Tempting the Muse
Posted on Mon Sep 2nd, 2024 @ 4:32pm by Hank McCoy
2,165 words; about a 11 minute read
Mission:
Episode 5: Days of Fortune Past
Location: X-Mansion | Hank's Lab
Timeline: October 29th, 1990
Hank McCoy sat alone in his lab as he had done in the weeks and months since his return. While he had told others he was pursuing answers, the truth was that he was chasing purpose. He had returned home, yet home was not as he had remembered it. Everything looked the same, yet felt different, a dull sepia whose tone washed all the color out of the world. Now that he was on the verge of losing everything he had left, it turned his jovial curiosity into the depths of melancholy despair.
The dim light cast its long shadows across the walls, mirroring the darkness that had settled in his heart. The familiar scent of chemicals and old books did little to calm his racing mind. For all his intellectual prowess, he felt utterly lost, adrift in a sea of doubts and fears. The altercation with Scott in the Danger Room from the other day had done nothing to soothe his anger—it had only served to highlight his failures. And then the debacle of the Freedom March in Washington a week ago only served to show him how deeply he was unraveling. He had wanted to kill Warren. Only Scott had pulled him back from the brink, perhaps even saving his life. A man who starts out on a journey of revenge ought to dig two graves.
If Hank knew anything, it was that if he wasn't at the end of his rope, he was damned near it.
“The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge,” he muttered, quoting Daniel J. Boorstin as he turned over a vial in his hands. The words resonated deeply within him. Before him was a treacherous path he only now dared to walk. His own illusions of knowledge had led him here, to the edge of a precipice he was unsure he should cross.
He looked down at the message on his computer screen. The cold, pixelated text from Moira MacTaggert blinked back at him in stark black and white:
Hank,
I've run the tests, and the results are conclusive. Every chi-square test returned null, just like the ones you ran. Whatever you're trying to achieve, it’s not working—not under these conditions. I’m sorry, but there’s no way to proceed safely to live trials without a significant breakthrough. Please, Hank, be cautious—or better yet, consider not moving forward at all.
Moira's warning was clear, yet it had done little to dissuade him. If anything, it only intensified his resolve. The stakes were too high, the risks too great, and the time too short. If he was to save Mara, to save his friends, to become the man they all needed him to be, then he needed more than just his current intellect—he needed to be more, to think beyond the limits of human or mutant capability.
He reached for his notebook, the pages filled with scribbled equations, molecular diagrams, and hastily written notes. The molecule he had been working on was a formidable challenge—a large, water-soluble compound that stubbornly refused to penetrate the blood-brain barrier. It was, as Moira had pointed out, nearly impossible to deliver to the brain.
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven,” he recited softly, his mind recalling the words of Milton. Hank knew the dangers of meddling with the mind, but desperation had a way of blurring the lines between right and wrong. The mind was his battleground, and he was ready to wage war within it.
He adjusted his glasses, his eyes narrowing as he reviewed his notes once more. The solution was tantalizingly close, just out of reach. The molecule’s water solubility was the crux of the problem; it needed to be encased in a lipid vector, something that could transport itself across the blood-brain barrier without being detected.
“The end justifies the means,” he whispered, though the phrase tasted bitter on his tongue. He had always despised Machiavelli’s cold pragmatism, but tonight, those words felt disturbingly apt. If this was the price he had to pay to protect those he loved, then so be it.
With trembling hands, Hank began preparing the lipid nanoparticles to become his compound's vector, his heart pounding in his chest. Every step was measured and deliberate—a ritual that grounded him in the here and now, even as his thoughts raced ahead to what he was about to do.
The solution came together slowly, the molecules binding as they were designed to do. “What is now proved was once only imagined,” he said, borrowing from William Blake as he watched as the solvent was agitated until lipid vesicles formed, a sign that the process was complete. His mind was a whirlwind of literary references, each one an attempted distraction from what he was intending to do.
Finally, the compound was ready—a syringe filled with the synthesized solution, glistening ominously in the dim light. He hesitated, the weight of the syringe unusually heavy in his hand. There was still time to turn back, to heed Moira’s warning, to stop before it was too late.
But as he stared at the needle, he saw not just the potential for danger, but the potential for salvation. The fate of his friends hung in the balance, and he could not, would not, let them down. “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself,” he thought, quoting Kierkegaard as he pressed the needle to his skin.
The moment the needle broke the surface of his skin, a strange calm washed over him. His hands were steady, his breathing even. The solution flowed into his bloodstream with minimal effect. Just as he began to wonder that he had measured incorrectly, pain spiked through his temples. Pressure, an impossible pressure seized his mind and forced his vision into an ever constricting tunnel.
“For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,” he murmured, recalling Shakespeare’s Hamlet in that terrifying moment when everything went black.
As the solution coursed through his veins, Hank’s mind drifted away from conscious awareness, unmoored from the present, plunging him into a series of nightmarish recollections. The walls of his lab faded away, replaced by a haze of memories he had long tried to suppress.
