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whiskeycoffeeTitle: In Your Own Blood
Author: m.jules
Rating: R for Mature Themes, drug use, violence, etc.
Summary: “I passed by and I saw you, squirming in your own blood, and I said to you, ‘Live!’”
Series: Time For Love
Disclaimer: For love, not money.
Archive: WRFA; anywhere else, please ask.
Continuity: Alternate Universe
Feedback: More than ever. I want to know if this is actually connecting with an audience, because it’s kind of unusual. Feel free to let me know if it isn’t.
Author’s Notes: This series is based on the allegorical story told in Ezekiel chapter sixteen, meant to have a story take place every three and a half years. If all goes according to plan, there will be seven stories to this series, of which this is the first. My thanks extend to Heather, Taryn, and Terri, who encouraged this first chapter back when I first started writing it; tinhutlady who gave it a chance despite her initial misgivings and offered suggestions.
A few things need to be explained in this alterverse of mine so I’m going to do it in as little space as possible. This is a mutation-having alterverse, but there are slight differences to one character in particular: Mystique. In this world, her skin is not naturally blue or scaly yet; she can change to that form, and does, as part of her shape-shifting mutation, but as of this point in the story, her natural form is not blue.
Also, this characterization of Logan leans heavily on his character in the Evolution series and echoes (probably not-coincidentally) tinhutlady’s vision of him -- a calmer, less insecure Logan whose protective streak is perhaps the most prominent of his traits. The rest will come as you read.
“On the day of your birth, no one cut your navel cord; no one washed you with water or scrubbed you with salt. You were cast into the field, abhorrent to the eyes that beheld you. I passed by and I saw you, squirming in your own blood, and I said to you, ‘Live!’...” -- Ezekiel 16
“Son of David, don't pass me by -- I am naked; I’m poor, and I’m blind.” -- Come Closer, John Mark McMillan
The sound was not so much unusual as unwanted; something he would really rather not hear. It was not, however, unexpected. In the grip of a strange emotion that was three parts sadness, one part anger, he slipped into the garbage dump behind the brown-bricked spine of the dirty blind alley, skirting a circle of rambunctious youths who looked as if the illegal substances in their bloodstream were seducing them with sweet lies of their own superiority. They were beginning to think they could take him; he didn’t want to have to prove them wrong.
“Hey, freak! Wanna piece o’ this?”
“Yeah, man! Come get a piece!”
His eyes never flickered their way. A woman with a hard face and a slight, scarred and sagging body pushed herself up off the cement steps as he passed, swaying her hips toward him in an attempt at sensuality.
“Hey, big guy, what’s your pleasure?” she slurred, winking one blurry, bloodshot eye at him.
The corners of his mouth turned down slightly with a heavy compassion tinted with distaste, but he didn’t stop for her either. There was a voice summoning him from the far end of the dump where its bottles, beer cans, syringes, and scraps of food melted away into the darkness of the empty field behind it. Small town slums were not much different than their big city cousins, he had decided long ago. The only difference he’d found was how far their borders extended and what was on the other side of the dividing line. In Chicago and New York, it was skyscrapers; in Meridian, Mississippi, it was cow pastures and trailer parks.
The low bellow from a sad-eyed heifer rose out of the night, harmonizing with the voice that had drawn him from the other side of the city. He’d been awakened from a sound sleep, roused by the urgency of an old friend. The dump behind the 5th Avenue Bar, Charles had told him. That’s where she is.
He’d reached the far end of the dump now and was surprised to see the person he’d come looking for stumbling away toward the bar. From the sounds of retching and moaning he’d heard clear down the alley, he’d expected her to be incapacitated.
“Raven,” he called, and she stopped.
“Don’t call me that,” she rasped, one track-marked arm laid across her stomach as if to soothe an abdominal pain. “That’s not my name.”
He didn’t answer that, but his mind flickered back to a conversation he’d had with Charles, the old man brooding with sadness over the girl. When she was a child, she had eyes like a dove’s, he recalled Xavier musing. I know she’s not like that now, but I have to believe she could be that again. Find her for me, Logan; bring her to me. I want to heal her delusions.
“My name is Mystique.” Delusions, indeed.
“Dressing it up in fancy names isn’t going to help, Raven,” he sighed. “Why don’t you come home with me? Charles wants to help you.”
“Charles can go to hell!” she spat. “He should’ve helped me when he had the chance!”
