Havok in Vietnam

by Invisible Pheebs

After Cuba, what once could of been a great team crumbled. Then, America crumbled with it. Havok ran away to Vietnam as though it could be his new solitary. But there, laying in a hospital bed, he didn't expect to meet his Marilyn Monroe. Well, Marilyn Monroe if she had a chip on her shoulder and venom in her lips. But maybe, just maybe this was something that'd actually go his way

1. Introduction

Havok in Vietnam
Chapter One - Introduction

After Cuba, they had crumbled. Magneto, Raven, Angel and Azazel went on their own way. Charles went to hospital - the American ships flew him there. Beast - Hank - went with him, lingering like Charles was a ball and guilt was his chain. Banshee hung around, for a while. Alex went with them, it was better than solitary, at any rate.

But the world crumbled with them. Kennedy died, two years later. Magento was in prison - finally - but then suddenly the USA were 23,000 military "advisers" in Vietnam and not a damn thing was being done. Three years later 100,000 US soldiers were out there in the fields. Two years after that. Well. 485,000 soldiers, and too many dead boys for the public to sit back and take it any longer. Protest, riots. 18,129 sons, brothers and fathers that would never come home.

It was in 1968, that Alex Summers went to join them. Fireworks in Time Square turned to kerosene bombs and flames so thick you choked on them from the camps. Kissing strangers at midnight became killing them - bullets and cosmic energy ripping through the grass and sending civilians and soldiers up in flames. But Alex had known he had to get out of the mansion. Charles was crumbling, relying on Hank to hold himself upright when the whiskey took him out of his wheelchair. Students had been packed into big vans with canvas roofs and driven away - down the drive and out of sight. There had been nothing the professor could do to stop them. Banshee had gone to - gone to get a better job, though that didn't last too long. But Alex had always had to keep himself first - and though Havok left with the night as his cover, and with his socks muffling the sound of his footsteps as he went through the front door, Charles' blue eyes burned guilty holes into his soul. But, at least he'd lasted this long. Still, Alex couldn't tie himself to a sinking ship.

Well, he could.

Perhaps that'd been why Alex volunteered himself to the war. He'd missed solitary. There was still that niggling feeling in his head that told Alex he was no better than Magneto. He deserved to be locked under the Pentagon but those fuckers in the secret service said he was no longer a threat. Thanks Moira. So perhaps, he'd have to rely on the government for some other outlet that requited him with that long lost love of being locked up. Though, he'd swap four concrete walls for that canvas tent and wide open fields. Burning villages and screaming children. In the end, it all gave Alex that sinking guilty feeling that made his bones hollow and mind heavy. He'd always known he wasn't doing the right thing, or the easiest thing. But it was the safest thing. The safest thing for him.