Dealing with mutants in the early 1960s is, believe it or not, exactly like playing hide-and-seek with a blindfolded toddler. It's objectively easier, but somehow still completely chaotic. Publicly, mutants are treated like UFOs and honest politicians—total myths. The CIA doesn't even have the word 'mutant' in its official glossary of things to freak out about. At least, they didn't until Charles rolled into Langley with his 'Hi, I'm here to make your lives vastly more complicated' presentation.
This blissful public ignorance means most mutants spent their lives as the local town weirdos, lurking in the shadows, juggling an astronomical amount of emotional baggage and 'Why me?' complexes. Most of them were totally isolated, crushed by the specific kind of shame that comes with randomly sprouting extra limbs or sneezing literal laser beams. So it really isn't a shocker that these outcasts form instant, codependent bonds the second they stumble into a room with other mutants. Misery loves company, and hey, so do superpowers. What was once a deeply isolating burden turns into a shared sob story, bonding them faster than a three-legged race at a corporate summer camp.
True to her word, Raven returned to my quarters exactly five minutes later, carrying a freshly laundered bundle of fabric that looked like it had been violently ripped from a Sears catalog archive.
"Best I could do on short notice," she said, tossing the pile onto the mattress.
I picked up the top piece with two fingers, holding it up to the light. It was a stiff, pastel yellow A-line dress with a high collar that looked like it was designed to strangle a housewife. I let out a low, deeply offended groan. "Raven. Seriously? This looks like the uniform for a suburban cult leader's assistant."
"It's standard issue civilian wear for the facility, Sarah," Raven said, rolling eyes with an amused sigh. "Just put it on. It beats the hospital gown."
Defeated by the complete lack of nineteen-sixties options, I threw the dress on. It fit well enough, hugging my frame tightly, but the overall vibe was aggressively vanilla. I absolutely refused to commit to the bit entirely, though. When it came to footwear, I firmly shoved my feet right back into my heavy, black, knee-high combat biker boots, pulling the laces tight.
I looked in the mirror, adjusting the asymmetrical blonde bob framing my face. The contrast was utterly ridiculous—a pristine, polite pastel dress ending abruptly at a pair of scuffed, combat-ready leather boots.
"Well," I muttered, smoothing down the yellow fabric. "If anyone asks, it's a high-concept fashion statement. They just haven't realized it yet."
Raven studied my reflection, her lips twitching into a smirk. "It definitely sends a message. Let's go."
The Division X guest room hummed with a chaotic energy that practically screamed group therapy—if group therapy involved active plasma blasts and a surprising amount of nervous laughter. As I followed Raven through the doors, my boots clicking heavily against the polished composite tile, I mentally braced myself for the stereotypical mutant welcome committee: angsty glares, moody teenagers, someone flipping a coin menacingly in a corner. The usual.
Instead, I walked right into a wall of genuine laughter. The new recruits were already clustered together, huddled around a central seating area. But what caught my attention instantly wasn't the laughter—it was their clothes.
Every single one of them was wearing the exact same drab, mass-produced CIA jumpsuit or matching facility loungewear. They looked like a highly coordinated, incredibly tragic beige bowling team.
I stopped dead in my tracks, looking from their matching jumpsuits down to my own rebellious outfit. Oh, you have got to be kidding me. Seeing these people in person is already weird enough. Back with Shido and the Spirits, everyone looked like real-life, high-tier cosplayers rather than actual anime drawings, but this is a whole different level of surreal. I am literally staring at the exact Hollywood cast list from the film, just dressed like generic background extras. Am I seriously the only one who refused to look like a tool?
A blond guy lounging across a pristine mid-century sofa as if it were a personal throne decided to kick things off the second he noticed our entrance. His eyes tracked from my bright yellow dress all the way down to the scuffed black leather of my biker boots.
"Well, look who's new!" he said, a slow, arrogant grin spreading across his face. "Although... what's with the footwear? Did you get lost on the way to a motorcycle rally, or did the CIA start recruiting straight out of high school homeroom?"
I met his gaze dead-on with a cool, unblinking blue stare, entirely unimpressed by the posturing.
Raven smirked, stepping forward with a raised brow. "Actually, Alex, Sarah's been here longer than most of you. I'd highly recommend not letting the clean slate fool you. She can more than handle herself."
