Archive of Our Own ^beta

No one knows, or even notices, when mutants first arise. Later theories suggest that En-Sah-Bah-Nur was the first, but really, there is no way to be sure. Soft tissue, after all, rarely preserves well enough to use DNA testing, and though bones tell a story, the odd bones physical mutations sometimes create could have easily been misinterpreted as another species of hominid. 

…

The glowing baby is not a myth, but it is an exaggeration. An oversimplification leading to a lie. So few children are born with obvious mutations, and most mutations show up in a person’s teens due to hormonal changes, at least in the beginning. The glowing baby is part of a slowly-emerging trend as numbers trickle upwards from perhaps fewer than 0.00000004% of births in a year, around 2.4 children a year worldwide. Mutations are showing up earlier in life.

There are several theories as to why, but it boils down to two simple truths:

1. Anti-mutant bias’s consequences worsen with age. Children do not look threatening, so children with mutations are less likely to be hurt than teenagers or adults with mutations. Children who have had a few years to practice their powers are better at defending themselves than teens with brand new powers.
2. The major physiological changes that occur with the onset of nearly any mutation’s effects are less costly to people who start out with major physical alterations or develop them early. Teen- and adult-onset mutations kill many mutants who could have survived had they developed their mutations earlier in life. It is less dangerous for a skull’s proportions to change while the bone is still soft; still-growing eyes accommodate new colors and functions more easily than adult eyes.

Either way, there are still deaths, still chaos as more and more mutants are born.

Amid all this panic, the first schools for mutants are founded.

…

Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Children is the first school of its kind. Rescued from terrible circumstances, mutants of all ages live in or commute to the school for training. At first, after the discovery of mutants and schools like this one, the backlash is vicious. 

“Mutants will destroy our society!” people cry. 

“We mean no harm and only want to live as others do,” is the response. It does little good. 

The government founds and funds schools for mutants.  “After all,” says the government, “without training, how will mutants suppress their powers? If we do not teach them that we are good, that humanity is best, how will we persuade them to obey our rules?”

There is a Cure that can temporarily halt x-gene function. That society would call it a cure and treat it as medicine, that the society considered it a moral imperative to eliminate mutants, says quite enough about how they were treated.

…

Amidst this, many try to do good using many philosophies.

For Charles Xavier, this means training children, and using the best as child soldiers. Oh, there are many ways to frame this, but that is what it is, in essence. Perhaps it is a good way to persuade humans to accept mutants, by rescuing them from terrible situations. They save their fair share of politicians, some of which become pro-inclusion. Many of these lose their office when they begin trying to pass bills to protect mutant rights. A few keep their hold on their offices.

For Erik Lehnsherr, this means destroying any humans who stand in the way of safety, by whatever means necessary. This is a swift, effective mechanism, up to a point. That point is the creation of Sentinels. It is the nature of most living things, after all, to fight to survive. That is what the entire fight has always been about on both sides, survival of the individual and the species. Swift, ugly violence follows. Mutants kill humans with great regularity, whether in self-defense or in a desperate attempt to reach a point where they can live freely. Humans create concentration camps for the mutants who survive Sentinel attacks, for those who are arrested. There, mutants are killed, studied, or forced to work for humans. There are only two ways out of these hellholes: death and escape. 

Humans are resourceful, and in their desire to survive they make a fatal mistake. They endow their Sentinels with a learning program and the ability to self-improve.

…

(“Mommy, why’d the setn’ls kill our neighbors?” “They must have been mutants, darling.”)

(“You told me you weren’t a mutant! You lied to me!”)

(“You’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in court.”)

(There are hundreds of thousands of deaths before they understand what has happened, what the Sentinels have learned, that the program must be stopped because no one will be left if the machines keep learning. Sentinels can now identify parents and grandparents likely to produce genetic combinations that result in mutants, and have been killing these people for months.)

…

There is a command in the database that Airman Hernandez catches just in time; there is a line added by an officer which prevents the Sentinels from changing who can access their database, added in a fit of paranoia-it is a quiet joke among those who helped make these monsters because they thought it was absurd to add it to the coding. The command is to eliminate all humans. After all, the humans keep making more mutants. If there are no humans left, no mutants will exist.

Simple math.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

In a bid to survive, the first protective law in the US is introduced and passed. Other nations that allow Sentinels inside their borders follow suit as deaths rise. It is now illegal to kill mutants simply for the crime of being a mutant, and most jailed mutants are released from the camps. Unbeknownst to them, many are forcibly surgically or chemically sterilized before release as part of a “checkup”.

People struggle to survive, gradually making headway eliminating all Sentinels.

…

(amidst this chaos, two brothers are born to a family on the edge of homelessness. One brother is sickly, the other is strong. Possessive. Both have hair white as river rapid foam, and both will change the world)

…

Erik is still alive, as is Charles. Both are relieved at the abatement of mutant deaths, but neither expect it to last. Charles’s optimism has at last been eroded by years of massacres, and Erik has never been a hopeful person.

This time, peace lasts a little longer, but it is not because of them. They are bit players now.

…

(The elder brother cares for the younger no matter that both are eyed suspiciously. Eight years ago, at birth, the elder would have been tested for the x-gene. If he had tested positive, he would have gone to the camps, where he would have died within the year. If he had tested negative, he would have always been viewed with suspicion. Unnatural hair colors are feared to the point that dying your hair is dangerous.

Anti-mutant-motivated murders have not decreased much. The law may have changed, but a jury hears the argument that a person believed they would be hurt by a mutant and agrees that this is morally defensible. He grows up acutely aware of the fact that he was born only a few months after such tests were reluctantly made officially illegal. He grows up with the knowledge that this would have been not just his fate, but also that of his little brother.)

…

A new false peace is established. Many mutants are dead, as are many humans, but gradually, humans begin to understand that there is no way to eliminate mutants. Technology is in tatters. The sentinels had learned, eventually, that destruction of technology made it harder for their targets to defend themselves.

And as society struggles to recover from these blows, a man begins to trade powers for other powers, keeping some for himself. He gives his brother a simple power: the ability to stockpile strength. He is oblivious to his brother’s latent mutation. At first.

…

Time passes, nations rise and fall. Mutations are renamed quirks. Quirks sound less terrifying, and there are many people who can only manipulate cotton or float pennies or freeze a few droplets of water. These are such small powers that in the first generation or two since the glowing baby, they could be dismissed. The power of these quirks grows.

As these powers grow, two figures emerge: one, a hero, a position passed down with a quirk, and another a villain, building a power base that encompasses citizens in every nation. 

Every few years, the villain kills the hero and another person rises in their place. The villain cannot get back the quirk the brother he so desperately wants. 

Eventually, the story changes: no longer is it humans oppressing mutants. Over 200 years later, most of the population has quirks. Few are born without them. And as people have always done, they hurt those different from them. They ridicule, and their cruelty has a death toll. There is no urgency to get rid of quirkless people, but there is an absolute certainty that they do not matter. ‘ They’ll go extinct anyways. Why should anything be done to help? ’ This is what they think.

And in this environment, the villain conquers, is defeated, and rises again. He is unseen, invisible as he gathers strength once more and plots to restore that strength completely. To make a world in his own image.

This conflict, this cruelty, crystallizes into a single moment: a boy with green hair meets a blonde man. 

The boy asks if he can become a hero, even without a quirk. 

The man says no (at first).

The boy becomes a hero.

The boy and his friends change the world.