(no subject)
Sweat glistens on pale skin over wiry muscle as Ellen utilizes the pull-up bar for the function for which it was designed. Monitoring the labor of lungs, heart, and muscle, with microscopic fascination, she is relatively inattentive to her surroundings. The loose sweats and tank top are both in black. Her hair is yanked back into a severe tail.
Yuriko is her Asian counterpart, an almond-eyed twin in attire, if not yet in exertion. Barefoot, grave, she steps into the weight room in silence and pauses long enough to blink -- her forehead furrows at Ellen's presence, tying body to scent -- before moving on to the mats. She has a towel. It drops (thump) onto a bench.
Ellen draws herself up once more, her arms tremorous under the pull of her not unconsiderable weight. Breath escapes past her teeth in a long hiss. The flick of her glance is recognition, if not greeting. Her eyes close for another pull.
Her new companion is polite enough not to interrupt the pull with purposeful sound. Yuriko begins to stretch, muscles attenuating under smooth, pale skin. The small pops of joints realigning themselves are curiously metallic. Not surprising in this model of woman, perhaps. She stretches a leg over her head and contemplates the ceiling. Hello, ceiling.
Ellen lets herself down slowly, white sneakers touching the floor before they actually bear her weight. She bows her head a moment, ponytail falling damply against the back of her neck. Her breath shakes a little on the long exhalation.
Yuriko wiggles her toes and hugs her calf to her ear with a twining arm. Mmf. The soft fabric of her sweats tugs strands of hair out of her ponytail to curl gently around her face. "I think," she says thoughtfully, aloud, "I think perhaps I should learn how to be a woman again."
Lashes lift over pale eyes, caught in something of a blank expression as they turn towards Yuriko. Ellen sinks slowly to one of the benches and picks up her own towel in turn to mop at her forehead. "What would this entail?"
The leg is released and lowered, slowly, testing balance against the dig of the foot still on the mat. "A dress," Yuriko decides, carrying on a conversation started without Ellen. "It seems appropriate. I remember that to be a woman was very useful to infil-- to inf--" She frowns. The other leg stretches up above her head. "Infinite? To go in secretly."
"Infiltrate," Ellen answers absently. She continues to look at Yuriko with a somewhat baffled air. "I am not certain I understand. What would require a dress to infiltrate?"
"I do not remember," Yuriko admits, and wraps a hand around her foot to pull her muscles long. "But I remember it was useful to -- to /blend/. Women in dresses are not dangerous. Someone told me this." She considers, lowers her leg, then wraps her hands around her elbows. "People who are feminine are not alarming."
"Oh." Ellen stretches in turn, limbering long arms in an almost balletic motion. "So you wish to obtain a dress?"
The other woman thinks. "Yes," she decides. "Also make-up. It has been a very long time since I have been a woman, I believe. I do not remember the practice clearly. My mother taught me, when I was young."
With the faint shadow of a smile, Ellen inclines her head. She says, "I never learned."
"I was a trophy wife," Yuriko explains, and folds in half to press her nose against her knees. Her ponytail dangles down like a little comma. Her alto emerges muffled. "It was very diplomatic. My husband was a businessman."
Ellen picks up her water bottle from beneath the bench, unscrews its caps, and spills what remains of its contents over her head with a diagonal shake. After a hesitation that is positively diplomatic, wherein she stretches in the opposite direction, pulling her other arm into an arc over her head, she says, "I do not imagine that I would have had the patience for such a life."
"It was a very different life," Yuriko admits into her legs, and straightens with a face gone slightly pink from the redistribution of blood. She is not noticeably regretful over her change of condition. "There were many parties. And ceremonies. Also, flirting." She pauses to blink, and announce with naive pride, "I flirted."
Ellen looks at her with frank incredulity, disguised after a moment with a blink, and a quick glance away. She says, "Oh."
Yuriko tips her head, eyes going blanker than normal for the exploration through memory. "Appropriately," she tacks on, and looks interested. "Perhaps I will be able to remember how. I will ask Mr. Toad if I may practice with him."
"You will ask ... Mr. Toad." Ellen stares at her. "If you may. Practice."
"Flirting," Yuriko explains kindly. In case Ellen has lost the conversational thread. "I will buy a dress first. And make-up. Unless--" She wraps her arms behind her head and regards Ellen with a little frown. "Do you believe Dr. Lensherr will object?"
Perhaps fortunately for the way this conversation is headed, a familar stride accompanies familiar scents down the stretch of hallway that leads to the weight room. Not of intercourse, but of acrid metal mingled with warmer coffee and aging boot leather. Magneto steps in with brows knit and looks from Ellen to Yuriko. "What?"
