Tribrib genesis

[Hordac]

Tribrid Chapter 16: What The World Saw

The footage ran on every channel. On all three channels.

Three cameras captured it from three angles, and none of them matched on the details. But they all showed the same broad strokes: a blue-skinned woman threw herself through a plate-glass window on the fourth floor of the Hotel Royale Majestic during an international peace summit in Paris, France. She fell two stories onto the cobblestones below, survived, and transformed in front of a crowd of hundreds into a black woman with an Afro. More mutants come down from the same broken window. The first tried to kill the shape shifter but was stopped by two more mutants that fought. In the chaos, the shape shifter limped at speed toward the nearest Métro entrance and vanished underground. All while other mutants fought with metal and red blasts shooting from their fists and a blue beast leaped massive distances in a single bound.

By six o'clock Paris time, the footage had reached every major broadcast network in Europe and North America. By seven, it ran on continuous loop. By eight, no government or intelligence agency could contain, contextualize or explain it away anymore.

Mutants were real and they were powerful. Many looked like people while some didn't. They could be anyone. The world panicked and every ordinary strangeness became evidence of something sinister. Neighbors watched neighbors. Families turned against their own and communities shattered. It was like the witch hunts of the medieval era. Mass frenzy and panicked mobs boosting fear resulting in families, neighbors and communities turning against their own.

Newscasters used words like extraordinary and unprecedented and historic while their producers cut between the three angles repeatedly, slowing the moment of transformation down to individual frames. The blue scales beneath the skin. The yellow eyes opening. The face that had been a woman's face becoming something else entirely in a second and a half. One shot, taken by a journalist's handheld camera from across the plaza caught the moment the blue scaled body hit the pavement and slowly rose again. That was the shot that ended up on newspaper covers from Paris to Tokyo to Sao Paulo. The mutant woman getting up. Already changing. Already becoming someone else.

In television studios from London to New York, people who had never said the word mutant in a professional context now said it continuously while experts were hastily located, credentials checked, chairs found.

Religious figures offered comment. Politicians offered placating statements. The Vatican said it was studying the matter carefully and advised followers to abstain from extremism. The Kremlin said nothing at all, which was its own kind of statement.

In a hotel room near the Palais de Chaillot, Bolivar Trask watched it all with the focused attention of a man watching an investment mature. His ever-faithful shadow Major William Stryker sat nearby, neck wrapped from the high-voltage burn his military-grade experimental taser had given him.

"Sir." General Brody stood in the doorway with his jacket half-buttoned and the look of a man who had been woken from something he couldn't easily return to. "The Secretary is asking for a statement. They want to stop the transmissions"

"Not yet." Trask didn't look away from the screen. "I advise you to let it run."

"The French government is..."

"Let it run." He turned then, finally, and Brody saw something in his face that was close to satisfaction but sharper, more considered. "Do you understand what we just witnessed, General? Not what went wrong but what went right."

General Brody moved into the room and let the door close. On the television screen the footage played again from the beginning.

"She came for me," Trask said. "She walked into a summit with two hundred journalists present and tried to put a bullet in my head. Then she fell in front of cameras that were already rolling. They couldn't help it. They never can." He looked at the screen. "She gave me everything I needed."

"You were nearly killed," Stryker said.

"But I wasn't." Trask turned back to the window. Below, Paris was going through the particular kind of shock that comes not from violence but from rearrangement. The world had looked one way this morning and looked different tonight. "I want a meeting with Nixon. Not a phone call. In person, in Washington."

"That's not..." General Brody began.

"Make it happen, General." Trask picked up the remote and turned the television off. The room was quieter without it, but not quiet enough for either of them to feel settled. "We've been asking the defense committee for a decision for two years. He won't need to decide anymore. He'll need us."

Brody looked at the blank screen for a moment. Then he reached for his radio.

*

They landed at the estate's private strip in the early afternoon.

The drive back to the mansion was short and nobody used the time for anything except watching the trees go by and occupying themselves privately with whatever they were occupying themselves with. The gates opened. The unkempt grounds came into view, and soon enough they were pulling up to the neglected mansion that had once been meant to be the hope of all mutants.

The main foyer was bright with afternoon light coming through the high windows. It smelled of wood polish and dust and the specific staleness of a large house with too few people in it.

Charles made it a dozen steps inside before his legs stopped working.

There was no dramatic warning, no wobble or grab for a wall. His legs simply ceased functioning and he went straight down, one knee hitting the marble and then the other as his hand caught the edge of the umbrella stand and stopped his fall. Hank was there in two strides, dropping to his knees, hands going to Charles's shoulders.

"Charles. Charles, look at me."

Charles was looking at something that wasn't in the room. His eyes had the slightly unfocused quality of someone hearing a great deal from very far away. He groaned as he pressed a hand to his temple.

"Your powers are returning. The serum," Hank said quietly. "I'll be back."

He was moving before the sentence was finished, taking the stairs two at a time. Havoc moved to Charles and crouched beside him. Logan stood with his arms at his sides and watched Xavier with that particular look he reserved for things he was still working out his feelings about.

Noah stayed where he was, watching the room rather than Charles, cataloguing exits and sight-lines out of long habit. Charles he could read from here. The man's pain was evident enough without crowding him.

"They're loud," Charles said. His voice was steady, which cost him something visible. "The voices. Their pain."

"Everyone for miles," he said, and pressed two fingers to his left temple with the automatic gesture of a man reaching for a switch that had been removed. "I'd forgotten. I'd been so long without it I forgot what it was like to have them all at once."

"How long has it been?" Havok asked softly.

"Years." Charles's jaw was tight. "The serum that Hank uses. It quiets everything. The powers, the noise, everyone's pain and misery." He stopped. Took a breath. "It lets me walk. It takes the pain away."

Logan looked at the floor for a moment. Then he looked back up. "Charles. That's not like you."

