Michael Thompson

"Okay, J.J., Michelle. You've been asking about the past, about who I was before I met your mother, and I suppose you're old enough now to understand.

"I was born in the Bronx, but the Bronx of another world, and I don't know much about my birth parents. I know their names, but that's about it. My grandparents raised me; they were my real parents. I was a cat-kid from birth, just like you, Michelle. How they managed through it I'll never know. Not long before I was a teenager, they were killed by a terrorist group called The Friends of Humanity, people who hate mutants for the simple reason of being mutants.

"So The Friends of Humanity were on the one side, saying that mutants are evil and should be destroyed. On the other side, in this world you also had a man named Magneto, Erik Lehnsherr, who led a group called Brotherhood of Mutants, saying that the non-mutant humans are scum and mutants should forgo them. It was hard to know where I stood, sometimes.

"A few years later, I was homeless, drifting around, and I made my way to New York City, where a man named Charles Xavier had a School for the Gifted, which really meant mutants. By this time I was about seventeen, and not long before I'd decided I wanted a new name. Didn't want to think about the parents that died for me, you know? So I'm digging around this Dumpster, right--come across an old magazine, and it talks about a book series named 'Rygar'. I added an 'H', and that was that.

"I forget exactly what was happening that day, but something big was going down. All I remember is stealing some hot dogs and nearly getting myself exploded for my effort. Not from the vendor, but from whatever big-bad-thing-of-the-week was stomping around. Guy in red leather tackled me; I was dazed, but I remember who it was--Daredevil.

"Some time later, I ended up with the Brotherhood of Mutants. They fed me, housed me, only asked me to work around the asteroid--yes, an actual asteroid was the base, named Avalon--but that made sense. I thought it was alright, you know? Met Elektra soon after, though that's not a story I should really go into. Suffice to say, I never looked at Central Park the same way after that. They were an interesting pair, Daredevil and Elektra. You could spend five minutes around them and realize that something was going on. Doesn't take a sensitive nose to smell the pheromones kick up a notch when they were around each other.

"Like a few others, I figured out who Daredevil was; I'd hung around him quite a bit, and met a man named Matt Murdock once. My nose could put two and two together. Murdock, he was a good guy, in his way. Elektra was a good woman, in her way. Better than I ever deserved. Still don't know what they saw in me, but they saw something. Never quite had the guts to ask, either. You learn, real quick--with those two, there are certain things you don't talk about.

"They became almost like surrogate parents for me, really, though that's another of those things I learned to never really mention. They looked out for me, they cared for me--and they never asked me for anything. That was the hardest part to understand, you know? Only my parents did that for me. Everyone since--they all wanted something from me. But not Murdock and Elektra. Murdock had a few 'talks' with me, Elektra would 'check up' on me, but they never told me I 'had' to do something, be something. They just asked me to be me.

"Now, I met a guy in the Brotherhood, Devin. We'd started to grow close, but I was also doing my own thinking, thanks to Murdock and Elektra. I began to believe that Magneto's declarations of brotherhood were actually thinly-disguised declarations of war. He wasn't spouting the 'mutant superiority' line much when I was there, but I saw it get started, and I didn't like it. I moved back down to the city, but tried to keep my ties to friends I'd made up there. It didn't last long.

"It came to a head at a Friends of Humanity demonstration in Hell's Kitchen. I was there, as, obviously, was Daredevil. We weren't doing anything but keeping an eye on things, making sure demonstration and protest were the only things on the agenda. Then some Brotherhood members showed up, led by Devin. They subtly incited the crowd, and a brawl broke out. Devin was about to zap an innocent protester, but I got in the way. Literally. If he wanted to blast the young man, he'd have to blast me, too. We stood staring at each other for a moment, then he recalled his team and left. We both knew we'd never see each other again, at least not as friends. I'd made my choice in that moment, to stand against the Brotherhood. He'd made his choice to stand with them.

