Running for Home - 79. April 28, 2022

April 28, 2022

Magneto’s dead.

He insisted, just fuckin insisted on taking part in the operation last night. Mystique warned him against it. Begged him not to do it. Even Exodus didn’t think it was a good idea, and he is Magneto’s biggest simp. But he told them that if they didn’t include him in the operation, he’d pull the Acolytes from helping us. He didn’t give them any choice.

And now he’s dead.

I don’t understand what I’m feeling. I’m angry, hurting, confused, but also grieving. He’s been such a fucking problem for so long, and he took advantage of me when I was at my lowest as a teenager and made me into something fucking horrible all in the name of his Cause, but he was also a father figure to me, someone I strived to emulate for years, someone who gave me a compass and a sense of purpose when all I had was hurt and anger and nihilistic feelings of uselessness.

Fuck.

But I’m grateful, grateful he did it - not that he manipulated me into becoming a terrorist with him, but that he went on this goddamned mission.

They succeeded and perhaps succeeded in a bigger way than we had originally planned. The Purifiers are crippled now, and the evidence we gathered on their operations has been forwarded on to the governments of all the countries where they have been active. We also sent the evidence to some news outlets, so the governments can’t just pretend they didn’t see it. The evidence of the crimes the Purifiers have been committing secretly and sometimes openly, along with any media pieces that get covered should force governments to act, now, and hopefully what is left of this organization will be disassembled, permanently.

The bioweapon was destroyed, of course. The Purifiers were actually in the last stages of work on it. It was far further along than Mystique had thought. We barely made it in time. But it’s over now - the samples of it were destroyed, the research and the data that supported its creation have been destroyed, and the scientists who were working on it have been eliminated.

I shouldn’t feel happy about the deaths of people, but these fucks were planning a genocide, so I don’t fucking care. Maybe I’m not ‘happy’, but I’m glad, if that makes any sense at all. The scientists weren’t the only deaths among the Purifiers. The Acolytes weren’t nearly as restrained as the X-men usually are. Any Purifier that so much as gestured like they were going to fight them, they were eliminated. All told, almost a hundred men and women among the Purifiers are now dead. Again, I’m not happy about it, but I’m glad. If I had a choice, I would have made these people suffer, rotting away in jail with nothing to do but eat, sleep, shit and piss for the rest of their miserable existances. Having them dead is a close second, though. Let’s be honest, there is nothing else that we could have done to eliminate their threat short of telepathically brainwashing each and every one of them to no longer be a mutant-hating piece of shit. Even if they went to jail, it probably wouldn’t have been forever, and then they’d be right back to trying to kill us all again upon release.

Probably best of all is that their leader, the Grand Bishop William Stryker, is dead.

How fucked up is it that two fucking bastards with mutant genocide as their goal were named William Stryker? What a bizarre coincidence. Or was it a coincidence? Mystique tells me that Stryker was an alias for this piece of shit, that his last name was actually O’Neil, but still… Fucked up. I don’t know if he somehow knew about the legacy of that secretive military bastard Magneto killed at Alkali Lake and was inspired by him, or what. I guess it doesn’t matter now. He’s dead.

His last act, though, his coup de grace, almost set us back as much as the bioweapon would have. As Magneto choked the life out of him with a piece of metal around his neck, he activated something he called Nimrod.

It was a robot, a fucking robot, that came alive and started shooting down Acolytes and X-men without mercy and without deterrence. The X-men and the Brotherhood and the Acolytes had all dealt with the Sentinels in the past, so fighting mutant-killing robots was nothing new. But this thing? No one had ever fought against anything remotely like what this robot was capable of. Seventeen Acolytes died, Mystique tells me, including the Kleinstock brothers, Senyaka and Mellencamp. The X-men? We were luckier, but the injuries were heavy. Piotr, Jim, Doug, Jean-Paul and his sister Jeanne-Marie were all hurt pretty badly. Sam and Rachel barely survived being blasted. Logan was fine due to his healing factor, but he couldn’t contribute to the fight because he was essentially taken out of the picture by an exposure to one of the samples of the bioweapon.

But Magneto?

He resisted, resisted with everything he had. The damn thing was shielded from magnetic force, somehow, and shielded from just about everything else too. Magneto couldn’t do a damn thing to it. It just kept blasting him and blasting him, and his magnetic shielding could only deflect so much of the harm. That was when Rachel got involved and started to desperately tear at it with her telekinesis. She tried and tried, letting everything rip, but nothing was working. But then suddenly it happened. In a last desperate attempt she overloaded her powers on the goddamned thing, passing out from the strain, and the tiniest flaw opened up in the shielding. Somehow Magneto felt it, felt the tiniest flow of electromagnetic fields from inside the machine. He felt it, and it was enough. He started to assault the thing again, and the damn thing knew it was in danger and it turned its weapons exclusively on Magneto once again.