Not exactly thrilled to be put on display like a chess piece, I forced a flat, half-smile. "Hi. I'm Sarah Vasilissa. Feel free to insert your incredibly witty, unoriginal nickname here."
The room immediately responded with a surprisingly enthusiastic, synchronized chorus of, "Hi, Sarah!"
Wow. It's literally a mutant AA meeting, just with significantly fewer donuts and way more high-voltage hazards.
"Ignore Alex," a guy with a bright, easy grin said, leaning over the back of a nearby armchair. He hoisted a bottle of soda toward me. "He thinks because he was recruited from a jail cell, he gets automatic street cred. I'm Sean."
"Sarah," I said, leaning my shoulder against the doorframe and crossing my arms.
"So, Sarah," Alex said, leaning back into the sofa cushions, though his eyes kept drifting back down to my feet. "Seriously, what is the story with the footwear? Are those government issued, or did you just decide the standard CIA aesthetic wasn't punk rock enough for you?"
I looked down at the scuffed black leather of my knee-high boots, then back up at him with a deadpan expression. "The CIA's wardrobe department has the creative vision of a wet cardboard box. I compromised. The dress says 'I am a cooperative citizen,' and the boots say 'Don't kick me, because I will absolutely kick back.'"
A laugh snorted out of a guy sitting at the small bar counter—Armando Muñoz. He gave a nod of genuine approval. "Honestly? Respect. The beige jumpsuits they gave us make us look like a highly coordinated, incredibly tragic bowling team."
Next to Armando, a young guy with thick glasses and a neat haircut shifted uncomfortably in his own beige jumpsuit. Hank McCoy. He adjusted his frames, his eyes darting down to my heavy leather boots with a mix of intense scientific curiosity and deep personal envy.
"Actually, functionally speaking, the structural support of a combat boot is far superior to these standard-issue loafers," Hank offered nervously, clearing his throat. "They, uh... they offer excellent ankle stabilization. Not that I've spent an inordinate amount of time analyzing footwear mechanics. I'm Hank, by the way."
Nicholas Hoult. God, he looks so young. And he's currently hiding those massive prehensile feet inside regular shoes, probably dying of embarrassment. The absolute cosmic irony of a brilliant geneticist being taken down by a shoe size.
"Nice to meet you, Hank," I said, keeping my tone casual. "And thank you for validating my fashion choices with actual science."
Raven gave Hank a warm, lingering smile from beside me, which made the resident boy-genius blush a faint shade of pink.
Sean leaned forward, his curiosity clearly piqued. "So, what's your deal anyway? You don't exactly talk like the guys in suits downstairs. You've got this... I don't know, weirdly sharp way of putting things. And Raven said you've been here longer than us. What did they have you doing? Are you like a secret teenage black-ops asset?"
Time to roll out the official cover story.
I let out a soft, dramatic sigh, spinning the narrative smoothly. "Less 'black-ops,' more 'glorified lab rat.' The baseline humans in the government found out I could do things they couldn't replicate with a calculator, so they kept me in a nice, sterile room to run tests. Standard corporate isolation protocol. Charles and Erik essentially staged a bureaucratic jailbreak to get me out."
A collective, knowing silence settled over the room. Out of everyone, Hank looked the most visibly stricken by the mention of 'lab tests,' his shoulders dropping slightly as he looked down at his own hands. It was a lie, obviously, but it was a lie built on the exact kind of genetic isolation they all understood. I could see the instant shift in their eyes—the immediate drop in defenses. Suddenly, I wasn't just a sarcastic girl in biker boots; I was someone who had been through the grinder, just like them.
"Yeah," Armando murmured, his voice softening as he looked into his glass. "Sounds about right for the Feds."
"Well," Sean said, trying to lift the sudden drop in the room's atmosphere by offering a warm, goofy grin. "You're out now. And honestly, the boots are a massive upgrade from the hospital gowns."
I shrugged off the sudden wave of sentimentality, keeping my pop-culture armor firmly in place. "Appreciate the vote of confidence, Sean."
I turned my head, letting my eyes sweep across the rest of the subterranean playground the Feds had so graciously locked us in. Across the room, Angel Salvadore was lounging back in a vinyl armchair, twirling a stray lock of dark hair around her finger while giving my yellow dress and biker boots a slow, highly critical fashion-girl critique. Over at the small bar counter, Armando was casually wiping down a glass, his skin subtly shifting texture for a split second as he adjusted his grip on the polished surface—a tiny, involuntary flash of his adaptation mechanism that went completely unnoticed by the others.
