The sadness that flashed in her green eyes on those soft nights when she would awaken from the nightmares that plagued her mind would almost destroy his heart on those rare glimpses he would be able to grab when she hadn’t realized that he was awake next to her. He loved her more than anything in the world and though it was her beauty that had attracted him first, it was her soul that had made him fall for her completely. Her black hair flowed softly and looked like silk curls draped down her back to her knees. Her white streak seemed to be illuminated by the contrast of white on black.. Her lips were full and moist and begged to be softly kissed. Her eyes, as sad as they were, were her best physical features. They were large and oval shape. The color was a deep green that would lighten when she allowed her rage to grab a hold of her. She was smart and cunning, always prepared with a witty come back when he would try to tease her. She was warm and caring and patent. Always patent. She was strong and balanced and always ready to defend her beliefs. She was perfect in his eyes, even with the sadness she refused to talk about. He had tried to persuade her to talk a few times before, but it was always the same. She would only shrug off his questions with an uneasy smile. The last time, he had refused to allow her to shrug it off, and he had persisted. Her dark forest green eyes seemed to brighten and glow and she lost her temper for only a few minutes before she collected herself. He never pushed her again. She had told him that it was the past and she didn’t think that he should know yet. And now he was about to make her his wife and she would have to tell him. He didn’t know what hurt more; that she could be in so much pain, or that she refused to tell him. Could it really be that horrible? He knew she was a mutant, but he didn’t care. How could she hide her heritage? The feathered wings were a dead give away. Although she had never said the words, he was sure that she loved him as much as he loved her.
She knew that he loved her, and she had always believed that she loved him, too, although she knew not to say the words. But now with her wedding day growing closer, she wasn’t as sure she could ever love him as much as he loved her. She wasn’t sure if she could love anyone anymore. He wanted things from her that she just couldn’t give anymore. He wanted to hold her after sex, but she just didn’t like to be touched, the guilt deepening after the pleasure. He wanted to tell her how beautiful she was and how magnificent, but she knew that if he knew the truth, he wouldn’t believe that. He wanted a wife that could be a mother to his children, and she wasn’t sure that she could even be the wife he wants. When she looked into his eyes, she would see a longing for a person that had died within her a long time ago.
“We have a daughter, Logan. A little girl,” she whispered tiredly as she handed her lover the tightly bundled baby. She had been staring at the little girl for hours, not wanting to let the miracle out of her sight for fear of her finding out it was only a dream. But her exhaustion was beginning to tighten it’s hold on her, and she knew she would have to close her eyes. She handed the child to her father and drifted off to sleep.
“I have a daughter.” He was still in shock, and had been for the past six months, since he had known that his love was pregnant. He had been hoping for a son, a little boy who could growl like him, and who could fight all the demons of hell without so much as a scratch in the end. He had chosen names for his son, always leaning towards Brutus or Colt, something powerful and masculine. Marie had dreamed of a son, too, and was so sure she would have a little boy that she hadn’t bothered asking a doctor. Now that their child was here, Logan wasn’t disappointed at all. Looking at her, he knew that she would be like both her parents. She would have his temper and his violent thirst for blood when she was wronged, but she would have her mother’s since of balance and duty and life. She will never yearn for an end to life as he had before he had met the young girl in the bar ten years ago. She would be a new beginning in their life, a silver lining to all the pain that they had to endure to reach this point. She would be the only thing that would keep him alive if anything ever happened to her mother. She was his guardian angel, and that’s when he whispered her name for the first time. “Angel.”
“Momma, what happened to Marcos?” she asked as her mother tucked her into bed. The last she had seen of the boy who took care of her when her parents had to go away had been when he was being taken from his room on a large stretcher. She had developed a crush on the boy, and, although he was ten years older than him, she had hoped that she could marry him one day. She had told him that only an hour before he had vanished into the elevator that led to the infirmary below the school they lived in. “Is he going to come back tomorrow?”
“God, Angel Baby,” Marie sighed as she sat next to her and stroked the white curly streak in her hair. That had been the name her mother had called her since she was a baby. “Marcos had to go away today. There was an accident in his room, and he had to leave.”
“Did Xavier send him away? Is he in trouble?” Angel could tell that her mother was having a hard time explaining exactly what had happened. Her father was away on a business trip with Scott and Orora. He was usually better at explaining the important things to her. He was always more blunt. Of course, Marie wasn’t always to thrilled with his honesty.
“No, Sweetie,” Marie sighed again and rested her gloved hand on her five year old daughter’s cheek. “Xavier wasn’t mad at Marcos. Marcos had a problem with his powers today, and he didn’t survive. God thought it was time for him to go back to Him now.”
“So… that means Marcos died, right?” Angel asked, her voice filled with a child’s innocent curiosity.
Marie looked at her daughter in shock. How could a five years old child possibly knew what it meant to die? “Yes, Angel, Marcos died.”
“Oh.” Much to Marie’s painful relief, her daughter’s voice was filled with a new sadness. She didn’t know it then, but that sadness would never leave her daughter. It would only grow stronger as the years rolled on.
