“You didn’t have to have the brats help, y’know.” Mort says, grunting as he rights an overturned bin of spare piping, “I did this before our benevolent cult leader gave me this shop job.”
Wagner hums noncommittally in his throat from where he’s carefully mopping up a spill of etching solution. It’s not particularly caustic, all things considered, but the blue mutant had shooed away a kid that was more goo than solid and a brat with more eyeballs than you’d expect telling them “He would help Herr Toynbee take care of that later.”
Herr Toynbee. That was new. He still caught most of the adults tripping over it when talking to the students, heard the click of the “T” as they stopped themselves from calling him Toad. Not Wagner though. He turned the whole place upside down one day, appearing in the kitchen like he’d gone out for milk instead of gone and dropped dead. Watching the X-men all fall to pieces over the blue mutant had twisted something hard in his Mort’s heart, clawed at the ragged edges where the Brotherhood was torn from him. He still pokes around after them, when he can. Even when the golden X-men only gave him a closet to sleep in, he’d patched his way into one of their computers and patched his way back out when he was done.
He hadn’t expected the teleporter’s return to make any difference in his life, just a stink of sulfur to deal with on top of all the other shit he had to clean up. But a week after the man’s return, Cyclops of all people stopped him in the hall, thrusting a key towards him as he looked off to the side, muttering something about “sorry it took so long to get him a room.” A week after that, he found out there were apparently monthly staff meetings, and he was invited. Things like that kept happening, bit by bit, until it wasn’t only Wagner asking his input in meetings or talking to him in the halls, it was Rogue and Storm, and Wolverine–though that last one was more an exchange of grunts than anything. McCoy started asking him technical questions, occasionally showing him his own projects, which Mort was loathed to admit were dead interesting. Portal technology, molecule destabilization, string theory, madcap, ridiculous shit the big blue man apparently did as a hobby.
It was on the doctor’s recommendation that he found himself teaching shop class, actually. Mort balked at the idea, baffled as to how he went from barely being worthy of scrubbing toilets in the X-men’s estimation to trustworthy with their precious future of mutantkind. But Wagner had circled back, prodded him after the meeting. Said something about Mort’s skills being wasted fixing things up and cleaning up after everyone, and that the children with obvious mutations like theirs needed more adults they could look up to. Mort had huffed that he’d consider it but found himself staring at his ceiling into the early morning, the phantom image of glowing gold eyes, so utterly sincere, staring back at him as memories of growing up strange and lonely in crowded places flickered through his mind. Would he have been Magneto’s dog for so long, if he had not spent fifteen years feeling like an alien on his own planet?
The next morning, on little sleep, Mort had fired off an email to Grey on the X-men issued laptop he’d been given, saying yes. Pryde surprised him at breakfast that day as the most enthusiastic about his acceptance. The short woman had a love of coding and had taken to working alongside Mort in the mornings, both of them nursing their coffee as they pecked their way through their personal labyrinths. Mort surprised himself after the first week of teaching, when he found himself warming up to the little brats, taking their questions and running with them, dumping circuit boards and batteries and gears on their desks and giving them the bare foundations of how to make them fit together and the freedom to decide the fitting.
As a janitor, the students seemed unruly, spoiled, disrespectful in the chaos they left in the halls and common areas. As a teacher, he found them gunshy, eyes flicking around the classroom any time they showed a flicker of restlessness, any time they played with their powers in the slightest as if they expected to be snapped to attention at any minute. Apparently, Xavier’s image of a beautiful mutant accepting future only existed if they kept their hair neat and colored diligently within the lines. An astroturf life. No wonder they behaved like devils the second the class let out. Mortimer enjoyed tearing up the streets every time he got loose from the wardens too.
“We must be responsible for the messes we make. That’s as much part of the lesson as the practice.” Wagner’s voice interrupts Mort’s wool-gathering and he startles, looking over at where the blue mutant is scrunching his nose as he wrings the fluid into a bucket. Wagner glances up at him, full mouth twitching up into a small smile, “Danke for helping with today’s practice.”
Mort face heats and he grunts, turning away to tidy a nearby workbench. “Sure.”
Wagner’d come to him a few days ago, talking about the therapy group he did with some of the “advanced mutation” kids and wanting to give them practice with dexterity and motor control outside of the child soldier training none of the X-men seemed interested in acknowledging as such. He called it an exercise in confidence.
The Nightcrawler wigged him out a bit if he was honest. It wasn’t the way the light never seemed to fully reach his face, how shadows pooled in the hollows above his eyes or the sharp lines of his cheekbones. It wasn’t the stillness of him, the grave chill that sometimes crept underneath all that warmth, though it was uncanny. Coming back from the dead did that to a man, and the X-men’s pet priest was no exception. It was the way he did things without any reason Mort could track. Mort wasn’t a fool, and he didn’t have any notions that him getting a room within a week of Wagner reappearing was a coincidence, but he couldn't fathom why the other mutant would make that a priority upon his fresh return to the living world.