"It is not so much that--" Ellen starts to say, and then breaks off, and looks at Magneto with an expression that is not so much guilty as mingled bafflement and barely suppressed horror. She lifts her chin and says briskly, too briskly, "Nothing, sir." Her voice takes on a slight tremor, almost undetectable, and yet quite telling. "I am sure that Yuriko's romantic life is hers to manage."
In view of Ellen's last words, it is perhaps unfortunate that the first words out of Yuriko's mouth are, "With Mr. Toad." She turns her attention to Magneto with great interest. "Unless it is inappropriate."
Magneto says nothing at first, expression changing little even when his eyes drift warily back to Ellen. Warm metal glistens in the spaces between the fingers of his right hand, and he adjusts his grip upon it before his jaw angles more decisively to Yuriko. "I am not entirely sure what is happening, but I believe we can discuss it another time."
Ellen looks from Yuriko to Magneto and back again. She straightens ever-so-slightly in her perch upon the bench and ducks a bare nod.
Yuriko peers at Magneto from under a slightly rumpled fringe of black, then smiles: a rare, singularly sweet expression. "Good evening, Dr. Lensherr," she says politely. "Do you wish to exercise?"
"Not tonight, Yuriko. Thank you." Her smile prolongs the moment - its sweetness, perhaps, enough to prompt a moment's distraction before Erik's thoughts are able to turn themselves politely over. "Would you excuse us?"
Ellen turns a look of mild surprise upon him, and unfolds from her bench with an air of expectation, expression sharpening to new alertness. She continues not to speak, but instead to stand ready. For what, who knows.
Yuriko's arms unwind from behind her head. She stoops to pick up her towel, looping it over her forearm before padding obediently towards the door. Even in her small, strange little world, she can understand a dismissal. A passing nod bids Ellen adieu, and then she is gone.
His free hand lifted to gesture the door smoothly shut after Yuriko, Erik keeps his head turned after it until the adamantium skeleton beyond it has wandered out of reasonable earshot. Only then does he turn back to realize that Ellen is on her feet, at which point his brows knit further, and his gesture shifts into a lazy suggestion that she sit back down. "I simply want to talk."
"All right." Ellen sits again, crossing her legs at the ankle. Rather than clasp her hands in her lap, she lest them rest on either side of her at the bench and tips her head slightly to one side, looking up at him curiously. "I am at your disposal, sir."
Magneto nods - automatic arrogance in assumption determining that he already knows as much. He does not notice the social misstep, his attention turned to moving and taking a stiff seat on the bench next to her. Notably, he does not...actually do any talking.
Ellen watches him quietly, her expression one of earnest interest and mild puzzlement. She blinks.
A blend of iron and steel molds like putty within the work of Erik's fingers - lines of light and dark smudging into a murky grey before he closes his fist around it. "I am unhappy," he decides eventually.
Presented with this information, Ellen seems uncertain at first what to do with it. She turns her head away from him with a faint frown, her brow knitting as she sits in extended silence. "I cannot pretend to be shocked," she answers slowly, uncertainly. "But it grieves me that you are."
A slow breath drawn in through flared nostrils, Erik nods again. His left hand lifts to rub idly at his brow, and for another stretch, he is silent. "Mystique believes that I have given up on the Brotherhood."
Ellen's frown deepens. "What do you believe?"
"I don't know." This is a lie, of course. His thumb presses deep into the socket of his eye, and he breathes out. "I believe that I have failed as a leader, perhaps. That the Brotherhood has failed as a concept, perhaps. I am not what I was."
"Sir." The syllable is soft reproach, equivalent as it sometimes is to a name rather than the honorific it was designed to be. Ellen bows her head. "I do not see that we have failed."
"Violence," says Erik, "war. Even in our occasional success, we cause more harm than good to the mutant population. We are hated and feared among our own kind. They do not understand."
With her frown still aimed roughly floorwards, Ellen's head cants. Her teeth catch her lower lip and she sucks on it.
"My own miscalculation. Humanity has not moved swiftly. Persecution has been a largely political matter, beyond the Friends, and smaller crime groups on the street." Content to speak to the space between the wide angle of his knees, Erik swallows. "My relationships within the Brotherhood are failing, and my command structure is weak. I am no longer inclined to socialize. I am no longer capable of ignoring my emotions."