The first memory surged forward with brutal clarity. He was on Krakoa, the wretched island that had been the First Class's demise. The team was scattered and defeated, their powers no match for the living island’s relentless assault. Hank had nearly made it to the Blackbird to prep its engines, but he found himself struggling against the tendrils of a prehensile vine. Its grip tightening around his limbs, dragging him away from the Blackbird. He could hear the distant cries of his teammates, but their voices were muffled quickly, drowned out by the sounds of pitched battle. All too soon, the dense foliage swallowed him whole.
The scene shifted, and Hank found himself face to face with a figure cloaked in flowing, ornate robes of black leather and high-neck velvet collar. The robe's edges shimmered with eldritch patterns that seemed to pulse with dark energy. The man before him exuded an aura of both arcane power and cold, calculated intellect. His pale face, masked by an unsettling indifference, revealed nothing of his true intentions, yet his glowing red eyes gleamed with a cruel, knowing light, like the crimson diamond embedded in his forehead.
"Who... who are you?!"
Hank’s heart pounded in his chest as the figure appraised him, a thin, mocking smile curling on his lips. The air around him crackled with an ominous energy, making it clear that this was no ordinary captor.
“I appreciate an equal intellect,” the sinister man purred, his voice dripping with condescension. “You, my Doctor McCoy, are far too valuable to be discarded like the others. No, your mind is a rare commodity, and I have a special purpose for you.”
Before Hank could protest, he was thrust back into unconsciousness. What followed next was a rush of moments rather than days forced together into a terrible experience. Hank had been sent into the world of forced labor, his brilliant mind shackled to the will of a madman. He was made to conduct research against his will, his knowledge exploited, his genius twisted to serve dark purposes he could barely comprehend due to the cognitive limitations placed on his higher reasoning. The blurred memories burned with shame and helplessness, the sense of being utterly controlled, yet aware of every monstrous thing he was forced to create.
The nightmare deepened as the memory shifted once more. Hank was in a laboratory in Hassenstadt, a detail he knew from shipments and manifests on supplies. It was a grim, cold place where the air was thick with despair. He was no longer himself—his body was gaunt, his fur matted, his spirit broken. He wasn’t alone. Across from him, equally enslaved, was another research clad in green scrubs. Whoever it was, his eyes were as hollow as Hank's felt.
Together, they were forced to work on the development of Prime Sentinel technology, their intellects harnessed to perfect the nanotech that would bring these horrors to life. Hank’s hands moved mechanically, assembling the pieces of a deadly puzzle he could not refuse. He realized, with dawning horror, that his expertise in biochemistry was crucial to the creation of the very thing that would later bring his friends to their knees.
Hank’s mind screamed in protest, but his body obeyed the commands of his captors. Each connection made, each sequence completed, felt like another nail in the coffin of his morality. The weight of his actions crushed him, but he was powerless to stop it.
Hank jolted awake, his heart racing, his breath coming in short, panicked gasps. The lab around him was dim, the only sound the faint hum of the equipment. But the memories lingered, seared into his mind like a brand. They were broken, fragmented, yet vivid enough to leave him trembling.
His hands shook as he tried to steady himself, but the clarity he had sought was now a curse. He could barely piece together the timeline of his own torment, yet the end result was clear as day: Mara was taken by the Omega Sentinel, his old friend Warren forged into a monster, in part, by his own unwilling hand. Bobby, his dear friend, was almost killed by a creation Hank had unwittingly helped bring into existence, all while wearing a mind-control collar that robbed him of any agency.
The weight of this realization bore down on him with unbearable force. The cruel irony of it all—of creating the very tools that now threatened the lives of those he held dear—was too much to bear.
“What a cruel twist of fate,” Hank muttered, his voice barely above a whisper. His knees buckled, and he sank to the cold floor of his lab, his head in his hands. The tears that he had held back for so long finally broke free, streaming down his face as he wept openly.
“Why? What have I done to deserve this? How could can I go on?” he cried out to the empty room, his voice hoarse with despair. But there was no answer, only the echo of his own anguish which reverberated through the dim lab.
As the sobs racked his body, Hank felt the last remnants of his hope slip away. The man he once was, the brilliant mind, the compassionate heart, was lost—buried beneath the weight of his guilt and the nightmares that haunted him. All that remained was a broken soul, adrift in a world of his own making.
And in the silence that followed, Hank McCoy cursed the cruel hand of fate that had led him here. In the sea of despondency that threatened to drown him, though, Hank found his purpose. Once the flood of tears had washed away the guilt he had not allowed himself to feel, he realized that the Sword of Damocles over his head swung both ways. Along with all of his guilt and trauma, he remembered his research. Not all of it. Perhaps only a fraction. But as the night wore on, Hank realized that his serum had been successful after all. Pieces of the puzzle which had eluded him now began falling into place.
In the end, Hank finally found that which he had been pursuing. Purpose. He set to work with a fresh vision of where to begin. What was done to him would not be the final word. Hank would claim that for himself. He would save them. All of them. Even if it killed him.
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