“He tried,” Logan reminded her, but he knew his words fell on deaf ears. She’d been only eighteen when she’d run off with Erik Lensherr, and Charles had begged her not to go. ‘He won’t be a father or a friend to you,’ he’d argued. ‘He’ll only hurt you’ She hadn’t listened, and by the time she had seen the truth about the older man and the nature of his regard for her, she had deceived herself into thinking that Charles and the others had abandoned her to her fate.
Logan had sympathy and compassion for the girl, who had not yet seen her twenty-first birthday, but he had to admit to a certain amount of frustration that she insisted on keeping the pet name Erik had saddled her with. She’s young, he reminded himself. Young, deceived, and extremely wounded.
“Why don’t you just leave me the hell alone, Logan? Go on and do whatever it is you do. I don’t ever want to see you again!” She turned and fled down the alleyway, throwing curses over her shoulder at him like broken bottles. He considered using the tranquilizer gun he’d brought along, but knew it would only harm his cause at this point. Charles would not particularly enjoy the knowledge that she’d been drugged, and it certainly wouldn’t do anything to foster Raven’s already broken trust in him.
Sighing, he turned in a circle, surveying the wreck that surrounded him. A sudden movement and a soft sound from the edge of the grass caught his attention, and his mind homed in on one sharp, pungent scent that he had previously lost in the rank mixture of garbage and vomit. Quickly, he stepped over the piles of rubbish near him, glass crunching under his boots, and crouched down beside the small, naked body. A pitiful whimper hiccupped from the tiny mouth, and he frowned when he noticed the mess of blood and birthing fluid that still covered the infant. Carefully, he pinched the mucus-like substance away from her nose and was rewarded with a sobbing wail that bubbled up from her diaphragm.
“Are you Raven’s?” he asked the child softly as he picked her up and tucked her inside his jacket, sheltering her from the bitter night air. He remembered the way Raven had hunched over, the protective gesture of her arm laid across her abdomen, the pain evident in her fleeing step. He nodded. Of course. He had to give her credit for moving that quickly after giving birth, but then, who knew what drugs were in her system and how they affected her?
“There’s no tellin’ who your real dad is,” he informed the baby in a matter-of-fact tone, “So whaddya say to meetin’ a real nice guy who’ll adopt you as soon as he lays eyes on ya?”
A stuffy-sounding complaint answered him, and he smiled wryly. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he told her, using his t-shirt to wipe away some of the gooey afterbirth from her face. “But let’s get you cleaned up first. Ain’t no way you’re goin’ all the way back to Chuck’s smellin’ like this.”
***
“Yet it is I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them in My arms; but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of a man, with bonds of love, and I became to them as one who lifts the yoke from their jaws; And I bent down and fed them.
...How can I give thee up, O Ephraim? How can I surrender thee, O Israel? ...My heart is turned over within me; all my compassions are kindled.” -- Hosea 11
“And they will bring your sons in their bosom, and your daughters will be carried on their shoulders.” -- Isaiah 49
Charles sat in his study, staring out the window at the dusky landscape. No lights were lit within, and the shadows stretched long and dark around him. He was deep in his thoughts, but not so lost that he failed to hear the soft whisper of his wife’s garments as she slipped into the room.
“Would you like me to turn on a light?” she asked in a low voice that rippled through the air without disturbing the hushed atmosphere.
“No, thank you,” he responded in a similar tone. “I was just thinking.”
“About Raven?”
“About Raven,” he confirmed. “And about the others... the ones who are gone, and the ones who are still here.”
She crossed the room until she was standing behind his chair and laid her palm gently against his face. “You’ve been crying,” she observed, though with no surprise or anxiety in her voice. She also had been known to keep vigil at this window, her eyes straining in the dark for a glimpse of one of their runaways returning home, and tears were no stranger to her.
He made no response to her statement, but instead let out a deep sigh and raised his hand to cover hers on his face. “So, my love, what drew you here just now?”
“My husband is here,” Ororo smiled, walking around his chair to lower herself gracefully to his lap and loop her arms around his shoulders. “Should I need any reason besides?”
His chuckle was low and warm as he pressed his lips to her cheek. “You know my answer to that, Love,” he smiled. “But I suspect you have other reasons, whether you need them or not.”
Her small, flirtatious smile faded quickly and he felt a shudder run through her. “Logan called.”
“Did he?” Charles was suddenly alert, all his energies now focused on this new concern. “When?”
“Only a little while ago,” she answered. “He was on the road; he called from his cell phone.” Charles was silent, waiting for her to continue. There were many things he wanted to know, but very few questions to ask. “He’s coming back here, Charles.”
