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.
