Author's Note: This story roughly takes place before the events of Uncanny X-Force Volume 2 Issue 1, and after X-23's second miniseries. Pretend you are watching one of Fox's X-Men films and feel free not to brush up on continuity, I don't plan to reference any events!

Part One

The woman was sweating profusely. Slick beads rolled down her back as they made a frantic escape from the minute space between the woman's skin and the elastic cling of her royal blue sports bra. Each drop had mere fractions of a second to live a solitary life before encountering one of its predecessors, together pooling into a rivulet, streaming down the defined musculature of the woman's back until either falling to the floor, dislodged by her movement, or getting captured by her shorts. Unlike her top, the violet haired woman's shorts left no space in which sweat could escape its grasp, condemning it to be absorbed into the material.

Alone at the front of the mirrored studio, the woman's reflection revealed that she rarely looked at her reflected image. In her presence, it served primarily to give the others in the room a total vantage point to watch her body move seemingly effortlessly through the demanding routine. The minimal outfit worked in concert with the woman's exquisite body, honed by countless hours of work and effort that most people couldn't even fathom, and combined with her otherworldly beauty to provide one of the many reasons why Elizabeth Braddock's yoga class was typically filled. Which made this class, just like the past few, a bit of an abnormality. The last few days of the English mutant's instruction had unexpectedly left than half of the sweltering studio empty.

"Brian, focus!" her sharp voice rang out from the front, and for a moment her violet eyes snapped open and directed a narrow gaze at a young man who had been amid a smirk, and who now looked somewhere between chastised and terrified.

Perhaps the absences in the class that gave the remaining students room to spread out and remain uncrowded was not so unexpected after all. The sharp correction that the woman had just given was absolutely tame in comparison to some others that had come from her of late. Elizabeth Braddock's mutant gifts included telepathy, the ability to read and influence the thoughts of others around her. The actual amount of time she utilized that gift on her students can't be known with any certainty, but the simple possibility of its usage was warning enough for the students to try to keep focused and not let their minds wander in her presence. Yet the truth was that the woman also tended to influence the thoughts of those around her without having to utilize her mutant powers at all.

Elizabeth (Betsy, to those who knew her) was just an inch under six feet tall, and if her towering stature were not enough, she was beautiful by any objective measure. Her long, purple hair was surely the prize of whichever stylist had achieved the deep, attention capturing color. The woman's long, lean body looked as though it had been sculpted by an artisan to embody the intersectionality of strength, femininity, and unrivaled athleticism. Easy to see as a martial artist or a dancer, some would think her a bit too tall to be a gymnast, and she would likely be more than happy to show them how wrong they were in that assumption with her ability to flip over someone's head of equal height to her. And then there were her piercing, violet eyes, a color of which seemed unnatural, and yet showed no sign of enhancement. They looked as if they should glow in the darkness, and while they didn't, it wouldn't be altogether surprising if at some point they chose to.

Intimidating in stature alone, the woman became all the more so by reputation: a long-time member of various incarnations of the X-Men where she is known as Psylocke, Betsy Braddock had been through literal hell and back. There was a story to be told if one knew who to ask that said that she wasn't even in the body that she was born onto this Earth in. Yet judging by her recent rash of foul moods it would seem unwise to attempt to ask her herself about the truth of that story. Rumor had run its typical course in embellishing and building upon any actual truth, but there seemed to be a consensus that the ninja-trained, telepathic instructor had an exceedingly low tolerance for bullshit of late, and any student who crossed her did so at their peril. The green-eyed girl in the back corner of the room had no intention of crossing her.

Laura Kinney stood apart from the other students of Jean Grey's Institute for Higher Learning, the latest evolution in the school that once bore the name of Charles Xavier. Each student in the school brought with them their own unique story and hardships, and yet very few could rival Laura's own. A genetic clone of the infamous, near-immortal mutant known as Wolverine, Laura's past life included being raised in captivity and trained to be an assassin, an unstoppable machine of death and destruction at the direction of the highest bidder. Of the people in the sweltering yoga studio that had been heated to a scorching 100 degrees, Laura felt she had more in common with the instructor than any of the students.

She moved through the poses in almost perfect emulation of Betsy: she too had spent seemingly endless hours building her body, earning the strength and flexibility that rewarded her now. Her long hair was matted to her head with sweat and it left her forest green eyes to peek out between the narrow gaps that were left. Laura had ensured that she was well hydrated in advance of the class and it proved a wise decision, for while the towel that covered her mat was nearly soaked through she felt rather comfortable in the moist heat even after nearly an hour of exercise. The class was nearing the end and Laura was certain that several of the other students were feeling faint and nearing exhaustion, her incredible hearing allowing her to notice the change in respiration, the slipping and sliding hands and feet, as well as the muttered curses.

It was almost cruel then that Betsy decided to end the class on one of the most demanding poses she could imagine. The woman started in a simple enough headstand with her weight resting comfortably on her forearms. Then she slowly allowed her back to bend, bringing her feet down towards the floor in front of her, slowly, slowly stretching until her soles touched down on the floor in front of her head, her body nearly bent in two. This alone defeated most of the class, the heat, fatigue combining with the difficulty of the pose that made it difficult to maintain even the headstand, much less trying the backbend. From there Betsy lifted her feet back up, returning to the original headstand, before once more allowing her spine to bend. Moving into this pose was slower, far more careful, as she once more bent backwards, only this time her feet stayed much closer to her head, collapsing inward until her soles nearly touched the top of her head, and then did so as she fell into the Sirsa Padasana. A disapproving sound emerged from the woman as she observed the struggles and failures of student after student failed to match her.