"A few more years to pass up, here. A lot of people had neighborhoods or protectorates they watched over, so I took Central Park as mine, and spent my nights running through the grounds, leaping from the trees, dashing by the lakes. I'd gotten into Parkour, which made racing around like a lunatic actually fun. I kicked butt, took names, and generally just lived life.

"Then I met Mariah. She was a normal human, in every way but one--she didn't see the world how most people saw it. She didn't think about terms like 'normal human' or 'mutant'. She just didn't. She only cared about who you were. That was something I'd never really found before, at least not quite to such a level, you know? It's probably obvious, but, yeah, we fell in love. Even got married about six or seven months after we started dating. I thought I was the luckiest cat that had ever been born, and for a time, I was.

"It was a little less than a month before our first anniversary when I came home and found the apartment in ruins. The place was torn up, the television and couch gone, that sort of thing. In the middle of the living room was Mariah. Dead. I could smell what they did to her, how they ravaged her before she bled out. I, uh--I don't remember the next few months, and I'm not proud of that, nor am I proud of what I did. I hunted every single person I could smell that had had even the smallest part in her death, and got lost in a bottle of vodka every morning after a night's 'work'.

"I stayed away from Murdock and Elektra around that time, too. What was I going to say to them? That everything they'd tried to teach me about murder I'd pissed away because of vengeance? I couldn't face that, not until after I'd finished what I'd started, you know? I'd save the recriminations for later. I hunted through the city, finding every one of them and disposing of them. 'Disposing' is too nice of a word, I think, but--no sense in going into too much detail. They weren't happy before they left this plane of existence. Let's leave it at that.

"After I found and disposed of the last guy--a sniveling shit cowering in a warehouse in Queens--I just sort of wandered. Didn't really get in touch with anyone, didn't really care about very much. Just sort of went through the motions, you know? Didn't even pop my head into Mutant Town to keep up with some friends and acquaintances I'd made there. Something was gone, from me. Something deep, something powerful. There was a hole left in me when Mariah died, and the boozing only let me put off facing it.

"I don't know how much time passed after that. Months? Years? It didn't really matter. I was simply existing, stalking those who would prey on innocent people and making them pay, waiting for the day when one would be a bit too quick for me. Time just--passed, without me paying much attention to it.

"Then Elektra found me. She--well. She was never the overly emotional sort, and if she liked you she wouldn't show disapproval with much more than a small frown, but it was enough. She spoke quietly, almost gently, for her, and basically kicked my tail for letting myself get caught up in revenge.

"She got me to take martial arts, to study under an acquaintance of hers. I was skeptical when she said it would actually help me focus, help me achieve the calm I was trying to find--but after a while, it started to actually work. I'm still not sure if learning Fu-Jow Pai was a joke of hers, since you could never tell when she was joking or not, but it worked. That's the important part. I'd finally started to find that--that calm, that peace, that I'd been so long without. That's not to say the problems stopped existing. The rage at Mariah's death and the guilt over the blood-bath I'd fallen into after it remained, but--I was starting to deal with them. Come to terms. I'd never be 'over' the problems, but I was finally starting to be able to deal with them.

"There's that old thing about cats having nine lives. I figure my fifth started the day of the whatever-it-was. After Elektra helped me get my head on straight (again), I got an apartment in Mutant Town, and one morning I was heading back there. It starts to get fuzzy, but the last thing I remember is falling. Falling--then suddenly waking up to bright sunlight. I thought I caught a trace of a--a swirly-energy-thingie as I opened my eyes, but I might have been mistaken. It didn't take me long to start to figure out what was going on; it's not like alternate dimensions and the like were uncommon in my own world.

"I managed to get into town and--yeah. Not really like anything I'd ever known, let me tell you. The people were surprisingly friendly, though. That wasn't something I was used to. I mean--I come from a place where being hanged for being even a non-obvious mutant is considered a less-shitty way to go, you know? People were actually nice to me, helped me get set up in an apartment.

