āMost people do want things to be better,ā Scott replied,Ā ābut typically only for the groups of their choosing.ā It was something heād understood since he was a child, since even before his fatherās plane went down and he found himself unable to look at the world without destroying it. He looked too much like his mother, people would say. His eyes were shaped like hers, his skin the same pigment, and heād never understood why that was a bad thing but some people had certainly seemed to think that it was.Ā
And even more thought that it got worse when his mutation developed.Ā
If he werenāt fighting for his very right to exist, he might have understood it, to an extent. It was fear that drove humans to attack mutants. It was the same fear that had driven the Brotherhood to fight back, the same fear that had Erik holding a gun to the head of a highly populated city and begging them to understand why his finger was on the trigger. But fear didnāt make a person right. Fear could explain a personās actions, but it couldnāt excuse them.Ā
He studied Bruce uncertainly now, remembering that lab where they had stood together and raised a man up from the dead, remembering all the anger in the air there. He had regrets, after Erikās death. He ached with them, carried them in his chest, and the weight of them threatened to tear him in two. Butā¦ He still wasnāt sure heād done the wrong thing in that silo. Eight million people were still alive. Erik was alive again. And pieces had been broken along the way, some irreparably, but he had to believe that it was better this way. He had to believe that Erik, in spite of everything, would have never done what he had if not for the Phoenix lighting his veins aflame. He had to believe that a man he respected, a man he loved, would prefer a world in which he didnāt kill millions of men, women, and children in his grief.Ā
He liked to think other people believed it too.
āI appreciate that,ā he replied, even if his nostrils flared briefly at the slip, at the almost utterance of our people. He understood, of course, that other powered people went through hardships just as often as mutants, butā¦ Scott had been murdered in a park for trying to help children get to safety. He had been dodging slurs and insults since he was a child, had had fingers buried into the deepest parts of his mind, had had parts of him cut away little by little because of something that existed in his DNA that he couldnāt help, that heād had nothing to do with, that had been there since he was born and would be there after he died. He had to build an island for his people just to stop them being murdered in the streets. It was difficult to imagine an adequate comparison to that.Ā āBut I hope we wonāt need it.ā
Mentally kicking himself, Bruce tried for a disarming smile, Scottās demeanor changing somewhat drastically at his slip up. While he may not have been born with The HulkĀ on a technicality, heād been born with gamma in his blood, his fatherās work boiling over into his DNA and changing him irreparably. He knew that that same DNA was the only reason heād survived the bomb in the first place - the only reason heād survived the birth of Hulk - but did surviving mean living?
Bruce wrung his hands together idly, staring blankly at the manās obvious discomfort at his presence. The physicist had a way of doing that to people, he thought. Since he was a child, an actual genius from birth, never fitting into the shapes of normal childhood, heād had a way of making his being too big, too much.Ā āThatās always the hope, isnāt it?ā
Genosha was beautiful, in both its meaning and its physical presence. It was literally alive beneath their feet as their meaningless conversations passed through the oxygenated air around them. It seemed like such a simple thing - living.
Bruce finally met Scottās gaze from beneath the round rims of his glasses,Ā āIf it could be cured,ā He started, swallowing with a soft click,Ā āWould you want it to be?ā He didnāt know if he was asking for him, or if he was asking Scott directly, but he was sure the man would understand the meaning, would answer nonetheless.
