Rating: R for f/f slash content and violence.
Continuity: First movie. And many old comics, in funhouse-mirror fashion.
Disclaimer: The mutant characters, plus Yukio, belong to Marvel Comics and Fox Entertainment.
Author's Note: I've always wanted to fill in the details of Storm's religious beliefs. But I couldn't, so I did this instead. I think you could call it an AU. Thanks to Julia for a lightning-fast beta.
The other day, the youngest child at Xavier's school - a girl not even thirteen yet, but deadly as a forest fire - asked me if it was true I was a goddess once.
These stories get passed around, distorted in retelling. Perhaps I should be grateful. There are certainly worse things she might have heard about me.
But no. Not was. And not just once.
When I was sixteen, I walked from Cairo all the way to Lagos City in Nigeria. My parents had both died that year. My father was American; my mother was from Lagos. You could put these facts together in a way that would make sense, but it would not be true. I had friends of my parents to stay with in Egypt. I had no real expectation that my mother's relatives would take me in. I once told Professor Xavier I felt drawn to the southwest, but we both knew I was only trying to explain my own behavior to myself. I didn't feel drawn, I just walked.
That is some of the most hostile country in the world. Last year the X-Men contacted a mutant child in Ajo, Arizona, and I saw what you Americans call desert. It was like a lush garden compared to the one that I walked through. Despite all efforts to conserve, I soon ran dangerously low on water, and the roads there were so rarely travelled that I might have died before I could beg help. But just as I had swallowed the last drop, I noticed that stormclouds were rolling in.
Rain made my situation no less desperate. More people drown than die of thirst in the Sahara. The sun is merciless, but you can plan for it. It is the sudden storm that kills.
Oya, goddess of the storm, spared my life that day, though I did not know her name yet. After many more miles of walking, I crossed the Niger, which I now know to be Oya's river, and came at last to the ocean and Lagos.
Lagos City was noisy and crowded and fast-paced and unbelievably dirty. The traffic terrified me and the buses rarely came to a complete stop - when they came at all. It was not an easy place to live, and yet I liked it. Even being stuck in traffic on a bus for three hours, breathing in the smell of sewage, could not change my mind. You might think that worshipping a weather goddess ought to give me an affinity with nature, but in fact I have always been happiest in cities. Furthermore, my native climate is quite different from New York's. Do not look so disappointed when I cannot tell the difference between oak and maple.
Somewhere on my journey I had lost the letter saying where my mother's family lived. But having had nothing else to read for months, I could remember every word, and I located them with little difficulty. I don't think they knew what to make of me, but to my surprise, they allowed me to stay with them. Their compound had a tap with water fit to drink, and a pump for when the tap was out, and toilets, though you had to carry water to them - relatively comfortable. Their hospitality provided a reprieve from what would otherwise have been an urgent need to marry; and looking back, I might attach a new importance to that thought, but perhaps, after all, I was only being choosy.
I have heard it said I was a thief in Lagos. Far be it from me to contradict such a romantic image. Very well then, I awoke at four o'clock each morning to go to my job as a thief, and I rarely returned before eight. Much of that time was spent in traffic, and in memory I see Lagos mostly from the inside of a yellow bus. My hair was still black in those days, and while I hardly blended in, I could attempt to live an ordinary life. My presence here at Xavier's shows how well that worked.
I know a man who found one day that everything electrical he touched went haywire. His car went through three alternators in a month; computers crashed as he walked by; cellular phones lost power when he picked them up. He is not a mutant, but a child of Oya. When he went through with his initiation as a priest, the goddess was satisfied, and the disturbances ended.
Something similar happened to me, but in Lagos it is hard to notice. If the power faded in and out for hours, then died entirely - well, that happens all the time. But when buses you are riding on break down for four days running, you begin to see a pattern. Soon I realized that the power kept going out every time I got angry, which was often, in those days. I tried to control my emotions, but I did not have that discipline yet. I only became angry at myself for failing, and of course that made the problem worse. Finally one morning before dawn, the electricity, which had been out since the previous day, suddenly flared up - and in the moment before the bulb shattered, I saw in the mirror that the roots of my hair were as white as bleached bone.
