Hank McCoy didn't trust men who claimed to have any sort of personal insight into God. That had been drained out of him when his mother and the pastors and the nice ladies from church and all those crying people in that tent in that field that one time prayed and prayed that God would heal him of his affliction. His mother spent the milk money on crystals that the ads in the papers said were blessed by the Holy Spirit and when they didn't work she cried and told him that God made him this way for a reason and Hank was a little angel. Hank nodded and hugged her numbly and when she took his hand in hers to give thanks for dinner his tongue turned to ash.
Hank grew up on a farm in Illinois to two parents who weathered the depression and the second Great War. His father, farm boy turned soldier turned maintenance guy turned farmer, was what people meant when they talked about strong backbones and the American dream. His mother, a pastor's daughter who married a boy who chose to fight the day before he left. She was the sort of soft that could take any beating you gave it. She volunteered with her church and made grieving widows casseroles with her twenty three year old hands and kissed her husband when he came home two years later and loved the baby that the nurse was scared to show her.
(When Hank is farther away from Illinois than he'd ever thought he'd be, staring into cameras held by people who are certain they are filming a monster, he will think that she would not know him now. He does not know that she would love him anyway.)
He grew up on the edges of revolutions that he didn't want to have to fight in. Fate drafted him regardless.
Mama taught him how to tie his shoes and more importantly, to never take them off in front of people. He was always younger than the people he was smarter than, so consequently, while he one day would be tall and strong, he was not then. He is familiar with bullies.
At school Hank sits with the freaks at lunch. He knows that none of them are as strange as him.
Hank is the oldest and only McCoy child in the county, so he is used to bullies hollering his name, but more used to freak and mutant and monster. His parents didn't have any children other than him. He is certain it was because they feared they would have another mistake.
(They love him, but he wouldn't be wrong. Hank isn't wrong about a lot of things these days, and it's a cold comfort.)
His mother smoothed his hair back when he was eleven years old and put him on a segregated bus to Harvard.
Hank was a genius and a prodigy and an ugly monster. It is only when he is fourteen that he confirmed what he had long suspected; there was something wrong with him on the inside too.
The Muller twins were gorgeous and Hank wanted to be sick every time he saw them, wanted the ground to swallow him up when he found himself wondering if he liked Ben or Ruth better.
He must not have been meant for happiness. It is a thought that he had been having for years. Hank McCoy, born freak and hell bound, graduated Harvard as valedictorian at age fifteen, and he cannot find it in himself to be proud.
(He might not believe in God or angels or miracles, but he was things that didn't have names that weren't whispered behind hands, and he knew that hell existed because life hadn't been kind to him, so why would death be?)
The farm was doing well when he went home, his Dad's back ached and his Mama was starting to get pains in her joints. The summer of '60 was hot and the men in suits who asked him if he wanted to serve his country didn't seem to notice. He signed on, thinking that he could find a cure for whatever he was. Whatever he was being something that wasn't mentioned in polite company.
Three years later, the file labelled mutant was thrown on his table by his boss's boss's boss who told him to keep quiet about these freaks.
(The thing about being different, being what Hank was, was that it never stops stinging. Being a mutant-and finally he had a word for it, and wasn't it funny that the bullies were right- and being a queer meant that people were going to hate you all your life. And it was always going to hurt.)
Hank read it and learned his own history. The children of the atom. Hank shook his head and called his Dad and Mama, and told them that he was doing great research and that he had his own lab. His Dad, with his calloused hands, told him that that was good and to make them proud. His Mama, sweet faced and iron spined, said that he had always been so smart and asked when he was coming to visit because she wanted to see her baby boy, and Hank heard his Dad say that he was a man now. These were the only people he was a child of.
Charles slipped up, and he would have been upset if it wasn't the first time someone had call him a mutant with a kind smile. Heard anyone say that showing his feet was showing off. Nobody had asked, so Hank never told.
(Another thing about being different is that you shouldn't mention it. It makes the normal people uncomfortable.)
Alex calls him bozo and Hank has been called so much worst that it is almost a kindness.
Raven is not the great almost of his life. She is a maybe in a long life of could have beens.
(His father had other job offers, and his mother nearly lost him when she was six months along, and the doctors said he would never walk and offered to amputate.)
The cure, the one that could make him go home to his Mama and tell her that her prayers had worked, split him to pieces and sewed him back up. He might not have liked the thing in the mirror but at least he had grown up with it, had known that he was his own monster under his bed. His brain was the only thing he was ever good for, and he figures that there are bigger problems than his, so he picks himself off the lab floor and puts on his suit.
When he is standing on a beach in Cuba, fur making him roast in the heat, he will realize that they are doing something that will change the world. He will never stand and make speeches with Erik's ease, but he can still feel these things. It frightens him, but only because they have only been together a week and they have averted genocide and still been fired upon. He wonders how many lines in the sand will be drawn before there is no need for them.
