Mystique: The Living Illusion by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Mystique-The-Living-Illusion-1256762612

Mystique: The Living Illusion ANIMATION

The Blue That Would Not Stay

Mystique had always trusted the lie more than the truth. Lies were pliant; they warmed in the hand like clay. Truth was a blade that never dulled, and she had learned early how easily it cut.

Tonight, the lie refused to hold.

She stood in the antechamber of an abandoned opera house that crouched like a cathedral of rot above the river. The velvet curtains had been gnawed by damp and time, and the chandelier drooped with crystals like old teeth. Mystique’s reflection wavered in a cracked mirror mounted between fluted columns. Blue skin, fine scales like water frozen mid-splash. Golden eyes, slit-pupiled, alert.

Then her face slid.

It was not the usual glide, not the intentional bloom of bone and muscle into another’s silhouette. This was a stutter, a seizure. Her cheekbone rippled as if something underneath were trying to surface and failing. Her mouth thinned, widened, darkened, lightened, and snapped back again. Her eyes flashed brown, green, gray—too many to count—like a deck of cards flung into the air.

Mystique’s breath caught. “No,” she whispered, to the mirror, to the theater, to whatever listened when old places were left to listen.

She reached for control the way one reached for a railing in the dark. It was there—she could feel it—yet her fingers slid through it. Her skin prickled with cold sweat. The flicker returned, faster now. A man’s jaw intruded on her face, then a woman’s freckled nose, then a child’s soft, terrified eyes.

She turned away from the mirror as if it had accused her.

“Focus,” she told herself, aloud, because sound anchored her. “You’ve worn storms. You’ve worn crowns. You’ve worn prison bars. This is nothing.”

Her body answered with a betrayal so intimate it stole the breath from her lungs. Her left arm lengthened, thinned, darkened; her right arm grew pale, freckled, bearing a small scar she recognized with a shock of ice. It was her own, from a winter long ago when she had been careless with glass.

Mystique staggered back and collided with a velvet rope. The rope parted with a soft sigh, and she nearly laughed at the absurd gentleness of it.

“Enough,” she said, and tried to choose a face—any face. The shapeshift faltered. Her torso became a palimpsest of ribs and breasts and scars that didn’t agree with one another. Her heart hammered like a trapped thing.

A voice drifted from the auditorium. “You always were more beautiful when you were afraid.”

Mystique went still. Fear, sharpened by years, arranged itself into readiness. She knew that voice. She also knew it could be lying.

“Logan,” she said, testing the name like a key. “If you’re here to growl and bleed, pick a better stage.”

Footsteps approached, deliberate, heavy with an animal patience. He emerged from the aisle between torn seats, coat collar up, eyes amber in the low light. Wolverine smiled, which on him was a threat dressed as a courtesy.

“You look like hell,” he said. “Which one of you is talking?”

Her mouth split into his grin, then snapped back to her own. “That’s new,” she said. “I was going to say the same to you.”

He watched her with a hunter’s stillness, nostrils flaring. “You’re sick.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she replied. “If this were a trap, you’d already be bleeding.”

A flicker took her again. Her face softened into someone younger, eyes bright with admiration. She felt the memory flood her muscles like a drug. Logan’s jaw tightened.

“Stop that,” he said quietly.

Mystique laughed, and the laugh was wrong, pitched too high, then too low. “I’m not doing anything. That’s the problem.”

She tried to step forward and stumbled as her legs forgot whose they were. Logan caught her by the shoulders. His hands burned through the borrowed skin she wore in flashes. Her body cycled beneath his grip like a broken projector: blue scales, pale freckles, old scars, a man’s rough knuckles, a woman’s long, delicate fingers.

“Easy,” he murmured, despite himself. “Easy.”

She could smell him: iron and smoke and the quiet grief of someone who healed too fast to ever learn patience. The scent tugged at something reckless in her, something that had always enjoyed leaning into danger and seeing who blinked first.

“You should go,” she said, leaning close enough that his breath brushed her ear. “If this spreads, you won’t like who I become.”

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