Laura believed that she was the only one who performed it correctly besides Betsy herself, though she couldn't risk attempting to look. The very center of her soles lightly touched the top of her head. She could force more, but she already felt the tremble in her body as so many muscles worked to maintain the pose, and while she did not fear an injury by pushing for more, she knew she'd risk losing the form if it happened. She contented herself with maintaining the slight contact between her feet and the top of her head, and focused on the instructor herself. As Laura's eyes wandered over the woman's body, she resisted the urge to let her gaze linger in any way, and instead noted with slight dismay that Betsy's body did not have any noticeable tremble as she held the pose, making Laura even more aware of how her own body did. Her eyes tightened at her critical evaluation of herself, a spark of anger flaring and as she started to drift down a dangerous path of self-critique, she noticed the pair of violet eyes staring back at her in the mirror.

As Laura met Betsy's eyes in the mirror she found it hard to maintain her descent into the destructive state of mind that so often followed her perceived failures. It was a path that she had traveled down so many times that she could speed along it with her eyes closed and never falter. If her healing factor didn't prevent her from accumulating physical scars then her arms and legs would be decorated with an intricate tapestry of scarification, parallel scratches from unimaginably sharp blades, the highly visible adornments of someone who turned to self-harm. It had long been a method of coping and control for Laura, something that her slavers could not take away from her, something that gave her just a little bit of ownership of her body. She understood it was unhealthy in almost every way but she had not been able to conquer it thus far. And now, when she had already been thinking of turning to it in the next moment of privacy that she could find, Laura found those thoughts slipping away as she met Betsy Braddock's eyes in the mirror.

Betsy had not sought out Laura when she looked back at the class. The disapproving sound that she had made seconds ago had come in the wake of witnessing the failure of most of her class. Their inability to complete the difficult pose was not truly an indictment of her teaching ability, nor was it a fault of the students themselves: some bodies were simply less pliable than others, the limits of their flexibility decided long before they ever walked into her class. That she had chastised them at all was far more a mark of her current mood than anything else. As her eyes surveyed the battlefield and found student after student recovering in a resting pose or picking themselves up from where they fell, they finally found themselves matched on another pair looking back at her.

Betsy found Laura mostly a mystery. The girl gave away as little as she herself did. Betsy was aware of what she looked like at this point of the class, and she knew that fixing her gaze on a few students, male and female alike, would send their appreciative eyes fleeing in terror and cause their wandering minds to focus on something mundane and random in fear that her telepathy would expose the truth of what they were thinking about her. Yet in Laura Betsy could not sense this at all, the green eyed genetic spawn of her dear friend Logan resolutely held her eyes. Betsy might have perceived this as some type of challenge in some cases but with Laura she did not get this sense either. Laura was such a blank slate to her that Betsy almost gave in to the temptation to exercise her power to gain some insight into what the girl was thinking but in the end self-control prevailed.

As their mutual staring began to stretch beyond long seconds it entered Laura's mind that she had miscalculated in some way and was going to end up in the unenviable position of earning the woman's ire. But she found the risk to be worth it for this moment of connection with this woman who truly captivated her, and she dared to risk that wrath in order to maintain it even a moment longer. Laura was not sure just how long she had felt drawn to this woman, it felt in one moment so new and strange, and in the next like it had been there for so long. They shared several things in common although they'd never spoken of it. Betsy Braddock had also had her life stolen from her. Once upon a time she had also been the target of dark forces who stole from her not only her body, but very nearly her mind. She had traveled the nightmare paths of violence and felt the embrace of death, and Laura felt a strange connection there in threads of their tragic histories.

Her concern of inadvertently provoking the woman was soon proven to be unfounded as Betsy closed her eyes and began to come out of the pose, utilizing her well defined abdominals to pull her feet up towards the ceiling to regain the headstand that had begun the sequence. The woman easily separated her feet, scissoring them in the air, walking out of the headstand before turning to finally address the class. She had waited until dismissal time to address them all as a group.

"Disappointing work from most of you today," she began, her richly accented voice filled the class, pristine as if she spent each waking day on the streets of London, when in truth she had been in America for countless years.

"For the most part you all need to work on your stamina so that you may perform well at the end of the class as you start to tire. The battles we face are relentless, demanding, and our enemies will make no concessions to you if you're tired and nor will I. Come back, and do better."

She spoke as she walked through the sweating students towards the exit at the rear of the class. As she walked a halo of shimmering pink light with a brilliant white core flashed into existence and snared her rolled up towel from the front of the class. The pulsing energy seemed to be alive, glowing with barely contained power that almost seemed wasted on so mundane a task as lifting a towel from the ground, and yet it did so and brought the towel to her outstretched hand before disappearing as quickly as it had appeared.

"If you need advice on what you should be doing outside of class, speak to Laura and you might have a fighting chance of impressing me."

And then she was out the door of the studio, leaving a rush of cold air in her wake as the seal of the hot room was broken and allowed in a refreshing blast of relief from the relentless heat.

Laura's normal displeasure at having even a small spotlight shone on her was overshadowed by the praise from the woman that had come along with it. One of her very best defenses was going unnoticed, and in one sentence Betsy had effortlessly defeated it. The other students were already reluctant enough to engage with her and adding an air of 'teacher's favorite' was unlikely to improve her standing amongst them. That did not bother her; right now, nothing at all could. Had the woman read her mind, did she know just what Laura thought when she looked at her? It didn't matter. Dark thoughts for once a distant memory, Laura looked at the door that Betsy had exited through and it took her only long enough to roll up her mat before she followed.