In a moment, it was over. They had destroyed one another.

Magneto got the glorious death he perhaps didn't deserve, saving us all from yet another human-generated threat. If Magneto had listened to Mystique, if he hadn't been there, that goddamned robot probably would have killed them all and then went on a worldwide rampage hunting down and killing mutants. It had stolen Sentinel technology in it, for sure, but it was advanced well beyond anything we've encountered before, leaps and bounds beyond anything the government had ever procured. Mystique's next project is finding out where the Purifiers sourced this tech from, because we needed to know if there was another underlying threat. Was the technology stolen from Trask Industries, or did they have a man on the inside? Where did the unknown tech come from? Was it also from Trask or from some other dangerous actor we didn’t know about yet? She was taking the remains of it to Forge's lab in Dallas for him to analyze. He'd be able to figure out where all the various pieces of tech in that monstrosity have their origins - or at the very minimum how they work and how we can counter them in the future.

Dom survived. He got shot in the shoulder, but one of the Acolytes - Carmella Unuscione - saved his ass and took out the offender before they managed to kill him. They weren’t at the site where the bioweapon was, where Nimrod was. They were at a massive weapons depot. Dom did what was asked of him and completely leveled the facility. It was chock full of illegal military equipment. Most of the facility was underground, and he managed to make it collapse in on itself, making it virtually impossible for what’s left of the Purifiers to recover anything from it except at great cost. Even then, they would likely only be able to recover some guns. The tanks, armored vehicles, rocket launchers, and other crazy shit that has no place belonging to a civilian militia would all have been crushed under the rubble. The government will be all over their asses before they are likely able to do anything, anyway.

Marie survived too. She was on another team, one tasked with taking out the Purifier’s central data centre. Fransico Milan and Shipa Khatri were on that team, along with Gambit, Neal Shara, Sage, Hank, Kurt and a few other Acolytes. They probably had it the easiest. Sure, the facility was well guarded and booby-trapped, but the team basically had exactly who they needed for a success. They came away with only some minor injuries.

The Acolytes will be taking Magneto’s body back to their stupid island and interring him there. They didn’t invite us to come to whatever funeral ceremony they are having, but we are still welcome on the island as part of their segregationist mutant-only society. Can’t say that I ever care to visit. Mystique, Dom and I are going to have a chat about Magneto and our time with him in the Brotherhood over some drinks at some point. Piotr too, I guess, since he’s probably the only other staff member at this school who had some sort of a close relationship with Magneto from the brief time he spent with the Acolytes until he could no longer justify associating with them based on some of their more extremist actions.

So where does this leave me?

Overall, I’m satisfied. We succeeded, and my friends all survived. No mutant genocide is going to occur, not anytime soon. I am still a little annoyed that Mystique didn’t want me helping with this operation, but I’m still going to find my own way to contribute, too. I’m already on the docket to write a historically informed opinion piece in the New York Times about the growth of the Purity movement in the South, along with the growth of the Church of Humanity and the Purifiers more broadly, but now I am going to try to coordinate with whoever is going to be covering the evidence we gathered about the Purifiers and the disturbing depth and breadth of their operations.

Honestly, even though we knew they were growing, Mystique shocked us earlier this month with her evidence of just how big and how dangerous the Purifiers had become, at least in America. There are offshoot branches in other countries that could probably use some intervention, but we are going to wait and see how their governments respond. Jean-Paul’s sister gave us a guarantee that Canada’s Department H will be deep down their throats now. They’d already been monitoring their activity in Canada, but we were now giving them the evidence they needed to have the government formally declare the Purifiers a terrorist organization and criminalize their existence. One can only hope that the governments in Europe, China, India and Africa will follow suit.

Africa, I’m not worried about, to be honest. Ever since Storm married the king of Wakanda fifteen years ago, things have been on a positive trajectory for mutants on that continent as a whole due to her massive political clout. China, too, shouldn’t be a problem since their government regards mutants mostly as an asset. Even if they think they should be able to dictate what sort of careers and lives mutants should lead, at least they aren’t actively trying to curb the existence of mutant population. We still need to work for more freedom for mutants there, in North Korea and in Southeast Asia, but we have time there. Mutants aren’t really being hunted down and killed, not like in South and Central Asia where anti-mutant beliefs have incorporated some religious undertones just like they have here in America.

