something queer going on

Title: Mutation
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Characters: Mystique, Magneto
Rating: All ages
Warnings: None needed
Word count: 200
Summary: Mystique changes. Or does she?
Notes: Written for eumelia, who asked for Mystique and shifting between genders.




Changing form is the first kind of play Mystique remembers. It's still fun, even though Erik, Magneto, calls it training now. She'll slip between a dozen forms in a minute, keep a changed one throughout a sparring session or a run to exhaustion, or instantly invent personas that are complete down to gestures and a loose thread in a buttonhole.

Becoming yourself, she thinks, is complicated. Her real self's blue-skinned and bumpy. Her real self's this power that lets her be anyone.

Mystique hasn't missed how sometimes, when she's got a man's form, Magneto looks at her differently. His attention sharpens as it never has before, even months ago when he kissed her.

It's how he used to look at Charles. Well, almost. When it's Mystique, he always looks away again.

She could go to him as man. She's thought about it, even practiced being, well, enough of a man for that.

Magneto, she's sure, would say that it wasn't real, wasn't her. And she doesn't know if he'd be right or not. Is there a way to be Mystique and be one person?

And who, she'd like to ask, is Magneto?

Then they'd both be lost for an answer.



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