(In another world that is fast approaching, he helps save many people, and he grows content with himself. In that world a mob gathers outside his home, and when he goes outside to calm them he is beaten to death in broad daylight.)
Raven tells him to be proud and he is angry. Erik leaves and he is angry. Charles falls on a beach in Cuba and doesn't get back up and he is angry. His anger is different now, and that itself angers him. Before, he was capable of hurting people, but now he doesnt know what his limits are, how far he'll go.
It is Hank, Hank and Alex and Sean and Moira who get Charles to a hospital hours later. They are sunburned and thirsty and hungry, with wounds and betrayal that they would all like to go home and lick, but instead they all sat in a hospital hallway in various states of undress, only occasionally bothering to snap and snarl and glare at the people who are staring and pointing at him. They did not move for twelve hours. None of them are going to abandon Charles.
Charles didn't need to be told what happened. He remembered everything and would remember everything until the day he died. They all take him to the mansion, the place that they were almost a family in. Moira leaves when he gets better, and now they are just three boys and a man with vague plans for a school. Alex asks why don't they find students, and Charles agrees and Hank is given hope, and this hope makes his steps lighter and mind freer, and that was when he created the serum. The day the first term begins he goes to breakfast the same old monster that he has always been, and if the boys and Charles want to say something, they are smart enough not to.
(He does not want to further confirm what he already knows. If these children are afraid of him when he is blue, that he means he is a monster amongst monsters, and even monsters have feelings.)
The school is almost enough. They play games and take the children to museums and Hank teaches all of the science classes except for the course on genetics. He is tutoring one particularly bright girl in Latin when he hears. It's Alex who runs to bring him to the TV and later it's Alex who tells him that this will change everything, as if Hank didn't already know.
The knowledge that somewhere your country is preparing to take up arms against another has a strange effect on people. Everyone is patriotic, but there is an underlying fear, one that has been there since the wailing in grief of a mother. Some parents come back to collect their children, wanting them by their sides if the world ended. The older students were getting drafted and on the same day Hanks mother called and said that she thought this was going to be ugly, Alex tells him his number had been called. Hank is nearly nineteen now, and Alex just turned eighteen, and it all seems terribly unfair to him. He would sign up, he's more than willing to be shot for Uncle Sam, but Sean's parents come and get him and Alex leaves and Hank cannot be the next person who abandons the professor.
Hank has never been patriotic, but he'd hold his gun if they told him to. Hold it and never fire and just wait until he could stop. Stop being Hank McCoy.
They become a man and a boy in a big house together, and Charles is drinking too much but Hank doesn't know how to fix it, so he makes him his own serum. And it works.
(There are many things Hank will regret in this life: showing a girl his feet when he was nine, not punching more bullies, and telling Raven that she would never be considered beautiful. He does not regret making Charles's serum, because he is certain that without it Hank would have been the one to find his body.)
The army tries to draft him, but they can't take him. Not with the glasses or the feet that they can't understand how he can even walk.
His mother calls and asks if he wouldn't like to come home at least for a visit if there isn't any school, but he says he can't. He can't face her. Not when he was a monster hiding another monsters skin, not when that hidden monster was so quick to lash out, so capable of killing. He couldn't hug her or shake his Dad's hand.
Ten years he spent in that house, and he can't cure himself, and Charles is just getting worse, and he doesn't even have a God to curse.
The halls are dimly lit and they wander around like that terrible place between sleep and waking.
(Hank would like for them both to slip into oblivion many times over the years.)
He grows into a man in that house, and he does it alone.
He hasn't heard from Sean in nearly four years, and Hank thinks he must have realized that there was no point in sending letters to two ghosts. Alex writes in fits and bursts, complains about the food and the heat and the wet. Hank begrudges him nothing, not the time he sent him three pages of stuff he wanted to eat or the time he didn't hear from him for six months and he thought he was dead. Who is Hank to ask for more?
There are mentions of peace treaties on TV, and the country rejoices. The boys are coming home.
Hank smiles, and gets out Alex's letters, and makes lists of the ingredients he will need.
He calls his Mama and Dad and tells them that maybe in a few months he can visit. They are old now, his mother fifty five and his father nearing sixty, and they are happy to hear that their son will be home again.
(He will go home tired three months after Paris, and he will not tell his mother that he is the monster that gives the neighbor kids nightmares, but he will allow her to make him breakfast when he shows up on their doorstep, and he will learn that they love him still.)
(It was never them he doubted.)
A man who calls him beast knocks on the door, but it is not Alex.
He never did believe in God, or angels, or miracles, but he started to hope again two weeks before the professor did.
Hank McCoy was a soldier in the revolution, and he might not have wanted to be there, but he holds his flag all the same.