Legacy

Once upon a time, in the Xavier Institute in Westchester, it was the very last day of the school year.

The summer lay just outside the windows — warm and green — and the students were restless with it, the way students everywhere are restless on the last day. But they weren't in any hurry to leave Professor McCoy's classroom.

Because everyone knew what today was.

Hank McCoy came in carrying nothing at all — no notes, no stack of books, no apparatus. He sat down ON the desk, not behind it, his enormous blue-furred legs hanging off the edge, his glasses slightly crooked.

He smiled.

"Tell me," he said, "the hardest thing about being a mutant."

Not the most exciting thing. The hardest.

The room was quiet. Then a girl in the second row said: "People stare at me in public. All the time."

Hank nodded. "Yes."

A boy near the window: "I can't shake hands with anyone without worrying."

"I know," said Hank.

Another voice, softer: "I feel different from my whole family. Like I got separated from them by something I didn't choose."

He listened to every person in the room. He did not rush. He did not offer easy reassurances. He let each voice be heard.

Then Hank McCoy told his students about the Brand Corporation laboratory.

The three days alone. The calculations that gave the same answer no matter how many times he ran them. Standing at the mirror. The four days it took him to call Professor Xavier.

He told the real version. With the silence in it.

When he finished, the room was very quiet.

"I'm not going to tell you it stops being hard," Hank said. "I won't say that, because it isn't entirely true. What I will tell you is this: it gets lighter. It gets lighter because you build things around it. Friendships. Work that matters. The knowledge of what you are actually capable of — which is always more than you think."

He paused.

"You've already started building all of those things. Look around this room."

The students looked.

Something moved through the classroom — quiet and real — as those faces looked at one another and recognized something that had been there all year, growing.

We belong to each other. We are in this together.

Hank McCoy had been an original X-Man, one of the first five Professor Xavier had called. He had been an Avenger. He held two doctoral degrees in biophysics and biochemistry. He had stood before the United States Senate and argued for the rights of people who had no one else in that room to speak for them.

He had fought Sentinels and Mister Sinister and Apocalypse. He had built cures in moving vehicles. He had synthesized antidotes mid-battle while calling out weak points to Cyclops across a battlefield.

And he had sat all night with a fifteen-year-old who could not stop causing small earthquakes — exhausted and frightened and unable to find the switch. He sat through the whole night. Talking sometimes. Mostly just being there. In the morning, the ground went still. The student slept.

Hank went to make tea.

All of it mattered. Every mission, every paper, every formula.

But these end-of-year classes — this annual last day with the summer at the window — might have mattered most.

He slid off the desk. He straightened his glasses. He looked at the faces in front of him.

"Go read something," he said.

They groaned. Every single one, in the comfortable, affectionate way of students who know they are loved.

Hank McCoy smiled his widest smile, the one that showed all his teeth and could light up a room on a dark December afternoon.

"Off you go," he said. "Come back in September. We have more work to do."

They gathered their things and streamed out into the sunshine. The room emptied. Their voices faded down the corridor.

Hank stood in the quiet classroom and looked at the empty chairs.

He thought about all the students who had sat in them — the frightened, remarkable, extraordinary young people who had arrived carrying their differences like something heavy, and left carrying them like something that belonged to them.

Professor Xavier had built this place. He had made it possible.

But the work of it — the daily, patient, careful work — was done by people who stayed.

Hank picked up his glasses case. He walked to the door. The summer came in through the open windows, warm and full of the sweetness of an ending that is also a beginning.

He had started in Dunfermline, Illinois, as a baby with very large hands and a very wide smile.

He had become, over the course of an extraordinary life, a doctor and a scientist and a warrior and a friend.

But most of all, he had become a teacher.

And that, he thought, walking out into the sunshine of the Xavier Institute's familiar grounds, was the best thing of all.