DISCLAIMER: This is an unauthorized work of fiction using characters that are (c) & TM by Marvel Comics Group. No profit is being made on this story, so I'll invoke The Marvel Readers' Bill of Rights (for the full text see Stan's Soapbox in some of the May 1998 comics, e.g. Generation X #38):
"8. The right to practice scripting and drawing our Marvel characters for your own pleasure and amusement."
The story is (c) 2003 by Tilman Stieve (Menshevik@aol.com). You can download this and copy it for your entertainment, but don't sell it for profit, or Marvel will set their lawyers on you. Please do not archive this on your website without informing me first.

Love in the Times of Legacy

By Tilman Stieve, aka the Menshevik

You did it. You and Moira MacTaggert found the cure to the Legacy Virus and saved all our lives. Just as we knew you would. Or just as we told everyone we knew you would when we finally made the official announcement.

But you know and I know that it was not that simple. Yes, we always hoped you and Moira in the end would find a cure, but hoping isn't knowing. There were times when you found it hard enough to keep even your hope alive through so many setbacks and failed experiments, never mind the hope of others. And having to face a deadline after you and I tested LV positive, a deadline where we did not know how long it would be but which would definitively validate the 'dead' part if you didn't beat it.

As I tried to tell you after it was all over, I wasn't always up-front about my feelings during the six months we were cooped up on Muir Island. Maybe you don't want to know (as you say) or maybe you already knew I hadn't always told the truth when I said I was confident in your ability to beat the virus (there may have been a reason why I was only given minor parts in my high-school play productions). But should you change your mind I owe you some record of the things that won't make their way into the official reports, and it is best that I should do this while the memory is still fresh, for humans increasingly tend to remember what they want to remember as time goes by, and who knows what I'd tell you ten years from now?

On one hand, it wasn't that I lacked confidence in your expertise. If you couldn't succeed in finding a cure in time to save us all (with a 'little' help from Dr. MacTaggert), then nobody could do it. (Well, maybe Barry Ween could have done it in the space of an afternoon, but unfortunately he's a fictional character). The problem was the gnawing doubt that maybe even you might not succeed in time. And when in March you started having dizzy spells and bald patches began to show in your fur I had to get a tight grip on myself to hold back the panic. As you kept losing weight in the weeks that followed, so did I. I just felt numb and listless (even though I did my best to hide it when I was with you), I lost my appetite and you had to wonder if I was trying to look like Calista Flockheart.

You were in the worst shape of the three of us. Although us 'Muggles' can contract Legacy, it appears from the known cases that we know of that its impact on people with the genetic X-factor is much quicker. It took five years from Moira being diagnosed LV-positive until her health deteriorated appreciably, with you it was just five months before you had to lie flat on your back after three hours of strenuous work. Obviously I did all I could to keep your spirit up, although the question is how much of that was actually needed. Of course I liked to think it was of crucial importance (you should have seen my ego inflate after Bobby told me on the phone how much you needed my support), but that did not make it true. Not that it prevented me from feeling guilty anyway -- in the bleak hours around 3 a.m. I would keep myself awake with the question if I was sollicitous and helpful because I loved you or because I thought of you as my ticket to health or I liked to feel important. That maybe by bottling up my frustration and anger, sometimes near-despair, I was betraying the trust between us, attempting to hide things from you that you were entitled to know.

Of course I was afraid of dying, all three of us were. Did I blame you for possibly infecting me with the virus? That was a subject we studiously avoided throughout those months, not a question that never occurred to you, I'm sure. If I did blame you, then certainly not consciously, and even in my emotional state any subconscious resentment I might have had was eclipsed by more important matters. There were times when I looked at your poor emaciated body and thought: If Hank dies I don't want to live. And as a gut-level reaction that was my honest feeling. You know we've been in some damn tight places together and when I told you then that if I had to die a horrible death I could not imagine anyone else I'd rather die with than you, that was not just me waxing lyrical. But it is a romantic notion, and we had to think practically. With our child to consider, it would be better should one of us had to die that the other should survive. But as at that time you were deteriorating a lot faster than me or even Moira, that thought became taboo to me, tainted as it appeared to be with disloyalty.