When it became obvious that she wasn’t going to tell him what he most wanted to know, he caught his breath and asked, “Is -- is he bringing anyone with him?”
“I think he needs to be the one to tell you,” she hinted, extracting herself from his embrace and standing. She leaned over, bracing her hands on the arms of his chair and kissed him softly, with great tenderness. “He told me he would keep his phone on.” Logan was notorious for turning his cell phone off, or at least changing it to ‘silent.’ He hated the sound of the ring.
Charles nodded his acknowledgement and thanks, squeezing her hand lovingly before she walked to the door. “Ororo,” he called softly, and she turned. “Will you please turn on the light?”
She flashed him an amused, affectionate grin and did as he asked before she slipped from the room as silently as she had come. He picked up the phone but did not dial, taking a moment to center himself and enjoy the faint sound he imagined he could hear of his wife’s footsteps on the stairs. When he felt he could handle any news Logan had to give, he dialed the number and settled back in his chair.
Ororo had been much too somber for Logan to be bringing Raven back of her own free will, Charles had decided, and he knew Logan would never force the girl. He was eager to know what was going on.
Logan answered on the second ring with a gruff, “Hey, Chuck.”
“Logan,” Charles greeted him warmly. “Ororo tells me you have news?”
“Yeah, ya might say that,” Logan muttered. “Listen, I’m sorry, Chuck. I didn’t get Raven. I saw her, but she didn’t want anything to do with me.”
“It’s all right, Logan. I understand. It probably would have been no different had I been there.” Logan gave a noncommittal grunt. He paused for a moment. “How is she?”
Logan sighed loudly, and Charles guessed the other man was trying to decide how much to tell him -- not enough to upset him, but enough to be truthful. “Not so good,” he finally said. “But there was a little surprise that I need to talk to you about.”
“Yes, Ororo said you were coming here,” Charles noted.
“Yeah,” Logan said again. “I—” He was suddenly drowned out by a sharp wailing noise, and Charles winced, moving the phone away from his ear. It died down, and Logan continued wryly, “I ran into somebody I think you’d like to meet, so I’m bringin’ her.”
“Who?” Charles asked, puzzled.
“Your granddaughter.”
***
Author: m.jules
Rating: R for Mature Themes, drug use, violence, etc.
Summary: “I passed by and I saw you, squirming in your own blood, and I said to you, ‘Live!’”
Series: Time For Love
Disclaimer: For love, not money.
Archive: WRFA; anywhere else, please ask.
Continuity: Alternate Universe
Feedback: More than ever. I want to know if this is actually connecting with an audience, because it’s kind of unusual. Feel free to let me know if it isn’t.
Author’s Notes: This series is based on the allegorical story told in Ezekiel chapter sixteen, meant to have a story take place every three and a half years. If all goes according to plan, there will be seven stories to this series, of which this is the first. My thanks extend to Heather, Taryn, and Terri, who encouraged this first chapter back when I first started writing it; tinhutlady who gave it a chance despite her initial misgivings and offered suggestions.
A few things need to be explained in this alterverse of mine so I’m going to do it in as little space as possible. This is a mutation-having alterverse, but there are slight differences to one character in particular: Mystique. In this world, her skin is not naturally blue or scaly yet; she can change to that form, and does, as part of her shape-shifting mutation, but as of this point in the story, her natural form is not blue.
Also, this characterization of Logan leans heavily on his character in the Evolution series and echoes (probably not-coincidentally) tinhutlady’s vision of him -- a calmer, less insecure Logan whose protective streak is perhaps the most prominent of his traits. The rest will come as you read.
“On the day of your birth, no one cut your navel cord; no one washed you with water or scrubbed you with salt. You were cast into the field, abhorrent to the eyes that beheld you. I passed by and I saw you, squirming in your own blood, and I said to you, ‘Live!’...” -- Ezekiel 16
“Son of David, don't pass me by -- I am naked; I’m poor, and I’m blind.” -- Come Closer, John Mark McMillan
The sound was not so much unusual as unwanted; something he would really rather not hear. It was not, however, unexpected. In the grip of a strange emotion that was three parts sadness, one part anger, he slipped into the garbage dump behind the brown-bricked spine of the dirty blind alley, skirting a circle of rambunctious youths who looked as if the illegal substances in their bloodstream were seducing them with sweet lies of their own superiority. They were beginning to think they could take him; he didn’t want to have to prove them wrong.
