DEVIL, Chapter Three
"I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves." - Che Guavara
"Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation." - Eugene Debs
Chapter Three
The instant solidarity that had appeared between them in the minutes following the missile attack on the beach began to fade almost as soon as it was over. When you had just helped to save the world - literally saved the world, like a superhero or something - and then to have the guns of the humans you had saved turned on yourself a moment later brought a lot of things into focus. It was a clarifying experience.
In the wake of such an existential threat, it had been easy to join hands and stand together as Azazel had transported them away from that place. Later, individual differences began to intrude, their difference pasts and different personalities coming between them. Erik had always been his own man, but when they'd had time to brood over the matter, it became difficult to get around the fact that the others had been Shaw's people and Mystique had been Charles's.
These barriers came up between them at odd moments. Mystique would find herself watching Janos and Azazel, and would suddenly wonder how much they had really known about Shaw's plan, and when they had known it. If they had approved. These questions seemed especially pressing as related to Azazel. Emma's arrival added more complications, because there was no question that Emma had understood exactly what Shaw meant to do.
When Erik announced his intentions to free Emma - first in English then again in Spanish for Janos's benefit - Mystique kept quiet. She watched the reactions of the others, trying to see what they thought of the plan, what Emma had been to them. Janos and Angel had exchanged a brief look that seemed uncertain and troubled. Azazel had only lifted his chin slightly, in a way that seemed to show agreement if not pleasure with the plan.
She hadn't wanted to question Erik in front of the others - hadn't wanted them to think that the plan frightened her or that she was afraid to fight - but later that night she'd gone to his rooms to speak with him.
The electricity in the old hotel was dodgy, and when she knocked on door of the apartment Erik had claimed for himself the hall light overhead flickered. Erik had bought the building less than a week previously. Chicago was overrun with empty, rundown buildings, but it still astonished her that Erik had been able to find someway to purchase such a big place quietly and outright. He'd paid in cash, and the name on the tittle and tax documents was not Erik's own. Erik had any number of skills that she could not yet see herself ever being competent enough to acquire.
"One moment," he said from the other side of the door. She waited, hand poised over the doorknob, while the deadbolt disengaged itself with a rusty click. "Come in."
When she opened the door she found Erik seated in front of the desk in the corner, a length of cloth puddled across the surface of the desk. He turned his head to look up at her, and Mystique saw that he held several sewing pins between his lips. When Erik saw who was standing in the doorway, his window curtains slid shut, the metal curtain rings clicking against each other as they slide along the bar. "I'm sorry about that," he said, glancing toward the now covered window. When he opened his mouth to speak, the pins floated down to a pincushion that was sitting at the corner of the desk, and stuck themselves there neatly. "I intend to have one-way glass installed in all the windows as soon as possible."
She shrugged. "It's not a big deal. I can always change form if I need to." She thought of Azazel, who certainly didn't have the luxury of being able to pass as human. Had he ever been able to do something as simple as taking a walk down a busy street? Had he ever been to a movie, or ridden in a car without tinted windows, been to a park or a zoo or anywhere where there were strange people? The thought made her feel somehow lucky and guilty at once, but mostly it just made her angry.
There was a smoldering ball of resentment located right behind her navel, which had taken flame the night Hank had tried to convince her to take his "cure" - to change herself to suit him and the society he so desperately wanted to be a part of - and which hadn't gone out since. It flared up now, reminding her of Hank; he couldn't pass anymore, either. She wondered if it was harder for Azazel or Hank, and decided on the latter. Azazel could transport himself any where at any time, but Hank would be a prisoner inside Charles's mansion. And Hank would know what he was missing out on. If Azazel felt that his highly visible mutations had cheated him of anything - had limited his opportunities or experiences - he didn't let on. He didn't seem to have any interest in such things.
Erik seemed to read her mind. "I don't intend that any of us should be forced to remain hidden for very much longer," he said, turning back to his work on the desk.
"What are you doing?" she asked, stepped into the room. The hotel had been coated top to bottom with decades worth of grim and dust when they'd moved in, and there hadn't been all that much time for cleaning since then. Nonetheless, Erik's rooms were spotless.
He turned in his chair, holding up the pile of cloth that had laid across his desk. She saw now that it was a half-finished garment. The... thing was almost completely shapeless, made of a heavy, felt-like material in swatches of black and bright purple and crimson. Erik read her expression, and laid the monstrosity back across his desk. "Well," he said, "More's the pity that Beast did not chose to join us. I'm afraid I have no talent for sewing."
It took her a long moment to come up with anything remotely nice to say. "The stitches look very even," she said lamely.
"Yes, well, that's the easy part." Demonstrating, he picked up a length of thread. A needle levitated upward from the pin cushion, slipping the thread through its eye. Holding the garment along the pinned seams with both hands, he guided floating needle to complete several extremely neat stitches. "However, the cut leaves something to be desired. As for the palate... I'm afraid that it looked better in my imagination."
