Fic; Xavier's Home for Wanderers
Title Xavier's Home for Wanderers, for this prompt
Rating pg-13 for language and some violence
Summary Alex's past finds him. (Alex + Scott, hints of pre-Alex/Hank/Sean, beware total disregard for movieverse timeline)
Disclaimer Will never own, boo.
Before Charles and Erik, before solitary and the detention center and foster care, before the hospital, there had been his mother, father, Scott, and Alex on a plane. Alex was three. "You look tired, my angel," his mother had crooned, gently combing back his blonde hair from his eyes as he nuzzled into her side. The seats on the plane were uncomfortable, but she smelled as she always did, a small comfort - like a dusty library and lavendar and talcum powder. "Go to sleep. We'll be there when you wake."
Alex slept.
The next thing he remembered was waking up in the hospital, fighting, shaking, reaching for his mother but finding a strange nurse instead. "You'll be okay," the nurse said, voice like dry paper. "You'll be taken care of." They kept him in the hospital for what felt like months but was probably only a few weeks. Scott visited sometimes, but he wasn't mom or dad, and every time his big brother came without them, Alex resented him more. Later, he would of course learn that they were dead, killed in the plane crash that Alex and Scott somehow walked away from. For now, though, Alex wondered why his parents never visited. He must have done something bad, he thought. That was why. If he had just stayed awake on the plane, maybe none of this would have happened.
One day, Scott visited and told him it would be the last time for a while. He was sorry. Alex was sitting against the headboard of his bed, white sheets like a cloud all around him. His brother sat hunched over in the chair next to him. He looked old, then, like their dad, blue eyes dark and shadowed.
"But you're my big brother," Alex said, not understanding.
The nurses had given him some toy cars to play with. He pretended the shiny red one was a plane and made it crash into his leg, over and over again. He liked to pretend that he made it explode.
"I'll still be your big brother, Alex. Just. I'll be far away, and you'll be far away. But I'll write to you, and call, and maybe when they find you a family, we can visit each other."
"But I have a family," Alex complained. "You. Mom, dad." Sometimes, he thought, Scott was dumber than he was.
Scott didn't say anything after that. He was only ten at the time, Alex supposes now, so what would he have been expected to say? They played with the toy cars for a little while longer. Scott pretended that his was actually a motorcycle. Alex crashed his pretend-plane into his pretend-motorcycle, just because. Then the nurse came to take Scott away, and he hugged his brother for what seemed like ages, because Scott wouldn't let go and it was starting to hurt his chest. His brother mumbled, "Goodbye, Alex," into his hair and then ruffled it when he pulled away. It felt final.
"Bye," Alex said back. He rolled the red toy car back and forth on the white sheets. "I won't crash into your motorcycle next time, okay?"
Scott took a deep, shuddering breath. "Okay," he managed.
Then he was gone. Alex didn't see him again for thirteen years.
x
For three years he had a new mom and dad and sister, who was older than he was by two years. Ann and Mark put up with his obsession with planes and destroying them, but sometimes they persuaded him to put the broken toys back together, too. They taught him his letters again, and they told him to always mind his manners so he wouldn't get into trouble. Sometimes, they called him 'Todd' with a strange, faraway look in their eyes, but Alex could ignore that. He made mistakes, too.
After a year, he started to believe that maybe Scott had died in the crash, too, and that was why he never heard from him. Scott wasn't breaking any promises, because Scott was dead. It was just Ann and Mark and his sister Victoria and Alex, now, and he could live with that. He could believe in his new family.
x
So he believed in them, right up until the beginning of the first grade, when suddenly, accidentally, Ms. Jane's desk was on fire and Alex was crying because his chest hurt, and before that John had told him that his real parents had died because he was bad and he was being punished, and Ann and Mark only got him to replace their dead son Todd, so they probably didn't really love Alex. At least, that's what John's mom had told him.
No one could say how the fire was started, but everyone, somehow, knew it had been the little blonde boy. It was serious to be labelled an arsonist at the tender age of six, so his foster parents did what they were told, and they signed all the right papers. Alex was going to be sent to a residential treatment center in upstate New York, where they could love and train the psychopathic tendencies right out of him. "It'll be like summer camp," Ann had told him with a glisten in her eye. "You'll like it." Victoria had refused to speak to him for days, like it was his fault that he was being sent away.
x
There had been land and trees, art and music classes, and something that the teachers liked to call 'group therapy.' There had also been other boys. Older, meaner, angrier boys. Alex hadn't liked it.
He still remembers Bill, ten years old at the time with a huge scar around his throat like someone had cut him open and left him to die (someone had). On his third day there, Bill had cornered Alex during free play when the teachers and care workers weren't looking and growled, "Teaches like you, boy. Which mean I don't. Watch where you sleep 'cause I'll do you like my daddy did me." He had pointed at the ugly scar at his neck, and then knocked Alex hard into the wall for good measure. Alex waited for one of the adults to notice. His heart beat fast in his chest and his vision swam in and out of focus. He pushed past Bill with little fists, fled through the door of the classroom and down the hallway and out into the courtyard. People probably chased after him, but Alex could only remember the thrum of his heart, blood pounding in his ears, then - fire.
They found him shaking near the border of the woods, smelling of smoke and ash. An acre of the forest had been aflame.
x
This time they hospitalized him at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital so he could be examined and treated, but it's a hospital so security is pretty much nonexistent and Alex had escaped, slipping past the doors and through the government system, after a week of blood tests and building with blocks. He could only destroy so many buildings and, besides, they were just going to kick him out later, anyway.
x
There are two years of his life that Alex hasn't told anyone - anyone - about before. Ever. Alex imagines that even if the Professor tried, he wouldn't be able to find anything about those lost years. The time from when he was six until when he was eight is a black void in his memory. The next thing he remembers is setting fire to some man's car and being caught by the police. It was a small fire. They asked him why he would do such a thing; they hadn't gotten all of his papers yet, or else they wouldn't have bothered.
