Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive. - Josephine Hart

Chapter One

There was a confusing disconnect between the pieces of Mystique's life.

She can remember how, less than a month earlier, she had cowered in a corner with half a dozen other children, crying stupid and panicked tears while the Hellfire Club slaughtered half a hundred CIA agents. Her throat had been raw from screaming for days afterward.

Today, in her new life as a part of Erik's new Brotherhood of Mutants, she saw the people who had frightened her so badly during that night at the CIA base – who Charles and others had fought against in Cuba – a dozen times a day, in the most mundane of circumstances.

Mystique passes them in the halls of the old Chicago hotel in which they'd set up the Brotherhood's headquarters, sits with them at the table to eat meals that she and Angel cooked together.

When it's her turn to do laundry, she sorts through Azazel and Janos's rumpled suits and white cotton underthings along with the rest of the group's dirty clothing.

There is an almost dorm-like intimacy to their life in the old hotel, as sprawling as the building is. Still, hey don't trust each other – at least not at first. Angel and Janos keep to themselves much of the time, sticking close together – Mystique suspects that they've become a couple, though no one talks about that. Janos doesn't talk at all, and for a while Mystique had wondered if he even could speak, before she overheard him exchanging a few words in Spanish with Angel.

Erik is sullen and distant most of the time, even toward Mystique. It seems to her that he is struggling to hold in his day-to-day to the impulse that had compelled him to dub all Mutants his brothers and sisters and bring the five of them here together. Sometimes she catches him glaring across the room at the other three, and in those moments Mystique feels as though she can read his thoughts as clearly as Charles might have. He hasn't forgiven them for collaborating Shaw.

Mystique suspects that he didn't sleep at all during the first week after Cuba. He was always waiting for the hammer to fall, for the others to turn on him. Things had relaxed some since then, but Mystique thought that he might still be waiting. She understood what Erik was feeling, because she still didn't feel completely safe sleeping under the same roof as the others, either.

Azazel was the only one who seemed to be taking everything in stride. He seemed completely oblivious to the currents of fear and suspicion and hatred that were flowing between the other members of their so-called Brotherhood, speaking easily in his broken English to everyone, and that was perhaps the first thing that really attracted Mystique's attention.

It's when she spoke to him – just over the smallest, most inconsequential of things – that her past and present most refused to line up with one other. How could she make a small joke exchanged in the common room or an almost shy question about English grammar jive with his skill with those blades, with the deadly midnight teleportations that he had used to smash the life out all those men back at the CIA base?

Mystique watches him out of the corner of her eye whenever she could get away with it, and she spends a lot of time thinking back to the beach in Cuba, to Azazel's tail poised above Hank's face while he held him down against the wet sand, half a second and a quarter inch from driving its needle-sharp tip through Hank's eye and into his brain, and she wondered how all of that balances against everything else she'd learned about Azazel since then.

Azazel dressed with fastidious neatness, but he wore his socks until the soles were riddled with holes. His English was dreadful, but he could muddle his way through fairly advanced conversations, and accepted corrections (which Erik mades constantly) without embarrassment or offense. She'd found that he smiles quite often – more frequently than she ever would have expected, before – and when he smiled it was dazzling, the teeth unbelievably white against the crimson of his scarred face.

Astonishingly, she'd found that Azazel enjoyed the company of other people – or at least other Mutants. He was often quite charming – even friendly.

Frequently, Azazel called the rest of them his "comrades," and that's something which made Raven uneasy, because communism was not exactly something which was thought highly of in the house in which she and Charles grew up.

But lately the word had begun to draw a sardonic smile out onto Erik's lips, and because of this Mystique had sort of started to like it. In recent days, Erik had even taken to teasing Azazel about it, accusing him of playing to stereotypes, of mocking foreigners and the unworldly, and of wearing the word out past all usefulness. Still, Azazel persisted in making his little joke (and Mystique had become more and more certain that it was in fact a joke, though not one she understood perfectly) and she'd almost gotten used to being called "comrade." A second new title, for a new life.

Erik rarely framed the coming revolution with words like "comrade" but when he and Azazel spoke together about the future they seemed to understand each other well enough, all things considered. It seemed possible to Mystique that Erik and Azazel were beginning to become friends, and she hoped very much that this was true. It seemed to her that it was very important that they all should – somehow – find a way to be friends. It seemed likely that their lives might one day depend upon this.

But it was difficult. The truth was that she didn't like the other members of the Brotherhood as much as she should – as much as she wished that she could.

The others had been more deeply damaged than Mystique, and that made them stronger than she was – harder and more experienced. Older. They intimidated her, though she tried not to show it. She recognized now more than ever how sheltered she had been in her life in Charles's home, how his lifestyle and outlook on the world had been calculated to keep her tame and small. Mystique felt this past privilege as a character flaw that she would need to correct before she could hope to fit in with the others.

She realized that she was on the cusp of becoming a completely different person, and believed correctly that when she would look back on herself years from now, it would be as though she were seeing a person who she had never known.

Azazel was the one who frightened her the most, and he was the one who was most different from everything that she had known before, so she looked to him to see how to become someone else.

But it would be a while longer before Mystique realized that he was also watching her.