Now I wonder if in trying to spare your feelings I did not underestimate your strength (typical, no matter what I could do, I am obsessed with thinking of reasons why it would be wrong!). I guess it comes easily to someone in your line of work (worlds saved while-U-wait) and I must have caught it from you: don't admit your weakness, draw attention away from your fears with a funny line or a smoldering kiss, act confident. There were precious few moments when you slipped up, when you let me or Moira catch a glimpse of the pain and exasperation you had to endure. But I love you all the more for them... Well, to be a little hair-splitter, I was not really too entranced with the one or two times you lashed out at me or the time when you and Moira got into a shouting match and I had to try to mediate between you and calm the flaring tempers, but I can empathize, believe me.

Those flare-ups and the days when you two wouldn't speak a word to each other for hours will probably only be alluded to obliquely when you and Moira write your memoirs. I guess no one even suspects today, you were so charming at the press-conferences that none of the journalists thought of asking questions that led in that direction.

We did got on each other's nerves so many times, so it was a good thing that we still could contact our friends and loved ones via telephone and -pathy and knew that they were rooting for us. The thing I most vividly remember is when Bobby and Emma told us they'd be holding back the christening of their daughter so we could be godparents at the ceremony after you found the cure. I cried myself to sleep that night, but it did a lot to raise my spirits. (Moira MacTaggert probably felt a lot like that when she heard that Rahne and Sam had put off their wedding another year for the same reason.) And after that vote of confidence it did not take you long to finish the job, as it happened, so now we'll even be able to take our second honeymoon before Imogen's baptism. And we could take Effie of Emma's, Bobby's and Martha's hands.

Nietzsche said "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger" -- if that is true, ours should be a strong marriage indeed. Our relationship survived misunderstandings, my abuse of your confidence when I as good as told the world what Pestilence had done to your mind, your metamorphosis, our disagreement about ethics, one or both of us almost getting blown up in some battle or other, and now this. Frankly, I think we could have done without these experiences, but I'm glad we came through them together.

What will people say? Instead of writing a heart-warming and frightfully meaningful chronicle of life in the Legacy Ward ("On the Island of the Shadow of Death" would have been a catchy title), I spent so much time scribbling away on doctor/nurse romances. It did seem the easiest thing to do to pass the time when you were occupied for hours and days on end with some new series of experiments. I had written such things to help pay my way through college and know the relevant formulas by heart. Now it was a form of relief, a way of avoiding to face directly what scared me. But when I look at the manuscripts today, I see that in a lot of my obsessions sidled their way into their subtext. (Perhaps you'd care to check the stories out?) Maybe it was a way to deal with my feelings after all and that's the subconscious reason why I dawdled away so much time with this instead of using more of the energy that had not been sapped by the disease and the atmosphere of Muir Island for something more demanding or worthwhile. And so unfortunately I yet have to write the paper you suggested I do, 'Sorcery As a Metaphor for the Mutant Experience in the Writings of J. K. Rowling'. Well, maybe when we return from our vacation.

And of course I spent a lot of time thinking about the child we had been forced to leave behind in America. At least Effie was too young to understand the full gravity of our situation, and at least Martha and later Bobby and Emma were there to look after her. Poor Emma! I hurt her a little because I did not take more advantage of her offer to mind-link us with Effie, but in my fretful state of mind I was too afraid of what she might learn about my fears in the process. Not that Emma would ever admit that anything gets to her (as I saw when I tried to talk to her about it later, after it was all over.) And of course she would not hear about the possible risks to herself, in spite of her pregnancy. But I'm still glad Martha took over for a while, just in case.

I never understood the phrase "I'm proud of you." How can one be proud of something someone else did unless one felt some of the credit was due to oneself? In that sense I can't say it. But in the sense that I am awestruck by what you achieved and that I feel joy and a little irrational pride that you chose me out of all the women in all the world to be your wife and to stay with me, then your Trish is very proud of you indeed.

Notes