On the second of April in 1969, in an office building inside London proper, Lord Henry Wickham stood over a bassinet containing two identical infants and suspected that the truth of their living circumstances differed to the presentation of clean cotton blankets and freshly-soaped limbs that he was looking at. He wasn't wrong. Up until two hours ago, his two month old bastard sons had had a squalor of newspaper for bedding and a black-rimmed bathtub to contain them. Not that there were all that many precedents, but he did understand: this is the sort of thing that happens when an old English lord knocks up a depressive fifteen-year-old girl from the East End. There was even some sort of rumor that she had given birth in a tavern basement, or something. He wasn't the sort of man to be moved by rumors. Or much else, for that matter.
The two squirmed and squawked with roughly the same level of zeal and volume. He shifted his eyes from left to right, studying them in mute for a protracted moment. His lawyer couldn't tell whether he'd discerned a meaningful difference between the two, or if his selection was randomized based on the perception that there were none. Anyway: he picked the one on the left, and left the other with the mother, in addition to a considerable quantity of money to make the sign-over (or his refusal to take both, as it were) complete. The lovers resolved to never see each other again without mentioning it out loud.
For as long as genetic congruity has been known as such, its limitations and influences have been the subject of considerable debate, the perennial conflict between nature and nurture, and room for scientific correlations. Mystery sets in here. Both parents— and all of the stepfamily involved— more or less expected their sons to grow up to be assholes. For one thing, the Wickhams had been famously privvy to certain character flaws for generations and little Georgiana— the mother— had a flighty disposition which translated roughly to ruthless egocentrism. Separately, both poverty and a moneyed lifestyle of excess and exclusion pricked and pried at by tabloids would probably predispose one to anger. There were many statistics and storybooks about such phenomenon. Surprisingly, one of them turned out okay.
August As A Boy
Which isn't to say that August Wickham didn't have anger. He was a bright kid, who drew astute if simplified conclusions from being invited to fencing salons but left home during dress shows, educated on history and economics by the finest tutors while his half-brother, John, attended Eton College. He did not do hugs and never would. In large part, he got on well with his siblings— polite, distant— and mutually ignored his stepmother, featured here and there in the magazines as the boy who never looked at the camera, blithely failing to concede that he was the subject of any of the photographs he appeared in.
As a child with solitude enforced in his life, it escaped his understanding that the worst of his family's estrangement and dysfunction His first real misdemeanor involved a keg of flour, and put dropped the little carved foot bridge shattered into the koi pond with a couple miscellaneous ducks as casualties.
August As A Soldier
August joined military school by choice— that was, the British Royal Air Force. It wasn't a dream, exactly, but it turned out to be one in a way that was probably as sentimental as it sounds. Despite that the romantic depiction most marketable to women on pubbing rounds was of high flight and F-16s, he personally found the truth a little more delightful. He flew Tornados. Close to the ground, at night, where the danger of the sudden stop was that much closer, as was fog, fire, retaliation from the ground. He loved flying. He liked making friends. Liked having to win them when his background came up, the privileges of his youth and the stigmatized circumstances of his birth. For the first time in his life, he fit.
He performed admirably, even to the standards of his father, who was reasonably difficult to impress for a man who ostensibly spent most of his time more concerned by hunting dogs and horses than war or duties of government. Though he enjoyed his first taste of acidic tension and active combat during the Cold War, training rigorously, conducting overflights in wait of the Soviet Union, hauling explosive cargo around in the belly of his bombers and occasionally dropping payloads on peripheral conflicts, he spent twelve years as a member of the RAF before he flew a plane into outright war, and he was baying with the rest of the hounds when it started. It was 1999 and the dossier read 'Operation Allied Force.' NATO made its principles and intentions clear. Optimistic at twenty seven years of age, he carried his army tattoos, decorative pins, boots, and coarse friendships off to Italy, fiercely prepared to defend an England that consisted entirely of Shakespeare, warm beer, and justice represented in nationalist primary colors.
Bombing Albanian refugees, though. Where does that get fun?
Ironically— and like many of his countrymen, he found great solace in irony— that turned out to be a question that one couldn't really turn around on a soldier to invoke priorities like duty and honor. Everybody understood when he refused his orders, but few would or could admit it to his face. A few comrades really turned on him, seeing hypocrisy— either in him or themselves— in his conscientious objection. Fewer still commiserated where anyone could see it. His superior turned a veiny shade of purple and had him court-marshalled. He was dishonorably discharged and his family was dismayed, insofar as they had 'always' figured he would turn out like this. This induced in him the urge to flip up middle fingers, both metaphorically and literally. He emigrated to the United States, had his legal named changed for reasons more personal and less superficial than spite, and found aerial camera work with Chicago Air.
August Goes To America
He liked the United States, even after he was reluctantly relieved of the titillating notion that all Americans were cowboys. He enjoyed himself a collection of Stetsons and baseball caps, however misfit they seemed with his preference of tartan, twill and khaki. After a few years, he also began to enjoy himself the occasional artillery-heavy raid on criminal enterprises for great justice. Were he of a slightly different disposition, he probably would have found it suspect that so many aggressive, ex-military personnel found it into Chicago Air's ranks. As it was, he enjoyed renewing a comradely rapport with his cohorts, though his experience with the RAF had subconsciously programmed him with the social gravitation to stay at arm's length.
A year before the Midtown Man hit, he discovered that he was Evolved. This occurred when he was visiting his father again for the first time in a decade. They went on a hunting expedition in Scotland, which was an exploration of blood in the literal sense rather than outright familial sentimentality, and were en route to Glasgow from the lodge, in companionably frigid silence when their Land Rover hit a stag.
August Has Superpowers
August woke to stars, moonshine turning crimson through the spatter on the windshield. Contrary to the proper physics of impact, the steering wheel had imploded in front of him and his half of the laminated glass had peeled outward. His father, who had a cut drying on his forehead, climbed out of the autowreck first, peculiarly unscathed despite the outward wear of age. He had a leg fracture to show for it, himself. A busload of Japanese tourists found them.
No explanations were forthcoming, of course: that would have required emotional honesty, or something. His father merely bullet-listed the sundry drawbacks to displaying preternatural power anywhere public, indicated that the English government and corporate forces were of concern, and told him to get out of the country. He did, fleeing just a few steps ahead of the ravening hounds of tabloids before his father managed to quell them.
Upon allowing his coworkers into his confidence, he was not especially surprised to discover that his boss was a mutant, or Jake. The revelation of the Midtown Man and the sociopolitical fallout afterward taught him very little about human nature that he hadn't worked out earlier, but lent him a rare but distinct conviction that, for the first time in his life, he was exactly where he needed to be.