He moved then, came down to Charles's level, sitting on the marble beside him with the slightly self-conscious heaviness of a man who did not do this kind of thing naturally. "I've seen the future, Professor. I know what you are there. I know what you build and who comes through your doors and what you do for people who have nowhere else to go. I've seen what you're capable of when you don't cut yourself off from it."

"That man has had a great deal more time," Charles said. "And I don't want to be that man."

"He started somewhere."

"I don't care," Charles said flatly.

"Your powers weren't the only thing that made you the unofficial leader of the mutants," Logan said. "Never were."

Charles didn't answer that.

"Mystique….Raven is out there," Logan said. "Alive. Which means the worst hasn't happened. But it hasn't not happened either. It's just waiting on what comes next." He paused. "And you're the only one who can find her. We need you as you were and will be. A wise leader and the strongest telepath on Earth."

Hank came back down carrying a syringe and the particular expression of a man who was doing something he understood the necessity of and wished he didn't. The serum was yellow and faintly luminous, and Charles's eyes went to it immediately with the focused pull that meant something Noah recognized and didn't enjoy recognizing.

He knew that look. He had seen it in a handful of people across his years and it meant the same thing every time regardless of what the substance was. The desperate pull of an addict finally in sight of his fix.

"Here." Hank crouched beside him and held it out. "I made it extra strong."

Charles snatched it the way people take things they have been waiting for. He had the cap off and the needle aimed and his sleeve already pushed up before anyone said anything.

Then he paused and looked up.

Logan was looking at him.It wasn't a look full of reproach, which would have been easier and something to argue against. He was looking at Charles the way you look at someone you have crossed decades and timelines to find, with the specific weight of someone who believes you are capable of being more than what you are presently settling for.

Hank wasn't looking at Charles at all. He was looking away, which was somehow worse. He was the loyal one who had stayed when everyone else left, who had been there for all of it and the serum that was supposed to be a temporary fix had become the drug Xavier clung to instead of everything else he used to be. He felt guilt and becoming an enabler for Xavier and felt miserable for not having a better solution.

Havoc looked at the professor and the look of shock followed closely by the look of disappointment that was clear on his face. Here was his mentor, the man who'd helped him gain control of his powers and seeing him behaving like a drug addict was the last thing he expected of their once wise leader.

Noah said nothing. He stood slightly back from the others, arms loose at his sides, watching. His expression was what it usually was: attentive, measured, giving nothing away. But Charles was a telepath even half-suppressed and Noah had felt the man's awareness touch the edge of him and find the carefully constructed fake thoughts and memories he kept to fool telepaths.

'He either didn't notice' Noah thought in relief 'or isn't in a state to notice. Either way, I'm safe for now but that won't last once Xavier really get a hold of his powers and masters his phobia for pain. I'll have to think on this'

Charles held the syringe for four seconds.

Then he set it down on the marble beside him with a very deliberate gentleness.

Nobody moved for a moment. Then Hank exhaled, a small controlled sound.

"Good," Logan said. Just the one word. He didn't elaborate. Didn't need to.

Havok smiled at Charles and nodded once, briefly, and that was all.

"We'll need the wheelchair," Charles said. His voice was steady. Whatever it was costing him he was keeping the accounting private. "The old one. It should be in my closet. I haven't needed it in some time."

Hank was already moving.

He came back a few minutes later with the old chair unfolded and slightly dusty, which he wiped down quickly with his hands. Logan took it from him without being asked and brought it the rest of the way and positioned it, and between the two of them they got Charles settled. Charles adjusted his position with practiced efficiency and then gripped the wheels and didn't ask anyone to push him and nobody offered.

"Cerebro," he said. "We need to find Mystique before she does something worse."

They moved out of the foyer and into the corridor and then down through the institutional quiet of the mansion's lower levels, the light changing to something cooler and fluorescent, the slight hum of systems running below the threshold of normal attention.

Noah fell behind the group as the corridor turned.

He waited until the others were far enough ahead. Then he stopped and spoke toward his wrist in a low murmur.

"Package confirmed. It's in the foyer. Find the yellow serum-filled syringe, uncapped, on the floor next to the umbrella stand. Follow standard retrieval protocol three."

A brief pause. Then a soft click of acknowledgment.

He caught up to the others before they noticed the gap.

In the foyer behind him, a shape descended from the high ceiling that was not visible to human eyes. Small and soundless, it moved with the focused deliberation of a thing that knew exactly what it was there for. It located the syringe in fourteen seconds, documented the remaining serum, stored its samples with careful precision, and was gone through the ventilation before the front door could swing back to still.

Vr'rak would find what was in it interesting, or maybe he would not. Either way they would know more than they had yesterday, and knowledge was power.

Noah was already through the door into the lower levels when it finished.

*

Cerebro was enormous in the way spaces built purely for function became enormous, swallowing you not with grandeur but with indifference to your presence. The spherical chamber hummed with the low resonance of things built to reach. The walkway extended out over the drop and at the end of it the helmet waited on its mount, patient as it always was.

It was the first time Noah had been in the room and he spent two seconds on the architecture, the scale of it, the deliberateness of the design, before he filed it away and returned his attention to the people he was standing with. He had Xavier's powers from drinking his blood as theoretically he could use the cerebro as productively as Xavier could.

'I'll try to steal this one's blueprints' Noah thought as he subtly redirected more stealth drones to into he cerebro from the outside to scan it thoroughly once the place was empty. 'hopefully the drone scans would be enough for Forge to re-create it for me'

Charles wheeled himself to the edge of the walkway and stopped.

He looked at the helmet for a long moment. "Last time I tried this," he said, to no one in particular, "the world had not been quiet for a long time. The Vietnam war…. the suffering. I didn't handle it well."

"You're the only one who can," Logan said.

"Yes." Charles reached up and settled the helmet onto his head. "Unfortunately."

He closed his eyes.

What happened next was not visible from the outside. From the outside it looked like a man sitting very still. From the inside it was the world arriving all at once: a billion voices, a billion registers of suffering and fear and longing and anger and grief, not sequential but simultaneous, every one of them at full volume. Not like sound. Larger than sound. The entire weight of the human condition landing on a single point.

