Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

I HAVE ALL THE MUTANT!AU HEADCANONS.  Listen, children, Auntie Moran has been an X-Men devotee since she was very wee, I have mutant AU headcanons for basically everything I’ve ever seen.  I think we’ll just do headcanons for this rather than a fic, though, you can hit me up later if you want actual plot.

Okay so I’m thinking that the Mutant Registration Act is going to have to be the big issue Les Amis are protesting–they’ve got to have something to be against, it’s Les Amis for God’s sake.  And I’m thinking that a number of them are in a peculiar position because a lot of them are from wealthy upper-class families and have invisible mutations, so they could have just gone on with their lives without ever telling a lie.  This is probably vaguely modern–hell, maybe the X-Men are kicking around somewhere.  Aaaaanyway, here, it got long.

• Enjolras can glow.  Actually it’s called electromagnetic manipulation, and he can do more than glow, but that’s the most common manifestation–when he’s impassioned or excited or angry, it’s as if particles of sunlight coalesce around his skin, a harsh and brilliant golden-white halo.  He can control it, but it takes some concentration.  With some practice, he learned to do other things with light, like setting off bursts of light to catch the attention of a crowd or throwing lightning-bright flashes from his hands to baffle the police and hide their escape.  It’s beautiful, watching him speak at the Musain or at a protest, his whole body outlined in not-quite-blinding light so that there isn’t a single shadow on him, like an angel or an ancient god.  It’s why Grantaire started calling him Apollo–god of the sun, of rapture and beauty, of eloquence and elegance.  It drives Enjolras up the wall, but Grantaire persists and Enjolras’ light is all the brighter in the heat of his anger.

• Combeferre has a small psychic ability, although not in the sense of reading minds.  He can share senses, specifically vision–look through the eyes of another animal.  He likes moths and butterflies for this, because as calm and logical as he usually is, Combeferre is creative and loves art and moths and butterflies have five color receptors rather than three, they can see a whole spectrum humans can only dream of.  When he’s drunk enough or exhausted enough, Combeferre will sit with his head on Courfeyrac’s shoulder and try to describe the other colors he can see through their eyes.  (He has absolutely never started crying about it, and anything Courfeyrac says to the contrary is nothing but lies and slander.)

• Courfeyrac is an empath.  I think I’ve used that one before, but I am VERY committed to Courfeyrac being an empath, y’all can fight me at dawn on that.  He’s not much good at projecting, he can only manage it in a moment of strong emotion, although once he does manage it, he can swamp everyone around him and send them reeling into hysterical sobs or blind rage or, on one memorable occasion involving Combeferre, pure blazing lust.  (They don’t talk about that one much, it’s a bit of a Noodle Incident, but suffice it to say Enjolras reacted…poorly, when they came out of it and he realized he’d kissed Grantaire.  It was a messy week until he apologized for his reaction.)  Courfeyrac is much better at receptive empathy, at reading the people around him, and he’s a master at balancing it all, knowing which emotions are his and which aren’t.  It does make being around Enjolras a little exhausting, with all that fiery passion roaring through him all the time–Combeferre, much steadier in nature, is a good balance, though.  That’s part of the reason Courfeyrac likes Gavroche so much.  He’s not a complex kid, he’s very direct and up front with his thoughts and emotions.  It’s restful to be around, unless you’re on his hit list.

• Bousset’s mutation is probability manipulation.  Nothing so large-scale as the Scarlet Witch–he’s not going to be rewriting reality any time soon, nor eradicating mutant-kind–and instead of being able to shoot bolts, he can sort of attach it to people like a curse.  It’s relatively shortlived, but he can grab someone, skin-to-skin, and attach his power to them for a while, giving them ‘good luck’ or ‘bad luck’ depending on his preference.  Problem is, entropy demands a balance, so he deals with the backlash–if he makes someone lucky, he deals with correspondingly strong bad luck until his power falls away from them, and vice versa.  He’s always having runs of really terrible luck because he’ll tag (he calls it ‘tagging’ someone) his friends with little drips and dabs of good luck whenever they’re having a bad day or a rough week or he’s feeling particularly affectionate, and little drips and dabs add up really quick when you’re doling them out to almost a dozen people.  (He did very quietly make an arrangement with pretty much everyone except Joly and Musichetta, tagged all of Les Amis with bad luck, waited for his luck to turn up, and then went and asked the pair of them if they wanted to date him.  They haven’t let him forget it yet.  They said yes.)