"He dropped his wallet. I took some money before giving it back," Alex had said, voice devoid of affect. The psychologist with the force had noted the vacant look in his eyes. "He was gonna hurt me, officer. So I hurt him first."
The officers were silent. Somehow, Ann and Mark were contacted, and they took him home with a monitor strapped around his right ankle.
x
Victoria was the one who taught him how to calm down.
"I learned something at school today," she said when they were walking home together from the bus stop one afternoon. Victoria was a fifth grader going on high schooler, and Alex loved her more than he loved anything else - of that he was sure. She had long blond hair and clear blue eyes, besides, so they even looked like they could really be siblings. Maybe Alex loved that about her, too.
"Uh huh," he said, waiting. Being a third grader meant always waiting for Victoria to impart her vast and every-expanding knowledge to him. He jumped over the cracks in the sidewalk, imagining that he was actually bounding over rivers. If he stepped in one he would drown.
"I think you'll like it," she continued, all important. "You're always getting in trouble for being so hyper." She looked at him to gauge his reaction but Alex just shrugged. It was true, after all. He was always brimming with extra energy that made him jump out of his seat during lessons and push the other kids too hard when they played tag at recess, especially when it was sunny out, for some reason. Alex jumped over a particularly crooked crack. They were just a few houses away from home.
"Well?" Victoria prompted. "Don't you want to know what I learned?"
Alex paused on one foot. "Sure."
"Let's go to the backyard. Race you!" And then she dashed off on her coltish legs, blond hair flying behind her. Alex followed, used to the headstart; he allowed it because he knew he was faster. They reached their backyard, a small grassy lawn enclosed on three sides by a fence that used to be white, at the same time, both panting hard.
"Tie," Alex huffed, throwing his bookbag to the ground. Victoria did the same but said wickedly, "My foot stepped on the grass first! So, technically, I win!"
"Well," Alex started, conceding. "That's because I let you." He earned a shove for that.
"Do you want me to teach you this, or not?"
"Yeah, okay." They let their breathing return to normal before Victoria adopted her familiar Teaching Pose, meaning that she put her hands on her hips and picked up a stick from the grass that she could use as a pointer. Alex stood with his hands behind his back.
"Ready?"
Alex nodded. Victoria cleared her throat. "Sometimes students get very excited or frustrated during the day," she began, obviously trying to remember an adult's words. "And they don't know how to calm their bodies. This gets them into trouble because they can't control themselves and may hurt other friends. So, this is what I do to calm myself down so I don't hurt others." She breathed in deeply, held her breath, and then exhaled slowly.
Alex watched, a little confused. Impatient, his sister cued, "Now you try!"
He tried it. He didn't feel any different.
"Do you feel calmer?" Victoria The Teacher asked.
"Um." He hesitated. That was enough for Victoria.
"Maybe it only works if you get really mad or hyper. Come on, Alex, what's something that gets you really mad?"
Alex really didn't want to think about it. "I don't know," he hedged.
"But you get angry all the time," Victoria persisted. "Come on--what makes you really angry? I won't tell."
Maybe because it's Victoria, looking at him so earnestly, and he wants her to be pleased, to be happy with him, maybe. But he lets his mind go, thinks about that time in first grade with John, and then before that, even earlier, a hazy memory but one stained black with anger and a little betrayal. His brother leaving him in the hospital, breaking promises, disappearing. The air crackled around him. He saw Victoria backing away, eyes worried.
"Um, Alex?" she was saying in a small voice. "You should take that breath now. Please."
He did. For five sweet seconds he inhaled, the pressure building in his blood, the thrum in his chest loud and erratic. He closed his eyes, seeing Scott's face, feeling all that confusion and hurt and rage again at being left behind, forgotten.
"Breathe out, Alex. Open your eyes. Don't panic. Breathe out," his foster-sister coaxed.
He opened his eyes, tried to remember not to panic like his sister said when he saw what had her edging away from him. Snakes of something red and crackling twisted around his arms, around his hips and torso. He exhaled, too quickly, an aborted scream, and watched with horror as the bands took shape into rings and then exploded from his body, one of the rings slicing into the fence and another straight through a branch of a tree in their neighbor's yard. Victoria threw herself to the ground.
For a few moments, Alex could only see the smoke rising from the damage, could only hear his and his sister's heaving breathing. Then, he started to cry, still standing, knees locked from shock.
Victoria looked up, finally, from her prone position on the lawn. Shock passed through the light features of her face, then uncertainty, then, at last, she crawled over to her little brother, clasped his hands in hers, and brought him down to his knees. "Oh, Alex," she said. "It's okay. No one was hurt. It's okay." She pulled him close to her body while Alex struggled, terrified. "Hush," she said, hugging him fiercely. "You are safe. I won't tell anyone; I promise." She rubbed soothing circles onto his back. Eventually, his cries died down into hiccoughs. She brought him inside and told her parents that one of the neighborhood boys had wanted to play with fireworks, when they asked about the fence.
x
Without Victoria, Alex thinks now, he probably would have gone to prison a lot sooner than he did. He has no doubts that he would have ended up there regardless, so really Victoria was only delaying the inevitable.
They grew closer, even when she had to go to a different school for grade six, and she became fiercely protective of him. If he were a little older, Alex probably would have been embarassed. "You get angry when people make fun of you," she said plainly to him once while they were at the local park; Ann and Mark had let them go after dinner and they just had to be back before sundown. "So don't let them make fun of you."
Her solution? Be the bully every once in a while and then people will leave you alone. Alex would get into trouble a few times, but then there would be fewer chances for him to get angry for real and set fire to something or someone, so it would be a good trade-off, right? Alex had grudgingly agreed.
