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“This is never going to happen, dear. But you're welcome to it.”
“But you haven't even tried these on?!” Megan points at the skis laying at her feet, sitting on the fluffy white. Of course she has pink ones and Azazel has red and black, but after agreeing to have fun in snow, which he hates, he then won't actually learn to ski. Behind her, people in puffy, brightly lit clothes go marching up and down the slopes. None are particularly pleased to be staying in the same lodge with her and Azazel, but they have plenty to distract them.
“Because it's never going to happen. Everyone I've ever seen skiing looks foolish.”
“But you can make anything look cool, Az.”
A blue iris slides sideways to regard her from a corner of a eye. Of course he's smoking, and of course he is still wearing his signature suit. “Da, and I'm going to make skiing look cool by not doing it.”
“Aww.” Megan's face falls and her wings dull, striking at the black heart of the Black Man.
“Aaah…Fine, but you keep the skis. If I'm going to do any sport on this white curse you call snow, it's going to be snowboarding, and it's going to be down Everest.”
As happens when one is confronted with absurdity too great to handle, Megan's eyes close on her without her permission, but she grins at the same time, because she could expect nothing less.
“You don't even know how to snowboard!”
“If normies can do it, so can I.”
Okay, but no one can teach her husband anything, or not for long. When he gets a hold of an instructor, an Olympic level teacher with a price tag to match, he stands and smirks as the man explains the principles, pointing out that his sport is much more difficult and taxing than skiing, and one ought to be relatively young. Megan knows for a fact that Azazel is ransacking the man's brain for the secrets of snowboarding. Edges, balance, et cetera. Simple in theory, difficult in practice.
But apart from being superhumanly strong and athletic, Azazel has a secret weapon that is not secret at all - his tail. It keeps his balance for him at all times, and it will be invaluable on the slopes. Of course Megan has to sacrifice her learning time if she wants to watch him, but he tells her to get on, he's going to train in a secret facility where no one can see him, then show up a day later when he's a master. Such is one's life if one chooses to love a supervillain.
So Megan practices her skiing, forming friendships on the slopes, which make up a little for her husband's absence. It's fun to whoosh down the mountain, even fun to fall, and she doesn't fall too badly, cause, you know, she can fly and teleport. Sitting on a chair lift is great, especially when Azazel returns for a ‘break’ and takes them with her, his feet strapped into an epic beetle black and fire red board, his arm around her shoulders.
“How's it going?” he asks.
“Great. I'm not going to be the best, but I don't want to be. You?”
“I am going to be the best.”
“Hahaha! Of course, silly.”
The other people taking the lift grimace and bite their lips. At the top Azazel disappears once again, leaving Megan to fiddle around, zooming around on her twin pieces of wood and fibreglass.
⛷️✨🏂
It's raining on Mount Everest the first day they're there, rain full of ice. The weather forecast promises that it will remove itself forthwith, but the couple are more interested in the fact that they're not the only mutants, not the only superhumans flailing around the world's tallest mountain in some sort of demented idea of a winter holiday. Wolverine is here, with skis. Loki is here, with a snowboard. Captain America is here, with skis. Many others are here, with snowboards or skis, depending on what rank of the Tree of Douchebaggery they occupy. Azazel smirks at them all, the same smirk he wears most of the rest of the time, a smirk that says he's plotting evil.
“Did the guys set up a race or what?” asks Megan, where she stands with a bunch of other women, who are all watching their men silently size up the competition.
“No. They all had the same idea.” says Black Widow, who is here with the Silver Surfer.
So near and so huge as to crush the breath in the throat from awe alone, stands the great mountain, nothing but a mass of rock and ice, littered with the bodies of people drawn by the siren song of glory. Unlike for the humans, and even most superhumans, it holds little fear for Megan, besides, Azazel can always teleport away should the mountain attempt to assassinate him.
So, upon discovering that they weren't such stunning and brave geniuses as they thought they were, the men duly set up a race, from the summit of Everest to the bottom. Everyone is secretly immensely glad for the presence of not only Azazel, but also his estranged son, Nightcrawler. That means no one actually has to climb the rocky beast, although most people attempt to pretend that are going to, before slipping off to make a deal with their chosen teleporter. By some sort of magnificent coincidence they all arrive at the summit within the space of ten minutes, about half of them with their souls still in their possession. Naturally, most of the women also make this mysteriously quick trip, but not Megan, because Azazel says it's called the Death Zone for a reason.
Really he's worried about all the men present.
“Now, mortals, shall we begin?” says Loki, adjusting the fit of his horned helmet before bending down to do the same with his snowboard, only to ‘accidentally’ spear Hawkeye in the backside.
“Who are you calling mortal, mortal. I'm seven times older than you.” hisses Azazel.
“You stole my chicken-killer, you big red bitch. That's mortal behaviour.”
“Geh zum Teufel.” sighs Kurt, pinching the bridge of his nose.
Steve buckles and rebuckles his helmet. “There's immortal and then there's immortal. If I need to, I will bring you both down.” he shoots a glance at Loki. “Again.”
