleep. And he had no malice towards humankind generally – he spoke wistfully about his days with the partisans in the Ukraine, the comradeship between him and his fellow rebels, was open in his admiration of pioneers like President Kennedy and Martin Luther King. It was only those who trapped and tortured mutants Azazel hated, and he did that with a raw, unsullied purity that was almost cleansing to Mystique, who was still fighting down an inner voice that sounded like Charles, counseling restraint and compromise.
She shook her head, trying to pull her wandering mind into line, wincing as Chamelea began bawling out a slight, pale-faced boy called Vincent – or rather Vitae, his code name – for failing to keep up with her regime. The by stood meekly until she had turned away, then fled behind the house as soon as Chamelea's back was turned. Raven sighed, and went to the back door to intercept him.
She found the boy leaning against the driftwood railing of the porch, shoulders up, head low. She let the screen door slam behind her, so as not to startle him as she approached. But Vitae didn't turn around. As she leant against the rail beside him, she saw that he was cupping his two hands over the rail, as if shielding something. She touched his forearm gently, and as he glanced up, raised a questioning eyebrow. He smiled, and gently removed his hands: beneath them, sprouting out of the rail, was a tiny green shoot, reaching blindly forward from the wind-whitened wood. As Raven watched, a squeaking bud appeared, and burst into a tiny pink blossom.
"Applewood," Vitae murmured softly, as they watched the tendrils unfurling. "It's been washing across the sea for years – but it still has the memory of what it was. If just – bring it out, somehow." Raven smiled in simple pleasure as the boy made a complicated motion with his hands and the new shoot wound round her hand where it rested on the rail, then put forth a translucent light green leaf. She looked at the smile of delight on the boy's face.
"Can you do that with anything?" He nodded, still watching the soft green shoot.
"Anything that's alive – or was once." She blinked.
"Alive? You mean people?" The boy blushed, shook his head.
"Oh no, not people – or animals. Nothing sentient. But plants, trees, even some rocks if I really try. But not people."
"How do you know?" Mystique asked quietly. The shoot stopped growing, wavered uncertainly in mid-air.
"I tried," the boy whispered. Then in a strangely detached voice, as if telling a story he had heard a long long time ago, he said: "I've always been able to do this, ever since I was a boy. My mother used to call me her little gardener; she used to sing to me; we used to play a game, back on the farm, where she'd go first and plant the seeds, and I'd follow and make them grow, and she'd turn round at the end of the row and act all confused…" He gulped hard. "The other farmers didn't think it was so funny. They were scared at first; then they were angry. Said it wasn't right. I wasn't right. They tried to… she tried to hide me, tried to fight them off. But they… there were too many of them for her. I was eight."
Mystique felt her throat closing up, the familiar fist of anger and sorrow tightening in her throat, sweeping away the simple delight Vitae's gift had given her. Would she ever hear a mutant's story and not find another wrong that she could never right, another debt to add to the never-ending bill owing from humanity to mutantkind? She tightened her grip on his forearm, trying hopelessly to give comfort when she knew there was none to be had.
"When she didn't come for me like she had said, I climbed out of the grain-store and came to find her. She wasn't in the house. I went out back into the yard, and she was on the porch. It was so dark I almost fell right onto her. When I touched her, she was all sticky with blood, but she was cold. She wouldn't wake up. I waited a while, and then I put my hands over her heart, tried to reach into her, find the memory of life. It was so awful, reaching out and finding nothing there-"
"Vitae."
Absorbed in the heartbreaking story, Mystique hadn't noticed Erik approaching. They both flinched as his voice sounded right behind them, but Erik didn't seem to notice, leant over Mystique's shoulder and indicated the stranded shoot.
"Did you do that?"
The boy nodded shyly, extended a hand, sent the shoot spiraling out, bristling with buds that burst into flower. Erik gave a thin smile.
"Very pretty. But you can do better than that, I think. What can your power do against an enemy? How can you use it to protect yourself?"
Vitae looked blank; the shoot seemed to shrink back into itself, uncertain. And then the boy's eyes narrowed, and he reached down, wrapped his hands around the wood. His shoulders tensed. There was a dry, strained, squeaking sound; and then the driftwood split apart, and thick, muscular roots ran up the boy's body, wrapped round his chest, and knotted into hard hydra-like tentacles of wood waving threateningly over his head. His eyes, still glossed with tears from the emotion of talking about his mother's death, now blazed with aggression. The delicate floral shoot had been shredded by the boy's power, shreds of pink petals spiraling unnoticed to the floor.
Erik nodded approvingly.
"That's more like it. Now get back to your cell; Chamelea told me just now she didn't think you had what it takes to fight with us. Go back and prove her wrong."
"Yes sir," the boy replied, and the softness that had been in his voice when talking to Mystique was gone, replaced by the ringing tones of a soldier. Without a backward glance, he strode off around the little house, back to where Chamelea's sharp voice could just be heard, exhorting her team to greater efforts.
Mystique turned to Erik, mouth open to protest – and then shut it again. After all, he was right. They would need all the edge that they could get when the war came; even the younger recruits would have to be encouraged to weaponise their gifts. But nonetheless, Mystique felt strangely robbed, as if something useless and yet essential had been lost. She swallowed down the feeling, squared herself. There was no room for weakness any more.
Erik was looking sterner than usual.
"I need you and Azazel in the house. Something's happened that changes everything."