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That Seventies Swap	By : Ksennin Category: X-Men: (All Movies) > Crossovers Views: 2020 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I own neither American Hustle or X-Men, or any characters in the franchise. I make no money from publishing this work.

Chapter List
- 1-Prologue
- 2-1979
- 3-1978
- 4-1978
- 5-1978
- 6-1978
- 7-1979
- 8-1979
- 9-1979
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- 2
- 3
Ever since about six years back, mutants had been coming out of the woodwork. It’d been scary at first, knowing there were people who really did have claws and furs like the boogeyman, but after a while, Rosalyn decided they were just like the Negros or gays. A little funny, sure, but they wouldn’t bother you if you didn’t bother them. She already knew there were people who could bend spoons with their minds, talk to the dead, all kinds of stuff. Now there was someone who could control metal like a big junkyard magnet? Pah!
Besides, a mutant had saved the President. Health of Tricky Dick aside, how could you argue with that? So when Rosalyn heard there was a real-life mutant giving an exhibition of his superpower at the Dallas Center, she instantly made a date for her and Danny. Irving didn’t want to go—he was sure it was all flim-flam, smoke and mirrors, like he’d said about Uri Gellar. Sydney agreed with him, the little suck-up, so they went to the Dallas Center alone.
It was a big community center stadium. Rosalyn had taken Danny there to see races and dog shows. Now the field was filled with a number of tarp-covered mysteries, being checked on by crew members as the show geared up. All around her and Danny, people were taking their seats, buying snacks. It was a pretty liberal crowd, which Rosalyn didn’t take with—all those hippies and love-in sorts, thinking they were so high-minded for going to see a freakshow. She kept a firm hand on her wallet.
“Mommy, will the mutant be scary?” Danny asked.
Rosalyn patted him on the head. “No, honey. Mutants are just weird. Ever since I married your father, I’ve been used to weird. Now the Commies, them you’ve gotta worry about…”
The show started. First a man in a tweed suit came out to give a brief lecture on evolution, explaining for all the cheap seats what mutation was and how they were still people and yadda yadda, get on with it. After five endless minutes, he got done, and people must’ve felt the same way as Rosalyn, because they clapped. Then a guy in some funky union suit came out. He looked like a wrestler or something, but he explained to the microphone that he was Unus the Untouchable, and his mutant power was to project a forcefield that made him totally invincible.
The first tarp was pulled off. Underneath was a table filled with chair legs, baseball bats, crowbars, lead pipes. He asked for some help from the audience, big stout guys, and got a crowd of dock workers to come down. They all picked a weapon and took some tentative whacks at him, but their blows just bounced off his body like he was encased in Plexiglass. They really went at it then, for a good two minutes, but Unus just stood there with his arms folded like he couldn’t even feel it.
“They’re ringers,” Danny said. “Unus planted them in the crowd, they aren’t really hitting him, they’re pulling their punches.”
That boy had been spending way too much time with Irving.
The PA system crackled. “I sense some of you are unconvinced,” Unus said. “Further demonstrations will show you!”
The next table had a buzzsaw and a blowtorch. Assistants with welder’s masks took them to either side of Unus’s head, but he just yawned. A Black & Decker drill didn’t work either. Neither did the handgun, or the rifle. When they brought out the flamethrower, Rosalyn sensed a pattern at work. It reminded her of something that had always bugged her about the King Kong movie, at the end, when the guy had tried to make a show out of Kong. Yeah, a big ape was impressive at all—but, what, you were supposed to stare at the same thing for two hours?
“You wanna go?” she asked Danny.
“Nah!” Danny was leaning forward in his seat, watching them trying and failing to put a dent in Unus like every spark was Star Wars.
“Well, I need to use the bathroom, so you just stay here and don’t move, okay hon?”
“Yeah, Ma.”
(This was how parenting worked in the seventies.)
Clutching her purse tightly, Rosalyn walked up the steps to the top of the stadium, where the bathrooms were. She thought she saw a few mutants in the crowd too, muttering disagreeably about selling out to ‘the Man,’ but with people’s hair these days, who could tell? Finally she got to the bathroom; thanks to the low turn-out (no doubt due to people being a bunch of scaredy-cats about the M-word), there was no line. Thanking her good luck, Rosalyn flung herself through the door as if a line were going to form any moment.
