X-Men: First Class Drabbles: Various
Anything I write for X-Men which is under 300 words (a lot of which, due largely to firstclass100, will be constrained to round-number wordcounts) will be in this post, as it's not really worth posting them individually.
Reprise (200 words)
written for firstclass100 prompt 'change'
Erik’s eyes are dark against the warm light the lamp casts on his face. She thinks they can pierce this false skin, slice to the core of her, the real Raven he implores her to wear with pride.
The disguise is a constant pressure underneath her skin, a mark of shame that only she knows. She takes a breath and lets go, allows her reality to force itself to the surface, and blue flickers over her. She feels the change like the brush of lips.
‘Perfection,’ Erik murmurs. His gaze is steady, and, for the first time, Raven meets it.
***
The needle is an icy note of pain, and then it starts to burn, fire running over her skin the way she’s seen it devouring dry grass. She tries to take a breath, but her lungs won’t expand. Her vision shudders, distorts like water as the change forces itself over her eyes.
It’s never felt like this before.
A strand of dark hair - not mine, don’t let it be mine - falls over her face.
‘You saved me,’ Erik says softly. But something has shifted in his eyes, and long before he speaks again, she knows what he’ll say.
Cast Dice (300 words)
written for firstclass100 prompt 'discovery'
The Brotherhood kill two hundred and forty-three people, for their first public appearance, at an anti-mutant rally in Austin. Emma strides glittering and hard-edged onto their makeshift stage. She casts flickering refractions of the Texas sunlight onto the crowd, blindingly bright; this is when the screaming begins. Raven moves lithely through the chaos, bare and blue and unashamed. They throw themselves aside, trample and crush each other rather than stand in her way, and Erik thinks he catches the edge of a smile on her face. The humans are a rolling sea of watches and jewellery, loose change, with - they make it far too easy - not a few guns. It’s all over so brutally fast.
They take separate paths through the crowd and converge on the stage, line up with Erik at the centre. When they are assembled he nods briefly to Emma, and a telepathic scream explodes out with all of her force behind it, sears into what remains of the crowd, strong enough that Erik sees several people collapse: CONSIDER THIS A WARNING.
Azazel takes his cue, and the Brotherhood leave only smoke and screams behind.
The world’s media seems to implode, after that, headlines shrieking about mutants and war and the martyred dead. They use the same grainy photo every time: Erik, his helmet outlining his face in stark shadows, as he crosses the stage to join the others already waiting for him. Johnson makes a speech full of vague platitudes. Some government office releases a statement substantially more detailed, and vitriolic. They are in the open, now, and the real war begins.
Erik doesn’t find out the number until he sees it on the news.
Point of no return, he thinks, and he pretends for ever after that that moment didn’t give him pause.
Clocks (150 words)
The stranger who is not a stranger looks down on Erik, as he sits, an unfamiliar reversal of positions. He shifts his weight continually as he stands, awkwardly, but with a pleasure that is clear on his face. In another time and another life, it would have been shining warmth in Erik’s mind. ‘What now, then?’ he asks.
Erik’s eyes skim over the chessboard where he has been playing pointlessly against himself. The pieces - dead, blank, empty, still, where they would once have danced under his hands - are scattered into a stalemate.
He reaches out and begins to shift the pawns back to their starting positions. They have both lost what Erik would previously have considered to be everything, and gained back, impossibly, something else. This is a good time to start again.
Erik gestures to the seat opposite him, open-handed. ‘Your move,’ he says.
Charles sits down.
Fall (80 words)
written for Three Sentence Ficathon prompt 'Angel, gossamer'
Her wings are withered, useless, now; they were always delicate, and it's becoming clear that they could never have healed from Summers' blasts, not really.
'I'm still a mutant, she says for the last time, voice dying in her throat, clutching at threads that can no longer support her weight.
Erik shakes his head, slow and mechanical beneath the weight of the helmet - what are you to us if you can't fly? - and he turns, and walks away.
Turning (100 words)
written for firstclass100 prompt 'duality'
Erik is innumerable things, standing smiling in a corridor and tipping his hat to Charles. A name and a title and a person and a power, a teacher and a corruptor and a zealot and a cynic; a weary old man and a screaming child; a survivor and a killer; silvered calm and raw red anger; time and memory and steel and glass. Charles’ mind distilled them all down to two things, long ago: enemy and friend, and he still doesn’t know.
‘We are the future, Charles,’ says Magneto, and Charles wonders whether Erik has been lost to the past.