Charles made a sound he hadn't intended to make.

The console sparked. One of the readout panels crackled white and went dark. Charles wrenched the helmet from his head and sat there breathing, both hands locked on the chair arms, his knuckles the color of old bone.

"Charles." Logan was already at the edge of the walkway.

"I can't," Charles said. The words came out flat, which was worse than if they'd come out shaken. Flat meant he had already done the accounting and arrived at the number. "I can't do this."

"You're just rusty," Logan said.

Charles looked at him, and the look contained several things it would have taken a long time to fully articulate. "You don't understand," he said. "My powers don't work the way yours work. They don't come from my muscles or my biology. They come from my mind." He stopped. "And they come from my heart. From what I feel." He let go of the chair arms and looked down at his hands. "and it's broken, Logan. I feel helpless. I feel nothing but pain. Pain that is not mine but theirs. Everybody's. How do you reach through that?"

He began to wheel himself back from the edge.

"This was all a bloody mistake," he said. "Coming back. Trying. Freeing Magneto. All of it."

"Stop."

Charles stopped. Not because he was told to, but because something in Logan's voice had a quality he hadn't heard before.

Logan came down the walkway and crouched in front of the chair, putting himself at eye level. It was not a natural posture for him and the deliberateness of it registered.

"You want to talk about broken," Logan said. "Fine. Let's talk about it." He let that sit for a second. "You know why they sent me back instead of you?"

Charles said nothing.

"Because you wouldn't have survived it. The procedure. The mental strain of a consciousness displaced across fifty years would have killed you or left you with nothing left. Only I could do it because of what I am." Logan paused. "Do you know why? Do you realize what made it possible?"

Still nothing from Charles, but he had stopped moving.

"You did," Logan said. "Forty years from now you put your hands on either side of my head in a room that smells like old books and you go looking for something I have spent my entire adult life trying not to find. My memories. The things I buried so deep I didn't know they were still there." He stopped. Looked at the floor. Looked back up. "You showed me what I was. What I could become. You did that. I was your most helpless student and you reached in and you found something worth finding. You helped me, a man broken by pain and loss and made me whole again" He let that land. "Now let me try to return the favor. I can't do it the way you did it. I don't have that gift. But there's something in me you might be able to use."

Charles looked at him.

"My mind is a tether," Logan said. "My future consciousness is anchored here in this body, in this present. That connection is still live. It hasn't fully closed." He held Charles's gaze. "Through that link, I think you can reach him. Your future self. I know it for a fact."

A silence.

Charles sat with it for a moment. Then he reached out and placed two fingers at Logan's temple, and Logan held himself very still.

What Charles found first was pain.

Not the diffuse communal pain of Cerebro but something intensely personal, a whole life's worth arranged in no particular order, the images arriving not as a sequence but as a flood. Bone splitting through skin. Fire. A face gone before he could look at it properly. Killing a beautiful woman he loved deeply to save her from her own corruptive powers. Decades of mornings waking up somewhere new with no certainty about how he'd arrived. The specific loneliness of a man who outlives everything he loves and has learned to accept it.

He began to pull back.

"Don't." Logan's voice, from very far away. "Look past it. Look past the memories and the suffering. Find yourself. Find who you become."

Charles pushed through.

What he found on the other side was different. The pain was still there but it receded as he moved forward through the tether, the years passing in a rush of sensation rather than image, until the rushing stopped and he arrived somewhere quiet.

A room he didn't recognize. It looked an old abandoned temple. A window with afternoon light coming through it at an angle.

And a bald man sitting beside the comatose form of Logan's future body, hands folded in his lap, entirely unsurprised.

The older Charles Xavier looked up.

He was not what the younger one had expected. He was not serene in the way Charles had always vaguely associated with wisdom. He was worn. He was tired in the specific way of someone who has had a great deal asked of them over a very long time and has provided it. But his eyes were clear and the quality of his stillness was not resignation. It was something that had been built deliberately, brick by brick, from material that had not been easy to come by.

The older Charles Xavier looked up, a faint, weary smile touching his lips. "I wondered when you'd show up. Hello, Charles."

The younger Charles didn't speak for a moment. He was still taking the room in. The sheer fact of it.

"You look terrible," the older one said, with enough warmth that it wasn't unkind.

"And you look worn out" The younger Charles replied as he came closer.

"I've merely aged with grace" The older one quipped before turning serious "You looked troubled. Talk to me"

"I...I can't do it. I can't use my powers" the younger Charles said. "The voices. All that pain. I reach for my powers and the world pours in and I can't hold it."

The older Charles was quiet for a moment.

"What you're feeling," he said at last, "is not a flaw. You understand that, don't you? The pain you absorb from other people is not a weakness in your gift. It's the source of it."

"It's too much." The younger Charles exclaimed miserably.

"It's always been too much," the older man said evenly. "That hasn't change. What changes is what you do with it." He looked at his younger self with the particular attention of someone who remembers exactly what it felt like to be where they are. "You're afraid of their pain. But that's not really what frightens you, is it. It's your own."

The younger Charles said nothing, which was an answer.

"You think if you feel it fully you'll break," the older Charles said. "You think you're not strong enough to carry it and still function. I know you think this because I thought it. For a long time." He looked down at his hands. "The telepathy doesn't work despite the pain. It works because of it. Because you feel what they feel, and that is what makes you something other than a man in a room pointing at things on a blackboard. It's born from the only thing in the universe large enough to hold all of that pain and use it as motivation to empower one's self"

"What?" the younger Charles asked.

"Hope," the older one confirmed. "Not the easy kind. The kind that survives knowing exactly how much there is to be afraid of and choosing to believe anyway. That's our true gift, my young friend. It's not the telepathy. The telepathy is just a very powerful instrument. It is hope that lets us use that power and lets us control it and not the other way around"

He showed him then, not in words but in direct transmission, the only thing possible here in this particular in-between: glimpses of what was coming. Not the suffering, there was enough of that, but the other things. The faces that would come through the doors of a school not yet built. The moments when someone who had believed they were a mistake discovered they were not. The extraordinary ordinary accumulation of lives lived with some degree of grace and purpose because one man had decided to act as though those things were possible.

