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She was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. Female, definitely, with her firm, jutting breasts and long, sinuous limbs. Her blue scaled skin and golden eyes might be those of a serpent or a mermaid. Exotic, mysterious, alluring-- He stared at her, trying not to, feeling himself growing hot and hard, limiting himself to brief, flashing glimpses of the table where she sat with Toad and the Man as he went through the fighting routine the Man had set for him. Leap, slash, duck, attack, spin, thrust, turn, slash, repeat, repeat, repeat, faster, faster, faster--
"My boy--"
He snapped to attention and at the Man's beckoning finger went to stand by his side.
"Mystique, meet our newest brother."
She regarded him openly, smiled, and her pink tongue wetted blue lips in a slow, sensuous caress. "Him?" she asked. And her voice, low, rumbling organ tones, reverberated in his loins. Her musky scent, one of sea spray and leaf mould, made him dizzy.
Now the Man smiled as well. "He has seen the error of his ways. Haven't you, my boy?"
"Yes."
"And what are we fighting for?"
"The Brotherhood of Mutants fights prejudice with power, fear with fire. We are the advanced, we are the evolved. We are the future of mankind and we will be accepted and honored."
She laughed, and it sounded like water chuckling over a rocky streambed. He was enchanted.
"Sabertooth will be amused," she commented.
"The fervor of a new convert," the Man agreed, "but heartfelt, nonetheless. The poor boy needed focus in his life and I have provided that. Sit! Sit!" the Man now ordered, and Boy sat beside good, old Toad so that he could gaze and gaze at the lovely creature before him.
"--comes at a bad time," the Man was saying.
Boy realized that he hadn't been paying attention and tore his eyes away from the woman to concentrate on the Man. To be inattentive meant pain. Although, recently he had received fewer and fewer reprimands. He was finally 'shaping up' the Man said, and that was good. He wanted to make the Man happy. So frequently, the Man was sad.
Once he had dared ask if it was something he had done to make the Man so despondent. And if so, to punish him harshly. And the Man had drawn him to his side, and smiled a sad smile, and mussed his hair, and said no, no, that he was a good boy, a brave boy, and that the Man was just remembering. In that way telling him that 'remembering' was a bad thing.
"I'm on the point of breakthrough in my research," the Man continued. "The newest DNA tests look promising, very promising. To leave now would mean almost three months of wasted effort."
The Man frowned at the table top. "And the experiments are taking even longer now that my assistant has inexplicably disappeared." He fixed Toad with the unforgiving, steely gaze Boy dreaded so much and that one felt a tremor of fear run though him. "You didn't have anything to do with Fawn's abrupt departure, I trust?"
"Me?" Toad honked indignantly. "I juth know what I already told you. Thee didn't come to work and thee wathn't at her houth either. And all her animalth were gone. The cageth were empty."
"Peculiar. Well, it can't be helped. However, you see the situation." He turned to the woman. "If I could have two weeks more, even one . . . "
She shrugged, and Boy was charmed by how the scales ruffled on her shoulders like a bird fluffing its feathers. "It's your decision."
"They won't be able to find me as long as I wear this." The Man tapped a finger on the dull, reddish helmet he had put on soon after the woman's arrival. "How did they discover that I was missing?"
Her eyes shrank to little gold sequins. "I've been wondering that myself, and I don't know. One day they thought I was Magneto, the next--I had to morph through five people to escape."
The Man addressed the table's last occupant. "Does anyone at the school know you're here?"
They all stared at him, waiting. Boy gaped, gasped. Fear made his breath ragged and his eyes frantically searched the familiar, cozy lab for some answer that would please the Man. He found nothing.
"S-s-s-school?" he stuttered at last and unconsciously cringed.
Toad hic-hiced. "Heth forgotten!"
"Yes." The Man looked with mingled sadness and displeasure on his creation. "We'll stay one more week, then. Meanwhile, Toad, you will--"
The woman rose to her feet in a languorous, lithe movement like water flowing up and came around the table to stand behind the crestfallen, newest brother. "I'm tired. Want to take me somewhere I can lie down?" She draped an arm over his shoulder and laid her palm on his chest.
He stiffened at her touch and his flesh burned under her cool hand, but he kept his eyes on the Man. "I- I haven't been dismissed yet."
Water tumbled over rocks as she laughed. "Magneto, what did you do to him?"
The Man looked up, apprised the situation at a glance and gave a sour smile. "Go ahead, my boy, show her a room, you're dismissed. And you, Mystique, be careful with him. He's fragile still."
She would sleep in neither the Man's room nor Toad's room, would have nothing but his room, even though it had no door and just a mattress laid out on the concrete. She laughed when she saw it. "You'll be on the bottom, then, but for now . . . ."
She pressed him against the broken wall and began to unbutton his black shirt, one of the Man's discards, button by slow button, slapping away his hands when he would fondle her breasts, and gouging deep, bleeding furrows down his chest and around his nipples with her nails, yanking out tweaks of hair, biting.
He stared up at the ceiling, quivering, panting, his own nails digging into his palms as his flesh ripped open under her touch. Pain was good, it meant he was alive. It seemed that only fear and suffering could bring him out of his usual deathlike stupor, and her petty cruelties of smarts and stings, pricks and hurts did not wound him so much as make his skin burn and tingle, his groin ache. Fire ran through his veins as first punishment then pleasure followed one another in rapid succession and he moaned in delicious agony. For no sooner did her scratches draw blood than the skin healed, leaving a trace of red to mark her passage. Eventually, he was in this manner tattooed all over his chest and the shirt was in her hands.
"Turn around," she ordered, and he obeyed.
She drew his arms behind his back and began tying them together with the shirt twisted into a rope.
He tried to look over his shoulder and she struck his face with the back of her hand.
"Hold still! It's more fun this way."
He was on the mattress now, she having pushed him there, and he submitted. The Man had long since burned out all rebellion.
She pulled down his jeans and his manhood sprang upright. With a delighted laugh she encompassed him with her loins and rode him and rode him, beating his chest with her fists, clawing it with her nails, nipping his flesh with her teeth, kissing, licking. He groaned as the fire blazed higher and higher, finally swept through him to suddenly explode in a shuddering rush.
Laughing breathlessly, she threw herself on him, rubbing her breasts against his chest even as she raked her nails down his ribs. He felt himself rise in her again and closed his eyes in ecstasy.
"I can be any woman you want." And she cruelly bit his nipple.
He cried out, looked up to see a woman with fair skin and long red hair straddling him. One of the dreams! He struggled to free himself, attack, but his bound arms were beneath him and her added weight kept them pinned fast.
"I can also be your own worse enemy." The red haired woman stood and turned into a ferocious, hairy, animal-like man with claws jutting from his fists.
It was himself, he realized, but a violent, frightening self. The beast looked at him, laughed, and drove his claws deep into the bound victim's chest. He screamed, writhed, coughed up blood.
The next instant the beautiful blue creature was at his side, running cool fingers down his face. "Now we're even," she said, and kissed him long and slow on the mouth. Her blue lips were smeared with red when she left.
After a time he emerged from his former cell. He knew it now as such, knew also he had deserved to be prisoned there, punished. Had he not dared to defy the Man? He remembered all--what he had been, what he had done--and was shamed and sickened by his perversity.
For the shock of self attacking self had completed Magneto's work. The strong had killed the weak. Shaped by the Man, forged by fire, now tempered by blood, what rose from the crimson-stained mattress was a fighting machine dedicated to the Brotherhood. Wolverine.
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