Ann and Mark were even getting better at not calling him 'Todd,' or perhaps they didn't want to associate their dead son with the burgeoning delinquent they saw in Alex. Or perhaps it had something to do with a conversation he had overheard in the kitchen between Victoria and her mother, when Victoria had said while putting the dishes back into the cupboard, "I wish you and dad would stop calling him that," and Ann had frozen.
"Call him what?"
"You know."
"No, honey. I'm sorry, but I don't know what you're talking about."
And his sister had practically thrown a bowl back onto its shelf, the ceramics clanking dangerously. "He's dead, okay, mom?" she had said. "He's dead, and Alex isn't, and Alex is his own person, okay?" Then she had burst out of the kitchen and Alex had to flatten himself against the wall to prevent from being caught eavesdropping. In the kitchen, Ann picked up where she left off, wiping some of the dishes dry, occasionally reaching up to swipe at something on her cheek with her sleeve.
For nearly five years, all was well.
x
His life shattered on the day that he and Victoria had been at the park a little too late, the sky already dark.
Alex was amusing himself on the monkey bars, counting how many he could skip without falling. His sister let her feet drag along the mulch as she swayed gently in a swing at the opposite end of the play structure. A man approached. "Hey, kids," he had said, smacking his lips. He slinked over to Alex's sister as the children eyed him warily, but this had always been a safe neighborhood, so. Then he leaned over, whispered a few things into Victoria's ear, and grabbed her roughly by the forearm. He was dragging her away, to his car parked along the side of the enclosure, and she was struggling. She yelled, "Alex, help me! Don't just stand there!"
The stranger was halfway to his car with Victoria by the time Alex could react. Red sparked in his vision as he ran towards them. A patch of dirt and grass exploded by the kidnapper's feet, startling him.
"What the hell?" He turned, saw Alex glowing red, and cursed. "Fuck this!" He dropped Victoria where they were and ran, stumbling in his haste, to his car. Victoria collapsed, dead weight, sobbing. Alex couldn't possibly let the guy get away, could he? And when the man climbed into the driver's seat, Alex screamed, and then the car was gone in a blaze, engulfed by a sudden, roaring fire.
He'll never forget the look on his sister's face as he dragged her from the smoking car, back towards the playground as the police arrived. She was afraid of him.
"You killed him," she kept saying, even as an officer was draping a blanket over her shoulders and leading her to an ambulance. "You've killed him."
But didn't she understand that he had been protecting her? That he would never do that to her? That she was everything to him? That she promised she'd never tell? He needed her to understand, so he struggled when two officers tried to sit him in their cruiser, desperate to reach her as his foster-parents appeared, frantic, rushing to their daughter's side. He spoke in half-formed sentences and thoughts, lost. "I didn't - he was going to - he was bad, and I saved you, didn't I? Didn't I?"
The way they looked at him when the car door shut him inside, muffling the sirens and voices in the park -- they were all afraid of him.
x
Alex was thirteen - old enough to be put into a high security detention center. Reasonble enough to enjoy solitary after the first time they put him there in that grey four-by-six, when he had sent two other inmates into the infirmary with severe burns because they called him 'pretty' in the showers. Victoria never visited, and it hurt, but he had expected it, in a way.
Three years later is when Charles and Erik find him and ask him to join the team, join the family. Alex says yes to the team; he'd rather not talk about family. Erik grimaces when he says that, but they share a look and come to an immediate understanding, so they don't talk about it, and Charles leaves them in their silence.
x
Then, there is Shaw. After, there is a wheelchair and the people he's lost.
He should have known that Erik never would have stayed.
x
Hank's transformation changes all of them. Or maybe it's how big the mansion feels now that even Moira is gone. Charles tries to fill the empty space with new recruits, but without Erik's banter and the threat of nuclear war, his enthusiasm leaves something to be desired. A shroud of melancholy covers the mansion, not quite oppressive enough to dampen everyone's spirits, but still palpable enough that Alex itches to get away. So he spends most of his time in the bunker testing out Hank's new plates or messing with targets on the field with Sean.
It's a Monday, start of a whole new week, and Charles had said during breakfast, "If you aren't going to open a book today, at least go outside to sharpen your skills." Alex stuffs a whole rasher of bacon in his mouth and nods, ignoring the slightly disgusted looks of the two children who have just joined them at the mansion this past Saturday. There's Ororo, a wiry girl with a broad, open face, ebony skin with a shock of white hair and blue eyes. She speaks slowly most of the time, every word carrying equal weight. Charles had told them that it thunderstorms when Ororo's upset, so Alex assumes that she must be in a good mood today; the sky is blue like the ocean, cloudless and endless.
"At least pretend like you weren't raised by wolves," Sean says, smirking. He leans purposefully across Alex and the table to whisper loudly to the little boy - Jamie - at Ororo's right, "He was, you know." The boy's eyes widen as he glances at Alex uncertainly. Alex thumps Sean on the back of his head. "Hey!" Sean rubs the spot vigorously, returning to his seat, pouting.
"Personal space," the blond grumbles.
"Boys," Charles say very deliberately, eyebrows raised.
"Where's Hank?" he quips back immediately, so that they can avoid having to sit through any horrible Talk about conflict resolution.
"I'm glad you asked, actually." Charles taps two fingers to his temple briefly before continuing. "He's got some new tools he'd like for the both of you to test. He'll be in the bunker shortly. And I thought today you would both like to try hitting some moving targets?"
Sean whistles through his teeth. "Well, how novel," he says in that way of his that's simultaneously admiring and sarcastic. The Professor glances over at Alex, rolling his eyes, but doesn't elaborate or comment. Alex takes this as a good enough dismissal and claps the redhead on his shoulder. Jamie's fork clatters against his plate in surprise. "Look at that, you're scaring the kids!" Sean says around a mouthful of toast, amused.
"Whatever. You ready to go?"
"Yeah, yeah." Sean takes about half a second to shove everything left on his place into his mouth. "Let's go," he tries to say through the food.