She did her business, washed up, and checked her make-up in the mirror. Perfect, as always. Then she saw she had another reflection in the mirror beside hers. She looked over. She had another her as well.
There was a woman, standing right next to her, who looked just like her—blonde and cute and with a great rack. Rosalyn stared. It was her, every dimple, every inch, and she could think of only one thing to say: “You’re gorgeous!”
“I know,” said the other her. “You could stand to lose a few pounds, though.”
“What? We’re identical!”
“Keep telling yourself that.” And then the other her was pivoting on her heel, doing some weird yoga thing that resulted in her foot leaping up and somehow kicking Rosalyn in the back of the neck. Everything went fuzzy.
Okay, maybe they weren’t identical, because Rosalyn was just not that flexible, and God only knew she and Sydney had tried.
The next thing she knew, she was on the floor and the other her was taking off her clothes.
“Be gentle with me,” Rosalyn moaned.
The other her gave her a look. Now Rosalyn knew what it was like to be Irving. “Don’t make this weird.”
***
Raven remembered visiting the city with Charles. Remembered seeing that angelic little blonde girl who everyone loved, everyone paid attention to, who got everything she wanted. How could Raven not want to be her? So she had. She’d always wondered what had happened to that little girl.
Well, she hadn’t wanted to find out that badly, but she’d take it.
Raven checked ‘her’ ticket as she left the bathroom, memorizing the seat number before hurriedly tucking it away. Her new clothes were a bit loose on her—not a bad thing, really. Despite her reflexive sarcasm to the human, she looked good in a Marilyn Monroe kind of way. If she still had her powers, Raven would even try that look. But ever since she’d been hit by that ray, she’d been stuck in this skin—comfortable as it was, it wasn’t hers. Hers was the magnificent blue dragon-scales that she could shed to be anyone in the world, not—a coincidence.
Raven found the other hers seat--Rosalyn Rosenfeld, according to her wallet. There was a little boy there, clearly the woman’s son. Christ, she hated kids. Why couldn’t this woman be on a date? Men she could handle.
“Hey kiddo,” she greeted the kid, “ready to go?”
“Yeah, they’re just stabbing him now. It’s kinda gotten old.”
Raven nodded, directing a mental sneer at Unus. Race traitor. Dancing monkey. She could’ve been rich and famous selling out to humans too. If they paid people to imitate people’s voices, then…
“Hey, let’s play a game,” she told the kid. “I bet you can’t get us home with no help from Mommy.”
“Yes I can!” he replied indignantly.
“Prove it.”
***
Rosalyn came to on the toilet, dressed in clothes that were far too tight-fitting for a decent woman like herself. She got up, rubbing her head, and left the stall to see a man in the ladies’ restroom.
“Raven,” he said—a big blond soldier boy with Eagle Scout posture, dressed conservatively in stone washed jeans and a denim jacket, a Western floral shirt underneath. He had his hands held up placatingly. “I don’t want to fight you. The Professor wants to give you your space. But we need to check out this ray you were hit with—we’re trying to help you.”
“The Professor? Who the fuck are you? Is that some rapist trucker lingo?”
The blond looked concerned. “I’m Alex, remember? We went to school together—we were in Cuba together…”
“I don’t know anything about that! You’ve got me confused with somebody else! Now get the fuck away from or I’ll—I’ll shoot you! I’m in the NRA! My husband’s Charlie Bronson’s nephew!”
Again, his brow furrowed. It seemed like a familiar expression. “Okay, do you really have amnesia or is this you trying to be a character? You know you can’t shift, right? You look just like you always do—except blonde, not blue.”
Rosalyn made the snap decision that ‘Alex’ was only going to get crazier from here on out. She made a run for the door. “Help! Rape! Rape!” She tried to whistle, but only blew spittle. Her whistle was in her purse, which that bitch with the beautiful face had taken.