I went to the market as soon as I could to find hair dye. But the woman at the stall kept asking questions about what had happened to my hair, and refusing to reduce a price I knew was much too high. I knew she sensed my urgency, and I do not like being taken for a fool. Just as I gave in to my anger and began to raise my voice to her, I suddenly realized I had been pickpocketed - and turned to see a little girl, no more than twelve, disappearing into the crowd.
I wanted to run after her. I couldn't seem to move my feet. Then a tingling came over my body, and I felt that some great power was being poured into me. The next thing I remember, I was lying on the ground. The woman from the stall was trying to help me up, while everyone else stood well back. She said - as if it were obvious - "you don't remember what happened." She told me I had been possessed, by Chango or perhaps by Oya. I was exhausted and seemed to be hearing her from a great distance, but I realized what she was saying must have something to do with the traditional religion of the Yoruba, in which the gods sometimes come down and wear their worshippers like clothing.
She said I had shuddered as people do when a god takes them. Then the sky had darkened. My hair had sparked with electricity, my eyes turned white. Lightning had struck the ground before me, and then I had fallen.
An Orisha, a god, had chosen me, she said. I should go at once for divination to find out which one, and prepare to be initiated as a priestess - for "the Orisha meant business," and she thought, now, it was most likely Oya, who is not known for her patience.
I did not believe her. What little I knew of Yoruba religion came mostly from gossip I heard on the bus; the tradition was alien to me. I shook her off and fled the market.
But I could not return to ordinary life. I tried to sleep that night - became annoyed that I could not - and woke up standing in the middle of a street I did not recognize. When I cried out in frustration, a wind shattered every window on the block.
I think I ran. The next few days are vague and flickering. When I came fully to myself, I had collapsed before the shrine of Oya in the compound of the Oyadolu lineage. It is not a place the uninitiated are allowed to go. I had barged into the sacred precinct without explanation, and when they tried to stop me, I had replied only with the wordless howl that Oya gives when she is in possession.
The sky soon cleared. The faces of the men around me never quite did. Still, they took me to a Babalawo, who cast the palm nuts on the Table of Ifa and confirmed that it was Oya who had possessed me. By that time, I was ready to believe it.
Oya is the goddess of storms, of lightning, of the whirlwind. She can be as gentle as a breeze, sometimes. Other times she will come from the sky and destroy everything you have clung to, tear you from the ground and leave you far from home. She is sudden change of every kind, including the transition into death. She is in charge of cemeteries and the marketplace. (Kitty Pryde once asked me if the marketplace includes the mall. Of course it does.) She is known to be fierce in protecting her children. She is capable of gentleness, but do not get in the way of her anger. In the stories she rides into battle swinging an axe, with sparks of lightning darting from her hair - just as my own hair flowed with electricity every time I let my anger gain the upper hand.
Or so they told me. I could not remember. Those possessed by an Orisha rarely do. If a god wishes to communicate with the priest he has possessed - or as we say, with the horse he has mounted - he will give a message to the others present. Over time, I myself have become able to remember - usually. Two years ago, when Oya struck down Sabertooth, she turned to Logan and said "tell my horse I killed him," and I am grateful to remember nothing but the smell of ozone and charred flesh when I had returned to myself - Logan having led me out of sight of the remains. But as a rule, now, I remember what the goddess does while in my body, though it is like something seen from a distance or heard in a story - something that happened to somebody else. As indeed it did.
My hair had two months' worth of white roots when I met Professor Xavier. He arrived in a wheelchair of exotic design, flanked by an improbably tall woman with red hair and an unsmiling young man in red glasses - and it is only with an effort I connect those apparitions with the X-Men that I know today. He told me that I was a mutant. I did not know what that meant. When he explained, I found it infinitely more farfetched than being mounted by a goddess. He wanted me to come to the United States with him, to learn, as he said, to control my powers. As if Oya's storms belonged to me, a human being. As if I could put a bit in lightning's mouth and ride the whirlwind.
I was flattered and astonished that anyone would come so far to speak to me (and how well I know, from the other side now, the expression that must have been on my face). But when he spoke of my responsibility to other mutants, I laughed at him. My responsibility was to the Orisha who had chosen me. Should I feel a greater loyalty to the boy that Xavier had brought with him, just because he had shown me that he could shoot fire from his eyes?
