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1: 1830 —
The year is 1830 when Victor Creed Logan is born in a small cabin on the outskirts of the sprawling Howlett Estate. His first act outside the womb, even before his first wailing breath, is to kill his mother.
Eight years pass in a haze of fright and bruises and welts; his father never forgives him.
This morning Victor's called in from weeding the Howletts' flower beds — his father's responsibility, as groundskeeper, but Victor's job more often than not; his father prefers to spend the days drinking — and sits on his cot in the cabin while some doctor looks him over. His father stands by, frowning and reeking less like whiskey than usual. Victor knows this must be important. He was disappointed when his father introduced the man in the suit as a doctor; Victor was hoping he was some agent of John Howlett, here to reprimand his father for having Victor do all the work for none of the pay, ever since Victor was old enough to handle a pair of shears.
Victor is often disappointed.
"Well, son, you're perfectly healthy," Dr. O'Hara says, and lifts his hand as if to pat Victor's shoulder, only to lower it when Victor flinches. Dr. O'Hara glances at Victor's father, who shrugs. "Excuse me, um." Dr. O'Hara clears his throat, smiles at Victor. "Anyway, congratulations! You're a neutral! The best classification, if I do say so myself. Men like us, we don't have to worry about all that caregiver-little nonsense, we can focus all our energy on our jobs. Seems like you and your father have a good job here."
Victor frowns, tilts his head. He's being classified? But all Dr. O'Hara did was check his pupils and reflexes. He uncovered a mottling of bruises on Victor's back, and glanced at Victor's father, but seemed to immediately forget about them. "Aren't you gonna take my blood?" Victor asks, tentative. "I heard that's how classifying is done, 'cause —" He shrinks at his father's glare; Dr. O'Hara shifts as if in discomfort.
"Uh — that won't be necessary," Dr. O'Hara says, his smile slightly queasy. "Your father tells me you've shown no signs of regressing, or caregiving, and anyway, genetics has a lot to do with classifications. Your father's a neutral, your mother was —" He cuts off at Victor's wide-eyed flinch and Victor's father's deep scowl. "So the usual tests won't be necessary!" Dr. O'Hara finishes with false cheer. He picks his bag — which he never even opened — up off the floor and heads toward the door. "I'll be on my way now. Good day, Victor. Thomas, will you see me out?"
Increasingly baffled, Victor watches his father walk Dr. O'Hara out the door, then hurries to the window to watch his father press a handful of crumpled bills into Dr. O'Hara's hand.
"I'll say it again, because it bears repeating," Dr. O'Hara says, pocketing the bills, frowning at Victor's father. Victor hears even through the window; he has sensitive ears. The same is true for all of his senses. Somehow. "Even if there's been no sign, and genetics aside, there's still a chance —"
"No. His nails are disgusting enough. This is a chance I won't take," Victor's father says sharply. Victor flinches instinctively at the punishing tone; Dr. O'Hara steps back. "You got your money, now keep your end of the bargain. The pills."
Dr. O'Hara hesitates, but after a moment pulls a glass bottle from his pocket and places it slowly in Victor's father's palm. Victor's father grabs it. "Just in case," Dr. O'Hara cautions. "Only if you notice some sign of regression — but I wish you'd reconsider. The side effects can be severe, especially in children. I've seen —"
"Good day, O'Hara," Victor's father says dismissively, and turns away. Victor hurries back from the door, sitting back on his cot by the time his father comes through the door. "Victor," his father snarls; he says Victor's name like a disease, something hideous. "Why are you still sitting? Have you finished weeding the gardens, do you need more chores?"
"No, no, I — I'm sorry, Father, forgive me, I'm going now." Victor's quickly up and moving toward the door, respectfully skirting around his father — only to yelp when his father grabs him by the jaw.
"Not so fast," his father says. Victor stumbles back when he's released, but doesn't run; he hasn't been dismissed. His father pulls the bottle from his pocket and shakes a large white pill into his palm; holds it out to Victor. "Take this. Now!" his father snaps, when Victor hesitates. Victor takes it and swallows almost unthinkingly, choking briefly as it catches in his dry throat.
"Wuh — what is it?" he croaks, tears in his eyes.
"Just a supplement. To help with your growth," his father says, vaguely, and pockets the bottle again. "You'll take one every day from now on. You're too small for your age, the doctor told me so."
No, he didn't. But Victor nods and slips out of the cabin without another word, just glad to have gotten away without a beating.
2: 1840 —
Victor is ten years old when the leaves rot from green to brown and drop from their branches like old skins. He trudges around the estate with a pitchfork and wheelbarrow, cleaning them up. There's a throbbing bruise on his face, his only birthday gift; same as every year.
