Arc: Ex-Gene - The Next Morning
It had been sitting there for nearly three years now.
It was perfectly innocuous. Just a sealed silver box with a simple clasp, popped open in an instant. The needle was tiny, injection would be completely painless. A beautiful delivery system, really.
It had been staring right back at him for nearly three years. Three years of bad days, bad nights, bad thoughts, bad actions. One lockbox away. He didn’t really know how he’d kept his sanity all the way through, with the knowledge that he could just … take the easy way out.
After all, he would just take the cure, everything would go back to the way it was when he was seventeen, and he wouldn’t have to worry about anything. Everything wrong with him was in his genes - everything everyone hated about him, couldn’t accept about him, it was all in that one little niggling gene.
And there was a painless delivery system just waiting to wipe it clean.
There wasn’t anything particularly special about the night he decided to take it. There was no … vehement attack against him online; there were no scared looks, no averted eyes; no nightmares … it was a normal, relatively happy day.
And then he’d stepped into his lab at eleven o’clock at night and simply stared at the lockbox for four hours. Just thinking it over. He didn’t use logical arguments for and against it - the children who needed him as a role model, the position he held on the field team, the way people nuzzled into his fur, or of the letter from Empire State that told him his application to teach had been rejected, the ravaging of his mind, the clear disgust on so many people’s faces … he didn’t even think about what other people would say if he took it, how they would look at him, how they would react - how his family would react.
instead, he just thought and thought about how he viewed himself. How he looked when he stared at himself in the mirror. What he saw. What he felt.
And he reached forward, took the hypo from the box, found an injection point in his arm, and with a muted hiss, the cure was administered.
It didn’t even hurt. He’d felt his fur fall out, his fangs, his senses mute - Osborn had done that to him once. That had been some of the worst pain he had ever felt. But this?
The fur came out in clumps. Thick and heavy. It just … fell off. Hank was laughing when he kept reaching into the pelt and finding the fur just came straight off, smooth, unmarked skin right beneath it. He didn’t even realise when his fourth finger grew back. All of a sudden, the pads were gone, there was just normal fingers. He felt his face.
It had taken less than five minutes. The claws had simply been shed, the fangs retracted, the nose reformed, the finger regrown … he was human.
Completely normal.
He just stepped straight from the chair to his feet and he went from Beast to Hank. He was so light now, he didn’t have the same bulk - he was still well-built, still athletic, but human now, nothing of … nothing of what he had been.
He was laughing and he was crying and he hadn’t looked like this in over a decade and he was happy. For once he was happy.
The energy slump hit him, his metabolism screwed up by the mechanics of the cure, the absolute enormity of what had happened, but he didn’t mind sleeping. The bed was massive now, but … it still felt like his.
And the next morning, at nine AM, Hank, practically swimming in clothes that were tailor made for a bigger body (he had used more than a few belts to keep the pants on), appeared in the Mansion kitchen by the coffee maker, practically beaming.
Three years ago, Hank McCoy got access to the mutant cure and hid it away in the recesses of his lab.
Three years ago, the so-called mutant Second Coming happened.
Three years ago, Kurt Wagner was injured so badly in the attempt to extract Hope Summers to Utopia that he was nearly killed.
Nearly. He didn't quite make it all the way to dead, mostly to the timely intervention of his friends, and the immediate response of that very same Hank McCoy, who flew in to Utopia the same hour Kurt landed on its shores and began immediate medical care.
For the better part of a year, Kurt had remained in a coma as his body struggled to recover from the catastrophic damage it had endured. He'd been carefully ferried any place Hank was stationed,cared for with a tenderness that might have surpassed friendship for a more paternal look at things had Hank been significantly older than Kurt. When Kurt finally woke up ten months later, it had been Hank who had helped him through the physical therapy required to coax him back into a reasonable mobile being again.
Since then Kurt hasn't been at the school. He's been living in Los Angeles on sabbatical, taking it 'easy' as he recuperates and tending to the sudden influx of mutants in the West Coast area. He's been happy, but he's also expressed a desire to return to the school, to teaching, and maybe one day to active duty.
He isn't to the active duty part yet, but teaching, he's been given a chance to prove he's hardy enough for a light schedule, which is why the school's kitchen this morning finds Nightcrawler padding into the room, barefoot and be-sweatpants in a baggy Xaviers' t-shirt that must be almost a decade old. His hair is a riot, which is saying something given how late a start nine am would normally be for Kurt.
Yellow eyes slatted, Kurt mumbles as he shuffles past 'Beast' towards the coffee machine. "Guten Morgen, Hank."
He retrieves a cup. He pours the coffee.
He almost spills the boiling hot liquid down his front during the double-take.
"Hank? Was im Himmel...Your clothes, what has..." He's squinting a little, like he's trying to decide if he thinks his friend is shorter.
