FORGE

When Forge took command of the government's mutant team X-Factor, Washington handed him two recruits he had never requested: the shapeshifter Mystique and the feral killer Sabretooth, pressed into service in place of prison sentences. From X-Factor Vol. 1 #114 (1995) onward, Mystique served as a conscript, and to keep the world's most accomplished infiltrator manageable she was fitted with a restraining device that prevented her from holding the shape of any X-Man or X-Factor member for longer than thirty seconds at a stretch.

It was not even their first collision of fates. Years earlier, on Muir Island, the precognitive Destiny had died with a vision of Forge and Mystique in love on her lips — and Mystique, who blamed Forge for her dearest friend's death, had carried that prophecy like an insult. The conscripted terrorist spent her X-Factor tenure flirting with her jailer partly as strategy, partly as sport, while Forge severed the team from the government handlers who had begun using it to hunt other mutants.

The turn came underground, in X-Factor Vol. 1 #132–134 (1997). Hunting for her kidnapped godson Trevor, Mystique dropped the performance and showed Forge raw, unstrategic grief — and the man who had built her restraints realized he had fallen for the prisoner inside them. Destiny's dying vision had simply been early. The romance never got a clean run: Sabretooth betrayed the team and savaged it, and Mystique slipped away into the wind while Forge lay recuperating from his wounds, leaving Marvel's most literal workplace romance exactly where it began — unresolved.