#like Shaw's plan was for the radiation to wipe out the humans so that the mutants could live as the primary species

[oldbooxie]

Can we talk about how secret invasion is literally x-men first class sixty years in the future but with no Nazis and with a few more aliens

[sebastianshaw]

Fic suggest: Black Queen Haven

((ooh, thanks Anon! I usually write haven post-possession and in current canon, but for this I decided to go with her still being under The Adversary’s influence, and still during the 90s. I think actually she was DEAD by this point in canon, actually, when Selene was trapped under the Hellfire Club but ehhhh. tagging @badmusesdoitwell since there’s substantial Tessa in this, though you don’t have to read it!)

“You can’t be serious,” he’d told Tessa when she had first recommended Radha Dastoor, or “Haven” as she went by, for the rank of Black Queen. The woman was an ordinary member of the Hellfire Club, just another of the ridiculously elite civilian crowd who came for galas and balls and had no idea of its dark underside. She was a philanthropist, like so many others, and though she had taken on advocating for mutantkind, she was not one herself. According to Tessa though, there was more to her than met the eye. She had...mad goals, and power to match. She was no mutant, but Tessa claimed to have accessed government data that described power on an incredible scale, a devoted cult following, great resources yes...but devoted purely to chaos, to devastation and destruction for its own sake, all the name of bringing about the Mahapralaya, some kind of Hindu apocalypse. It was not the sort of thing the Hellfire Club trafficked in, and not something he wanted to tie them to. Sure, she had power, but if she was only interested in wielding it for religious zealotry, she had no place here. “It can be profited from,” Tessa urged him, “The “natural” disasters, the riots and revolts incited, the famine...all these things, Shaw Industries can find a market in. You know this.” “I can profit from her acts without having to have anything to do with her.” “Emma has defected. Madelyne has left. Selene is trapped beneath the basement of the Club. We have a great many empty seats, and I think it would be wise to fill one with someone of your selection, who will not be a threat to you, rather than wait for someone it is to fill it herself.” “If she is not a threat, she’s not worthy to be here.” “Haven...is a threat. Just simply not to you. Your destruction...would have no benefit to her cause. She has power enough to fill the seat and be safe from anyone who would take it, and thus keeps it occupied from anyone who would use it against you.” Shaw furrowed his brow, exhaled through his nose, and thought on it. Finally, he agreed. *** Tessa’s motives had been twofold. Firstly, she indeed didn’t want Sebastian killed by one of his cohorts, as much as he might at times deserve it. If Sebastian was no longer head of the Hellfire Club, then she could no longer influence it through him. Speaking of influence, that was the second reason for her recommendation. Xavier had contacted her about Haven, made this suggestion. His own confrontation with her had gone...poorly....but he said he had sensed a second mind within her, and he wished for Tessa to investigate. And, perhaps, Tessa hoped, she could stop this woman, save her, as she had been unable to stop or save Jean, another woman of great power from the influence of a being beyond herself. Haven herself had taken some convincing, some coaxing, just as Sebastian had. She’d been shocked at first to find out there was something more to the Hellfire Club than a mere social group, but she had accepted the surprise with grace, conceding that perhaps she should have guessed that the super-rich among the super-rich would form such cabals. Cabals that, she had said with the most polite of phrasing, she simply wasn’t interested in. Her actions were based not in the desire for personal power or gain, but in holiness, goodness, compassion. And she believed it, Tessa could tell. Even as the woman spoke of the massacres to come, she radiated both sorrow and divinity, the purity of her belief making it all the more tragic. She hated what she was doing yet she truly, Tessa didn’t need to be psychic to see, was compelled to. Tessa did most of the talking. Shaw was scornful of religious at the best of times, and she knew that Haven’s strange angelic, soft-spoken zealotry engendered nothing but scoffs and sneers from him, which hardly would persuade her. Tessa also made no use of telepathy, not just yet---Xavier had spooked her when she’d been aware of him creeping in, and Tessa knew she was no Xavier. No, she manipulated in a different way. She appealed to logic, made the calculations of what would appeal rationally to Haven, rather than pulling at her heartstrings. But if she had done that, if she could have---she knew it would have worked. After all her data on the woman’s deeds, she was unprepared for how...kind she was. Even her conversation was gentle, and she looked to Tessa with eyes of...it was as though she were being held by that gaze, embraced, as though Haven had never met her but loved her nonetheless. She’d looked the same way at Sebastian, though Tessa doubted he saw it. It sometimes seemed that just as Sebastian was insensitive to tender feelings himself, he was just as insensitive to seeing them in others. But Tessa...was taken aback by the woman, and she continued to be taken aback by her. Over her years in Shaw’s service, Tessa had become used to being ignored at best, derided at worst. Not by Sebastian himself---she was a valuable asset to him and he treated her as such---but by the others of the Hellfire Club, who were her primary, perhaps only, source of human contact. They either looked past her entirely, or leered at her when she was in her lingerie costume, or derided her because they could