At first, he’d thought it might be a freak to freak solidarity, given that the blue mutant sure as shit wasn’t about to stroll into a stop ‘n go for a snack without turning heads. And maybe it was that, initially, but outside of talking about the students and mentoring, the taller mutant never brought it up. Most of his conversations with Mort felt entirely random. Questions about what he was working on, or what he was growing in the little corner of the greenhouse he’d managed to wheedle away from Storm after proving he knew how to use it, and on one baffling occasion, almost wistful sounding questions about the tattoos that bloomed across his arms and shoulders, a garden of deadly plants inked over his dappled skin.
He glances at the blue mutant now, where he’s sidled up next to him on the workbench. Wagner's attempting to place several of the smaller drill bits the kids failed to put back in the little holes meant for them. No one would ever accuse Mort of having delicate hands, with his broad palms and webbed fingers, but as he watches the blue mutant hiss irritably, slender drill bits plinking to the tabletop as big blue fingers block the holes they’re trying to fit them in, he appreciates the relative ease his five fingers give him.
“Budge over.” He says, plucking the box of bits from Wagner’s hands and shoving the box he’d been dropping scrap metal into in its place. “Here.”
The taller mutant sighs, a rueful smile twisting his lips, “Perhaps I was working a bit uphill.”
Mort snorts, “No shit, weren’t you listening to the bit about ‘adapt the task to yourself, not yourself to the task’?”
He focuses on slotting the bits into their homes, enjoying the little sense of satisfaction at the way they stand like rows of iron trees. Kurt huffs a small laugh beside him, the sound flowing over the gentle scrape and clink of metal being shuffled around.
“Hmm, who said that? I’m a terrible daydreamer you know, probably missed it while abusing your equipment.” Kurt says, voice playful and a laugh hops from Mort’s mouth before he can catch it. He does manage to stop any jokes about what parts of his equipment the blue mutant might have permission to abuse before it can skitter past the safe boundaries of his own treacherous thoughts. He covers the laugh with a cough, but from the rhythmic thump of Kurt’s tail against the legs of the bench, he has a feeling he’s been caught.
He’d turned around in the middle of the same safety reminder he gives before the beginning of any class, because teenagers have brains like sieves, useful and highly selective, to see Wagner craning to stare at the gears of the hydraulic press, tail wiggling the lever and face dangerously close to where the mechanism was teetering up and down. Mort took it as an opportunity to share about the time an old factory coworker got himself a facial fracture crushing one of those little talking furball toys kids went nuts for a few years back in a press. The blue mutant had taken the hint, quietly uncoiling his tail and sitting back from the machine, hands politely curled in his lap.
“Oh, it was after the shop talk, when that lanky blue fellow took over, the one with the little accent.” Mort says, wiggling the last bit between his fingers as he shoots Kurt a sly look. The blue mutant stares at him open-mouthed, ears flicking like he’s trying to decide which bit of that sentence to be affronted by. Mort sticks out the tip of his tongue, biting on it just a bit to cover the way his stomach twists. He’s slid out onto the ice here, but he isn’t sure he guessed the thickness right.
“We both have little accents here, Froschkönig.” Kurt says finally and Mort stutters over that nickname, ears heating as the little bits of German he picked up riding the rails in his early twenties drift back to him.
He turns his face away, sticking his nose in the air and hoping the blue mutant can’t see the orange flush he’s sure is creeping under the green of his skin, “Nah, blue, you heard your little teammates? Hell, you heard your sister? American’s are the ones with the accents, me, you, Storm and the Tin man? Dead normal-sounding by comparison.”
Kurt bursts out laughing, nearly dropping the box of scraps as he tucks it onto a higher shelf “Oh please say that in the next staff meeting. I want to hear Scott splutter.”
Mort chuckles, “That would be something, they’ll toss me right out again.”
“Nein, we would not let them.” Kurt says, and Mort's heart skips, “The number of times Scott has corrected my pronunciation, I would live for it.”
Mortimer balks, “That man talks like he’s reading every word off a teleprompter and he corrects you?”
Kurt shakes his head, smile twisting into something a bit more wicked on the edges, “Not anymore. He tried it with Ororo and she told him straight out where to stuff it. But me, I started mispronouncing more things, waiting to see how long it would take him to catch on.” The blue mutant turns gold eyes on Mort and he swears they’re glowing brighter than usual, “Would you like to guess the word that did it?”
A snicker slips from Mort and he bites his lip, hand holding the dustrag he’d started wiping down the counter with stilling as he looks back at Kurt, amber eyes meeting gold, “Don’t hold me in suspense, here, tell me.”
Kurt leans in like he’s sharing a secret, and Mort can’t help but lean in right back, lips twitching into a grin.