• Joly’s a healer, of course.  More specifically, he can alter physical functions on a molecular level through physical contact, which means that he can do anything from cure cancer to cause someone’s body to break down where they’re standing.  He’s a little wary about physical contact, consequently–it’s never happened, but he worries that if he’s touching someone when he’s angry or scared he might hurt them.  But he always kisses Bousset’s bumps and scrapes better–literally–and he aced the fuck out of his anatomy and physiology classes.  He loves medicine, really loves it, because yeah, he can make all this stuff happen at hyperspeed, but it’s so cool to learn how it works.  He can’t heal himself, though–he could, but there’s a mental block that he can’t get around, because when he first broke his leg and tried to heal it, it didn’t work, so he’s convinced himself it’s impossible.  The limp doesn’t bother him, most of the time, but every once in a while he sits there and chews on his lower lip and wonders what went wrong.

• Musichetta can draw the future.  She’s a talented artist, and she likes to work in paints when she has the money–some of her paintings were hung in a gallery and Bousset drenched her in good luck that first time, so she does pretty well for herself, and can work in oil paints more often now.  She and Grantaire have very different styles–he has a warm pre-Impressionistic style, real and living and firelit, where she paints with sharp contrasts and comic-book-esque figures and buildings–but they love to look at each others’ work, and they tease each other about the paint splotches left on their skin after a day in the studio.  She has a whole sketchbook full of pencil sketches of the future–waste of good paints, she says dryly–and it travels everywhere with her, always ready to be yanked out when she feels a flash of insight coming on.  She saves the lot of them from being arrested almost monthly, and there was one time where she saw a train wreck and called the company in a panic, and they found a loose bolt that would have come free and killed everyone on board.  It doesn’t always go that well, though–Joly lets her curl up in his lap when she can’t stop a vision, and she’ll put her head on his shoulder and cling to his shirt, Bousset’s hands gentle and soothing down her back, until she feels better.

• Feuilly is easily spotted as a mutant, because his skin is streaked in places with smooth, beautiful black scales.  They arch over one of his cheekbones, down the line of his spine and up the inside of one of his wrists.  It’s snakeskin, black mamba specifically, and he has a host of other tricks up his sleeve–he’s never felt the need to find out if he’s venomous, though.  Black mamba venom is one of the most lethal in the entire world, and he’s just as happy to never know.  But he can sense heat, taste/smell/something in between infinitesimally small particles and his skin is so sensitive that he can feel the print on a page or sense the change in vibration when an engine is low on oil.  He works as a mechanic, because he can turn on a car and put his hands on the hood and feel and smell and sense, and know what’s wrong in no time flat.  His coworkers are generally proud of his brilliance (he’s also working toward graduating summa cum laude with a Master’s in Engineering) but every so often they get a customer who’s an A-grade dick.

• Bahorel is a muscle-mimic–he can watch someone do something physical and replicate it perfectly.  He uses it for what he calls ‘cheap tricks’ more often than not, like the time he watched Feuilly fold a paper crane and settled down to folding a thousand of them.  (He gave them to Feuilly when the man came in with a bruise on his face, his scales raw as if someone had scraped them along the ground, and won a smile before Joly pounced on Feuilly to heal him.)  But it makes him unspeakably useful in a tight spot, because Bahorel’s spent so much time watching how the police fight in a riot that he can use it against them like it’s second nature.  He’d almost rather die than watch any of the others get banged up, and Joly spends almost as much time healing him as he does Bousset, just because Bahorel has no apparent self-preservation instincts to speak of.