The younger Charles stood in it for a long moment.

"We need you to have hope again," the older Charles said. "Not for them. For yourself first. The rest will follow."

He came back to himself in the Cerebro chamber with the taste of old books still somehow present. Logan was watching him from a few feet away with the careful attention of a man who was not going to ask questions and was going to pretend he was not moved.

Charles looked at him for a moment.

"Thank you," he said simply.

Logan gave a short nod and looked at the floor and that was that.

Charles turned the chair back toward the walkway and reached up for the helmet.

What happened this time was different. The voices arrived as they always had, all at once and in full force, not quieter and not less. But he did not try to hold them at arm's length. He let them come. He felt them. The fear and the misery and the small daily griefs and the larger ones underneath, he let all of it move through him and kept moving and found on the other side of it something that resembled solid ground.

He looked for Raven.

She was not difficult to find. He had known her mind since she was a child and it had a particular quality that nothing about the years or the hardening had changed: bright and furious and underneath the fury something that was still recognizably her.

She was in an airport. Moving, purposeful, closed against the world in the way she always had been, that particular combination of certainty and grief that had been her register since she was fourteen years old and understood she would always be the thing that made other people uncomfortable.

He wasn't strong enough to enter her mind and control her. Or shut her down. She had a strong will and was trained by Magneto how to resist mind control. So he tried to talk to her by using the people around her. He could still convince her.

He slipped into the nearest available mind with the lightest touch he could manage. A traveler waiting at the gate. He used the man's voice.

"Raven. Stop running. Please come home."

"Charles?!"The mind ahead of him went still. Then, from the inside: "Where are you?"

"Back at the house," Charles said, through the stranger's mouth. "Where you should be. I need you to come home."

A pause. Then something cooled in the quality of her silence.

"You have no idea what it cost me to stop," she said. "In that conference room. You asked me to and I stopped, and Stryker put thousands of volts through me for it. And then Erik tried to kill me." Her voice was level, not angry, which was somehow more damning. "And you did nothing."

He let that sit. It deserved to sit.

"I know," he said. "I'm sorry."

She didn't answer right away.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"That's none of your business" she said, and her words had the quality of a door already closed, a decision already settled into its frame. "Trask's still alive. He's going to use what happened today to get everything he wanted and then some. I'm going to finish what I started."

"If you do this now, after what the world just saw..." He held the frequency steady, kept the desperation out of it. It had never helped her. "A frightened world is exactly what Trask needs. Please. Come home. We'll find another way."

"You don't have another way," she said. "You've never had another way. You have hope and that isn't the same thing as a plan."

He could not argue that.

"The girl I grew up with," he said, "was not capable of this."

"I'm not the girl you grew up with," she said. "Not anymore. And you haven't changed at all. Still certain you know best. Still certain that if you say it the right way, I'll simply do as I'm told."

"If you force me to stop you Raven" Xavier warned her "I will do it"

"Good luck with that" she replied coldy. "Goodbye, Charles,"

Charles sat for a moment in the roar of the world. Then he pulled the helmet from his head.

The walkway. The chamber. Logan's face. The others behind him.

"She's at an airport," he said. "She could be going anywhere. She's going to try again."

Logan didn't say anything for a moment. "We can figure it out and be ready for her."

*

Noah followed the others back up toward the light.

Xavier had just done something remarkable. Not Cerebro specifically, though Cerebro was remarkable enough on its own terms. What was remarkable was the decision.

The man had been standing at the edge of the thing he was most afraid of and he had chosen to go in anyway and the second time he had gone in differently and it had worked. Noah had seen people make that kind of decision before. It was rarer than it looked from the outside.

He filed that away in the mental folder that had Xavier's name on it. The folder was thicker than it had been when this day started.

Outside, somewhere above the cloud cover and the grey afternoon, a plane was already in the air carrying Raven west towards Xavier to neutralize his ability to be a threat to her plans.

Alone in his room Noah could see via his stealth drones that Bolivar Trask was writing out talking points for his meeting at the white House tomorrow.

Nixon would see him tomorrow afternoon. He would give Trask the approval he do desperately sought.

Everything that was coming was already in motion. It had been in motion before they left Paris. Possibly before any of them had any say in the matter.

That was fine. Noah had worked inside inevitabilities before. The trick was not to mistake the current for the destination. The river moved where it moved. What mattered was where you put your feet.

He closed the holographic console of his watch and got into bed to catch some sleep.

end chapter 16

---

Author notes

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[Gaones Paran]

He has stealth drones capable to infiltrate buildings and track people, cloaked spaceship, can infiltrate buildings himself with mutant power and is an omega level telepath.

So why hasn't he scouted all Trask institutions, kidnapped Trask and read his mind to find all he has on mutants and the Sentinel program. Then rescue all the mutants in captivity, and take or destroy everything about the Sentinel program.

Then kill Trask and all his closets likeminded advisors or reprogram their brains with telepathy?
Or arranged "accidents" or natural deaths to them like dying of suicide by shooting them self three times in the head or jumping of hotel balkongs?

 

[Hordac]

Tribrid Chapter 17: The Shape of Things to Come

Things went as no one had known they would happen.

No one except Noah who had seen these events take place in a movie in his previous life.

Mystique came to Xavier Mansion two days before the White House press conference, slipping past the mansion's security with ease because this was the place she grew up in and she knew all its secrets. She came because the two most important people in her life were telling her not to kill Bolivar Trask and because she needed an excuse to be in the mansion for other nefarious reasons.

Hank saw her first.

He was coming up from the lab with samples when he rounded the corner into the main hall and opened the door and stopped.

"Raven?"He said it the way one says something when a single word hides a dozen emotions beneath it.

A breath. Another one.

Something moved through his face. It was happiness and relief. Then confusion and the particular kind of disorientation that comes from seeing a person you have imagined seeing for a long time suddenly being actual and present and real in front of you.