"You are frustrated and unhappy," Ellen says quietly. She lifts her head and looks at him sidelong. "Your relationships," she says. "Your command structure. I would follow you no matter whatever else. You know that. I suspect that I am not the only one."
"Yes." A short chuckle has very little to do with good humor, and Erik's hand flattens over the lines of his face as his head bows down. "If I truly believe this, then I have been wrong about a great many things."
Ellen laces her hands together in her lap and sits very still for a moment, barely even breathing. "I believe that this is a fight that must be fought," she says. "There is one path I know and that path is death."
"I do not have a tremendous amount of time left to dither." Low voice muffled into his hand, Erik breathes out forcefully, successfully pushing air out of the tightness in his chest despite his awkward posture.
With pale eyes clear and sharpening, Ellen turns her head the rest of the way to gaze at him directly. "Then perhaps you are right," she says, her words given barely enough voice to qualify as speech rather than whisper. "Perhaps you and your Brotherhood are warriors with divergent paths."
"I have an unhealthy propensity for abandonment and betrayal." Feeling her eyes on him, Erik straightens somewhat, and then all the way, left hand dropping next to the right to receive the worked upon lump of metal that is passed between them. "The great Magneto. And if I leave?"
"I don't know," Ellen says. "How can I?" She looks away again, staring a little blankly off into the indeterminate middle distance. "You have always come for me."
"I am not making a decision." This delivered quietly after a pause that stretches uncomfortably into guilty terrain, Erik looks over at her for the first time once she has looked away. "I am simply talking."
Her eyes close as she swallows, and then open again as she smiles: a slight, sad thing, one that lingers rather than flitting away. "If we are not the tools you need, remaining bound to us..." She loses track of where that is going, and lowers her gaze to the floor.
"Ellen." Erik cannot quite find it in himself to be reproachful. Instead, he knits his brow and works his jaw and huffs at himself irritably. "I am simply talking," he repeats eventually, and then stands. "Nonsense, at that. That is not what I meant, anyway."
Ellen follows him with her gaze, but does not rise in her own turn. She raises her eyebrows at him, her question unspoken.
"I have not slept," is his answer, regardless of what the question is. He meets her gaze for just long enough to be avoidant of the line of it, and steps back for the door, turning as he goes. "Disregard this conversation."
"Sir," Ellen says, rising in turn. She stands in front of the bench, somewhat at a loss, and does nothing at all.
As quickly as he appeared, Erik thrusts the door open and shoulders through it, leaving it to swing idly in his wake.
Yuriko and Ellen have girl-talk. Then Magneto happens.
The steady rhythm of fists hitting the punching bag marks Ellen's presence in the weightroom, her face and arms bearing a sheen of sweat and her breath coming with increasing shortness and she pushes herself further towards her physical limits. Thin strands of fair hair escaped from the severity of her ponytail curl stickily damp around her face and neck.
Mystique has little to worry about by way of hair or clothing, and so her journey to the weight room is a simple one. Her hip, minus Ellen's administrations, is mostly healed by now, and her stride is once again an even gait as she enters. There is a brief moment's pause as she tips an acknowledging nod toward the other woman, and then she moves toward the long mats.
Ellen stills, inappropriate to the workout: the punching bag swings back towards her and strikes her in the shoulder, to the detriment of her balance. She leans her weight back on the the brace of her heel, catching her breath as she works sweat-sticky hands within the cushioning of the boxing gloves. She acknowledges aloud, "Mystique."
The stilling catches her attention before her name, and Mystique straightens to turn toward Ellen. There is a moment of silent consideration, and then she tips her head in another nod. "Ellen."
Ellen looks at her in silence for a moment, one hand balancing in a light touch upon the punching bag to avoid a continuation of its attempts to pummel her back. Eventually she ventures a mild-toned inquiry. "Your injury?"
"Healing," Mystique assures, shifting just slightly so that Ellen can see the smooth blue skin of hip and thigh. "Thank you. It will scar, I think, but nothing more."
Ellen inclines her head. "You believe scars have their uses," she says, although her tone suggests she is drawing the information from the catalogue of her memory and stating it without especial meaning: bland, not quite flat.
"Yes."
Ellen takes a half-step back from the punching bag, working her hands absently at her sides within the confines of the gloves. She studies Mystique's face for a moment longer without speaking. What she is looking for is not clear.
Mystique lifts her brows slightly at this inspection, and for a long moment she is silently allowing, patiently waiting as she faces Ellen.
"I bear none," Ellen says. She cants her head, her gaze slanting along a diagonal past the punching bag towards an indeterminate point on the weight room's wall. "I have never kept a wound of the flesh. Wounds of the spirit are not so visible."