It's healing more quickly today, though. An hour ago Victor's left eye was swollen shut, and already the swelling has gone down. Like last month, when it only took him a week to heal a broken finger.
Thinking hard on this, working mindlessly, Victor doesn't notice the other boy until he's in front of the wheelbarrow.
"Hi!" the other boy greets brightly. Too brightly. He's bigger than Victor, plumper, with round cheeks and clear eyes and clean skin. He wears a tailored suit, his dark hair combed neatly back. "You've been out here for hours. I noticed you yesterday, too, and every day this week," the boy says. "Aren't you tired? Or thirsty? My nanny Rose made some lemonade for breakfast, would you like some? It's delicious," he adds, when Victor just stares at him.
Victor's bafflement quickly hardens into resentment. Hatred. James Howlett, whose birthday is celebrated every year without fail by an assembly of guests from far and wide, an extravagant feast and a mountain-heap of gifts. James Howlett, who's never hurt, or hungry, or cold. James Howlett, whose father playfully ruffles his hair and gazes at him adoringly.
James Howlett. He's bigger than Victor, but two years younger; Victor's hated him since the day he was born, watching and simmering from the cabin as the boy in the mansion was pampered and loved.
"No," Victor snarls, though the only breakfast he had was his morning pill. He imagines with sick pleasure the way James would squeal if Victor stabbed him through the chest with the pitchfork. James does this sometimes, comes down from his throne to offer Victor things; Victor hasn't been able to build the nerve to kill him yet, but hopes to someday.
"Oh." James falters, but recovers quickly, smile returning. "Maybe later, then," he says kindly. "But surely you'd like to take a break? I was just going down to the river to skip stones, do you want to come?"
Victor takes a breath to decline, viciously, but reconsiders. Maybe, just maybe, if his luck turns completely around, James will slip into the water and drown, and Victor will get to watch. Smiling thinly at the thought, Victor says, "Okay."
The river is nearby, and nothing new. Victor comes here to sit sullenly sometimes, and does so now, watching as James carefully gathers a handful of small stones from around the boulder Victor likes to use as a chair. James babbles all the while, his grating voice ruining the usually calming sounds of the gently flowing river.
"Oh yeah, and I was just classified yesterday!" he says, after he's bored Victor to irritation with a story about his dog Callie eating a cake off the dining table. "I'm a caregiver! I think I knew I would be, I've always loved children and littles, and my father's a caregiver, you know. He's very proud, though he admitted he was hoping I'd be a little. Rose, too." James laughs. "They just want to baby me forever, I guess."
He says this like it's a bad thing. Victor turns to glare at the water; if James doesn't fall in, maybe Victor could give him a push. Just a small one.
"What's your classification, by the way?" James asks. "I keep meaning to ask, but I never have, I'm sorry." When Victor stays silent, fuming, James coaxes, "Come on, you're older than me, you must've been classified."
"I'm a neutral," Victor says bitterly. "Like my father."
"Your father." James clicks his tongue. "I've noticed you do most of your father's duties. I hardly ever see him tending the grounds. Why is that?"
Victor just shrugs, wraps his arms around his knees. His father's probably unconscious by now, halfway through the whiskey bottle Victor saw him open this morning.
"And there's another bruise on your cheek," James continues. Victor doesn't like the edge of exasperation in James' tone. And suspicion. "What happened this time?"
Another shrug. "Must've fell," Victor says blandly, same as every time James asks. Why James keeps asking, Victor doesn't know.
"Right," James huffs. "Victor, I could help you if you told me the truth. If you're being mistreated —"
"I'm not!" Victor snaps, whirling on James with a low growl shoving up his throat, like the desperate animals that end up in his father's traps, that he has to dispose of. He cuts the growl off at James' wide-eyed look, sniffs and turns back to the water.
"Mistreatment" would imply that he deserves better.
He half expects James to run home to his adoring father and doting nanny and delicious lemonade. Instead, James comes to sit beside Victor on the boulder, slow and without touching Victor. Careful.
"Here," James says gently, and offers Victor a rather perfect stone for skipping, smooth and flat. "It's the best one."
Victor takes it, clenches it in his fist, watches James warily.
"I growl sometimes," James says, sorting the other stones on the ground in front of them, his eyes on his hands. "And I hear things I shouldn't, far-away things. I smell things, too. Everything."
"Oh," Victor says, disarmed. Some days it seems like he can hear and smell the whole screaming, stinking world, it's maddening; and his hands…
One thing James never asks about is Victor's nails.