"My God." He looked at her standing there, hand still on the door, and the confusion finally won out over everything else. "I don't …. understand. What are you doing here?"

"I... uh." She shifted almost imperceptibly. There had been a plan when she arrived as there always was with Raven a.k.a. Mystique, a clean line between where she stood and what she wanted and how she intended to get there.

All that logic evaporated at being caught by the one person she had feelings for. Feelings that she'd suppressed for a long time "I guess I just..." She exhaled. "I...realized I didn't have anywhere else to go."

It wasn't untrue but It was also not the whole truth either. But Hank only had eyes for her, all of him focused on the fact that she standing there in front of him and whatever the real reason was became a secondary concern. He didn't notice that she was fiddling with the locked door earlier and or that she had that deer caught in the headlight look on her face for a second.

"I have to wake Charles," he said, more to himself than her as he backed away and awkwardly gestured her to come in.

"Yeah" She nodded. She followed him in limping slightly.

An hour later they were all at the kitchen table.

Raven sat at the far end of the table. Charles sat opposite her, with Hank, Logan, Noah, and Alex hovering nearby like anxious bodyguards. They had just caught her up to speed on the time travel, the Sentinels, and Logan's apocalyptic future.

After exchanging brief pleasantries with Xavier and Wolverine, she was introduced to Wolverine whom she recognized as one of the potential recruits Xavier and Magneto tried and failed to recruit for the first class of mutant years ago. She also recognized Noah as one the mutant soldiers she had rescued alongside Havoc and others several days earlier.

Together they explained the whole Wolverine time travel situation to a disbelieving Raven.

"So Erik was telling the truth," Raven said. "It's either me or Trask. Or so you claim"

"If you kill Trask, there'll be ten more like him," Charles said.

"Then I will kill them too," Raven stated flatly. "And anyone who comes after."

Logan shifted in his seat. "You want to know how this little crusade of yours ends? I have seen you in the future, Raven."

She looked at him with a raised eyebrow and asked "Yeah? What am I like in this supposed 'future' of yours?"

"Cold," he said. "Murderous."

"Cold," Logan grunted. "An absolute murderous nightmare. You're a grade A b*tch "

"Please, don't hold back," she replied, her tone dripping with sarcasm.

Logan didn't even blink at her sarcasm. He just leaned against the kitchen counter, crossing his arms over his chest while his eyes tracked her every micro-movement.

"I am just stating facts, darling," Logan said, his voice a low, gravelly rumble. "The version of you I left behind in the future doesn't swap witty retorts over a breakfast table. She just cuts throats and disappears into the woodwork."

"Then maybe you should watch your own throat," Raven replied, her voice dangerously smooth as she leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table.

Noah let out a soft, delighted chuckle from the corner of the room, drawing both of their stares. He flashed a grin, intentionally letting his lips pull back far enough to show off the extra pointy, gleaming canine teeth that looked like fangs.

"Fascinating," Noah chimed in, turning his head slightly. "The tension in here is so...so dramatic. Hank, do you have any popcorn hidden in this mansion, or are we stuck watching this tragedy play out on empty stomachs?"

Alex Havok shifted his weight, giving Noah a dry, unamused look. "We are currently trying to prevent a global mutant genocide, Noah. Keep your fangs inside your mouth and your mind on the target."

Raven's jaw tightened, her eyes flashing a bright, lethal yellow for a split second before she forced her human disguise back into place. "I am right here, you know. I can hear every word you are saying."

"Good," Logan snapped, stepping away from the counter and walking right up to her end of the table. "Because you need to hear this. By the time they finish with you, and trust me, they do finish you, you have killed so much that you are knee deep in human and mutant blood. You don't even know who you are anymore. Just a radicalized espionage and killing machine."

Raven didn't back down. She met his gaze head on. "Maybe there wouldn't be as much mutant blood if we made our move now. While they are still building their little toys and feeling safe behind their desks."

Charles spoke quietly. "Those are Erik's words. Not yours my dear. And besides …. you'd be giving Trask exactly what he wants which is a reason for humanity to fear and hate us. A reason that will unite them against us"

Raven scoffed, her yellow eyes flashing. "Do you think they need a reason? Do you honestly believe they will ever look at someone like me and feel anything but terror?" She paused, the anger giving way to something much older and sadder. "You cannot even look at me."

"That is not true." Xavier denied and looked at her.

"I can hide. The way you hide. You all can because you look like normal humans. Except Noah maybe. His ears are too… elvish" She said looking at Noah who grinned widely showing his extra pointy canine teeth that looked like fangs "….and teeth apparently"

"But what about the ones who can't?"She continued ignoring his antics. She turned back to Xavier. Her jaw tightened. "While you were hiding here, I was out there looking out for mutants. I saw them getting abused and hiding away like criminals. I saw them in Vietnam too. It's hard to hide your powers when you're getting shot at. And the ones who couldn't hide became lab rats for Trask and other government funded agencies. I lost many friends to that mad man. For all we know I could be next"

"I will never let that happen to you." Charles's voice dropped. "I made you a promise, a long time ago, that I would keep you safe. That I would protect you. If I'd done my job properly perhaps none of this would be happening. Perhaps you wouldn't have left."

"I couldn't stay here forever, Charles." Raven replied softly "I couldn't remain the little girl you grew up with forever"

And why not? The telepathic voice slipped into her mind, carrying an easy intimacy that instantly sparked her rage.

Instantly Raven face clouded in anger. She slammed her fist on the table and was on her feet before the sound finished.

Raven shot up from her chair, kicking it back. "That is exactly why!" she yelled, glaring at him.

The silence that followed was complete. Charles looked at her. His expression shifted, the certainty going out of it and something more honest emerging in its place.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I am."

Raven was still standing. Some of the fury had gone out of her shoulders but her eyes were bright with it.

"It's not me you should be worrying about. Erik is going to start that war whether you want it to happen or not." She said as she started to walk towards the stairs.

