DEVIL, Chapter Two
The 'spontaneous' state of our daily lives is that of a lived lie, to break out of which requires a continuous struggle. The starting point for this process is to become terrified by oneself. - Slavoj Žižek
Chapter Two
Decades later, Mystique would attempt to locate the terminus line in her life; the turning point at which it became impossible for her to continue to attempt to be the person Charles wanted her to be.
In the end, she concluded that it was Hank who had finally forced her to make a decision, once and for all. She'd been playing at rebellion for years before that, staging little stunts to annoy Charles when he became too smug, but she'd never crossed the line. She had been cognoscente of how much she might stand to lose if she took that final leap, how much a misstep might cost her and Charles both. And Charles had seemed so certain that he knew the right way to handle things. She had not wanted to disappoint him.
Charles was not a villain. He meant well, after all, and he only wanted to help - to keep everyone safe. He didn't see the way that his attempts to take care of her had kept her weak and uncertain of herself, dependent upon his protection and his approval. He was not a villain, and at first she felt as though it was very important that she should not forget that, no matter what happened. Later - as the Sentential program was instituted, as the secret horrors of the Weapon-X program were uncovered by the Brotherhood (which supplied the top secret files to a predictably disinterested media), as Erik's predictions began to come true, one after another - the importance of maintaining this distinction began to mean less and less to her.
Good intentions, she would find, became increasingly irrelevant when compared to an intolerable and untenable reality. A point came when his seemingly endless capacity to apologize for atrocities committed against their own people stopped hurting her, and instead only provoked rage. When it became clear that his love for humankind ran so deep that it allowed him to excuse the targeting, torture and murder of Mutant children, it became impossible for her to find a way to excuse herself for loving him. And when that breaking point came - when she simply stopped loving him - it came easily, with no great emotional turmoil or pain. But all that was a great many years away. But all this was a great many years away.
That first break was messier. She had a great deal of self-doubt after she left Charles behind. She was badly worried about the future, because - as often as Erik spoke of the dawning of a new era, as much as he seemed to believe in it and as much as she wanted to believe in him - she could see no conceivable future for any of them, Charles's group or Erik's. She was pretty sure that they would all be killed, probably sooner rather than later, probably badly. When she had been Charles's sister she had at least had security; that was gone now, along with nearly everything else she had gotten so used to having. In the weeks following the events on the beach she spent a great deal of time in private, crying. She hated this, because it reminded her of Hank and the way he had been able to hurt her.
Hank. Poor, self-loathing Hank, who was supposed to be so smart. How could someone with a brain like that allow himself be so goddamn stupid? But if it hadn't been for Hank, Hank and his stupid and cruelly well-intentioned words, her entire life might have worked out differently. If he hadn't pushed her past that breaking point - if he hadn't hurt her so badly that she could no longer stand to remain the sort of pitiful and weepy little girl who could be wounded by such words - she might have remained a pet to Charles and a slave to his assimilationist ideals forever. Sometimes this seemed like a good enough reason to forgive him, but only sometimes.
As the Brotherhood began to settle into their new headquarters - an unassuming old tenement house on the wrong side of Chicago, where none of their neighbors were likely to start trouble over the blacked windows and locked gate - and as they began to settle into each others' company, Mystique began to wonder if Azazel resented the way she had tricked him during that fight on the beach to save Hank; she had decided that she was finished with pretending, so she did not allow herself to be so deluded as to believe that he had not intended to kill to Hank. At the same time, she did not think it had been personal. She thought that if Hank showed up on their doorstep tomorrow and asked to join them, Azazel would accept his presence gracefully and without comment, as he had Mystique herself.
He did not seem to hold her past against her. Still, in those first early days - before the Brotherhood went active, before she began to have many more pressing concerns to deal with - Mystique spent a great deal of time wondering what Azazel's first impressions of her had been. What - if anything - had he thought of her back then? More to the point, what did he think of her now?
It wasn't until after their first mission together that she'd work up the courage to ask.