SABRETOOTH (EXILES): Page 3 of 3

BIOGRAPHY page 3

Soon after, the Exiles underwent some large changes. With the addition of some new members, and the departure of Longshot, Blink decided to retire from the team and Sabretooth became its new de facto leader. Before Blink’s departure, she and Victor completed one last mission. Together, they tracked down their missing teammate Wild Child on their home reality and included him on a special Exiles roster tasked to help save a reality from the Hulk’s Annihilation Wave. [Exiles (1st series) #100, Exiles: Days of Then and Now]

Leadership treated Sabretooth well. While once he was a hot-headed berserker, Victor found himself making level-headed and strategic decision for his team and managed their disparate personalities well. It wasn’t all perfect, though, as he soon realized he had developed romantic feelings for Psylocke, and he had a romantic rival in the form of Mystiq.

These feeling were brought to the forefront on Creed’s first mission as team leader. Victor fell under the mental influence of the vampire Bloodwitch, who drove him to act on his impulses and kiss Betsy, infecting her too. However, neither Psylocke nor Sabretooth had actually fallen under Bloodwitch’s spell, due to their respective resistances, and were just playing along until they could defeat the vampire. [New Exiles #1-4]

Soon, Sabretooth began to start excluding himself from missions, remaining behind on monitor duty. Unbeknownst to the rest of the Exiles, Victor was monitoring Madame Hydra and Slaymaster as they recruited undesirables to their cause and killed their way across the multiverse. Slaymaster had developed a particular obsession with Psylocke and was killing various versions of her throughout reality, which Victor had to watch from the Crystal Palace’s monitors. The last straw for when was when the assassin and his allies killed a version Psylocke who was married to Sabretooth, along with their kids.

Victor wanted to protect Betsy at all costs, so while the rest of the Exiles were on a mission, he tracked down Madame Hydra and her cohorts, and attempted to take them down one by one. Unfortunately, Slaymaster got the drop on Victor and he would have been killed if not for the intervention of his teammate Kitty Pryde. While he failed in taking down Madame Hydra and Slaymaster, he and Kitty did manage to kill their evil Wolverine. [New Exiles #11-12]

It didn’t take long for a rematch with Slaymaster and Madame Hydra, as the pair attacked the Exiles during a mission. Victor rushed from the Crystal Palace to aid Psylocke, and arrived just in time to stop Slaymaster from stabbing her in the back, though he escaped once more into the multiverse. On the plus side, Madame Hydra was killed, though it came at the cost of young Cat’s life, which hit Victor particularly hard.

Later, in the Crystal Palace, Victor and Betsy finally gave into their feelings, and made love on the beach in the ocean room. [New Exiles #18]

Eventually, the crystalline structure of the Panoptichron reacted to the Exiles’ continued presence by absorbing them into the crystal walls of the Palace itself. With the exception of Morph, Sabretooth and the rest of the Exiles were now permanently entombed within the Crystal Palace, like flies in amber. Morph continued the mission with some retired and newly recruited Exiles and eventually learned that spending prolonged periods inside the Eye of Time resulted in becoming involuntarily merged with the Palace, becoming part of its collective conscious. [Exiles (2nd series) #6]

After an undisclosed amount of time locked within crystal walls of the Panoptichron, Sabretooth was somehow freed. Reunited with Morph and Nocturne, who continued the Exiles’ mission, he discovered Blink had not only returned to the Exiles but retired once again. However, he was eventually reunited with Blink when, while on a mission, he was pulled to the realm of the Time Eater without explanation. Likely, this was due to the power of the Tallus that had been guiding Blink in combating the threat of the Time Eater. Victor was ecstatic to stumble across his foster daughter, even in a strange frozen realm. Their reunion was brief, however, as while Creed helped Blink flee an army of Kangs, they were inextricably separated once again. [Exiles (3rd series) #5]

[Note: Although the above story was published several years after the following ones, we chose to present it in this order. The return to the Age of Apocalypse ultimately led to Creed's death, making his return in Exiles (3rd series) an anomaly. There was time travel involved in that arc, as well as the established fact that different timelines progress at different speeds. The other option is that Creed was somehow reincarnated back at the Panoptichron after dying against the Exterminators. Time, and his next appearance, will tell.]

At some point, for unknown reasons, Sabretooth retired from the Exiles and returned to his home reality, collecting Wild Child on the way. Once there, he found a new his old teammate Weapon X had been corrupted by the Death Seed and taken up Apocalypse’s mission to cleanse the world of the weak. Reunited with the X-Men, Sabretooth and Wild Child helped fight against Weapon Omega’s oppressive regime, losing teammates and loved ones along the way.