He would ask James if he heals quickly; if Victor thought James had ever been injured.
"I smell you," James says, glancing over at Victor, almost shyly. "You don't smell like a neutral."
Tensing, Victor sits up and tosses the stone with a practiced flick of his wrist. It skips four times, sinks. "Ha! See if you can beat that," Victor says, quickly excited. His hands shake sometimes, which makes stone-skipping more difficult, but not today.
"Okay!" James selects a stone from the pile and makes a few warm-up motions with his wrist, grinning. "My record's twelve skips, you know."
Victor laughs and shoves him. "Liar!"
3: 1980 —
The older Victor gets, the faster the world seems to move.
Everything after 1848 (Victor led Thomas to the cabin, gestured for him to enter first and stabbed him in the back with all ten claws; then blocked the door while James finished the job) was a blur of gunfire and adrenaline. There was always another war to fight in, another rebel cause to take up. It never mattered much to Victor what side of the battle they were on; it was James’ job to pick one that didn't offend his delicate caregiver sensibilities. James got strange sometimes, usually when he was drunk, maudlin and rambling about how they ought to settle down somewhere, and Victor ought to cut it out with the pills, but it was nothing an explosive, claws-out argument and a few days apart couldn't fix.
(“I could be a good caregiver, Vic, I know it, and you could be a good little. We could be happy together, really happy, the way we were meant to be happy. The way other caregivers and littles are happy. There's gotta be more to life than just whiskey and war and killing! Don't you want that? Finally, some fucking peace?”
“James, for the last goddamn time — I. Am not. A little! Get it through your thick fucking skull. And open your eyes. You're dumber than you look if you think there's any peace to be had in this world.”)
They had a good thing going, and if sometimes Victor slipped, if he ended up laying his head in James' lap or crawling into James’ bed at night; or throwing up and trembling too terribly to function, needing to be taken care of for a day — well. What's a little weakness between brothers?
Until Team X. Victor's been on his own since then; he tries not to think too long about it.
Victor kills an American senator in a bar in Washington State, then hops a ship back to Genosha, where he tosses the senator's bloodied wallet onto Magneto's desk.
"Got 'im, boss," Victor says. He hopes to be dismissed quickly; this place is fucking eerie, all cold metal walls and echoing voices.
"I see. Well done, Sabretooth." Magneto barely glances at the wallet before he gestures elegantly for Victor to take it back. Victor shrugs and pockets it; Magneto's not unlike the other bosses Victor's had over the years. Powerful men prefer not to dirty their own uncallused hands.
That's not entirely fair, though. Magneto has something no other boss ever has: Victor's respect, loyalty that lasts beyond payday. Magneto's a deceptively delicate man, slim and unmuscular, gray-haired with a deeply-lined face, middle-aged, half Victor's age despite looking twice it — but he's the most powerful man Victor's ever met. Vicious, with plenty of blood on his hands. "Informants" are brought back here sometimes; their shrill, echoing screams are haunting even to Victor, when Magneto gets to them. And he offers purpose. Victor doesn't feel like some scummy grunt working for Magneto; he feels more important, at the first line of a revolution.
A mutant revolution, what a concept. The times, they are a-changing.
"Sabretooth," Magneto says, when Victor turns to leave. "One more thing, my friend."
"Oh, sure." Victor smiles with all his sharp teeth, turning back. "Who's the next fat cat on the list?"
"No, no, it's not that. Not yet." Magneto sits back in his chair, reaches into a desk drawer, and places a glass bottle on top of the desk. He says, when Victor frowns in confusion, "Come closer. Do you recognize this?"
Victor just stays where he is and sniffs. "Oh, shit," he says, the familiar scent filling his nose: slightly sour. Headspace suppressants. He lost a bottle the last time he stayed here, weeks ago, but he replaced them and forgot about it. "Uh. Those aren't mine, I've never seen anything like that before in my life," he tries. He'll get kicked out of the Brotherhood if Magneto finds out, he'll be so fucked —
"It's alright, there's no need for that," Magneto soothes. Victor realizes his claws have come unsheathed, and quickly retracts them. "I understand. I just wanted to commend you for your sacrifice."
"My —" Victor cuts off, spluttering. "What?" he says. "You aren't gonna send me packing?"
"Of course not, you're among my most valuable soldiers." Magneto stands and comes around the desk to clasp Victor's shoulder. Victor suppresses an instinctive flinch; an old weakness. "I understand," Magneto says again, meaningfully.