Alex makes a face. "That's disgusting." Then, because he's not a completely horrible person who hates all children, he huffs out, "Don't be too hard on the Professor, okay? He's getting old."
Jamie nods, mute and staring. Ororo is either really enjoying her scrambled eggs or has been ignoring everyone for the entire duration of the meal (Alex thinks the latter).
Charles allows the jab, graciously.
x
Hank is, just as Charles said, in the bunker, setting up one out of the seemingly endless supply of mannequins at the far end of the bomb shelter. He looks up when Alex and Sean enter in their sweats. Hank's taken to wearing his lab coat and pants since every shirt he's owned before no longer fits over his blue chest. Alex makes a mental note to pick up some shirts for him the next time he and Sean go into the city, and then promptly discards the note because why would he do that?
"Good. You're here," Hank acknowledges before launching into an explanation of Sean's new cape - now completely fire-resistent - without any further preamble, striding towards them near the entrance. "Oh, and I've got something for you, too, Alex." He takes something black out of a giant pocket of his lab coat and hands it to the other boy. Alex stares at what Hank's dropped into his hands.
"Um, leather gloves?" Perhaps Hank thought they would go well with his leather jacket. The look of confusion must be evident on his face.
"Not just leather gloves. Look carefully." Alex does, and then Hank proceeds to put the gloves onto Alex's suddenly numb hands, turning them over so his palm is facing the grey domed ceiling. "I think I've managed to scale down the chest plate I had developed earlier for you, and I'll have to find a more flexible material because it's your hands, but these should work the same way, and you should be able to channel and shoot the plasma from this area, here." He traces a little circle on Alex's palm, still upturned.
"Man," Sean interrupts, a sudden presence at Alex's side. "That's awesome. You could, like, shoot two things at once."
"Conceivably. It's still in the testing phase."
"So let's test it." And damn it all if Sean's energy isn't contagious. Alex feels a smile tugging at his lips.
"I'll thank you if it works, Beast."
Hank smirks. Despite his transformation, his self-assuredness in his intelligence has never suffered. "It'll work. Sean and I will just step outside, here. We'll know when to come in again."
They leave through the door and it shuts heavily behind them. He waits until he hears the bolt click into place before willing his adrenaline to speed up. The pressure builds quickly in his blood. Feeling silly, he takes aim with his right hand at the naked model across the way. It's different, focusing his energy into a hand rather than at his chest. He lets the plasma linger a little bit as his palm, cataloguing this new sensation of heat and hands. Then, he exhales.
And is promptly thrown back into the cement wall behind him, right shoulder aching like no one taught him properly how to shoot a rifle. "Mother of--" he manages to grit out, lungs protesting. He sucks in a breath before he hears the door creak open. For such a little blast, there is surprisingly no difference in observable damage, meaning of course that half the bunker is on fire and that Hank will probably use up the fire extinguisher that he brought in with him entirely.
"You missed," Sean supplies gleefully. Alex glares at the redhead as he's returning himself upright. "Mannequin's okay." Alex moves to jab him in the upper arm, more amused than irritated, but a knife-sharp pain in his shoulder has him curling his arm to his chest with a rather pathetic, "Ow."
"How was it?" asks Hank, approaching the two with a now-empty extinguisher. "Precision? Power?"
"I think I dislocated my shoulder." Alex's right arm hangs limply at his side.
"The power output seems adequate, judging by the amount of damage done to the bunker--"
Sean says, "Alex! What are you--?" at the same time Alex forces his shoulder back into its socket, grunting.
"--but the precision may need some fine-tuning," Hank finishes.
"It's fine. I just wasn't expecting it." He rolls his shoulder experimentally and winces at the twinge, but other than that it seems fine. Sean's eyes look like they're about to bug out of his head. "Power output can be taken down a little, actually." He peels the gloves off his fingers and tosses them towards Hank, who catches them only because of his now-heightened reflexes. "Nice work, Beast."
"You don't want to test them again?"
Alex shakes his head. "Later. Take the power down a notch and I'll be able to use 'em without knocking myself out."
"Oh, is your arm okay?"
To which Sean gives Hank this look like how are you even serious right now? and then because he's Sean, can't keep his mouth shut: "His arm is like the opposite of okay! How did you not see him, like, putting his bones back into place?"
Hank huffs out of his nose like an agitated wildcat. "I was merely working to gather necessary feedback as quickly as possible from the source. Of course I noticed--"
"Oh my god," Sean interrupts. "You animal." He laughs.
Hank growls menacingly at that, even though it's been weeks, frankly, and it makes the little hairs on Alex's neck stand on end.
Unexpectedly, he intervenes. "Quit trying to get a rise out of him, Cassidy."
"I'm just messin' around," Sean amends, and well, he's always messing around.
"I'll take him out for target practice, you adjust my awesome gloves, and we'll check back in an hour or so, okay?"
Hank blinks at Alex. This is new. The blond guides Sean out of the bunker with a curt nod while the other boy rambles, "You know I'm just messin' around, right, Hank? Beast? I'm just messin' with you!"
x
"why'd you do that?" Sean asks after he misses shooting down the clay plate that Alex had thrown into the air like a frisbee. The plates crashes into the field and splits neatly in two.
"Do what?" Alex tosses another place into the air, higher. Sean forces a tight ring of sonic waves from his throat and whoops when it hits his target. The plate shatters on its way down. "Lucky shot."
"Defend Hank's dignity from my unlearned ways."
Alex pauses mid-toss so that his elbow is crooked awkwardly at his side. "Don't know," he says finally, rearing back again before letting the plate fly. Sean misses. He's hit three out of seven and they've got three more to go. His shoulder aches.
"Hey, I'm not sayin' it's a bad thing, just. You know. You've never done that before."
"He also wasn't massive and blue with the ability to rip your arms off before, so. I don't know. There's this thing. It's called self-preservation." Alex tosses another plate, this time low and nearly skimming the grass in the field.