“Why does everyone keep dying, Dad?” Angel asked as they finished their Friday night movie. It had been a tradition for them to watch a movie every Friday night that had a horrible plot and cheesy lines, but was filled with wonderful fight and explosion scenes. For the past 12 years, he had never missed their movie. “I feel like it’s something wrong with me.”
“Scott’s death had nothing to do with you, Angel,” Logan stated sternly as he gathered her close to him. She rested her head on his shoulder and listed to the words rumble from his chest. “It was an accident. He knew the mission was highly dangerous, and he took the risk. He’s been like this ever since Jean died. I’ve told you about that. That’s why he was always so reckless on our missions.”
“I know, but it seems as if everyone I’ve ever loved has died, Daddy. I mean, I’ve lost someone every year since I was a little girl. I feel like I have something to do with it.” The tears began to well up in her eyes as she released her biggest fears to her best friend. “You know, before he left for that mission, I made him promise me that he would be careful. I told him that I loved him and that I would miss him too much if he died.”
“Scott’s with Jean now, Honey. He’s happy. I know it’s hard for you, but these things happen when you live our life. You have to be prepared to lose a loved one.” Logan stroked the white streak in her black hair, the trait that she had inherited from her mother. He wanted to be able to comfort her, but he wasn’t sure how. He only hoped that she could get through the losses she had endured.
“She’s only sixteen, for Christ Sake, Marie. She doesn’t need to be dating.” Logan walked in circles on the living room floor as he shouted into the phone. Angel sat on the couch, watching him, holding her own temper. She had been asked to the junior prom by one of the students at the school. Of course, she herself hadn’t developed any mutations, but she was only sixteen. It was about the same age her mother was when she lost the ability to touch. “What if she turns out to be more like you than we thought, Marie? What if she’s dancing with that boy, and the next thing we know, she’s put him in a coma? I mean, I can’t say I don’t like the idea that a boy might not be able to touch her, but I don’t want her to hurt because of it. She’s not going on this date, Marie. I forbid it.”
That’s when everything in her life changed. Logan looked at his daughter and stopped breathing. What he saw scared the shit out of him. Angel wasn’t sitting on the couch as she had been. She was floating in midair, her hair aflame except for the white streak that still hung sown against her cheek. Her dark green eyes had changed lighter drastically, and they looked as if they were glowing. Her face had turned pale, and wings were rising behind her. Not feathered wings like Warren had had before his accident three years ago, but the wings of a bat or gargoyle.
“I am sixteen, Dad.” Her voice had changed from the high pitched sweetness he had always loved to listen to, to a dark, harder rasp that another man would find sexy. “I am tired of this shit. I’m going out. I am not a child anymore, and I’m not helpless.” Six claws, three on each hand, extracted from her knuckles. They were almost identical to her father’s, but they seemed to be made out of something more dangerous.
As Logan watched, their daughter suddenly jerked with pain and fell eight feet to the floor with a loud thud. Her hair quickly shifted back into the long black curly locks she had since birth, and her eyes dimmed back to the dark green they were before. Her wings didn’t vanish, though. They grew feathers quickly, and they resembled the wings of an angel now. Her claws hadn’t extracted, either. Angel looked up at them, tears in her eyes. “Daddy? What… what happened?”
“Oh, God, Baby,” Logan whispered as he gathered his only daughter in his arms. “You’re a mutant.”
“When we land, I want you as close to me as possible,” Logan said sternly as he faced his daughter, the only child he and Marie were ever really able to have. “This is your first mission. I don’t want anything to go wrong.”
“I’ll be fine, Dad. I’ve dealt with worse in the simulator. Everything’s going to be cool.” Angel smiled sweetly at her father. She was 21 years old now, and had just been made a member of the team. She was now engaged to Kyle Drake, the son of Kitty Pryde and the late Bobby Drake. She had learned to control her powers and her anger under control when she was 18. Of course, her wings would never disappear, but they would grow feathers and at least look more angelic. Now she was in full uniform, and her appearance had changed so that her hair was aflame, her eyes were a light green, and her wings were bare. She was the happiest she had ever been in her life.
“Just because no one’s rated this mission as being extremely dangerous, doesn’t mean that it can’t get that way.” Logan’s voice was filled with sternness as he spoke to her. Marie didn’t say anything, only watched the talk from her pilots seat in the front of the X-Jet. “You just need to be careful.”
“It’s only a bunch of protesters.”
Angel looked to her left, her body soaked in the blood of those who had tried to kill her. She couldn’t see her mother or father anywhere. For that matter, she couldn’t see any of the fellow X-Men, including Kyle. Of course, that didn’t really mean anything about him. He had the power to become invisible at will. She used her wings and lifted herself into the air, looking for any familiar face. Yet, through all the rocky terrain they had been lured to, she could see absolutely nothing.
The battle had been much worse than it was supposed to be. It hadn’t been a demonstration as she had expected, but a trap set by the Brother Hood of Mutants. It was said that they were stronger than ever, and that they were still being led by Mystique, the woman who had been her mother’s adoptive mother.