"Purple and red don't really go together," she agreed.
It was his turn to shrug. "What was it you wanted?" he asked, setting his project aside.
"After you guys got back from Russia, Charles told me about what happened there... he said Emma Frost had shown him how Shaw was planning to start a nuclear war. He said she showed him a vision of Washington in flames, and called it 'beautiful.' He said she seemed to be 'deeply mad' - that she frightened him."
"I see," Erik said. He had become suddenly very cold, and she regretted already that she'd brought this up. "Let me ask you a question; do you consider your brother to be an especially good judge of character?"
"Well... No," she said, uncertainly, feeling the words 'your brother' as the rebuke that they were. "But -"
"We will need a telepath if we're to have any chance of success," he told her. "Without Emma's ability to block out Charles, we will be completely helpless when he turns on us."
"He won't do that," she said. "Charles won't sell us out."
Erik stared at her long and hard, unblinking. She didn't dare to allow herself to break his gaze. "If you're childish enough to actually believe that," he said softly, "then you don't belong here."
He turned back to face his desk, returning his attention to the dubious project of the uniform. "You need to understand what's coming," he told her, without looking up. She lingered in the doorway, watching him, unspoken words queuing up in a jumble inside her throat. After several minutes, Erik said, "Go to bed, Raven."
She left the room with a sense that she had postponed but not dodged complete disaster. But she didn't go back to her own rooms.
Instead, she went down to the hotel kitchen. After their own rooms, this had been the part of the hotel that they'd all been working the hardest to get cleaned up and made decent, and the room smelled of Ajax powder. There were gaps along the counters, where Erik had removed the old, nonfunctional stove and frigidaire. Workmen were coming to install new appliances in the morning; it went without saying that she would appear as a human while they were inside the hotel, and that Azazel simply would not appear at all.
Angel had gone shopping earlier in the day, Mystique knew, and now she went to the cupboard and looked inside, browsing through the cans of vegetables and beans, the tuna and spam and peanut butter, pushing aside boxes of crackers and macaroni and cheese. These were not things that had commonly been found in Charles's cupboards while they were growing up, she reflected, and then found something she had never even seen before.
She pulled it down to look at it more closely, staring at the label. It was a medium-sized Styrofoam cup, wrapped in a layer of cellophane, and the front read "Cup O' Noodles." The directions on the back called for boiling water, which she didn't have anyway of getting. Instead, she turned the tap on and let the water run as hot as it would get while she unwrapped the package. She filled the cup with water, as the instructions advised, found a fork and turned to toward the table.
Azazel was sitting at the table. She gave a small jump, almost spilling the hot soup on herself. Trying to recover her manners, she said shakily, "I didn't hear you come in."
He didn't say anything to that, only watched her as she took the seat across from him at the table. She stirred the noodles uneasily as the silence went on. When the quiet had grown deafening, she spoke simply to fill the silence. Gesturing with her fork at the cup of dubious noodles, she said, "This is something new, isn't it? They aren't quite as horrible as they look, anyway."
"Capitalism," he said wryly, with a supremely indifferent shrug. She was pretty sure that he meant that as a joke, but not certain enough to laugh.
"The world is getting stranger," she said.
"Is true," he said, and his hands made a smooth gesture that took in first himself and then Mystique. A smile tugged up the right side of his face as he did so, gifting her with the vision of just a sliver of those stunning white teeth.
"Do you think we should rescue Emma?" she asked suddenly. Once she'd asked the question there was no taking it back, so she pushed the noodles away, giving them up as a bad job, and waited for an answer.
"Emma," he said slowly, "does not need rescued." She blinked slowly, and when he saw that she didn't understand he went on. "Emma could make herself rescued at any time. She could think to the CIA holding her, 'Unlock my cell, and then shot all yourselves' or 'and then go to sleep.' Anytime she could do this."
Mystique leaned over the table, watching him closely. "Why doesn't she?"
"Emma is..." he paused, grouping for a better, more apt word. Failing to find it, he said with a sigh, "She is sad. Weak - No, not weak. She is supreme Mutant, but she wants someone to tell her what to do, always. She wants a man who says what to do." He shrugged again. "So she will not be a danger to us."
"She wanted to start a nuclear war."
"Nyet," he said, shaking his head. "No - Shaw wanted war. Emma wanted what Shaw said.
"Erik will rescue her, and then she will want what Erik wants. You will see."
"What did you want?" she asked. "The same thing as Shaw or..."
This time he smiled with both sides of his face. It was an easy, broad smile, strangely careless, given the topic at hand. It might have been the thing that made her fall in love with him, that smile. "Like Erik, I am in my heart a moderate; If the humans are willing to turn over control of this world to us, then I am willing to allow them to remain alive until the day of their natural extinction comes."
"But that's not very likely, is it?"
"No," Azazel agreed. He stood. "I am going to bed," he said. "You should do the same."
He left. After a few minutes, she took Azazel's advice and went up to her own rooms.