“Now, now.” Tony licks his lips, and grins, his eyes flicking between Sumerian, Asgardian, and American. “This rock is crowded as all hell. How about we let the old men go first? Their joints need time to warm up.”
As a result, Tony is thrown from the top of Everest, which is just what he wanted. Manly whoops and yells and laughter swoops past the abysmal queue of rapidly dying climbers waiting to crest the ridge to the peak, the strangest figures imaginable surfing or skiing down the five and a half miles of the mountain’s face.
Of course, with villains as part of the fun times, you're going to get villainous behaviour. Loki is most concerned with looking as elegant and androgynous as possible, in contrast to his brother, meaning he hasn't his guard up, meaning that when Azazel appears beside him, manifesting out of a wave of powder, he takes just that half an instant too long to respond. An arm slams into his stomach, knocking his breath from him and fatally destabilizing his balance. He begins falling horned head over fancy heels while his fellow trickster zooms off to play dirty somewhere else.
Nightcrawler, further down the face of the mountain and doing extremely well thanks to his possession of a tail, is ten times more on edge then he would be ordinarily. That's just how he has to play it in the presence of his father, so when a flash of red intersects the vision in his left eye, he takes no chances and teleports away, off Everest completely. But Azazel was not coming for him, and what he saw was a piece of jacket belonging to a corpse lying buried in the snow.
Iron Man is doing fabulously, of course he is, wearing a special suit as he is, and riding a special high tech board of his own design.
“I'm the best. Yes I am.” He slurs over and over, as a mantra.
He blasts apart obstacles in his way, like rocks and tents, and halfway down the mountain he does a flip over a crevice in a glacier. Which is when Azazel emerges out of nowhere, grabbing hold of his board and adding his own weight and momentum to the flip, throwing his rival into the crevice on the downswing. Landing on the ice he carries on boarding downwards, leaning left and right as a black and oily cloud rises out of the crack in the glacier behind him.
By these means and by sheer skill and determination, as well as the murderous intent of the mountain, Azazel arrives first at base camp, raising his arms in triumph and accepting the love and admiration of all but especially of his wife, who flutters over too fast and knocks him down. Luckily he simply teleports a little to the right, where a field of stones are not a problem. He's still only wearing his regular suit.
“This mountain has become too commercial," he says. “Let's go elsewhere.”
🏂✨⛷️
‘Elsewhere’ proves to be the second tallest mountain in the world, and also the most dangerous, orders of magnitude more dangerous than Everest, thanks to its near vertical sides, hanging seracs, and remoteness. K2, the Savage Mountain.
“Good, looks like there's no one annoying here.” Azazel, with the ease of someone who's had a thousand year’s worth of practice, makes sure his feet are clamped into his board then looks up at the triangular monolith, straight-edged as a child's drawing of a mountain, but drawn in the colours of pure terror. The stench of rot drifts over the silent plain below it, coming from a cairn made from the body parts of the people K2 killed, and it kills on the regular, for there is no mountain the true mountaineer is more desirous of conquering.
“Want to see the view from up there? The other one was so ridiculously crowded.” he says, pointing at the summit and looking at Megan, who is still adorably dressed in skis, which have been snapped in two since she flew into him. Thank God she's much better at aiming these days.
She nods, thoughts of acclimatization irrelevant.
So more than eight and a half thousand metres they travel in an instant, appearing on the roof of the world, bypassing the exhausting vertical climb and the terrible bottleneck where so many die. The view from up there is eerie, other colossal peaks suddenly made into hills, one's equals, the sky the deep dark blue of space. Glaciers weave between mountains like roads, the toothed land almost empty of people. Of course it's extremely cold, extremely difficult to breathe, so after Megan takes a few pictures she's returned to the bottom, as far away from the cairn as possible, while her husband prepares to do his thing. Snowboarding is quite the unexpected pleasure, fitting in perfectly with his swagger and style and mid air cavorting. He'll need to immediately purchase a new board when he gets off the mountain though, he thinks, looking down the long, long way to the bottom. Going have to slide over parts of the face where there is no snow, nothing but black rock.
Despite (or because of) its staggering kill count, there are always hopefuls making the long ascent up the immensely hostile flanks of the King of Mountains, and they receive a surprise when a man goes flying past them. Human bodies flying past is a feature of K2, not a bug. People slip, fall, or are knocked off, but this one is not leaving a trail of cascading personal possessions behind him, he has not exploded into a hundred pieces after falling a thousand feet, nor is he wearing the heavy, cumbersome clothing and oxygen mask needed in order to not freeze to death or suffocate. Oh, yeah, and he's doing tricks on a bloody snowboard of all things, surging off outcrops to sail over climber's heads, doing flips and landing only to immediately take off again, sailing down ropes, shearing them off when he's done.
One struggling climber at the Black Pyramid snaps a valuable shot of Azazel surfing past him, jet black tongue stuck out, fingers raised in the Devil Horns salute.