“Angel!” It was her mother’s voice, calling for her from behind the rocks to the right of her. She swooped down towards the area her mother’s voice came from. She could see a small cave from behind the rocks. She still wasn’t sure where the voice had come from, but only after a minute of listening again, she heard her name being called to her from the cave. She ran inside and soon found herself face to face with her mother.
“Come on, quickly,” her mother hissed as she ran deeper into the cave, Angel, close behind her. “It’s your father. He’s hurt badly. His healing factor is keeping him alive, but I don’t think he’s going to make it. She stabbed him in the chest. I think she punctured a lung.”
“How is that possible?” Angel whispered as she sped up.
They reached a large opening and came upon the Wolverine sitting up strait against the wall of the cave. His eyes were wide open, and he looked as if he witnessed a pain worse than the one he felt. A large spike was sticking out from his chest. He had already stopped breathing, and there was no life in his eyes. But there was something else. He was looking directly at something, and at first, she had thought it was her, but he had been sitting in that position for too long to know that she was coming. The way his claws his claws her extending, and his fists were bare, he was looking at something that he had witnessed, something he couldn’t tare his eyes from.
She turned around and peered over her mother’s shoulder to see the same woman staring back at her. Only she wasn’t looking at her, but at her father. Although there was no life in her eyes, Angel was sure that she could see the same warming love that had been there for as long as she could remember.
Angel knew then that the woman who had led her here wasn’t her mother. She had walked right into a trap. She jumped away from her mother’s impersonator and extended her wings. She had never let down her defenses as she came into the cave, and she was still in her mutant form.
“It was interesting watching your mother die. Of course, I had to beat her before I could kill her so that your father could watch. But once I killed him, that’s when your mother became more interesting. I knew that when she touched someone, she took on their behaviors, but I didn’t know that she also took on some of their traits. I guess that’s what she inherited from me, when I touched her. She also became so many others. There was your father, of course. I mean, he’s probably the only one who touched her more than once. Then there was Bobby and St. John. You wouldn’t know St. John. He joined my side long before you were even born. That was back when the Brother Hood and the X-Men had to join forces against the man, Striker. Now he was a character. I mean, he was a mutant hater, but his son was a mutant.
“As your mother changed, I saw people I hadn’t seen for years. Like Magneto. She only touched him once, but he must have really stuck with her, because he was here for a minute, and I swear that she became magnetized. There were other’s, of course, such as Carol Danvers and Scott Summers. There was Jean and Juggernaut. There was that poor boy, David, who was the first boy she had touched with her powers. There were also a few unfortunate truckers who must have touched her during that time she was on the road by her self. There were a lot more that she must have gone to school with her that she accidentally touched.”
“Who are you?” Angel had heard every word the woman that looked like her mother had said, but she it took her a moment to get over the shock to ask the question. Her light green eyes turned yellow as her rage entrapped her. Her wings grew larger, and her hair grew more fiery. Her claws grew longer.
“Why, my dear child. I am your grandmother. But don’t call me that. I prefer Mystique.” With that, the woman’s face changed and her skin turned blue with scales and her hair became the color of blood.
Angel’s rage manifested as she looked at the woman, knowing the insanity trapped in her eyes. She had seen it before, in the eyes of a rabid wolf her father had put to sleep. She hadn’t realized what was happening when she felt her fist connect with the side of Mystique’s face, her claws sliding into her face. Angel pulled it out, and watched Mystique’s dead body crumble limply to the floor. Angel looked at the blood on her fist. She fell to the floor, next to her father’s body and cried as the guilt set in.
That had been more than ten years ago. She had found out that, including herself, only three other X-men had survived: Storm, Beast, and Gambit. She had left the institute a year later, unable to take the pain that set in every time she walked into a room.
She still dreamed of the death of her parents, wondering who it must have felt to watch each other be tortured, and unable to die in each other’s arms. She remembered how she had found Kyle’s body, tangled up in a large bush, twelve slashes across his body. She gave up on everything that night, knowing she would never be able to love anyone else as much as she had loved the people who had died that night.
He found the letter as he was getting ready to leave for work. It was sitting on her night stand, on her side of the bed, the ink splashed with tears. He read it quickly, and re-read it, hoping that he had read something wrong, hoping that it wasn’t true. Than he called into work, laid down on the bed, and cried for days.
My Dearest Jimmy,
I wish I could say that I love you as much as you love me, but that isn’t possible. You know so very little of me, that I am afraid that you will never understand the truth about my past. I am more of a mutant than you will ever imagine. My powers accede much beyond what you have seen. I wish there was more that I could say, maybe be able to comfort you in someway, but I know that I will never be able to be who you need me to be. Don’t worry about me. I will be fine. I will let you know how I turn out every now and then, maybe we’ll even run into each other again. Only know that our child will know how great of a man you were to me.
Angel
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Not really one of my favorites, but the best one I've finished lately. Let me know what you think.