• Jehan can talk to plants.  He’s like Layla from Sky High and I have no shame about that comparison.  He wears cuttings of flowers in his hair and they’ll grow through his braid and bloom happily and just kind of live off his energy until he puts them in dirt, and when he’s feeling particularly effusively affectionate tendrils of his plants will reach down his arms toward whoever’s closest to him.  Also, he’s normally very gentle and his plants are all pretty flowering vines and dandelions and things, but when shit gets serious during a protest or on the street, everyone is reminded very quickly that tree roots can crack open mountains.

• Grantaire can animate shadows.  He’s one of the unlucky ones–anyone can take a look at him and know he’s a mutant, his eyes glassy black and his curls shifting as if in a low wind as the shadows shift on his skin.  He’s been told all his life that it’s ugly, that the way the shadows curl lively along his jaw and under his curls and beneath his brows.  It’s useful sometimes, being able to summon a shadow army to get between the police and the fleeing Amis, or being able to animate a sparring partner out of his own shadow, but Grantaire is always the first one to call Enjolras out on being naive.  Easy to talk about how humans will trust you when you look like an angel–less so when you deal in darkness.  Enjolras is perpetually furious with Grantaire’s cynicism, but he’s more furious with the world that created him, that convinced him that his mutation is something ugly and irredeemable.  He thinks (but never says) that Grantaire’s shadows are beautiful, like ink spilled over his skin, and once they finally work their shit out (Gavroche is the one who makes it happen, probably, because he’s a sneaky little shit), he discovers that Grantaire can let his shadows spill on Enjolras’ skin, leaving dark pools against the golden radiance.

• Gavroche and Eponine (and Azelma, wherever she is) have a modification of the same mutation, which is, according to Thenardier, the only reason he knows they’re all his children.  They’re all pyrokinetics, although at different levels–Gavroche is a manipulator, able to shape heat and fire into any shape as long as he has something to work with, and Azelma is a firestarter, but Eponine is the only one of them who can do both, just like their father.  They’re all easy to spot as mutants, too, with eyes that flicker red with flames when they catch the lights and core body temperatures well north of 200 F.  She’s terrified that somehow her power’s going to corrupt her, turn her into Thenardier, and Marius is the first person who shows nothing but pure delight at the sparks that crackle out of her hair and the flames that lick her fingers.  She can’t help but love him a little for that.

• As long as we’re on the subject, Patron-Minette.  Montparnasse’s mutation is 100% out of his control, he can’t turn it off or strengthen it at all.  When asked, he tells everyone his mutation is being beautiful.  In reality, he doesn’t really understand it, but it’s something to do with pheromones–just about everyone who sees him, who draws close enough to talk, is clobbered with a metaphorical two by four of attraction.  It’s very useful in the killer-for-hire business, and he’d never admit how uncomfortable it makes him sometimes.  Eponine, her skin always just this side of burning, is one of the only people unaffected, and he’d kill to keep her around.  Claquesous is a teleporter, and Babet is a metamorph, able to look like anyone he wants, and Gueulemer has superstrength.

• Marius isn’t a mutant.  He did get booted out of his grandfather’s home and disinherited for starting a fight in polite society about mutant rights, though, so Bahorel and Courfeyrac take to him immediately.  But he also had the misfortune to walk into a conversation about the concept of a mutant ‘cure’ and open with “Well, some mutants might need it” and that went over a treat.  He managed to redeem himself, though, although Enjolras eyed him with suspicion for a while.

• Cosette!  My sweet girl!  Has wings!  They’re not the crisp white wings of an angel or a dove, either–they’re broad and angled and bronze fletched with dark red, the wings of a hawk.  She normally hides them by binding them down under her clothes–her mother had wings too, she remembers vaguely, wide and soft and wheat-pale as a songbird’s, and it was Mama who taught her to bind them down, hide them, before she went away.  Marius saw her for the first time with shed feathers braided into her hair until she looked like a spirit from another world, and she’s strong enough to take him flying (bridal style, of course).

