CHAPTER III

When twilight fell that evening, Hank was still hunched limply in the corner of the living room. He had not moved from that spot for the entire afternoon—and while his exhausted body adjusted, he wasn't sure he could have, even if he had wanted to. To stir even slightly was to invite a dull ache that throbbed through every part of him.

Nora, Kitty, and Peter had taken on the full burden of restoring order, and they did what they could to comfort the younger children. Perhaps to preoccupy her own mind as much as to accomplish a helpful task, Nora even went dazedly through the motions of cooking dinner. As for Hank, he was left alone to heal, and the students spoke in hushed voices around him. They knew far too well the pain of manifestation, and respected his need for physical and emotional distance.

And the changes in him had not yet completely ceased.

As the hours passed, he became conscious that his senses were growing sharper. His close-range eyesight was not perceptibly altered—he had needed reading glasses for several years now—but his distance vision seemed to be improving. More significantly, his senses of smell and hearing were intensified to an acuteness he had never imagined. With this came an entirely new level of innate, half-conscious awareness, a set of instincts that enabled him to interpret the myriad scents and sounds he had never known before. He was grateful that this development, at least, came more slowly; had its onset been quicker, the sudden flood of unfamiliar sensory input would have overwhelmed him.

Yet there was another side to those new instincts, as well: a thing that existed in murky depths between emotion and simple reflex, strange and primal half-feelings that stirred in reaction to almost every scent and sound and movement around him. It heightened his physical alertness, but to his conscious mind, it was an unnerving distraction.

There was something purely animal within him now, and it felt disquietingly at odds with his human mind.

Just after seven o'clock, Nora leaned over him. He could taste the scent of her, so intimately familiar to him even before; and in that newly feral portion of his being, it stirred a desire that frightened him. He closed his eyes and turned his face away.

"Hank…" Nora hesitated, and then her hand came to rest lightly on his shoulder. "Please. You've got to eat something. You'll be sick if you don't get some nutrition into your system."

The thought of moving from his darkened corner made Hank cringe, as if it meant stepping irrevocably into a nightmare he had still somehow hoped to awaken from. Nevertheless, he knew Nora was right. After the devastating stress his body had endured, he needed nourishment—and he did feel hunger. His new instincts reacted to the thought of food with a fierce craving, and it was a sentiment that even his distraught mind could not argue with.

Slowly, reluctantly, he uncurled himself, wincing at the pain in his strained muscles. With the raw power they harbored, it was almost laughable that he felt like a feeble old man. Nora put her hand under his arm to help him up, and he was too unsteady to resist the aid.

Only when he gingerly straightened to his full height did Nora give a start. She did not quite let go of his arm, but he felt the surprised quiver of her fingers. Glancing down at her face, he understood just as quickly what she had realized: until today he had been only slightly taller than her, but his transformation had added another three or four inches to his height. Coupled with its sheer heaviness of muscle, his new body was a behemoth.

Embarrassed and upset, he turned away from Nora. He looked down at his hands, giving them the first semblance of real scrutiny: flexing thick blue fingers, touching leathery palms, dazedly testing the sharpness of vicious talons. Those hands felt enormous and clumsy—and at least for the present, he knew they were. He would be able to retrain them for refined tasks in time, but first he would have to adapt to their size and power.

He lowered his hands to further regard himself, and his gut gave an involuntary twist at the sight of the deep blue fur that bulged through his torn clothes. His shirt was practically in rags, and although his trousers had at least held together well enough to preserve decency, massive thigh and calf muscles now swelled through burst seams. With a pang he thought of the closetful of exquisitely tailored suits that had been his one vain indulgence, and he wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry.

Instead he glanced hesitantly at Nora, and forced the ghost of a broken smile that felt strange on his altered face.

"I think… I should find some other clothes," he murmured demurely, making a half-hearted effort to straighten the remains of his shirt.

Nora's eyes brimmed again with sympathetic tears, but she nodded slightly. "Do you want me to help?"

"No," Hank answered quickly. Then he swallowed hard and shook his head. "No. I… I want to be alone, Nora… when I see myself."

A tear spilled onto Nora's cheek then, and she reached up, caressing his face. Her touch felt different now, through the thick mane of bristles along his jaw… but not unpleasantly so.

Animal feelings stirred again, and Hank turned away quickly, moving toward the bedrooms to find his clothes.

With the density of muscle that had given him his original enhanced strength, Hank's figure had not been slight even before his change. Still, in the haphazard pile of clothing he had thrown into his suitcase on the previous night, he feared there would be nothing that could fit his now tremendous frame; but he was in luck. He found the sweat pants he wore to bed, and a sweater Nora had given him for Christmas, both of which he tentatively judged would stretch well enough to survive careful wearing. Certainly they would never be the same again—but at the moment, reassembling his wardrobe was the least of his problems.