Xavier stayed in Lagos for two weeks to argue. What girl, I thought, has ever been so flatteringly courted? He seemed interested in what I said, in a way no one had ever been before. I began to like him, but I did not take him seriously. And yet when he returned to Westchester, I came with him. If I did not know Xavier for an honorable man, I might think he had used his powers to control my mind, in that way so disturbingly reminiscent of an Orisha taking possession. But he would not do that. In time, I realized it must have been Oya.
At first I could not understand why Oya would bring me here. Then I began to listen to the stories of mutant children, and in their lives, as in mine, I saw Oya's working. Who else would give them these strange gifts that tear them from their feet and drop them far from home - shatter their lives as if lightning had struck them? A mutation, after all, is sudden change; and when Jean reads the genetic code of each new student, the DNA molecule spins on the screen in the shape of a whirlwind.
I have not dared to ask for divination on the question of what Oya intends for mutants, for fear that I would give away too much about this school. But I know that I was brought here to protect these children.
Xavier said I could protect them best by learning to control my powers. But Oya doesn't work like that. I have learned to keep my anger under very close control. And I was willing to learn martial arts, though I am an indifferent student. But I refuse to call the goddess down for frivolous reasons. It is outrageous to suggest that a goddess who was going into battle long before the birth of Christ be summoned to the Danger Room for training.
I have found that if I ask Oya for specific things, then often, if it suits her purpose, she will do them. But no human can control a goddess. The others may not understand it, but when Oya possesses me, I am no longer there. On one occasion for which I will always be grateful, she answered my prayer to lift Logan up to the torch of the Statue of Liberty. I know too well she might as easily have torn the statue down.
Of course I wanted to learn more about the goddess who was so important to my life. Xavier had said that while he had known nothing about Oya until he talked to me, he believed every religion in the world was practiced in New York. He was not wrong. The Orishas came with the slaves to the Americas, where their worship was carried out under a veil of Christianity. Shango, before he was a god, was a great king in Africa; in Cuba he became associated with Saint Barbara. In a masquerade nearly as daring, Oya of the mat - who in Africa is said to carry bedding around with her, just in case of sudden need - was worshipped as the Virgin of Candelaria. Yoruba traditions acquired new names: Candomble in Brazil, Santeria in Cuba, Voodoo in Haiti. I know some of these names have dark associations. I assure you my only connection with zombies is through the movies that Bobby Drake sometimes persuades me to stay up and watch. I do not sacrifice human beings, nor do I worship the devil. Despite that sort of slander, the traditions have survived. Santeria in particular thrives in New York, and most Orisha worship here is based on it.
At first I half expected Oya to deliver me to the door of the ile she wished me to join - and perhaps she did. On a trip to the city I met a Cuban girl named Teresita, on whom, in retrospect, I had a hopeless crush. She was a priestess of Oshun in La Regla Lucumi, also known as Santeria. She introduced me to her godmother - the woman who had initiated her - who taught me more about the high god Olodumare, the Orishas, and the spirits of the dead. When she felt I was ready, we began to discuss my initiation as a priestess of Oya. The ritual would have cost thousands of dollars and required the sacrifice of an entire menagerie of animals. My head would have been shaved. For a year after that, I would have had to wear nothing but white cloth, and would have been forbidden to touch anyone who was not also an initiate.
I did not have the money. I was still a student then, and when I did become a teacher, I found out that maintaining a jet was more important to Xavier than increasing our stipends. (I disagreed until they taught me to how to fly it. Now I would work for free to keep that jet fueled. Please do not tell Xavier.) As for the prospect of a year of white, we all knew that our first encounter with Magneto might occur at any time. To go into battle without the protection of leather seemed foolhardy.
It is ironic in retrospect, but I felt the restriction on touch was the worst part. Not only for my own sake. Some of the children arriving at Xavier's were so much younger than I had been - children of thirteen, betrayed by their own bodies, worrying that they were monsters. Jean and I were older sisters by default. To shrink away from simple touch would be unthinkable.