“Hey, freak! Wanna piece o’ this?”
“Yeah, man! Come get a piece!”
His eyes never flickered their way. A woman with a hard face and a slight, scarred and sagging body pushed herself up off the cement steps as he passed, swaying her hips toward him in an attempt at sensuality.
“Hey, big guy, what’s your pleasure?” she slurred, winking one blurry, bloodshot eye at him.
The corners of his mouth turned down slightly with a heavy compassion tinted with distaste, but he didn’t stop for her either. There was a voice summoning him from the far end of the dump where its bottles, beer cans, syringes, and scraps of food melted away into the darkness of the empty field behind it. Small town slums were not much different than their big city cousins, he had decided long ago. The only difference he’d found was how far their borders extended and what was on the other side of the dividing line. In Chicago and New York, it was skyscrapers; in Meridian, Mississippi, it was cow pastures and trailer parks.
The low bellow from a sad-eyed heifer rose out of the night, harmonizing with the voice that had drawn him from the other side of the city. He’d been awakened from a sound sleep, roused by the urgency of an old friend. The dump behind the 5th Avenue Bar, Charles had told him. That’s where she is.
He’d reached the far end of the dump now and was surprised to see the person he’d come looking for stumbling away toward the bar. From the sounds of retching and moaning he’d heard clear down the alley, he’d expected her to be incapacitated.
“Raven,” he called, and she stopped.
“Don’t call me that,” she rasped, one track-marked arm laid across her stomach as if to soothe an abdominal pain. “That’s not my name.”
He didn’t answer that, but his mind flickered back to a conversation he’d had with Charles, the old man brooding with sadness over the girl. When she was a child, she had eyes like a dove’s, he recalled Xavier musing. I know she’s not like that now, but I have to believe she could be that again. Find her for me, Logan; bring her to me. I want to heal her delusions.
“My name is Mystique.” Delusions, indeed.
“Dressing it up in fancy names isn’t going to help, Raven,” he sighed. “Why don’t you come home with me? Charles wants to help you.”
“Charles can go to hell!” she spat. “He should’ve helped me when he had the chance!”
“He tried,” Logan reminded her, but he knew his words fell on deaf ears. She’d been only eighteen when she’d run off with Erik Lensherr, and Charles had begged her not to go. ‘He won’t be a father or a friend to you,’ he’d argued. ‘He’ll only hurt you’ She hadn’t listened, and by the time she had seen the truth about the older man and the nature of his regard for her, she had deceived herself into thinking that Charles and the others had abandoned her to her fate.
Logan had sympathy and compassion for the girl, who had not yet seen her twenty-first birthday, but he had to admit to a certain amount of frustration that she insisted on keeping the pet name Erik had saddled her with. She’s young, he reminded himself. Young, deceived, and extremely wounded.
“Why don’t you just leave me the hell alone, Logan? Go on and do whatever it is you do. I don’t ever want to see you again!” She turned and fled down the alleyway, throwing curses over her shoulder at him like broken bottles. He considered using the tranquilizer gun he’d brought along, but knew it would only harm his cause at this point. Charles would not particularly enjoy the knowledge that she’d been drugged, and it certainly wouldn’t do anything to foster Raven’s already broken trust in him.
Sighing, he turned in a circle, surveying the wreck that surrounded him. A sudden movement and a soft sound from the edge of the grass caught his attention, and his mind homed in on one sharp, pungent scent that he had previously lost in the rank mixture of garbage and vomit. Quickly, he stepped over the piles of rubbish near him, glass crunching under his boots, and crouched down beside the small, naked body. A pitiful whimper hiccupped from the tiny mouth, and he frowned when he noticed the mess of blood and birthing fluid that still covered the infant. Carefully, he pinched the mucus-like substance away from her nose and was rewarded with a sobbing wail that bubbled up from her diaphragm.
“Are you Raven’s?” he asked the child softly as he picked her up and tucked her inside his jacket, sheltering her from the bitter night air. He remembered the way Raven had hunched over, the protective gesture of her arm laid across her abdomen, the pain evident in her fleeing step. He nodded. Of course. He had to give her credit for moving that quickly after giving birth, but then, who knew what drugs were in her system and how they affected her?
“There’s no tellin’ who your real dad is,” he informed the baby in a matter-of-fact tone, “So whaddya say to meetin’ a real nice guy who’ll adopt you as soon as he lays eyes on ya?”