Sean misses again. "Come on, man! Too low," he whines.
Alex grins. "Three out of eight."
"Whatever. You want to know what I think?" Sean waits for an answer.
"You're going to tell me anyway, so, what?"
"I think you're finally settling in, and you care." His friend looks positively euphoric when he says this. Alex stomps down on his urge to chuck the plate he's holding at Sean's face, because that would not be okay, and yeah, of course he cares about his strange little family - Xavier's ragtag team of misfits - because how could he not, after all that they've been through? After the shock and grief of death, the sting of betrayal, the exhaustion of running and fighting and worrying? And Alex hadn't wanted to care, at first. He had thought he'd run with this gang for a little while - it got him out of prison, you know - and then he'd part ways or disappear when he got tired or bored. Sure, he got bone-tired. But, bored? No; suddenly everyone, everything, had become so interesting, and the other mutants had slowly wormed their ways into his heart or brain or wherever, and he knows now that before flying, Sean had sort of wished that he could breathe underwater, and that he never washes his favorite pair of lucky jeans because he thinks he'll wash the luck right out of them. He knows that he and Hank are more alike than he previously thought - that as a boy Hank and held the strength and heightened senses from his mutation inside himself for so long that some unfortunate high-schooler said the wrong thing at the wrong time and Hank had exploded and the guy had to be carried out of the school in a neck-brace - and that was when the genius' search to become normal really began, because he didn't want to hurt anyone else, ever again. Alex can understand the kind of constant worry over not knowing your own strength. He knows Charles had grown up pretty much alone in this giant mansion until Raven came into his world. He scowls at the thought of Raven and Angel and Erik. Fuck it all, but he cares about them, too. But why does Sean have to ruin the whole thing and point it out?
"You're getting red," Sean says, still high on his glee.
"You're a bastard," Alex grumbles back. Not the most creative of insults but it'll have to do. "We're just - we're a team, you know? And we should act like one."
Sean gets it; Alex knows he does. He can tell by the way his shoulders slump a little and he knows he's thinking, yeah we're a team and we can't lose anyone else - same thing as Alex is thinking.
"Yeah, okay," Sean says finally, breaking the tension and jolting them back into the present. "You gonna throw the last two, or what?"
Alex prepares to throw another target but stops when he feels the slow creep of Charles' psychic presence at the base of his skull, like he's knocking at their front door. Stop, the Professor says in his mind. By Sean's sudden shift in stance, like a dog that's just heard a squirrel dart up a tree, Alex reasons that Charles is talking to him, too. Train later. There is something that requires your attention in the East living room. There is no urgency in his voice; only a soft, pleased undercurrent. "Did you get that?" Alex asks Sean.
Sean shrugs. "Wonder what it is."
"Pick this back up later?" he asks, even though he's already turning back to the house and trekking up the gentle slope of green. The sun is at high noon in the sky.
"Can we tell the Professor that I got seven outta eight?" Sean follows, then catches him up. He smiles, impish.
"He'll know we're lying."
"Worth a shot." They shove each other good-naturedly, but somehow it's turned into Alex forcing Sean into a headlock and the younger boy feebly punching his captor's shoulderblades by the time they reach the living room. The teens pause in their rough-housing when they see Hank already sitting on the edge of the cushion in the armchair, Charles looking rather comfortable and pleased with himself in his wheelchair between Hank and the couch. And on the couch--
Alex's breath hitches. A man. Unfamiliar to him, but at the same time so familiar it hurts. He has dark brown hair and heavily tinted sunglasses and a leather jacket. Undeniably collected normally, but drumming his fingers against his knee at this moment, his only tell. Early twenties, maybe. He shouldn't know this man, and yet--
"Ah," Charles says. "Alex and Sean. I'd like for you to meet someone. Well, Alex, you may not need the introduction, but for Sean's sake. This is Scott Summers, Alex's older brother."
Sean wiggles his way out of Alex's limp hold and launches himself at Scott, hand outstretched. "Oh man, oh man," he's saying, shaking his head in disbelief. "Alex, I can't believe you never told me you had a brother." He clasps Scott's hand enthusiastically. "I'm Sean Cassidy."
"Scott," the man on the couch says with a tight smile. "Good to meet you." He turns his head to the side, towards where Alex is still standing, frozen to his spot. "Alex?" he says uncertainly, rising slowly. "Are you...?"
"He's here," Hank says.
Scott's staring at him. Or maybe he's not staring, because he's wearing sunglasses indoors and that may or may not mean he's blind, and how did that happen anyway? But he's waiting and here. Jesus Christ.
"Please. Say something. You look...well." Not blind, then. Just the kind of dick who wears sunglasses indoors.
Alex is aware that everyone is staring at him, now. He's breathing hard like he's just run around the grounds twice, his vision swimming like trying to peer through the haze on a hot summer day. Everyone's just staring and they can't hear the blood pounding in his ears, his heart hammering in his ribcage, dull and painful. Hank reacts before anyone - even Alex - knows what's about to happen, sniffing the sudden spike of something dangerous and metallic in the air.
There's a flash of blue Alex barely registers, a roar of "Get down!", and then the breath is knocked out of him when Hank hauls him into the air, turning as they crash through the window and into the flower bed below it. He's literally shaking as the momentum carries them over the gravel of the driveway and onto the gigantic front lawn, where Hank finally lets go and Alex does, too. Angry red rings explode from his skin - he uses the little conscious thought he has to force them away from the mansion - leaving trails of yellow fire in their wake. He's going to black out like he used to before; he can feel it. He's never been so enraged before, so angry that his body doesn't even know what to do.