Nevertheless, I began to save money. When I had about a third of the amount I needed, a child in Boise, Idaho became so frightened by a horror movie that he turned most of a historic theater to glass - including, sadly, three other moviegoers and a projectionist - and the existence of mutants became known throughout the world. I knew then that I could not go through with it. Oya does not choose to bring down lightning when she possesses other people. If she made some dramatic display during my initiation, the wrong person might realize I was a mutant, and this school would be endangered.
When I decided not to go through with initiation as a priestess, I earned a stern lecture from my godmother, but I felt the whole school breathe a sigh of relief. A few of the students had thought Santeria was Satanist. Many more had been repulsed on hearing that it involved animal sacrifice. (Yes, some of our rituals involve the death of animals. So does dinner every night at Xavier's. People are very strange.) As for my fellow X-Men, it was a different kind of heresy they cared about. Soon after I came to Xavier's, Jean told me that when her own powers manifested, she had thought that all girls became telekinetic at thirteen and adults were only too embarrassed to talk about it. She did not say so, but I know she thought my own beliefs would come to seem equally childish to me. After all, she had shown me the X-factor gene that proved I was a mutant. In time I would surely accept that I, and not Oya, controlled the storm.
She was wrong. Of course I know I am a mutant, but I also know it is a goddess that possesses me. I see no contradiction. If there can be mutations for reading minds, walking through walls, controlling fire and ice, and so many other things that used to be believed impossible, why not one that allows for my unusual relationship with my Orisha? Those who worship the Orishas have always known ways to invite them to take possession. The drums and prayers and dances at a bembe are all designed to praise the Orishas and call them down. In Haiti, they found that certain patterns known as veves, drawn on the ground during a ritual, also helped to call the Orishas - something unknown in Africa. If humans can discover a new way to entreat the gods to come possess us, then so can genes.
I do not know exactly what it is that my mutation changed. That is a question for Jean's science to answer. But somehow my emotions call out to the goddess - as if my brain waves were a veve, and the pounding of my pulse the beat of bata drums.
I know what the other X-Men think of me. They believe that because my anger brings the storm, I must repress it, and when it finally breaks free, it feels like becoming a different being. Once as I approached the Danger Room, I heard the word "dissociative," and when I entered, conversation stopped. I cannot blame them. It must be disquieting to see me - the world's most unconvincing superhero, who, attacked by Sabretooth for the first time, was too frightened to fight back at all - turn into someone who gratuitiously shatters windows, levels anything in her way, and, when need be, kills without remorse. But I have felt the wise and strong and sometimes terrifying presence that possesses me. No one who has been touched by an Orisha could doubt that it is something more than human. Until you have felt that, do not talk to me about what is real.
Even Xavier and Jean cannot say they have felt it. They think the electricity I generate when I use my powers jams their telepathy. I believe that the mind of a goddess is simply beyond their abilities.
Rogue understands the most, I think. Her mind is also home to other presences. She did decline when I suggested that my godmother in Santeria might find a way to help her with the voices in her head. After all, my religion has long experience in dealing with unwanted possessions, and Western psychology none. But the prospect of a cleansing sacrifice was too strange to her then. Later we found out together that when she had to use her powers in battle, I could help quiet the new voice inside her the same way you calm someone possessed by an Orisha, by blowing in her ears. And every week, now, she gives a bit of chocolate or some other sweet to the Eleggua by our door, with an air of well-why-not I know is partly feigned - but I am getting ahead of myself.
Two years after Magneto was captured, the X-Men went to Japan. It was the usual sort of thing - half rescue, half recruitment - but that boy was almost as stubborn as I had been, and Xavier and I stayed for almost two weeks. It was there that I met Yukio. She was someone who said she knew Logan, though Logan didn't remember her. A ronin, she called herself - a masterless samurai - and Logan and I exchanged looks, but after all it was no more ridiculous than our own lives. And she was wild and free, and I think that like so many, she saw only my reserve at first. Over sake and invertebrates she ran a strand of my hair through her fingers, and then made a scissoring motion and said I would look good in leather and a Mohawk. I believe she was trying to shock me, but I laughed and said that I only wore leather to work, and if I were going to have my hair shaved off I would have done it long ago. She argued so endearingly (and filled my cup so frequently) that in the end I let her talk me into having my hair cut almost to the scalp - no longer than the roots had been a month after the goddess first possessed me.