The first problem, the most immediate, the one he had to confront before he could focus on anything else… was the task of facing himself.

With his chosen clothes draped over his arm, he walked down the hall to the bathroom, like a condemned man being led to the gallows. He couldn't think about what he was going to find there—couldn't let himself think about it. In his mind, he scrounged for every scrap of platitude he had given to patients struggling to cope with a visible mutation: It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's simply a unique and extraordinary work of nature. It doesn't change who you are in any way that matters.

Now that he truly knew how it felt to be marked as different for all the world to see, he was disgusted with himself for peddling such comfortless drivel.

The bathroom lay in evening darkness. Hank stepped inside, and with gravely deliberate slowness, he closed the door behind him. He switched on the light, and drew a deep breath… and at last, slowly, he turned to face the mirror.

In the living room and the kitchen, the students cringed at the savage roar of anguish that penetrated the walls; but Nora only sank her head into her hands and wept.

Hank was still capable of tears, as well. For a long time after that first real glimpse of himself, he vented them in deep, choking sobs of grief, their wetness streaming down his blue-skinned face and into his fur. He leaned his head against the wall, and his claws dug into clenched fists as he shook with a purely human sorrow. His primitive new instincts contributed nothing to this release; loss and despair and violation were far more sophisticated emotions.

When the tears finally subsided, and he had become calm, he scrubbed at his eyes with a white towel. It came away with strands of rough blue hair clinging to it, and he stared numbly at them.

At last he turned back to the mirror, and was able to swallow down the fresh lump that rose in his throat. Slowly he peeled off the ruined scraps of his clothes, and regarded the alien thing that was now Henry McCoy.

Some part of him had to admit that as a doctor, if he had observed this mutation in a patient, he would have been impressed—perhaps even admiring, in certain ways. Hesitantly he ran his hands over his body and limbs, feeling the muscular solidness beneath the unnaturally-colored fur. Once he recovered from the manifestation, he would be stronger than ever… and far more agile than he had first expected. That was evident in the subtle new configurations of muscle and bone, the increased flexibility of his joints. His leg sinews were wired for powerful leaps, and his arms had an extension and grip meant for climbing. Given time to adjust, his build promised an inhuman adeptness of movement that seemed at once both simian and feline.

His gaze drifted upward, and as he recalled the once-red hair he had formerly been losing at a dismaying rate, he swept his fingers through the luxuriant blue mane he now possessed. A crookedness that was not quite a pained smile crossed his lips. At least that's one change I can very happily live with.

But his face…

Hank finally met the gaze of his reflection. His eyes were all that remained unchanged: palest aquamarine, clear and intelligent and desperately human.

He touched his face with the tip of one claw, tracing the hawkish nose, the jaw framed by whiskers of Victorian proportions, the deeply etched lines and shadows around eyes and mouth. Here and there, he could still find some trace of the features that had been his. Familiar creases of thoughtfulness between the now-heavy brows, lines of old and very far-away laughter at the corners of the lips; these were all his own, created not by genetics, but by time and the rich experience of life.

The rest, however, belonged to something out of a frightening fairytale.

He bared his teeth—an action that gave him, quite unintentionally, an expression of savage fierceness. For the first time, he looked at the sharp cuspids he had already felt inside his mouth, gingerly probing their points with his tongue.

My, what big teeth you have, Grandmother.

He laughed without humor and leaned against the sink, hanging his head. For a moment, he bitterly savored the vast, grand irony of it all: Beast they had called him, and a beast he was now in fact. He didn't need to test his abilities to know that he had become something lethal, a superbly designed predator.

The question was just how well his sensitive intellect could tame the restless animal lurking in the shadows of his psyche.

Already he could think of a hundred medical tests he wanted to perform on himself—and not out of any mere scientific curiosity. He wondered what sorts of hormones were now flooding his system. Surely they played a role in the incessant instinctive reactions flickering through his nerves, and perhaps…

Hank shook his head abruptly. No.

There was a reason why those instincts had been coded into his genes. They were ingrained upon the natural balance of his new being, a part of the way this body was meant to function—as much a part of him now as the fur and claws. If he sought some medical means of suppressing them, he would be contradicting nature, as well as betraying everything he had ever tried to teach his patients.

And everything Charles Xavier had once taught him.

His jaw tightened as he raised his eyes to the mirror once more, fixing a defiant gaze upon the merciless glass.

This is what I am, and where I stand… and I will never be sorry for it.