"How do you know?" Xavier asked

"He told me." Raven replied as she limped a bit as she walked away

Charles looked at her injured leg. Then, with a deliberate change of topic he said "Whoa! You're bleeding. When did you last change the bandage on your leg?"

She blinked as she looked down at her blood stained pants. "What?"

"Hank" Xavier said turning to him "Please see to it."

"Charles…" She said gritting her teeth in anger.

"You need rest, my girl." Charles Xavier said in polite but firm voice.

"I'm not your girl!" She retorted angrily

"You'll find your room just as you left it."He replied ignoring what she said. He looked across the table. "Hank."

"Come on, Raven," Hank said.

A furious Raven left with Hank following behind.

Logan waited until they were through the door. "You want to know something, Charles? I don't blame Erik for trying to kill her. I get it."

"She's home," Charles said. "Isn't that enough?"

"She's home because she's hurt and had nowhere else to go for now. That's not the same thing as coming back for good" Logan looked at the door. "Men who try to save women the way you're thinking of saving her…. in my experience, that doesn't end well. For anyone"

Charles was quiet.

"Are you going to let her leave?" Havoc asked from where he was standing quietly and watching the quarrel.

Charles looked at his tea. He didn't answer.

Hank redirected Raven to another room instead as Raven's room hadn't been used nor cleaned in years. The room Hank took her to instead was a side room off the east wing, shelved with the quiet accumulation of a man who had been living somewhere a long time: reference texts, repair tools for equipment that no longer existed, a medical kit that was always stocked because Hank believed in being ready for things.

Raven sat on the examination table in her own skin. She had stopped pretending otherwise around Hank a long time ago, even when she was pretending otherwise around everyone else.

He cleaned the wound in her thigh without comment. The bullet had only caused a flesh wound, which was something but the tissue around the entry was unhappy about it and she had not been resting it the way a bullet wound needed to be rested.

"You shouldn't be walking on this," he said. "It could cause permanent damage"

"I've had worse." she replied "I'm tougher than I look"

"That's doesn't make it right." Hank replied

She watched him work. The competence of his hands, the concentration in his face, the way he had always moved through the world with a kind of careful nerdy precision. It was as if he had an inferiority complex and was trying to be worth and helpful.

She sighed, leaning back on the exam table. "So you have just been living here all these years?"

"Someone had to look after Charles." he replied

"He doesn't need…" Raven started but was interjected by Hank

"He does," Hank interrupted gently. "He is doing much better now, but you missed the worst of it. He misses you, Raven. You were like a sister to him."

She looked at the ceiling for a moment. "He misses what I once was. What he was making me into. He misses the project I used to be " she corrected him. "I'm not who he wants me to be anymore. I never really was to begin with"

Hank tied off the bandage with a knot that was neat and final. He was quiet for a moment.

"He's not the only one who missed you," he said quietly.

The silence that settled over the small examination room was heavy, suffocatingly familiar. Hank kept his eyes glued to his medical kit, meticulously organizing gauze pads that didn't need organizing, simply because looking at her felt like staring directly into the sun.

Raven let out a soft, breathy laugh, tilting her head back against the wall. "You always did that when you were lying, Hank. Or when you were about to say something that terrified you."

"I am not lying," Hank said softly, finally pausing his hands. He looked up, his blue eyes wide and painfully earnest behind his thick lenses. "I did miss you, Raven. The house felt massive after you left. Just Charles and me, wandering around like ghosts in a museum. Every time a floorboard creaked, I used to think it was you coming back from a run."

"I couldn't stay, Hank," she said, her voice dropping its sharp, defensive edge, replaced by a raw vulnerability she only ever allowed around him. "Charles didn't want me. He wanted a version of me that he could show off to the neighbors. A perfect, polished little mutant girl who hid her skin and said her pleases and thank yous. Every time he looked at my true form, I could see the tiny flicker of disappointment in his eyes."

"He was afraid for you," Hank argued, though his voice lacked any real conviction. "We all were. The world out there is brutal."

"And what about you?" Raven asked, leaning forward on the examination table, her bare feet dangling off the edge. "Were you afraid of me, or were you just afraid of yourself?"

Hank swallowed hard, his fingers tightening around a roll of medical tape. "I was afraid of losing you. And then I did."

"You lost me the moment you started drinking that serum, Hank," she said, her tone a mix of sorrow and gentle accusation. "You chose to hide. You chose to pull a curtain over the beautiful, incredible thing you are, just so the baseline humans wouldn't look at you sideways on the street."

"It isn't that simple," Hank muttered, looking down at his own completely normal, human looking hands. "The serum gives me a life. It lets me walk into a grocery store without causing a stampede. It lets me be a scientist instead of a monster in a cage."

"You were never a monster," Raven whispered, reaching out to touch his arm. "That is the lie Charles fed you, and you swallowed it whole."

She watched him, tracking the slight tremor in his fingers, the way his breathing had hitched the moment she touched him. The emotional chemistry between them was a volatile thing, built on years of shared isolation and a desperate, unspoken affection that time hadn't managed to erode.

Slowly, deliberately, Raven reached up and took his glasses off carefully. "What happened to all of it?" she asked, her voice a soft, teasing caress. "The fur. The blue. You look... normal."


"Not all the time." He turned the glasses over in his hands. "I take a shot of the serum every morning. And whenever I get too..." He stopped.

"Too what?" She asked in amusement.

"Emotional." he replied awkwardly.

"Emotional huh?" She smiled, leaning closer. "Like excited? Like you are right now?"

"I can usually fight it off." Hank rebuked

"Hank." She said seriously. "You shouldn't have to fight what you feel. The things that come naturally to you." Her eyes moved over his face. "To us."

She leaned in and kissed him on the lips gently.

It started small. A hesitation, really, the kind of kiss that asks permission without words.

Then something gave way. It was like a dam had burst open.

The years between them had been building toward this, and once the first wall cracked the rest followed fast. His serum failed and his control slipped. The blue flooded back into his skin like water finding its level. His face changed. The bones settled into their true shape. She also shifted away from her human form and now they were there in the only forms that had ever mattered, two people who had been romantically attracted to each other but had walked separate roads and had somehow, against the weight of everything, ended up together once again.

