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"Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever." - Leon Trotsky
Chapter One
There was a confusing disconnect in her life.
Mystique remembered how, less than a month earlier, she had cowered in a corner with half a dozen other children - stupid and innocent and panicking at the prospect of very imminent death while Azazel slaughtered half the CIA agents at the base. Her throat had been raw from screaming for days afterward.
Today - in her new life - she sees Azazel a dozen times a day, in the most mundane of circumstances. They pass each other in the hallway, sit at the same table for meals. When it was her turn to do the laundry, she sorted through Azazel's rumpled black suits and white cotton underthings along with the rest of the group's dirty clothing.
He's not human - none of them are - but strange and frightening as he is, he isn't a devil. There is more to him than his skill with his blade, than the deadly nighttime teleportations he had used to smash the life out of all those men back at the CIA base. She thinks back to the beach in Cuba, to Azazel's tail poised above Hank's face while he held him down against the wet sand, half a second and half an inch from driving its sharp tip through Hank's eye and on into his brain, and Mystique wonders how all that balances against everything else she's learned about who Azazel is.
Azazel dresses sharply, but he wears his socks until the soles are riddled with holes. Azazel's English is not as good as he lets on, but he can bluff his way through most conversations without embarrassment by keeping largely silent. Azazel smiles more often than Mystique would have ever believed before she'd known him better, and when he does his smile is dazzling, the straight teeth unbelievably white against the crimson skin of his scarred face. He is often quite charming - even friendly - and open to others in a way that seems to be in contradiction to many other aspects of the whole; that openness seems at once to confirm all of Mystique's best and worst suspicions about him.
Azazel calls almost everyone he meets "comrade" - even people who obviously fear or hate him. Even humans, which confuses Mystique. She has heard him call a man his comrade, and then she has seen Azazel gut the same man like a fish not ten minutes later.
Erik scolds Azazel about this sometimes. Speaking in that wry tone of his - the one that seems to tease gently while still being deadly serious - he accuses Azazel of playing to stereotypes, of mocking foreigners and the unworldly, and of wearing the word out past all usefulness. Azazel's reply to these jests is always in Russian, yet another language in which Erik (judging from his quick and flowing replies in the same tongue) appears to be completely fluent. Mystique pays close attention to these exchanges, but so far she has been able to recognize only about five words, the meanings of which she is still shaky about. She is painfully aware that she is the only member of the group who - in the very least - is not on the way to becoming bilingual, and feels this as another of the many deficiency she needs to correct.
Erik rarely frames the coming revolution with the word "comrade." When he is recruiting - when he is giving a speech or making a point - he says "my fellow mutants" or "brothers and sisters." These are terms he reserves solely for their own kind.
Azazel does not become angry when Erik corrects him; he listens to Erik with intense interest and a seriousness that has every appearance of sincerity, though afterward he always persists in making his little joke (and Mystique was becoming more and more convinced that it was a sort of joke, though not one she understood perfectly).
In fact, she has never yet seen Azazel become exactly angry. At times when she would expect him - expect anyone - to get heated up, she has learned that he becomes horribly cold and indifferent instead. In these moments he has no mortal weakness, and loses all tolerance for such weakness in others. Even when he kills another person (and there has been some killing since that day on the beach - no one was demanded that she take a direct role it it yet, but she knows that time is coming) he has a way of being efficiently detached from the matter, as though the taking of a life was an event so trivial as to be unworthy of the slightest emotional response. This troubles her - maybe even more than the killing itself - but she counters these feelings of unease with the thought, At least he doesn't seem to enjoy it. That means something, right?
She doesn't like the other members of the Brotherhood as much as she thinks she should, as much as she wishes she could. The others have been more deeply damaged than Mystique, and that makes them stronger than she is - harder and more experienced. Older. They intimidate her, though she tries not to show it. She recognizes now more than ever how sheltered she was in her life in Charles's home, how his lifestyle and outlook on the world had been calculated to keep her tame and small. She feels this past privilege as a character flaw that she must correct for before she will fit in here. She realizes that she is on the cusp of becoming a completely different person, and believed correctly that when she would look back on herself years from now, it would be as though she were looking back at a person she had never known.
Azazel was the one who frightened her the most, so she looked to him to learn how to be strong.
It was a long time before she realized that he was looking back at her with interest.