• Valjean’s not a mutant, but Javert is.  He’s also neck-deep in denial.

ELIOT SPENCER.  THE LOVE OF MY LIFE.

Okay, for those of you poor deprived souls who have NEVER HAD THE PLEASURE OF WATCHING LEVERAGE, here is my rapid-fire pitch: take a hitter, a hacker, a grifter, and a thief, add an ex-insurance agent who hunted them all at one point or another and has a guilt complex that is…well, very Catholic.  Mix with a helping-the-helpless motto, and point at the nearest righteous crusade.  It’s Robin Hood for the modern age.  It is the five-season-long, genuinely enjoyable, never grimdark but always sincere, emotionally wringing show you have looked for.  The characters are a delight, the writing is witty and soulful and real, the women are treated excellently, they have racial diversity, every episode is a whole different flavor of wonderfully wicked glee, and it’s obvious in every moment that everyone involved loved working on it.  The found family feelings spill off the screen.  Here is a pitch, here is a pitch, also here, here is MY pitch, there’s another here, here, here’s a spoilery but super detailed one, here, here, and I could find more BUT THIS IS A LOT ALREADY.  It’s on Netflix, go forth.

Eliot, my hitter darling, I love him so much.  

Okay, like, let’s talk about how devoted he is to the Leverage crew.  Eliot is one of the ones who, quite frankly, does A-OK solo.  He doesn’t need Sophie there to grift, he can do it, he can steal stuff even if he’s not as expert as Parker, having Hardison around is helpful but not mandatory, and, as we see when Nate’s taken out of play in the Zanzibar Marketplace Job, Eliot’s a good enough tactician to wing it successfully.  Like.  He’s fine on his own, maybe even more fine than Parker or Hardison, who are a little hit or miss on the others’ fields of expertise.  He’s there because these are his people and he is going to take care of them.  It’s all about taking care of his people.  And I think the thing about Eliot is that that’s always been a part of him, one he’s had to throttle into nothingness for years.  The mercenary life doesn’t lend itself to emotional connections, and for Eliot, who–even if he’s gruff and irritable about it–loves his people with his whole self, that must have been a very lonely life.  Trust no one, because they might be hired to kill you tomorrow.  Love no one, because they might sell you out to the highest bidder.  Be alone, be safe, keep everyone more than arm’s length away and watch for the glint of a knife or the press of a gun.  Touch nothing but the object of the mission, let nothing touch you.  

And then…and then he meets the Leverage crew–only, they’re not the Leverage crew yet, they’re four people hired for a job.  Four, Eliot has to admit, brilliant people, even if they’re all their own unique flavor of bonkers.  And then one of them’s holding him at gunpoint, and then a building is blowing up and he’s pushing them ahead of him out of a building, and let me ask you something.  Do you think he knew, then?  With the fire at his back and his hand in Hardison’s shirt as he dragged him to his feet?  Do you think he had a moment of clarity, running out of that building, or waking up in the hospital, where he knew that his carefully constructed walls–cold and hard and strong as diamond, be alone, be safe–were already down?  

I do.  I think he sat there, handcuffed to a chair with ink on his fingers and Nathan motherfucking Ford out cold in the bed beside him, and wondered when it happened.  Because he pushed Parker ahead of him–Parker, who had pointed a gun at him and lived anyway–and he dragged Hardison along and he made sure Nate was outside.  And it wasn’t a job, he can’t tell himself that, because he wasn’t getting paid.  He just…had a moment of weakness, he tells himself.  He never believed in collateral damage, it’s sloppy, it’s messy, so he avoided it.  He might still need them to get his paycheck from Dubenich.  It’s okay, he’s fine.

