Villain Brotherhood

Once upon a time, in the grandest building in New York City, the leaders of every country in the world had gathered together.

The United Nations building was full of marble floors and tall windows and quiet voices, people working very hard to find peaceful answers to difficult problems. It was the kind of place where, if you listened carefully, you could hear the whole world trying to understand itself.

And then the doors burst open.

His name was Magneto.

He was tall and silver-haired, dressed in red-and-purple armor, and he walked into the United Nations with the certainty of someone who believed he was completely right. Magneto had lived through very dark times as a young man — times when people with differences had been treated with terrible cruelty — and he had decided that the only safe future for mutants was a world where mutants were in charge. He was not a foolish man. He was not an unkind man, deep down. But he was a very wrong one.

With him came his Brotherhood: Mystique, cool and watchful, who could shift her shape into any person she chose; the Blob, wide as a doorway, immovable as a mountain; and Toad, who bounced and leaped and snapped his long sticky tongue with the energy of someone who had a great deal of anger and no very good way to spend it.

The X-Men arrived in the great marble corridor.

Hank saw Toad coming before Toad reached him — he had a gift for reading a room, for noticing where the danger was before it moved. He shifted his weight, ready.

Toad's tongue shot out — fast as a cracking whip — and wrapped around Hank's ankle.

Hank did not fall. He tucked himself, felt the pull of the tongue, and used it — spinning into a handspring that brought him all the way around and deposited him directly in front of a very surprised Toad.

Hank's enormous hand closed gently around Toad's coat collar.

"You don't have to be here," Hank said, quietly. No anger. No shout. Just a simple truth, offered honestly.

Toad looked at him. Something moved across his face — a flicker of something that might, in a different life, have been wistfulness. But he sneered, and pulled away, and kept fighting.

Across the chamber, Scott Summers — Cyclops — was working with Jean Grey to keep the Blob from advancing deeper into the building. The Blob was enormous and could not be moved by any ordinary force, but Jean didn't need ordinary force. She had her mind, which was extraordinary.

And Magneto — standing at the far end of the room, silver hair sweeping back, one hand raised — was pulling the metal railings from the balcony above and sending them spinning through the air. Every piece of metal in the room was his to command.

Jean Grey looked up at the steel support beam in the ceiling. She closed her eyes. Slowly, gently, the beam drifted down and floated directly into the path of Magneto's magnetic force.

Magneto's power hit the beam. It spread through the metal, sideways, confused, and Magneto stumbled — just for a moment — with an expression of great surprise on his proud face.

It was enough.

Cyclops fired one precise blast. The Brotherhood scattered. Magneto gathered his people with a look and they retreated through the windows and into the New York sky, leaving behind the smell of ozone and the echo of steel.

The marble corridor was still again.

The world leaders were safe.

Hank McCoy watched Toad go and thought about what he'd seen in that flicker on the smaller mutant's face. Magneto's Brotherhood were not simply wicked. They were frightened — or angry — or lost. That didn't make them right. But it made Hank sad, in a quiet way, that things had come to this.

He picked up his notes. He wrote a seventeen-page report on how the United Nations building could be made safer, and delivered it before dinnertime.

Then he went to the library and sat in a comfortable chair and read for a long while, letting the words of other people's stories settle around him like something warm.

Outside, the city of New York carried on its business, noisy and bright and full of people just trying to figure out how to live together.

Hank thought that was, in the end, the most important work of all.

He turned the page, and kept reading.