And then he hears Scott saying, "Oh my god, Alex, are you okay?" and fuck Scott for coming and finding him now, after all these years, after years of him not caring. He's vaguely aware of the smell of singed fur and of the crunch of feet on the pebbles of the driveway as Sean wheels out Charles and Scott follows. Then they're crouching around him, close. Too close. The sprinkler system hisses to life. Alex curls up on his knees, pushing his forehead to the ground and covering his hears with both hands. He doesn't want to see him; he doesn't want to see anyone.
Someone puts a hand on his shoulder. "Al," says Scott softly, like he's coaxing some injured baby animal out of a trap. "I'm sorry," and that just makes Alex furious. He has no fucking right to be making any stupid, useless apologies. He feels his body moving before it registers. Scott gets thrown back by a pulse of plasma to his chest. He falls to the ground, winded but otherwise unharmed. It's not enough.
"Alex, stop!" he hears Sean shrieking, his ears protesting against the pressure. Charles' reach licks at the corners of his consciousness just as the familiar, horrifying black veil falls over his eyes, his mind. He hopes he doesn't cause too much damage, this time.
x
Alex jolts awake, mind already racing. He's sitting up on a bed with wrinkled sheets and no comforter; it's warm and his right arm is in a sling. He tries to move it and grimaces at the throbbing pain. Beside him, there's a gasp, then something like a hiccough, and when he turns to look there's Jamie, or three of him anyway, slackjawed and unmoving, perched on the bed by the opposite wall. Two bedside tables sit between them, mirror images of each other. One of the duplicates runs off, squeaking, "I'll get the Professor!" and another quickly follows. "And I'll bring some water!" They dash out of the room -- Alex and Sean's room -- leaving behind the original Jamie, his look of surprise amplified by the cowlick near his forehead. They stare at each other for a moment, unable to break the silence.
Finally, Alex says, "Did I hurt anyone?"
Jamie shakes his head frantically no, then pauses to reconsider. Alex's stomach coils tightly in anticipation. "Well, I think you burned Hank, but, you've got some cuts, and the Professor said you hurt your shoulder, somehow." The boy shrugs. "So I guess you were hurt the most." Then Jamie clamps his mouth shut tightly and winces, as if preparing for a backlash.
Alex tries to smile at him but feels like he has too many teeth in it to make it gentle. "Thanks," he says instead, maneuvering himself until he's resting against the headboard, knees drawn up. He's still in his sweats. Gross. "How long was I out?"
Jamie visibly relaxes, brightening immediately now that, it seems, he's sure the older boy isn't going to bite his head off or something. "Only about an hour. Hank and Sean brought you up here after the Professor did his thing. You, like, totally torched the front lawn." Alex glances up sharply, looking for a look of disgust or horror on Jamie's face but finding childish, unabashed awe in its place. "Ororo made it rain for a little bit, so everything's okay," he finishes, bouncing a little bit on Sean's bed. Predictably, Sean's sheets are a mess.
Alex thinks maybe he's starting to like this kid. Then, Jamie ruins it by saying, "And Mr. Scott is with Professor, I think. They wouldn't let me stay and listen to what they were saying in the study." The sudden flare of energy that sings through Alex is alarming, but he feels depleted, wrung out, and knows that for a little while at least, there won't be any unexpected fires.
"Do you have any brothers?" he asks the kid suddenly. The boy gives him a look and Alex reconsiders, sheepish. "Oh, right."
"No," Jamie answers anyway, shrugging. "I've always wanted a big brother, though."
"You know it doesn't work like that, right? You either have one or you don't, if you're the younger one." He doesn't mean for it to come out so aggressively.
Jamie flushes. "I know that!"
Thankfully that is when Sean appears in the doorway with a jug of water, a purpling bruise on his jaw, and one of Jamie's duplicates in tow so that Alex doesn't have to struggle through a bonding moment with the younger mutant, although he suspects that the moment has already happened, sneaking up on them. The duplicate calmly crashes into Jamie on the bed, who shivers as that part of himself reintegrates. "Jamie told me you were up," Sean says in his sluggish way, walking over to stand by the blond's bed. "Professor says to come down when you're ready."
Alex considers this. There are a lot of things he wants to say at this moment. He settles on first: "Got a glass?"
"Nope," Sean returns swiftly. "Forgot. You're drinkin' out of the pitcher." He hands the pitcher to Alex, who takes it awkwardly with his left hand. "Drink up."
The water is cool on his lips, just shy of icy. He swallows two giant mouthfuls before setting the pitcher heavily on his bedside table. "Was that my fault?" Alex asks the other mutant, gesturing to the darkening bruise at Sean's jaw. Sean paws at the mark, smiling.
"You should see the other guy."
Despite himself, Alex cracks a grin at that. No lasting damage, then. "What about--? Is Scott still here?" He wants to curl his knees tighter into his chest or maybe burrow into his sheets and just stay there because he realizes quickly that, actually, he doesn't want to hear the answer to that question. He fights to stay relaxed.
In perhaps the most genuinely sensitive and thoughtful way that Sean has ever managed, he says, "Scott can wait," digging his big toe into the carpet, almost shy. Alex huffs out of a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. "Jamie, go tell Hank that Alex is up." The youngest jumps at being addressed so abruptly but manages to keep himself in one piece. Alex watches him run out of the room with a short, "Okay!" Sean follows behind him to shut the door, closing it with a soft click, then pads over to Alex's bed, sitting down heavily and making the frame groan. Alex does draw his knees up tighter this time, unaccustomed to the nearness of another person. They wait.
When Sean speaks it makes Alex twitch a little in surprise. "Do you want to talk about it?" The question is so loud.
Alex looks down at the fingers of his left hand as they pick at invisible threads in the covers. "No," he says roughly. "Yes."
Sean exhales audibly. "Um," he begins, uncertain. Then, because he has no tact: "He's your brother, man. What's the problem?" He leans back on the bed until he's resting slouched against the wall, twiddling his thumbs. Sean's the only person Alex has met who actually twiddles his thumbs.