With Magneto dead, will the Acolytes continue to carry the torch of mutant supremacy? They have their island now to act as a base, but they have never been as aggressive as the Brotherhood - mostly only acting to rescue mutants from bad situations and convert them to their cause, and dealing with some out-of-control bad actors before the X-men could. The Brotherhood is still around, of course, though under Toad’s leadership. They haven’t really been any sort of real threat for a long time, though. They have a scattered membership and they mostly only involve themselves in online forums, protest actions and a little bit of infrequent rioting nowadays. They aren’t anything like the militant threat they were back when I was a member and Magneto was in charge.

I can only hope that we can find a way to temper the hatred and distrust. Mutants have been abused and forced to the margins of society for so long, but we are making progress. We are so much closer to integration and acceptance in so many places. I have to keep working hard to make my voice heard. If I can forgive humanity, even if I still distrust them, then everyone should be able to.

No, maybe not everyone. I should know better than that. I suffered as a child, but I never really suffered for being a mutant. My pains and hurts over being a mutant were mostly the product of teenage angst and misguided interpretations of the dictums of my teachers here at the School that left me feeling like my powers were a burden and that people thought I was a danger to society. I never really had a valid personal truth to justify how twisted and hateful and destructive I became. Not like Magneto, with his experiences in the concentration camps in World War 2. Not like Toad and Sabretooth and Mystique, with their physical mutations that lead to rejection and ostracization by society.

Maybe that’s why I was able to leave the path Magneto laid out for me after I was jailed in my twenties. Sure, Mystique and Destiny’s influence on my thoughts and behaviours during the Freedom Force years contributed a lot, too. I was curious, of course, why Mystique had chosen to align herself with the government after the Cure War. I understood that she wouldn’t want to go back to Magneto after he betrayed her trust by leaving her to be arrested after she was shot up with the Cure, but I never thought she would work for the government. Any reasons I had imagined were wrong, however - her reasons were part of a deep, long plan. Her time with Magneto was all part of her and Destiny’s master plan for affecting the future of mutants and humanity more broadly. Mystique believed in working for mutant salvation, sure, but she was actually much more pragmatic about how things should play out. Her relationship with Destiny was much longer than I’d initially suspected, and their plans and actions had layers upon layers of depth and contingencies.

There is part of me that is heartened that Mystique is still working on the plans that she constructed with Destiny. In the case of the Purifiers and this bioweapon issue, I am beyond glad that she is still working on the things Destiny gave her foreknowledge of. But at the same time, how accurate do Destiny’s prognostications remain? It’s been a long time since she’s died, and the world has changed. How long is Mystique going to remain shackled to old prophecies that may no longer be relevant? Should she be remaining so secretive about things and continue to only operate solo? Wouldn’t it be better if she had consistent dedicated help?

I guess I should talk to her about it. I’m not the one who should be helping her, not anymore, but if she has an emergency and needs me… well, I will answer the call. It’s something I will have to talk to Bobby about. Obviously I have responsibilities now - to Bobby, to Liam, to Daniel… but if I am needed, truly needed, then I have to help.

There are many ways of fighting a battle. Obviously, preventing the battle from happening in the first place by speaking up is the best solution. But sometimes writing isn’t enough. Sometimes you have to fight. I know Bobby of all people understands that.

Bobby could be called to fight, too. I mean, he’s been helping the X-men here and there since we started teaching in September. I guess since he’s not really done anything big since before I was kidnapped, I’ve stopped thinking about it.

Am I prepared to let him go and fight, now that we are together? Now that I finally have him? Now that we are building a family together?

Fuck.

As much as I am ready to let him go fight, it’s only if he is really and truly needed. Only if there is no other choice. And if it comes down to that, I want to be by his side.

But is that the right choice?

Wouldn’t it be better for at least one of us to stay behind, to make sure Liam still has someone to care for him should the worst happen?

I don’t know. I don’t know if it is right to make that decision ahead of time. I mean, even if something were to happen to Bobby and I, we know Liam will be taken care of. Jean-Paul and Piotr already told us that if something were to happen, they would take over caring for Liam. But they are out there fighting, doing the hero act, all the time. Could we rely on the fact that they will be there for Liam if in all likelihood they would be out there fighting any fight that would possibly also bring Bobby and I into play?

I guess Bobby and I need to sit down and talk through this. I don’t know if we will come to a conclusion, in advance. But we need to have plans.

We can’t leave shit up to chance.