Surprisingly, Victor reconnected with Psylocke years later when she and her X-Force teammates travelled to Victor’s reality in search of a Celestial Life Seed. Victor initially clashed with Betsy’s teammate Wolverine, after mistaking him and Betsy’s other teammates for clones, before she shut him down psychically. When the X-Men learned the Life Seeds were the antithesis to the Death Seed infecting Weapon Omega, and could effectively kill him, they agreed to help X-Force retrieve some. They also agreed to help get them home by freeing Gateway from Weapon Omega’s prison. Unfortunately, both missions went disastrously wrong and, while X-Force got the Life Seed they were after and made it home, Victor lost some teammates in the clash with Weapon Omega’s forces. [Uncanny X-Force (1st series) #11-13]

A few days later, X-Force sought the aid of Sabretooth and the X-Men once more. This time, Victor travelled to Earth #616 with Sunfire, Wild Child, Nightcrawler and Jean Grey to help X-Force stop a Death Seed-corrupted Archangel from destroying the world. In the chaos of battle, Wild Child was slain, bisected by one of Archangel’s wings. An enraged Sabretooth fought one on one with Archangel, who took the man down in brutal fashion, leaving him for dead. Fortunately, the combined might of X-Force and the Age of Apocalypse’s X-Men was enough to take down Archangel and save Psylocke.

Victor lost two teammates during this mission, Wild Child and Sunfire, who sacrificed himself to stop Archangel’s doomsday weapon. Furthermore, Nightcrawler opted to remain behind to hunt down the remaining threats that had fled to this Earth from the Age of Apocalypse. Before he returned to his home reality with Jean, he shared a surprisingly touching moment with Wolverine. Logan gave Victor a sword that he had owned for years, saying he had more guts and honor than anyone he had ever met. [Uncanny X-Force (1st series) #17-19]

Sabretooth and Jean returned to their world to learn more of their teammates had fallen to Weapon Omega’s forces. Along with Rogue and Magneto, they were the only X-Men left. The quartet had been working with the Human Resistance for some time in an attempt to gather the last dregs of humanity together and protect them from Omega’s cullings. After her interaction with X-Force, Jean concocted a plan to take down Weapon Omega. The Human Resistance created a mindless clone of the Scarlet Witch, which Jean attempted to use to depower every mutant on Earth. Unfortunately, this plan backfired and only Jean and Victor were depowered. Meanwhile, Rogue and Magneto were killed during an attack by Weapon Omega, meaning the X-Men were no more. [Uncanny X-Force (1st series) #19.1]

Victor and Jean were taken in by the X-Terminated, the leaders of the human resistance. Unfortunately for Sabretooth, they considered him a criminal for previously working for Apocalypse and put him under arrest. Despite his incarceration, the humans treated him well. The only exception was his human son Graydon, who was also a member of the X-Terminated and hated his estranged father. At their first reunion in decades, Graydon beat Victor in his cell, though his father gave as good as he got. [Age of Apocalypse (1st series) #1, #8]

While Sabretooth was locked away, Jean Grey had become an integral member of the X-Terminated. When Jean was being hunted with Weapon Omega in the Morlock tunnels, the X-Terminated leader Prophet released Victor to help find her and rescue her. Victor readily agreed to this, not for his freedom but to save his friend. An outmatched Sabretooth faced off against Weapon Omega, to rescue Jean. Beaten and bloody, Victor detonated a bomb, sacrificing himself to buy Jean and the X-Terminated time take down the Overlord. [Age of Apocalypse (1st series) #10]

However, Victor survived the bomb blast, albeit extremely injured. His son Graydon found him buried under the rubble and in a surprising move saved him, stating that, while he hated him, he was still his father. Graydon spent the next few months nursing Victor back to health, hiring various doctors and mutant healers to help his father. Eventually, Victor awoke from his coma to find a new world free of the influence of Apocalypse or Weapon Omega, where he forged a new relationship with his son. [Age of Apocalypse (1st series) #13]

While the future was looking bright for Sabretooth’s world, things took a dark turn when three energy consuming monsters were unleashed from the void between realities and which immediately began consuming everything. The X-Terminated allied themselves with two different teams of alternate reality X-Men to fight the nearly unstoppable monsters, but had little success. As the teams needed time to escape and regroup, Sabretooth and Graydon volunteered to distract the creatures. After saying his goodbyes to Jean, and telling his son he loved him, Victor and Graydon charged headlong at one of the extra-dimensional monsters, distracting it long enough for their friends to escape, before being consumed in the death field that surrounded the beast. [X-Termination crossover]