And of course Sean wouldn't understand; he's got about a million siblings, so Alex ruminates, taking time to form the sentences before they're coming out of his mouth. "It's different," he starts, slow. Deliberate. "You grew up with your brothers and sisters. You've got this - I don't know - this bond with them because you've been through shit together. For ages. You know you can always go back to them. I don't have any of that with Scott. He's like a stranger with the same blood. We don't have any shared experiences except for that fucking plane crash that killed our parents. And then he left, and now there's nothing for us to go back to." He hasn't spoken this much in years; it exhausts him. He hopes it's enough to make Sean understand.
Sean says, "Did you ever talk about it?" and it throws him. He looks up, making eye contact for the first time since this conversation began and finds Sean staring openly.
"What?"
"Did you ever talk about it?" Sean repeats patiently.
"The crash?" The redhead nods. "Of course not. I was three."
Sean looks away first. "Maybe you should," he says, resuming his twiddling. "Talk about it, I mean."
Alex glares, but Sean is unrelenting.
"Maybe that's where you start, if that's the only thing you share." And then he puts his hand on Alex's knee like Alex is some child and Alex really does not appreciate that, except his hand is warm and heats up quickly, and it's nice, really. Sean says, "Hank'll want to check on your injuries." And then he leaves, the faint warmth of his hand lingering.
x
They do, in fact, start with the crash and build from there, once they start talking, that is. Charles charges them - Alex and Scott - with fixing the giant window that Hank and the younger teen had tumbled through, rather than calling in some experts, but everyone sees through his little guise: he's taking it upon himself to bring or force the two brothers together. Perhaps because Charles had lost a brother in Erik. Alex tries not to think too hard about it.
"Sean is hopeless with the tools, and I have asked Hank to work on a suit for Jamie. You two seem to be the only ones able to get it done," Charles reasons that night over dinner - roasted root vegetables and chicken - as Alex attempts to spear a carrot with a fork held in his left hand. He feels the need to point out that he is, in fact, not particularly 'able,' seeing as his dominant arm is useless, bound tight against his chest in a sling, but correctly judges that pointing such a thing out would be both redundant and pointless. But then Charles says, "Additionally, you did break the window, so."
Well, if Charles is going to guilt him into doing this - "Fine, okay," he finds himself saying - it works. From the seat next to him, Sean wordlessly snatches the fork out of his hand, sticks the right end into a carrot and a bit of potato, and hands it back to him, grinning. Alex may bite down a little too hard after that.
Then there is near silence, probably brought about by the newest arrival to their dinner table, Scott. It forces Charles to sit at the head, with Jamie, Ororo, and Scott to his left side and Hank, Sean, and Alex to his right. Alex is sitting directly across from his older brother, but refuses to look at him, even when Scott says, "We can go into the city tomorrow to pick up supplies, yeah?"
Alex grunts his assent. He knows he's being a little brat right now, with the silent treatment and all, but really it's for everyone else's good because if he opens his mouth to speak to Scott he's not sure or responsible for what sorts of expletives may come out. "Excellent," Charles says for him, his voice carrying easily down the table. "You can take one of the cars. Jamie, you've got something, just there." He points to a spot on his cheek.
Jamie brushes it away with the sleeve of his arm as Ororo protests, "Use a napkin, goodness."
"Is Mr. Hank really going to make me a suit?" the boy asks Charles.
The Professor smiles, charmed. "Why don't you ask Hank?" As a child, Jamie takes this suggestion literally. He turns to Hank, who is sitting across from him, and repeats, "Mr. Hank, are you really going to make me a suit?" Hank puts his fork down and tents his hands together over his half-finished plate; the politeness with which he eats is a stark contrast to his appearance, but they've grown accustomed to it and, somehow, it doesn't seem out of place.
"I will certainly try," Hank answers diplomatically. The smile he receives in return is mega-watt blinding. "And, ah, Scott? If you'd like, I can also take a look at your eyewear, see if any improvements can be made."
Scott turns to him, considering. "That would be great, thank you." He sounds genuinely pleased. Alex scowls involuntarily and receives a sharp nudge in his side by Sean's elbow in return. "A friend of mine had made them for me, but they have a life of only a few months, so it'd be great to find something more long-term."
Sometime between Alex going apeshit and dinner, Hank and Charles and Scott had had A Conversation about Scott's mutation, likely brought up because he had been unharmed by Alex's dangerous blast of plasma to his chest, but they had neglected to inform Alex about the details of said conversation, leaving him to his guesses, which were: 1) Scott's eyes were a problem, and 2) since they were brothers, they probably had similar mutations, and depending on the validity of his first guess, this meant that Scott could probably shoot lasers out of his eyes like a frickin' cyborg. He was guessing because it's not like he's going to just ask his brother about it, what with the silent treatment and all.
"A friend?" asks Charles, leaning forward intently. "How interesting," he continues in a way that really means yes please tell me more I need to know.
"College was good to me," his brother replies succinctly. "I met some people who...were like me."
"You mean other mutants?"
That was Sean. Alex shoots him a withering look because traitor, he thinks.
"Yeah," Scott says, now smiling, although it doesn't look like something his face is used to, so the smile remains small and twitchy. "Other mutants."
"Did you come across any while you were in high school?" comes Charles' lilting voice and, okay, that just - high school? He wants to talk about high school when Alex was never even able to make it that far, thrown out of public education because he lost his temper and was a danger to society - even though he was protecting someone - and all Scott had to worry about was keeping his eyes closed, and how is that even fair? Alex has absolutely no desire to hear about Scott's fucking high school experiences and college and all those normal life things that he got to have. And then Charles' gaze slides over to him, slightly guilty and worried and Alex knows that he's just heard everything that he was thinking.
"Can I be excused," he says more than asks, already rising from the table just as Charles pleads, "Alex, wait," but he doesn't want to hear it and he gathers his plates with his good hand and makes a beeline for the kitchen, depositing the plates into the sink with a clang.