"Do you remember," she said quietly as they paused after several minutes as she loving traced his blue jawline "the last thing you said to me? About how I'd never be considered beautiful. In my real form."

He looked at her. His eyes were full of desire and love for her but her question brought him back in control.

"Do you still think that?" she asked

Hank looked at her, his golden eyes wide with regret and overwhelming affection. "You know what humans think of us. We both saw it in Paris."

"I'm not asking about others." Raven said.

A beat.

"What do you think?" she asked again

He reached up and put his hand against her face and caressed her lovingly. His furry blue fingers against the dark blue scales of her jaw. They were entirely focused on each other as they gazed into each others eyes showing their feelings in their true forms.

"I think you're beautiful," he said eventually "I've always thought that. I love the person underneath this skin. It doesn't matter to me if your skin is blue, pink or brown or if the face is even yours"

"Oh" She said hiding her shock at Hank admitting his love for her. She was stunned and didn't know how to reply to that. So she distracted him with a question instinctively as misdirection was her default M.O., so she instinctively bought time with a question.

She held his gaze. "And you? What about yourself?"

Something flickered in his eyes that looked like an old wound hurting and maybe shame and then it was gone in a blink.

He stepped back. She could see her question had ruined the mood. She cursed herself for asking such a stupid question now.

"Get some rest," he said as he stood up. "Your leg needs it. We can talk about….this tomorrow"

He walked out of the room with the body language of someone who had just discovered the limit of how much truth he could hold in one night.

Mystique a.k.a. Raven watched him go with a disappointed look on her face. She sighed and laid down to rest and tried to suppress all the emotions Hank had brought up.

The mission came first and all these mushy feelings could be dealt with later.

She focused on why she had come back in the first place.

It was for two reasons.

The first was that she wanted to talk to Xavier and get to the bottom of this time travel stuff that both Xavier and Magneto were telling her about and see if Charles had changed his attitude towards her. He hadn't and all of their discussion in the kitchen hadn't been enough to convince her to stop her from assassinating Trask. She would not be able to rest until mutant killing monsters like Bolivar Trask were dead.

The Second reason was to use her injury and discussion to hide her contingency plan.

If she found that Xavier was still the overbearing and controlling person she'd left years ago and would use the cerebro to stop her from assassinating Trask, she'd be forced to destroy the cerebro.

She rested and planned. She wouldn't sleep. Not tonight. Not while she was on a mission.

At two in the morning, Raven disguised as Charles Xavier limped through the secret lower corridors of the mansion.

Cerebro hummed behind its door. The retinal and facial scan accepted her. She stood there for a moment and looked at it as the sight brought back fond memories of simpler times.

The helmet sat on its cradle, patient and waiting, the thing that let Charles reach across continents and pull secrets out of strangers' skulls. He had done it to her once. She would not let him do it to her again.

He would do it again if she let him and then he would know where she was going and why. He would try to stop her. He would mean well but he would be wrong and she would have to hurt him to get past him.

She didn't want to hurt him. But she had stopped letting what she wanted matter a long time ago.

She picked up the helmet. It was lighter than she expected. She brought it down against the console once, twice, three times, until something cracked and the hum stuttered and died. Sparks jumped. Smoke curled up from the wreckage. She kept going until she was sure, until the only sound was the fizz of broken circuits and her own breathing.

Then she stood in the silence and looked at what she had done.

The mansion was warm behind her. It had been her home once before she understood what homes cost. Everyone was asleep upstairs. She thought of the bandage on her leg, the way he had ordered Hank to tend it, the way he still said "my girl" like she was twelve years old and stealing cookies from the kitchen.

A familiar ache opened in her chest, the old wound of leaving people who loved a version of her she had outgrown.

She shut it down. She had a lot of practice doing it in the last several years.

Magneto a.k.a Erik was out there planning something terrible. Bolivar Trask was still alive, still building his machines and still turning mutants into lab rats and corpses.

That is what mattered. One person's feelings, even her own, weighed nothing against the lives of every mutant who couldn't pass as humans, who couldn't hide because who would end up in a cage or on a slab if she let her feeling win.

She set the ruined helmet down and left. She went out through the kitchen door into the dark. She did not look back at the lit windows. Grief was a luxury she had never been able to afford and she was not about to start now.

The cab was waiting where she had told it to wait. She got in and gave the driver an address that was not her final destination and sat with her hands in her lap while the mansion shrank behind her and disappeared.

She had a flight to catch to Washington.

----

Noah was also awake and in his room at the mansion, sitting cross-legged on the bed with the holographic display of his watch open in the air before him. He read all the important messages he had missed that the dumb AI had tagged for him.

The non metallic drones that were stealthily following every major character had recorded everything for him to see.

One of them was a recording of Magneto that was several hours old. It showed a pretty interesting meeting between Magneto and some very familiar mutants. He played it and watched:

RECORDING START:

Magneto P.O.V.

The building in Millvale was above a hardware store on a side street that had seen better decades. The door opened if you knew which panel to push. Magneto had helped design the protocol for a series of mutant safe-houses for his brotherhood and spread the word that it was a safe-haven for any mutant who sought refuge in it. It had sensors that would alert Magneto when one of the safe-house was activated.

Magneto received the information when he retrieved his helmet and his attire which included his belt which had a receiver for the safe-houses activation message.

He didn't know who had come seeking refuge but he was desperate for any help he could get. He was sure Xavier and the four other mutants would try and stop him so he needed mutants to fight beside him to even the odds.

He let himself in. He saw there were two mutants inside.

Saber tooth a.k.a. Victor Creed was in the far corner, dragging one set of claws in a slow line down the plaster. He had been doing it long enough that the wall was powder from shoulder height to the floor. He stopped when he heard the door and turned. He did not move from where he stood but his posture was that of a feline ready to pounce on its prey.