I think he might have convinced himself of that right up until they each get a check pressed into their hands by Hardison, a huge check, a go legit and buy an island check.  And then…and then they walk away and for the first time in a lot of years, Eliot thinks I don’t want to go.  And for the first time in a lot of years, he realizes that maybe he doesn’t have to go, and he comes back.  From the very beginning, he comes back, because he’s been a hitter and a hunter and a killer for so, so long, and maybe this is a chance to be a protector instead.  Maybe this is a chance to reach back in time a little and find some scrap of that kid with a flag on his shoulder, who believed in what he was doing.

Maybe this is a chance to have a family.

LAURENS, your timing is a dream, I just finished the first part of that.  It’s going to be a longer thing, because of course it is, and I’m going to post it piecemeal under the tag “Stranger Labyrinth AU” because if people can portmanteau character names into increasingly worrying sexual diseases, I can do that.

It was the girl’s smile that drew Nancy’s eye, the first time.  There was something about it, something off-kilter and a little familiar—it was the smile of someone laughing at a joke no one else understood.  Harder than pure humor, somehow, as if looking out at the world and saying you poor oblivious bastards all the while.

There were days where Nancy lived that smile.  She hadn’t gone a day without seeing it on a face since she was in high school.  Her brother had it, sometimes, her boyfriend, often, she could feel it curve her lips every time someone suggested a horror movie. They sort of lost their thrill, when you’d lived one.

So when she saw the girl sitting alone at a table in the quad, long dark hair swinging loose and her lovely face turned up toward the sun, Nancy walked over.

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ALWAYS.

Okay so we’re going to talk AU where the Enterprise crew goes rogue.  Now, here’s the thing, the Federation just kind of wants to make friends with everyone.  They have a habit of going out, fighting wars, and then making friends with their erstwhile mortal enemies—the Klingons, the Romulans, the Cardassians, even the Borg (although admittedly only Seven of Nine and the Borgettes), and that’s just what I can think of off the top of my head.  The Federation isn’t perfect, but fundamentally they just want to hold hands with aliens and poke spatial anomalies with a big stick and build wildly implausible and unsafe technology and hit big red buttons to see what happens.  That sort of thing…just doesn’t really lend itself to piratical behavior within the Federation itself.  You get smugglers, naturally, and space pirates attacking the Federation, and even your odd freedom fighter/rebel corps (I’m thinking the Maquis from Voyager, although, hell, they end up part of a Starfleet crew too) but even in the AOS (and we’re doing AOS because I just saw Beyond again), with Admiral Marcus kicking around, I can’t really see the Enterprise crew going properly pirate.

(I mean, I guess they kind of do, several times in TOS, but only in the ultra-technical Mark Watney-esque sense of space piracy of “we’re taking the ship that’s not ours without permission.”  And they always do it to save everybody and let’s be real, it’s hard to punish the people who saved the Federation, it would be a bit hypocritical to go “thanks for the save, glad not to be dead, time for your court martial”.)

That being said, obviously now the solution is to figure out under what circumstances they WOULD go full pirate.  And in the AOS I’m going to say that the way that would happen would be if Admiral Marcus had a little more success with the whole Section 31 thing.  

So, let’s suppose that he did, and Marcus might have died with the Vengeance but Section 31 sort of slowly took over Starfleet, as these things tend to do, and the Enterprise is out on their five-year mission so they don’t realize anything’s wrong because they’re pretty far out into uncharted space and even subspace signals get weird after that kind of distance.

And then the Enterprise comes home, cruises into spacedock, and the crew is dropped into a Terran Starfleet that…they don’t recognize anymore. Things are stiff with protocol, there are massively lethal torpedoes being integrated into the new ships, half the science complexes have been annexed by weapons research, McCoy’s highly alarmed by the sort of questions he’s being asked about the new species he has records of, and the Security officers are being issued some very large phaser rifles.  Let me tell you a thing: Jim and the bridge crew ain’t pleased with this development.