Alex made a grab for her, but she chopped his hand away, kicked him in the shin, and made the door only to see another man standing watch. This one was more of a nerd—a NASA-looking guy in a brown corduroy suit, with coke-bottle glasses and a shave that could’ve been finished off with sandpaper. He moved fast as a card shark when she came out the door. Grabbed her by the wrists and barreled her back into the bathroom, where Alex took aim at the door with… his fist.
“Raven, I am so sorry for this,” the nerd said, “but we can’t indulge your lone-wolf pathology when the larger issue of mutantkind is at stake. I know you’ll take this personally, but maybe someday, you’ll see I have only your best interests—“
“I’m not Raven! Get the hell off me! Fire! Fire!” That was supposed to get people to come running and not rape, right? Wait, what kind of stupid people would run toward a fire? “Rape fire!”
The nerd clapped his hand over her mouth. “The injection,” he told Alex. “Hurry.”
Rosalyn raised her knee between the nerd’s legs; she did it at a very rapid speed.
He slumped against the wall as Alex was still prepping the syringe. Rosalyn broke for the door again and she would’ve made it this time, if a breeze hadn’t blown the door open, knocked Rosalyn back, plucked the syringe from Alex, and deposited it in Rosalyn’s backside.
Rosalyn had a quick glimpse of a platinum blond wearing goggles and an incredibly loud jacket before she passed out. The man caught her as well.
“I can understand wanting to talk to a chick like this as long as possible,” Peter Maximoff said. “But you should’ve just let me stick her in-between blinks. We could’ve been home by now.”
Hank angrily pulled her unconscious body from Peter’s arms. “If you’re going to be an X-Man, you have to learn to respect—“
“Gonna start the car now,” Peter told Alex. “Have the air conditioning ready when you get down there. Maybe snacks too. Chop-chop, slowpokes.”
“As long as we’re revising the plan,” Alex said, once they realized the gust from the door blowing open was him leaving, “I think you should’ve let me nuke him while he slept.”
***
Danny led her home accurately enough, and from there it was just simple infiltration. Luckily, whoever else lived in the house was out. Raven was able to quickly find ‘her’ bedroom, and in another stroke of luck, Rosalyn Rosenfeld kept a diary. Raven scanned through it quickly, similarly documenting all the family photos she could find, any letters left lying around, was even able to watch a reel of home movies. Very useful. She came to the conclusion that Rosalyn had a nice, comfortable life. She’d be able to lie low there for a while.
She didn’t credit the ‘X-Men’ with much intelligence. They’d waste a few days sweating Rosalyn, using kiddie gloves on her before figuring out it wasn’t really Mystique. By then, Raven would’ve grabbed enough money to start a new life and taken a train far away, to someplace she could scrounge up the technology to block out Cerebro, like Erik had. From there, she could see about rejoining the Brotherhood. She still didn’t know if she wanted to associate with Erik, even after all this time. Maybe Charles was right, and his brand of mutant rights did more harm than good…
Then Raven’s skimming got interested. She checked the date on the diary entry—a few months ago. It was already a helluva Dear Abby column before then—Rosalyn’s husband a con man whose partner in crime was a fake-British grafter he was sleeping with. Then, after the FBI got involved, she finally dumped the lummox and got together with, of all people, one of the mobsters she’d met during the FBI business.
Fine. Whatever. Gangsters needed love to, and Raven didn’t think her double had an overabundance of good sense. Date a mobster. Yeah. Why not? Only then she broke it off with him, because he was cheating on her too. Poor bitch. So she moved back in with the ex-husband, who by now had married the not-Brit and moved in together, so that was all three of them under the same roof.
And Irving had a heart attack. So that was him, needing to diet and exercise and not do any strenuous activity, and his ex-wife Rosalyn, and Sydney, the woman who Rosalyn had described kissing for an entire entry, writing about how drunk she was and how Sydney had taken advantage of her by flirting with her so outrageously in her hazy state.
Raven turned the page, feeling a little proud of her erstwhile twin. You had to be a little proud of someone that interesting—especially when they’d messed up their life even more than you had.
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That Seventies Swap