A stuffy-sounding complaint answered him, and he smiled wryly. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he told her, using his t-shirt to wipe away some of the gooey afterbirth from her face. “But let’s get you cleaned up first. Ain’t no way you’re goin’ all the way back to Chuck’s smellin’ like this.”
***
“Yet it is I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them in My arms; but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of a man, with bonds of love, and I became to them as one who lifts the yoke from their jaws; And I bent down and fed them.
...How can I give thee up, O Ephraim? How can I surrender thee, O Israel? ...My heart is turned over within me; all my compassions are kindled.” -- Hosea 11
“And they will bring your sons in their bosom, and your daughters will be carried on their shoulders.” -- Isaiah 49
Charles sat in his study, staring out the window at the dusky landscape. No lights were lit within, and the shadows stretched long and dark around him. He was deep in his thoughts, but not so lost that he failed to hear the soft whisper of his wife’s garments as she slipped into the room.
“Would you like me to turn on a light?” she asked in a low voice that rippled through the air without disturbing the hushed atmosphere.
“No, thank you,” he responded in a similar tone. “I was just thinking.”
“About Raven?”
“About Raven,” he confirmed. “And about the others... the ones who are gone, and the ones who are still here.”
She crossed the room until she was standing behind his chair and laid her palm gently against his face. “You’ve been crying,” she observed, though with no surprise or anxiety in her voice. She also had been known to keep vigil at this window, her eyes straining in the dark for a glimpse of one of their runaways returning home, and tears were no stranger to her.
He made no response to her statement, but instead let out a deep sigh and raised his hand to cover hers on his face. “So, my love, what drew you here just now?”
“My husband is here,” Ororo smiled, walking around his chair to lower herself gracefully to his lap and loop her arms around his shoulders. “Should I need any reason besides?”
His chuckle was low and warm as he pressed his lips to her cheek. “You know my answer to that, Love,” he smiled. “But I suspect you have other reasons, whether you need them or not.”
Her small, flirtatious smile faded quickly and he felt a shudder run through her. “Logan called.”
“Did he?” Charles was suddenly alert, all his energies now focused on this new concern. “When?”
“Only a little while ago,” she answered. “He was on the road; he called from his cell phone.” Charles was silent, waiting for her to continue. There were many things he wanted to know, but very few questions to ask. “He’s coming back here, Charles.”
When it became obvious that she wasn’t going to tell him what he most wanted to know, he caught his breath and asked, “Is -- is he bringing anyone with him?”
“I think he needs to be the one to tell you,” she hinted, extracting herself from his embrace and standing. She leaned over, bracing her hands on the arms of his chair and kissed him softly, with great tenderness. “He told me he would keep his phone on.” Logan was notorious for turning his cell phone off, or at least changing it to ‘silent.’ He hated the sound of the ring.
Charles nodded his acknowledgement and thanks, squeezing her hand lovingly before she walked to the door. “Ororo,” he called softly, and she turned. “Will you please turn on the light?”
She flashed him an amused, affectionate grin and did as he asked before she slipped from the room as silently as she had come. He picked up the phone but did not dial, taking a moment to center himself and enjoy the faint sound he imagined he could hear of his wife’s footsteps on the stairs. When he felt he could handle any news Logan had to give, he dialed the number and settled back in his chair.
Ororo had been much too somber for Logan to be bringing Raven back of her own free will, Charles had decided, and he knew Logan would never force the girl. He was eager to know what was going on.
Logan answered on the second ring with a gruff, “Hey, Chuck.”
“Logan,” Charles greeted him warmly. “Ororo tells me you have news?”
“Yeah, ya might say that,” Logan muttered. “Listen, I’m sorry, Chuck. I didn’t get Raven. I saw her, but she didn’t want anything to do with me.”
“It’s all right, Logan. I understand. It probably would have been no different had I been there.” Logan gave a noncommittal grunt. He paused for a moment. “How is she?”
Logan sighed loudly, and Charles guessed the other man was trying to decide how much to tell him -- not enough to upset him, but enough to be truthful. “Not so good,” he finally said. “But there was a little surprise that I need to talk to you about.”
“Yes, Ororo said you were coming here,” Charles noted.
“Yeah,” Logan said again. “I—” He was suddenly drowned out by a sharp wailing noise, and Charles winced, moving the phone away from his ear. It died down, and Logan continued wryly, “I ran into somebody I think you’d like to meet, so I’m bringin’ her.”
“Who?” Charles asked, puzzled.
“Your granddaughter.”
***
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