MYSTIQUE

Charles Xavier died in Avengers vs. X-Men, killed by his own first student, and his affairs were settled the way he arranged everything: on a delay, by hologram. In Uncanny X-Men Vol. 3 #23 (2014), by Brian Michael Bendis, attorney Jennifer Walters — She-Hulk — gathers the feuding X-Men factions at the Jean Grey School for the reading of the Last Will and Testament of Charles Xavier. The projection appears, thanks them for their regard, and then mentions, almost as an administrative footnote, that he was married. To Raven Darkhölme.

No wedding was ever shown, before or since: no ceremony, no date, no witness list, and no prior storyline in which the founder of the X-Men and the Brotherhood's most committed shapeshifter behaved like spouses. The room reacts the way the readership did — Firestar, in the follow-up issue, is still stuck on the same sentence: Charles Xavier and Mystique are married? The will then withholds its remaining business until the X-Men deal with Matthew Malloy, the catastrophically powerful mutant Xavier had been secretly suppressing since boyhood, and the marriage is simply left standing there, unexplained, while everyone goes to work.

Later writers walked straight past it. When the Krakoan era finally confirmed on the page that Mystique's true spouse was Destiny, commentators noted the Xavier marriage had been left untouched ever since Bendis planted it — a legal marriage to the world's most famous telepath, contracted at some unrecorded point by a woman who can be anyone, and never once used by her as leverage, inheritance, or alibi. For a character who weaponises every identity she owns, the one she never spent may be the strangest document in her file.