WARNING: This room has been set watchable. RP in this room can now be monitored by using the alias: BHWeightRoom.
"No," Mystique allows with a slight inclination of her head. Her gaze remains steady on Ellen, slightly curious. "Scars are scars, however they manifest."
The hesitation that holds Ellen's tongue lasts too long. Too many beats of her pulse, too many inhalations and exhalations. She opens her mouth, closes it, and then opens it again to speak, with a slow blink. "Dr. Lensherr bears both."
"Most of us do," Mystique answers. There is a slight tightening of her expression, more a result of Ellen's hesitation than her words. Suspicion.
"Some fresh."
"Is there something you wish to say, Ellen?"
Ellen's head lifts slightly, the narrowing of pale eyes as subtle as the slight flare of her nostrils. "I don't know what I would say," she says.
Mystique studies Ellen for a moment, and eventually she takes enough pity on the other woman to ask, "Are you merely attempting to express sympathy, or is there something you believe I should be concerned about?"
"I do not believe that sympathy is precisely relevant," Ellen says after a moment's consideration. "Our war is as much of the spirit as it is one of blood and bone. His malaise is not one I can heal." Her eyes sharpen curiosity as she regards Mystique, her head tipping. "The question is personal," she prefaces, "but are you similarly ailing?"
"No one can heal it but Erik," Mystique answers, and there's a sharpness in her voice that carries into her expression in the wake of Ellen's question. Silence stretches, and she does not answer.
Ellen apparently takes silence for affirmative, or as good as. "Do you believe likewise of your own?"
"We are each responsible for ourselves," Mystique answers stiffly.
Ellen's reply is cool simplicity. "We are a Brotherhood."
"Then feel welcome to heal Erik Lensherr," Mystique replies, and she turns away from her Brother to drop to the mat in a focused stretch.
Ellen watches her in serpentine silence, her gaze unblinking.
Mystique works silently, pulling her muscles loose with side bends and forward stretches.
Finally Ellen blinks, and turns her face away. "We are soldiers in a war of faith," she says. "Without it I do not know what we are."
"Neither do I, Ellen," Mystique allows, pausing in a stretch to hold it. "But you cannot create faith from nothing. I have tried."
"Then perhaps we are all doomed." Ellen smiles, swift and sharp and gone again as fast, and picks up her towel from the bench such that she might blot it against her skin.
"Doomed?" Mystique straightens, drawing herself up. "No. If he chooses to cast us aside, we do not become nothing. Who and what I am does not rely on Erik Lensherr."
"Who and what you are?" Ellen raises her eyebrows, straightening her ponytail with a twist of one hand on its tie.
"I am Mystique," she replies simply.
"You are that," Ellen says coolly, with another inclination of her head.
"I was Mystique before him. I will be Mystique after him." Her reply is perhaps directed at herself more than Ellen, and the blue woman turns away to regard her own reflection in the mirror as she drops into another stretch.
Ellen says nothing at all. Frustration creases her brow. After a moment, she bows her head.
Tension is evident, barely, in the set line of Mystique's jaw, in the unusual stiffness of her movements from pose to pose. The over-careful maintenance of strict control speaks what she does not. Silence lingers.
"Then are you with us?" Ellen asks very quietly. "Or are you alone?"
Mystique's glance snaps to Ellen. There is a short moment's silence before she answers, "I have been with the Brotherhood since the beginning. I have no intention of leaving it now."
"But your strength is yourself alone. If you have weakness it is none but yours to eliminate. You are Mystique, and that suffices you."
Mystique's reply is a single stiff word. "Necessarily."
"I am Valkyrie," Ellen tells her. "I have been alone. It does not suit me."
"Then do not be alone." Mystique answers evenly, "As long as it is not Erik Lensherr you are relying on."
Pale eyes grow a trifle cooler, a measure sharper. Ellen's lips thin. To that, she says nothing.
There is a brief moment in which regret flashes in yellow eyes, not for the sentiment but for having spoken it so freely. A turn of her head hides anything further, and Mystique crosses the space to the bar hung in the corner for chin-ups.
"We are soldiers in a war of faith," Ellen says, as soft as snowfall. She turns to walk away, her steps measured short and quiet over the weight room floor.
"It is not I who lacks faith," Mystique answers, voice pitched louder and firmer as she strides in the opposite direction.
Ellen glances over her shoulder at Mystique's departing back, and shakes her head.
Come the next day, Mystique and Ellen have a friendly chat. Really friendly!