not directly attack Shaw without consequence. This was good. It was what she wanted, what suited her mission, to be considered invisible, beneath notice, beneath ever being seen as a threat, as nothing more than Shaw’s lap dog or ornament, a mere secretary or eye-candy, usually both. Haven wasn’t like that. She smiled every time she saw Tessa, asked her how she was, and sounded like she MEANT it. It wasn’t just a social nicety. It made Tessa feel...human special, even if Haven said the same to Shaw, to everyone. Because she really did mean it for everyone. She tried to find out Tessa’s interests, bring her small gifts, connect with her...it, it was hard to fend off. She’d dealt with would-be gal pals from the maids and would-be suitors here and there, but everyone eventually understood---Tessa was cold. Tessa was a robot. Tessa wasn’t interested. Tessa wasn’t real. Haven...she didn’t press. She didn’t try to CHANGE Tessa or try to make her feel something, yet at the same time treated her so... It didn’t matter. The death toll on Haven’s hands had continued to mount. The reports had been true, and now she had the resources of the Hellfire Club at her disposal. It was up to Tessa to begin doing what Xavier what could not. It was up to her to free this woman...or, if it came to it, end her. *** Haven made Shaw uneasy. Tessa had been right, her simpering philanthropic principles and soft-minded religious zealotry were ridiculous to him in equal measure, but neither was disturbing to him. Indeed, the former was more immoral to him than the latter, but it was nothing unusual. Many people swallowed the societal norm that the haves should help the have-nots with hand-outs, and Haven was clearly not the sort to think for herself---hence the religious zealotry---it was something he’d seen countless times before in countless other fools. And her powers, whatever their source...those were unusual, but as much as she was wasting them, Tessa was right, they at least kept others at bay. No, this wasn’t what got under his skin. Nor that fact she cared for the sick and orphaned in the same day as wiping out millions of the same and seemed equally sincere in both, nor knowing she could wipe him out of existence if she so chose just by thinking about it, nor the way her eyes were sometimes solid black like volcanic glass. No, her eyes bothered him for a different reason. It was when they were normal, when they were plain big brown eyes that looked at him like...like...like she felt sorry for him. The softness in them, the sympathy, the gentle way she spoke when she refuted any attempt he made at engaging her in rationality. It was infuriating, provoking. It made him want to push harder, and he didn’t like that---not because Shaw had any qualms doing it, but because he didn’t like the feeling he was being influenced towards ANYTHING, even something he’d have done anyway. He’d walked in on her crying once and been  struck by the shocking urge to hit her. The shocking part wasn’t the  violence in mind, but the fact he cared enough to think of it, that he  wanted her to stop crying, that he did not want her to cry, to be  distressed, that it distressed him, and his only understanding of what  to do to make her cease was that violence. And that unnerved him too, that he had given a damn, enough to want to hurt her. He hadn’t. But he’d wanted to.   He wanted to hurt her a lot, to force her to fight back. She was a gentle thing, for all her power, and someone else was going to do it sooner or later, someone who MEANT it, someone who knew what she was doing with that power and planned to stop her PERMANENTLY. Better she learn NOW, since she should have long ago, against someone who WANTED her to do it. Who WANTED her to fight back. Of course, if she did, well...given what her powers did, that’d be the end of him, so he didn’t. But he wanted to. To see those soft eyes turn to hard obsidian and those open palms curve into claws that would tear his own from their sockets. But he didn’t. One day, someone else would make her. And that was not, he reminded himself, his business or his responsibility. If she wished to be weak despite all the power she possessed, she deserved what she got, it was not his problem. Not his problem. Still, his growing irritation with her lack of self-preservation and his disgust with her...expressions at him...began to color their interactions. Until one day, she had to asked, gentle and polite as ever, “Have I offended you, Mr. Shaw?” Of course she had. But he wasn’t exactly sure how to express that without sounding like a lunatic. “I’m not offended, Ms. Dastoor. I simply find you unbearably insipid. That’s all.” And she smiled at him. That sweet, damnable smile. And he’d lost it. He’d told her in no uncertain terms---and no uncertain volume--what he thought of her, why he thought, and what he’d like to do to her for it, what he’d like for HER to do, what--- She’d kept smiling, even as her eyes got sadder and sadder as he spoke, and she reached out and touched him, holding the side of his face, "There’s a hole in you,” she said, like a deathbed nurse giving comfort, “A hollow, with no opening. No light gets in. Any bit of brightness someone sends your  way goes out and you can’t perceive it or produce any of your own to  return it. I don’t know if you were hurt or you are made this way but  it’s as real a defect as if you had a missing  limb. And like a missing  limb, it does not cause you pain but it impedes you. And just as  physical deformities make others wince to gaze upon, so too am I in  pain when I feel this from you, when I see you suffering without knowing you are suffering.   Do you think I do not feel your crushing void?” He felt it, in that moment, a black hole that sucked out any possible response, any possible THOUGHT for response. But it wasn’t from inside him. It was coming from her. He told Tessa the next day to get rid of her.