But it was Hank who really drew my eye. Just behind the lounge area, a chalkboard was pushed against the wall, covered in dense, frantic equations detailing cellular degradation and genetic sequencing models. He's probably already trying to isolate the X-gene. Should I warn him? Then again, I'm not a biologist; he definitely wouldn't believe me, and besides... what's the fun in interfering if we don't get to have the big, fluffy, good-natured Beast?
As the sun fully dipped below the horizon, painting the room in deep evening shadows, the initial tension had completely evaporated. We had spent the last hour trading stories, and the relaxed vibe was hitting its peak. Raven leaned against the wall beside me and casually lobbed what could only be described as a conversational grenade into the center of the room.
"Since we're basically a team now, wouldn't codenames be fun?" she mused, her tone breezy enough to pretend she wasn't pitching something that would spiral into a massive existential debate.
I blinked, arching a highly skeptical eyebrow at her. "A team?" I echoed slowly, my voice dripping with the exact kind of razor-edged skepticism I usually save for terrible diner coffee or Erik's dramatic, over-the-top speeches. "What, like secret agents? James Bond style?"
Raven winced. "Oh. Right." She gestured vaguely with her hands, as if the missing details would magically materialize in mid-air. "Charles and Erik are putting together an official mutant squad. We're... um, technically affiliated with the CIA now. Everyone in this room is on the team."
I folded my arms tightly over my chest, keeping my expression entirely deadpan. "CIA agents?" I repeated, testing the syllables out loud for pure comedic value.
More like the X-Force, but with significantly fewer leather fetish suits. And if my memory of the movie timeline serves me right, isn't Sebastian Shaw supposed to barge into this exact bunker with his merry band of mutant terrorists incredibly soon? What exactly am I going to do when Azazel starts dropping CIA redshirts from the ceiling? I need to be ready.
Raven shifted her weight uncomfortably under my stare, clearly trying to ease me into the idea on direct orders from Charles.
Oh, Charles is definitely losing sleep over me. He has no idea what to make of my brain. He probably thinks I'm in some fragile, highly volatile mental state after being experimented on by baseline humans. Honestly, shoutout to my shadow duplicates for overhearing that little hallway gossip. It's a flawless cover story. Charles's complete inability to read my mind is making him paranoid. Smart man. Incredibly annoying, but smart.
Though, honestly, thinking about Charles just gives me a massive headache. Right now, he's a young guy with a full head of hair. Is he suddenly going to wake up one day looking like Patrick Stewart, or is the original X-Men 2000 trilogy a completely different continuity? Does this universe follow the original timeline, or am I stuck in the absolute structural disaster of the soft-reboot prequels? Trying to calculate Fox's chronological timeline choices is actively melting my brain. I need to stop thinking about it before I trigger a localized electromagnetic pulse.
Seeing the conversation stall under my blatant skepticism, Raven decided to lean directly into the madness. "Alright," she said, a wicked, conspiratorial smirk spreading across her face. "Since codenames are apparently mandatory for our new black-ops status, I'm calling immediate dibs on Mystique."
A sharp spark of instant recognition flashed in my eyes. And so it begins, I thought, filing the iconic moment away in my mental archive. The birth of the legend.
"Oh, come on!" Sean protested, throwing his hands up in mock exasperation. "I literally wanted Mystique!"
"Too bad, Sean," Raven quipped, the corners of her mouth twitching upward into a sharp, confident line. "The codename is officially claimed."
Her skin began to shimmer. A cascade of electric-blue scales rippled seamlessly across her entire body. Her features shifted, the bone structure reconfiguring in a blink, until she was standing there as a perfect mirror image of Sean himself.
The room went completely quiet. Everyone's brains scrambled to process the visual reality of what they had just witnessed. A slow ripple of deeply impressed murmurs spread through the space, punctuated by a loud whistle of pure admiration from Armando at the bar.
"Okay, yeah," Alex finally said, breaking the silence with a nod of respect. "That is a damn good codename. You earned it."
Raven, still effortlessly wearing her borrowed male face, shot him a cheeky wink before the blue scales rippled once more, returning her to her natural form. The unspoken message was loud, clear, and absolute: Mystique isn't just a cool name—she completely owned it.