"I was there for a little less than a year. I mostly kept my head down, really. I tried to keep to myself--then a few months after I first got there, I fell along with you mother, Jamie. She was everything I wasn't, really. We started officially dating about two weeks after we met, and things were calm--for a while.

"We tried taking things slow, but she ended up pregnant, which neither of us expected. I didn't even know I could have kids; you might be surprised how many obvious mutants like myself are infertile, or otherwise incapable of having children. Still, it was a responsibility I wasn't going to run from. I was determined to be the best father my child could have, though I had no idea how to do it. I didn't know how to be a father, and that weird city wasn't exactly an environment I wanted to raise kids in, anyway. The choice in at least that last one was soon taken out of my hands.

"To make a long story short, Avalon had gotten stuck in some sort of--eh, I dunno--dimensional 'rift' or something. Never really made sense to me, but, then, science was never my strong point. The punchline is that while Magneto had access to a few dimensions, he lost access to Earth. He realized I was there, and sent his right-hand monster, Victor Creed after me. Creed and I--we have a history (though he has a 'history' with pretty much everyone; as much as he hates me, he'd help make me Emperor of the World Forever if it meant getting a crack at some guy named Logan), so he wasn't exactly kind about it.

"Long, dramatic story short, is that over the next few months, Creed and I got in each other's faces, until he stepped over a line--one that meant he ended up in the brig. Then--Jamie gave birth. to you, Michelle. You, Jamie Junior, and Alex came later. She, uh--she died delivering Alex, a few weeks after your fourth birthday, Michelle.

"Doctor Henderson did everything she could, but--Jaime's body just couldn't take it. There was actually a lot of medical babble behind it, but it didn't matter. What mattered was that Jaime died. If it weren't for you three--well, I don't know what would have happened.

"After that, I took over Creed's position as Magneto's right-hand man, a position I never thought I'd take, but--I came to see that, though I tended to see things in terms of moral black and white when I was younger, the truth was that there were more shades of grey. Magneto was the first to admit that he undertook horrific acts--but he also showed me why they were necessary, and how he never took innocent lives unless he had to. I might not have bought it if I didn't meet people like Doctor Henderson, a normal human who saw that peace would never be an option. She was a normal human, but given a position of authority on Avalon. The younger me would never have believed it, but--there she was. Technically, she's third in line of authority, after Mystique, but that's only come up once.

"Anyway, I watched as these giant robots called 'Sentinels' grabbed young mutants before the Brotherhood could get to them--I only saw one returned, and she--she was a shell of a person. I knew I couldn't let that happen to anyone else, so when Lehnsherr offered me the position--I actually took it.

"Not that everything was hunky-dory or whatever. I was still a single father trying to raise you kids and having no idea how. Raising kids, who, even at your age age, conspired together to get what you want. It wasn't an easy experience, but I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

"I knew that Avalon was no place to raise you. I knew it. Sooner or later, Magneto would end up pushing a government too far, that eventually flat-out nuclear war or something would come to the station. I couldn't raise you there--I couldn't. Yeah, I know you remember this part, Michelle. I took you guys and ran to the control room for the dimensional gate. There was a list of alternate worlds, and I chose the one that seemed the safest, and here we are.

"Now, I know that--that it seems like I went through a lot of pain, and I did--but I got you three out of it. Everything--everything--was worth it, because of you. That's why I don't like talking about the past, except for your mother. I don't want you thinking that I in any way regret my life, or that I am not incredibly proud of you three and feel amazingly lucky to be your dad. Every day I think of you three and just--I'm happy. I'm honestly happy. And you know--I did things I regret. I did things that by all rights should have landed me in prison, but the universe gave me a second chance. I got to start over, here, with a clean slate, and you three. I honestly can't imagine what more I could possibly want.

"Heh, yeah, now we're all tearing up. Go ask Alex what she wants on a pizza, and I'll call, okay?"