It takes Victor a second to catch the meaning, but he gapes when he does. "Fuck," he says, reeling. "No."
"I'm afraid so." Magneto chuckles. His hand on Victor's shoulder trembles slightly; Victor's noticed it before, but just attributed the trembling to Magneto's age. "It's the greatest of sacrifices, to be sure," he says with his crisp, speech-making voice. Victor finds himself rapt. "To go against one's own nature for the sake of one's people. To give up personal fulfillment. To find fulfillment, instead, in the service of the greater good. That is true selflessness."
Selfless. No one's ever called Victor that before. He thinks on this in the pause Magneto allows him, and on fulfillment.
Every day, every time he steps outside, he sees littles. Littles smiling; littles laughing. Littles being led by their caregivers' hands, or carried, or pushed in strollers. Little parks, little stores. Littles everywhere. These things have become more widespread in recent decades, as headspace suppressants have been all but phased out. They can only be purchased illegally these days, dark, back-alley type deals. Victor's had the same dealer for forty years, but he's old and sick now; soon Victor will have to find another. It won't be easy.
Seeing littles everywhere isn't easy, either; it's gotten more difficult since... Victor would only ever want that — a gentle hand, a warm voice, soft kisses pressed to his forehead — with one man. One caregiver.
But he's gone, now.
"Do you know," Magneto asks then, "why headspace suppressants were created? Aside from the obvious, of course."
Victor shrugs, blinks hard against the traitorous sting of tears. "Dunno, boss."
"It was during the late 1700s, for the American Revolutionary War," Magneto begins, releasing and stepping back from Victor. "With a third of the population little, the Americans' already outnumbered forces needed more men. So, headspace suppressants were developed and used as a way to allow littles to enlist, without risking them regressing on the battlefield. Which would be a liability, of course." His mouth quirks into a smile; less charming than usual, more unnerving, something about his eyes. Victor tenses.
"Makes sense," he says. All the wars he fought in, the guys in charge said no littles could enlist, but he was never questioned when he said he was a neutral. Used to be that he could get a bottle of headspace suppressants from any medic tent. Things are different now, stricter; part of the reason he agreed to sign up with Team X — James said it didn't smell right, but Victor pushed for it — was that he couldn't enlist with another army.
"That use continued up until a few decades ago. I'm sure you noticed the difference, in your line of work," Magneto says. "At that point, however, the practice was heavily protested, and in the present day headspace suppressants are banned in every country on Earth. It's remembered as a barbaric, even evil, form of abuse on behalf of the world's governments. But where there's a will." His unnerving smile widens. "Who won the Revolutionary War, Victor?"
"Uh. The Americans?" Victor inches back a step, the hair at the back of his neck prickling.
"Victory can only be achieved through great sacrifice." Magneto nods slowly. "Through complete abandonment of the self in service of the cause. That is how wars are won."
"Okay," Victor says. Magneto as a little; Victor's still reeling. "But —"
Magneto's smile drops; the air in the room seems to chill, the walls closing in. "We are at war, Sabretooth," he says lowly; Victor just keeps inching back. "We have been at war for years, for centuries," Magneto spits. "Since the first mutations, the first mutant brothers and sisters tortured to death in human laboratories, we have been at war. Many are blind to it, on both sides. My Brotherhood are some of the few who realize." He takes a breath, tilts his head, narrows his eyes at Victor. "You do realize, don't you, Sabretooth?"
Victor nods frantically. "Yeah, yeah. Of course, boss."
"Of course." Magneto softens, and his usual charming smile reclaims his mouth. Victor sighs with relief. "Now," Magneto says, sending the bottle of headspace suppressants to Victor with a twitch of his fingers; the cap is metal. "Take those, and the next time you need more, I want you to come to me. I'll take care of you, my friend."
"Th-thanks." Victor fumbles pocketing the bottle, struck dumb by Magneto's whiplash transition from cold menace to warm camaraderie. By warring fear and gratitude; Magneto tends to have this effect.
"Of course," Magneto says again, and nods toward the exit in gentle dismissal.
Glad for it, Victor all but sprints to the door — only to freeze when he passes Mystique in the doorway. If he's Magneto's soldier, Mystique is first lieutenant. She smiles thinly at Victor, her eerie yellow eyes boring acid-like through him, her face morphing to mimic his features for a split second, scales skittering like an insect's legs. A cold shudder rakes up his spine.
"Ah, my beautiful Mystique!" Magneto calls, a manic edge to his grin when he opens his arms for her. "Come, come, we have much to discuss!"
Victor doesn't want to hear it. He nearly trips over the bottom of his coat, racing out the door.