“I asked Scott to hand me a ‘fork’ from the dishwasher.” Kurt stage whispers, stretching the ‘o’ down into a ‘u’ sound and shortening the ‘r’ til it almost disappears. Mort howls.
“You asked him to give you a what now?” He hoots, and the blue mutant jostles his shoulder with his.
“Vas? Scott is such a helpful person, I thought surely he could spare a fuck, ah excuse me, it is said ‘fork’, ja?” Kurt asks, accent transforming into Cyclop’s flat midwest American drawl on the word ‘fork’ before bouncing back.
“Fucking hell, I wish I’d caught that exchange.” Mort says, catching his breath a bit from the laugh.
Kurt waves him off, “Ah, it was years ago, back when we were all clobbering the stuffing out of each other every time you and your other team gave us the runaround.”
Mort sobers, the reminder of the Brotherhood and his tenuous ground here with the X-men running cold over him, “I’m not sorry about all that you know.” Well, he is sorry about some of it, but he’s not about to lose face saying that to Wagner of all people, “My days with the Brotherhood.”
Wagner hums softly, puttering about straightening bits on the table for the sake of moving his hands, “Didn’t expect you to be. They were family, no? Some of them.”
“Are.” Mort bites out, and his own steel surprises him, Kurt turns, facing him fully, and the tightness that crept into the blue mutant’s face softens at something he sees in Mort’s.
“Are.” He says, an agreement and an apology, he puts his hand on the back of Mort’s where he’s sweeping the counter, his calloused fingers radiate heat across Mort’s skin, “This will keep, we should get lunch before the others leave us with wilted lettuce and lumpy potatoes.”
But Mort’s chest is tight, and words he hadn’t noticed piling up in his throat the past couple months, since he started teaching, since they all started talking to him like he was a person, not a task, spill out “I’m not here for redemption. Or rehabilitation. I’m not a pet for you to keep, to gloat about as a feather plucked from Magneto’s cap. I chose to come here and I can choose to leave. But don’t think my choosing here, for now, means I’ve changed my thoughts about what mutants deserve or how I feel about the way the world tosses us into the trash heap if we’re not sparkling teeth and a pretty face.”
He heaves a sigh, sucks in what may be the deepest breath he’s had in months, in a year since he left Magneto and set fire to his former life to end up shivering to the X-men’s door. Maybe he’ll find himself thrown back out again now, but he can’t find a trace of bitterness left on his tongue from letting that truth fall. Kurt stares at him, shadowed face tipped to the side as those pupilless eyes roam over Mort. His palm is still draped over Mort’s knuckles, loose like Mort hasn’t just snapped that he’s an extremist, that he’s mutant first, mutant forever.
“Did you not sleep in a closet when you first came here?” Kurt asks, not waiting for Mort to answer, “The X-men are not above cruelty or ego. Many of us have no place to judge your life, or your choices, for we have done things not so differently. If any of us deny you the chance to reforge yourself, however you choose, with us or elsewhere, then we are no different than the world that throws mutants in the trash heap when we are too strange for their bland consideration of beauty, of normalcy.”
“I’ve killed people, you know.” Mort says mildly and Kurt snorts.
“You have met Logan.” Kurt says, raising an eyebrow.
“I’m not sorry about most of them.” Mort says. It’s true. Most of the people he’s killed tried to off him first and he figures it’s not his problem they miscalculated the risks. Don’t blow smoke if you’ve got shit lungs.
Kurt shrugs, “I am not sorry for most of mine, either. Glass houses, mein freund.”
Mort blinks, tries to imagine this muppet of a man, who pulls faces and sticks straws over his fangs to make the children laugh, covered in another’s blood, baring those fangs in a snarl. He’s fought Nightcrawler, on more than one occasion, but never felt the other mutant was out for his life.
“That’s not very priestly, I don’t think.” He says finally, and Kurt laughs, body rolling with it as he tosses his head back.
“Nein, I think not. But neither is dancing and fucking and drinking and many of my other favorite things, so I think perhaps I was wise to leave that path.” Kurt says, “There are other paths to the divine, and what my sins are and whether I have atoned for them, only God can say for me and only She can say for you.” He pats Mort’s hand, “Now come, lunch is nearly done.”
“Just like that?” Mort asks, brow furrowing as he lets Kurt lead him from the shop room. He pauses in the doorway, hand on the light and Kurt's light grip on his other hand slips. He feels colder for the sudden loss of contact.
Kurt turns and smiles at him, bright as the moon on a clear night, “Just like that. Und Mort?”
Mort grunts, looking back at Kurt from where he slid his eyes back to the shop room, to the familiar machines and grease and metal. Those eyes burn at him in a way he still can’t pin down and he swallows, “Yeah?”
“This team can be yours too, if you want it.” Kurt says, holding out his hand again to the shorter mutant.
Mort glances back at the shop room again ducking his head to cover his smile, he flicks off the light. He slides his hand into Kurt's, “I’ll consider it.”