▸ Column · Contemporary mutant-rights era; suburban America in a world where homo sapiens and homo superior coexist in uneasy tension, and mutation is the axis on which childhood cruelty finds its sharpest edge.
MAGNETO replies.
Replied to by Magneto, with a rebuttal from Sylvanas Windrunner.
The letter
I'm in my mid-thirties. Last week I was standing in a grocery queue behind a man I recognized — the boy who, from the middle of fifth grade through the end of eighth, made every lunch period a kind of theater. He'd discovered my mutation manifested when I was nervous, and he performed it for the table every day until they laughed. Last week he had a toddler on his hip and he looked completely ordinary. He smiled, I smiled back, and I'm almost certain he didn't know me at all. That somehow felt worse than if he'd been terrible. I lay awake that night with my heart hammering the way it did when I was eleven. And I realized: I have spent twenty years walking into every room in my head first — rehearsing what I'll say, who might turn on me, how to hold myself. My mutation has steadied. I have a career, real friendships, a life I'm proud of. None of that seems to have reached the part of me that still expects him around the next corner. How do I actually put this down?
Magneto replies
The child you were at eleven made the only correct decision available to him: he built a fortress. Every word rehearsed in private, every studied manner of entering a room — that was not a wound. That was a weapon, carefully forged in the only material he had. He was given no protection by the people who stood by watching, and so he became his own. Resent none of it.
You are asking whether you may now lay it down. I am perhaps not the right person to answer that. I built my own armor in circumstances so far removed from a school cafeteria that I will not insult you by drawing the comparison directly, and I have not laid mine aside in sixty years. I know what it costs to keep carrying it when the enemy who shaped you has long since forgotten your name. I know exactly what it feels like to be awake before dawn with your blood moving the way it does when the wire is still real.
The man with the toddler has forgotten you. That is not resolution — the wound was real, and the fact that the one who made it cannot recall making it does not revise the record. What I would have you look at clearly is this: he took eight years from the child you were. The question you are circling, but not quite asking, is how many more years he takes from the man you have become. That answer does not belong to him. It does not belong to me. It belongs to you alone, and you are the only one in that grocery queue who still holds it.
— Magneto
Sylvanas Windrunner weighs in
Magneto will tell you the armor was earned. He's right, and then he'll stop — because he never went further himself, and can't. So I will. You're waiting for something to make this land: his recognition, your vindication, some moment where the record gets corrected. I was murdered by the thing that enslaved me. Arthas never apologized. He never looked at me and understood what he had taken. There is no resolution coming from outside you. The only real question is whether a terrified eleven-year-old stands watch at every door of your life until you die, or whether you take back that post yourself. Marcus is already gone. You are the only one keeping him present. Take your mind back — not as forgiveness. As theft.
— Sylvanas Windrunner