Toad was on the ceiling. He hung there watching the TV upside down while he munched from a stolen bag of jerky. He turned when he saw they had unannounced visitors, dropped his food and got into a crouched stance ready for a fight.

Erik a.k.a Magneto stood in the middle of the room and looked at them both. He took in the peeling walls and the bare bulb and the two mutants who had been living in the particular way you lived when the world would rather you did not exist in it at all.

"Hey!" Toad said recognizing him "I recognize you from the TV news. You're Magneto" he said turning his head towards Sabertooth "He's the guy that we saw on the news from Paris. He was imprisoned for killing JFK!"

Toad hopped down from the counter, his webbed feet making a wet, slapping sound against the floorboards as he drifted closer to Erik. He tilted his head, his tongue darting out to lick a stray piece of jerky dust from his upper lip. "Is it true? Did you really curve the bullet? Because the guys in my unit in Saigon said it was a second shooter on the grassy knoll, but I told them, no way, that has got to be mutant business."

Erik Lehnsherr did not move. He stood in the center of the filthy, peeling room like a king who had accidentally wandered into a peasant's hovel, his posture rigid and his dark coat completely pristine despite the dust. He didn't answer Toad's question; instead, his gaze slowly drifted over to Victor Creed, who was standing deathly still with an animalistic predatory gleam in his eyes

"You are Sabertooth," Erik said, his voice entirely devoid of warmth. "I have heard of you. A feral creature with a habit of leaving a trail of bodies wherever you go."

Victor mouth turned into a slow, predatory grin spreading across his rugged face, revealing elongated, yellowed teeth. "And you are the guy who likes to talk a lot. Tell me, Magneto, does all that metal manipulation make you a good fighter, or do you just hide behind coins and guardrails when things get bloody?"

Toad let out a nervous, high pitched cackle, jumping back onto a nearby chair. "Oh, man, Victor is going to fight the guy from the news. I put five bucks on the guy with the cape."

"There will be no fighting here," Erik said smoothly. He didn't raise his hands, but suddenly, the exposed rusty nails in the floorboards began to groan, pulling upward against the wood by a fraction of an inch. The heavy iron skillet on the small stove rattled violently.

Victor's grin faded slightly, his shoulders tensing as his wild, animalistic instincts picked up on the massive surge of magnetic energy flooding the room. He growled, a low, vibration in his chest, but he stayed where he was.

"I did not break out of the Pentagon to squabble with mercenaries," Erik stated, his voice dropping to a commanding, resonant register. "I came because our people are being slaughtered in the dark. While you two have been hiding in the shadows, scratching walls and eating garbage, our brothers and sisters were being cut open. Taken by Bolivar Trask's people. They were cut open, studied, and catalogued like lab rats."

"Their lives extinguished to fill up some scientist's data files that now circulate Washington while their bodies are kept preserved like animals in a lab for them to study. To them we are not human" Magneto said.

Toad had come down from the ceiling. He stood with his weight on the balls of his feet.

"You've been hiding," Erik said. He said it without accusation. He said it the way you stated the weather. "Both of you. Because you look different. Because you were taught to be afraid of what you are. To keep it small. To keep it quiet. To hope the humans with the guns and the files and the machines decide today is not the day they come for you." He looked at them directly. "They are coming anyway"

Victor grunted.

"Bolivar Trask will stand in front of cameras at the White House tomorrow afternoon," Erik continued. "He will show the world his Sentinels, the mutant killing machines. He will sell the people of the world the idea that the only good mutant is a mutant in a cage or on a slab." A pause. "I intend to be there when he does. I intend to make an example out of him and others like him"

"Just you?" Victor asked.

"For now." Erik's eyes moved between them. "I will soon have twenty-five of Trask's own machines. I will take control of them from him while they are being transported later on. Their own mutant killing weapons will stand on that lawn tomorrow but they will do what I tell them to do. I will have them kill and destroy everything! And the whole world will watch." He let that sit for a moment. "The whole world will understand, perhaps for the first time that we are not what they have been told we are. That we are not something to be managed or contained or studied. We are the future. We are to be respected and feared. And the people who built the cages were afraid of exactly that."

Toad looked at his webbed hands. He had a habit when he was thinking of spreading his fingers and looking at them as though the answer might be written somewhere on the webbing.

"Why would we do this?" he said. "They'll hunt us afterwards. I just got away from them in Vietnam. I want to live freely"

"You call this living?" Magneto said pointing at the room "This isn't freedom. As for your question. They won't be able to hunt us. Not if they are too afraid of us. Not when I will turn their own weapons on them." Magneto replied "Not if our actions give rise to a mutant revolution where more mutants from across the country will rise up and fight with us. We'll become an army that will protect each other and fight fro what's right"

"What do you want from us then?" Victor Creed a.k.a Sabertooth asked

"I want you to stand by my side," Erik said. "In your own skin and proud. In front of every camera in the world and show them the error of their ways." He looked at Toad directly. "You have spent your life being told that what you are is a thing to be ashamed of. That the shape of you is wrong. That the way you move is wrong. That you should hide it." His voice did not rise. It had no need to. "I am asking you to stop hiding. Join me and fight! So that every mutant watching on a television set somewhere understands that it is possible to stop hiding and stop fearing being used like a lab rat! We start a revolution which you two will lead under my command!"

The silence went on for a while.

Victor looked at his nails. He looked at the wall he had spent an hour destroying out of boredom and the particular tension of a man with too much power and nowhere to put it. He looked at Lehnsherr.

"I want to be standing there when it happens," he growled out. "In the open. I want them to see me. I want to rip those high and mighty people in fancy suits"

"You will have the chance to do that and much more," Erik promised.

Victor nodded once.

Toad had stopped looking at his hands. He was looking at Erik with something that was not quite belief and not quite hope but was in the territory between them, the place you arrived at when someone had said out loud the thing you had spent years finding no language for.

"Anything beats living like this" Toad muttered.

"No more hiding," he said quietly. Almost to himself.

"No more hiding," Erik said.

END RECORDING



Author notes

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