Between Spock, Jim, and Chekov, they hack into the ‘Fleet database and discover the plans for the next mission of the starship Enterprise.  And their response is “Nope.”  The Enterprise crew is loyal unto death to their captain—hell, he died for them already, they’re not in a rush to forget that—so when he summons them quietly to an out-of-the-way location and tells them that Starfleet is planning to start a war, they believe him.  And when he asks “Please help me stop this” they agree, readily and gladly.

And then they steal a ship.  They steal their ship, because when Captain James Tiberius Kirk leads his own crew onto his own ship, no one thinks to stop them, until Scotty’s dismantling the tracker they slipped into Engineering and Sulu’s punching it and the Enterprise is soaring away.

And then…well.  I suppose then they have a war to stop and a Federation to evade and a Starfleet to fix.  They refuse to take off their uniforms, even after the fourth time they’re accosted by another ‘Fleet ship and barely escape alive—they are Starfleet, the real Starfleet, and they will prove it.  They’re wanted criminals, according to the Federation, run rampant under the command of a lunatic captain.  Every scrap of incriminating information about Jim Kirk is dragged out of the mothballs and splashed across every news source in the quadrant—did you know he was a repeat offender in Iowa?  Did you know he had a record of violence and aggression?  Did you know he destroyed property?  And once the Enterprise is really getting to be a problem, they crack open the classified files and there’s whole new surge of questions.  Did you know he was on Tarsus IV?  Did you know he admitted to murdering guards there?  Did you know that his psych eval afterward said he’d never really recover?  Did you know, did you know, did you know? 

The Federation, the point is, is officially on the hunt.

Unofficially, though…well.  They’ve escaped an awful lot of brigs and shiplocks—all though underhanded trickery and violence, their ex-guards are always quick to point out. See, they have the footage to prove it, look, the Enterprise crew is crafty and tricky and crazy and dangerous.  And there were problems with the lock, with the cuffs, with the shiplock, can’t the Federation keep their own people in good quality tech?  Naturally no one would help the Enterprise, they’re wanted criminals, they’re dangerous, they’re pirates.

That brig door has been broken for years.

They’re pirates with a weird habit of helping stranded ships and going on strict rations so they can share their food and figuring out ways to save whole cultures from plagues and negotiating treaties, though.  The worlds that are part of the Federation territory learn to fear their own ships, but the Enterprise…she’s their savior. The names of the crew are whispered among the people on the ground, Kirk and Uhura and Spock and McCoy and Chekov and Sulu and on and on and on. She’s always oddly well-stocked for a pirate ship, never really risks starvation.  Her dilithium chambers are always full—must be stealing from old wreckage and defeated enemies, of course.

The Federation’s upper echelons hunt the Enterprise down.

The Federation’s people love her.  They call her the Silver Lady, or the Lady of Starlight, or Lady Luck.  

And everywhere she lands, her crew says “We will fix this.  We will stop this.  This is not what Starfleet should be, we are what Starfleet should be, and we will make this better.”

BABE I will never tell you to take a hike about my original writing, I have real shit to get done and a bunch of older asks to answer, but I’m gonna do this instead, sorry.  I have many novels started and that’s one of the ones that gets an actual place where I’ll find it to work on, I love it very much.  Okay, so, *clears throat* let’s do this.

So.  First off, some backstory: an insane percentage of my stories are rooted in an original conversation with someone, somewhere, that goes “But it’s so stupid that this book/TV show/movie did this, because it would be so much better if they’d done that” (see also: Falls the Shadow, product of a Supernatural rage quit, Emrys Ascendant, product of a Merlin rage quit, and Polaris, product of a “please God I just want a F/F couple that lives” tirade).  This one was the product of a half-dozen episodes of Dominion in very short order (which I have yet to rage-quit, by the by, and love very much in its capacity as a ridiculous lovely garbage pile) and me turning to @twistedangelsays and going “But it would be so much better if there were two angelic factions openly, one that thought humanity was past redemption and one that believed that they were still duty-bound to love and protect us.”  And then I did kind of this weird magician trick and pulled a fully-formed universe and plot with main characters and ships out of thin air.

And thus Battalion (this novel) happened.

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