only_skin_deep | Drift Fleet IC inbox

It's fine. He's probably better off back there.

[ It takes Raven a little while to be able to speak, and she's cautious before she breathes out and forces herself to keep writing, to keep typing. ]

He's an X-Man.

It's to be expected, I guess. [And no doubt the safest location for him.]

Did you ever meet, [Mystique almost wrote 'my Kurt', but quickly stopped herself. Kurt wasn't hers, not anymore.] The Kurt that came from my world?

No. I don't think I did.

I'd probably have hated him at first. [ Because why not be honest? ]

[Mystique was blunt, no reason to expect Raven not to be.] He's part of the X-Men. He joined them after Xavier found him in Germany with his parents. [Mystique was also not delusional (even if others would argue that), she knew the Wagners were more his parents than she ever had been.] It's very well suited for him. I don't doubt it's helped him a lot, taught him to be part of a bigger community and to help accept himself more.

I found him in Germany. He didn't have his parents with him - he was in a cage fight with another mutant. [ So much for it being better in the world - at least Charles realised that now. Things were going to get better and she was going to be able to help it. ] Maybe it'll do the same for my Kurt. I mean, the one that I know.

Was he there under his own choice or forced into it? [Because that was now the most important part of this conversation, even if it wasn't 'her Kurt' who had gone through it. It better had been his own stupid choice, not some forced mutant fighting ring for the entertainment of others.]

The cage fight? It wasn't his choice. I got him out of there.

[It takes awhile before Mystique writes back, needing to step back from the communicator to cope with the anger that Raven's answer created in her. Kurt, any Kurt, any mutant, forced against their will to fight, no doubt for the entertainment of humans, it pushed at the edges of her rage. It was what she fought against, for mutants to not be the play things, the demons, the experiments of humans, and to hear her 'son' was one of those...]

Good. That you got him out.

Edited 2016-09-19 11:17 (UTC)

[ It's infuriating and Raven knows it; she's been there herself. She had watched it happen. The idea of it being Kurt, though, someone important and precious... No, it doesn't matter. Any mutant suffering like that deserves so, so much better than what they've been given by the world. ]

That's what I did. I found mutants and I got them out of trouble.

[The fact that Kurt, and others, were forced to fight... Mystique couldn't picture Kurt as a fighter, or her Kurt at least, as clearly Kurt Darkholme was more than capable of taking care of himself and others as needed. But the boy from her world? He barely fought, even against the Brotherhood, it was more just an obstacle course for him, bouncing and porting between targets.]

That is the goal. [And it was, plain and simple but so very complicated at the same time. To help mutants, even those that didn't seem they wanted help. It's all her goals had ever been, to make sure others didn't go through what she did.]

Because it's that simple. [ It's not, and she knows it. It's still hard for her, not being able to do enough for mutants, to help them enough, to push herself forward and give everything she can for them, but... Maybe one day she'd be able to.

Maybe being at the school would be enough. ]

He's safe, now. And so am I. We're both X-Men.

I'm not entirely surprised. [Not with Charles' influence on Raven. Then again, Mystique hasn't gone digging into the girl's past, half an act of hopefully shared respect that Raven wouldn't try to do the same thing to her, but also because Mystique didn't want to go looking. There was still a fine spike of hate within her for what Raven had been gifted in her life, and Mystique was so use to thriving on hate to survive.]

There isn't anywhere else I wanted to be. [ And Kurt was there; Hank was there... Charles was there. Where else would Raven want to be? Where else could she go? After almost losing her brother, losing herself, the idea of being distant from him was, frankly, terrifying. ]

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