In initiation the head is shaved so that the god may more easily be seated in the mind - and Xavier's hair fell out the month he turned fourteen, as if it would have interfered with his emerging powers. Walking out into the Tokyo night with a much lighter head, I felt indeed that some new spirit had entered me. Yukio took me to Shinjuku Nichome, to a bar no larger than my office at the school. No one there spoke any English, French, or Arabic, but I communicated with sign language and with Yukio's enthusiastic - although, I suspect, approximate - translations. I know twenty words of Japanese and two of them mean "lesbian." When the bar closed I realized we had forgotten to dance, but we remedied that lack in Yukio's apartment. And in the end it was a gentle wind that blew that night, no hurricane, only a breeze that slipped in through the window, mussed her hair and disarranged the sheets.
I returned, even so, to find everything changed.
I had long been the freak of the mansion - and considering the competition, who could help but feel an odd sense of accomplishment? I became even more so when we returned. Not universally, of course. Kitty Pryde pronounced my haircut "cool," while Bobby Drake only pretended to believe that I had joined the Army. As for some others - well, I will not dwell on it. Not everyone is comfortable with sudden change. Bobby said they were just trying to convince themselves that they were still in Kansas, and, as he predicted, they did come around in time.
The reaction that surprised me most was Rogue's. She couldn't even look me in the eye until (as rumor told me) Xavier spoke to her about it. I did not realize what that conversation must have been about for two more years.
We threw an exorcism party for Rogue when she told us she could no longer feel Logan in her head. The X-Men will celebrate anything, and why not? We all know we may not live to see another birthday. Scott acquired a sheet cake with a photograph of Linda Blair printed in food dye on the frosting, and Rogue produced one of those bride-and-groom figurines, which Logan sliced neatly in half when he cut the cake with his claws. It seemed some understanding had at last been reached between them. And that night it was my door that she knocked on, my bed that she sat on and made small talk for ten minutes before finally looking up at me.
"I had to be sure it was really me that felt this way. I was so afraid that it was only Logan...."
Ten years my junior. Formerly my student. I took her gloved hand and said all the things that, I suppose, she had expected. She nodded and carefully didn't cry, and I looked into her face and could not bear it. I think at that moment I must have known.
I let her go, that night. But it was not so many more nights before I let myself stroke the inside of her wrist through her glove.
How is it that we know ourselves so slenderly? Could I have felt this way about her all along and never known? If I look back I can imagine that I see the signs, but perhaps I am only inventing a story to tell myself. Love is the whirlwind, and I of all people should not be surprised if it sometimes strikes out of a clear sky.
Caution was not easy. We had to learn to make do. I grew my hair out long again so she could run her fingers through it. We have to sleep in separate beds, because I know too well how natural it would seem, in sleep, to curl up close and rest my cheek against her neck. It became a little easier when I suggested that we switch beds every night, so that the other's scent would linger on the sheets. But I knew that what troubled Rogue was not my absence from her bed, but the fear of waking up to find I was not there at all. She seemed certain that I would leave sooner or later, in search of things that I could have with anyone but her. Words made no difference, but I think that time has finally eased that fear. I cannot claim it never bothered me to have to kiss her through a scarf, or touch her through the white cloth of a sheet. And yet the pleasure that transforms her face - the lightning that flows through her - is the same thing that happens to everyone else. If by some magic we could have the touch of skin on skin that we have almost ceased to long for, I believe it would make little difference now. Perhaps love always longs for something more than flesh can give it. Perhaps love is always astonished, as well, at how much it can have.
I have been with her three years tonight. I have been an X-man more than twelve. It would be tempting to believe that the great changes in my life are past. But I know that I rest in the eye of the whirlwind. If I could go back now and talk to my young self, I would tell her what I try to tell these children when I teach them history. That change will come, and you must welcome it. If you cling to the ground, you will only be uprooted. Better to raise your arms and cry out to the wind with a full voice and let it take you. When it lets you go, declare the place you land to be your destination, and no one can prove you were not flying.
But here I am - a white-haired pagan mutant sleeping with another woman, who wears leather and a cape to work and flies a military jet. If I could stop that young girl on the street as she left Cairo, or catch her arm as she prepared to board a yellow bus in Lagos, what makes me think that she would speak to me?
The End