A few moments pass before Alex realizes the kitchen is dark and he's just standing there in front of the sink, brooding. How pathetic. From the dining room he hears the low murmur of quieted conversation, and then a chair scrapes back and Hank is there, backlit, in the archway between the two rooms. He turns on the light.
There's this small part of him that knows his behavior is unnecessary, that he's being unreasonable, and this part fights its way out as Hank takes the plates that Alex had carelessly flung into the sink and scrapes off the uneaten vegetables into the bin. "I'm not ready," Alex finds himself saying, needing to explain himself, to justify his childishness. His body hunches in on itself, curling into his arm in its sling, as he watches Hank clear his own plate.
"Of course you're not ready," Hank says gently, his voice a low rumble. This catches Alex by surprise, and he glances up sharply. "It was a shock to your system, when Scott suddenly appeared back in your life. You are still recovering from that shock. I suspect that, by tomorrow, after a good night's rest, your stress-response system will have more or less normalized and you won't feel like bolting every time you see his face."
Which, okay? Alex certainly wasn't expecting a scientific explanation to his sudden short fuse, but it's comforting in a way. Even though it makes him feel like a specimen. "Hank," he says, for lack of anything else to say.
He keeps shoveling scraps into the bin. "I've adjusted the power output on your gloves," and the non-sequitur feels a bit like someone's just shoved Alex off the rafters. "They're ready for you, when your shoulder heals up." Hank places his dishes into the sink, now that most of the scraps have been cleared. "It's Sean's turn to wash up," he adds unnecessarily. Then he blinks up at Alex, who's still not sure how Bozo became Beast became Hank, and says, after a pause that seems simultaneously too long and too short, "You know that just because he's here, it's not going to change the way we think of you," which is exactly what Alex needs to hear right at that moment.
"Okay," Alex says, nodding once like it's a promise, because, yeah, maybe it was a worry that he hadn't wanted to acknowledge, that Scott was probably better than he was in so many ways - he had finished high school and gone to college and was nice and reasonable and all Alex had was a criminal record - but it means so much more now that Hank has said it. Hank understands, Alex is sure, because all his life, especially in the past few weeks, he's been working to make people see that he's more than his outward appearance, whether that's the innocent blue-eyed child genius or a furry, blue beast. "Thanks." The word sounds awkward coming from his lips, but it makes Hank brighten, so that counts for something.
"Come by the lab if you need anything." He puts a hand on Alex's uninjured shoulder and it's big and warm, except why is it that since Scott's appeared everyone feels like they can just touch Alex and be comforting and nice and - okay, Alex thinks. Stress-response system, right? He swallows the immediate reaction to shrug Hank's hand off and lets it rest there. Hank says, "Or even if you don't need anything." His hand slides away and then Alex is alone in the kitchen wondering, what the hell does that mean?
x
He spends the next few days feeling like a particularly large accessory; with his right hand out of commission, all he can really do is sit or lean against the wall as Scott asks for tools and he hands them over in the East living room. There's a gaping hole where the window used to be, as Charles assumed it would be easiest to just take the old one apart completely and install a new one. It gets drafty at night, but during the day it's relatively pleasant. The weather, Alex means. It's frustrating, because it seems that being men of few words is a Summers family trait, so Scott doesn't talk unless it's to ask Alex for a nail or bolt or hammer, and Alex doesn't talk because he's still holding up his pact of silence. Sometimes, Ororo brings them sandwiches and makes ominous comments about the weather, but mostly it's just them, every morning until the late afternoon, the sound of a hammer like gunshots.
Alex thinks back on the last couple of days around the mansion as he hands Scott yet another bunch of nails. Everyone has been absent and periphery since Scott's come, leaving the two brothers to themselves, so he gets the impression that the entire mansion has gone quiet, but of course that's not the case. Just the other day Jamie had run screaming down the hall after one of his duplicates had refused to reincorporate. Charles has busied himself with testing the new facilities of Cerebro, with Hank at his side, and Sean has just been...away. They see each other at meals and as they're getting ready to turn in for the night, but it feels strange not to train with him. He thinks about the last real conversation they had, when Alex had just come to after his brother's re-emergence, and decides to take his advice.
His voice is scratchy and rough. "Where were you, after the hospital?" he asks, grimacing immediately. He can't pull back the question now. Too late.
Silence. Scott has stopped hammering, and Alex can hear the wind rustling the grass outside. "California," Scott says finally, putting the hammer down and turning toward his brother. He sits cross-legged across from Alex, eye-level. "My foster family lived in San Diego." He pauses for a moment, unsure of how to continue. "What about you?"
Alex shrugs before remembering that his arm is in a sling. "New York, mostly." He lets his gaze drift away, purposefully not maintaining eye contact, and besides, with Scott's eyes perpetually behind those lenses, it's not like he can tell the difference. It just feels like he's always gazing intently at you. "I moved around a lot."
"Alex, I-" Scott begins, hands heavy on his knees, but Alex cuts him off: "Don’t apologize. Not yet."
The older brother sits back, sighs. "Okay. Okay, fine. I just, I don't know anything about you. And I want to. I want to be your big brother again. So, I want to know. Where did you live? What were your foster-family like? What did you like to do? When did you know?"
"How about one at a time." Alex quirks an eyebrow.
Scott mirrors him. "Deal."
This is what he learns: Scott had lived in San Diego with his foster-parents, who told him that, yes, he could contact Alex any time he wanted (but then Alex had been signed out and something had happened to the paperwork and then - nothing). Scott had been a perfectly normal adolescent who brooded a lot over not being able to get in touch with his lost younger brother, but figured that Alex was probably doing just great, just like he was. Then he had turned seventeen. He had woken up from a recurring nightmare about the crash to his sheets on fire. His parents put the fire out. His mom calmed him, asked him to open his eyes. Scott told them he would never open his eyes again. That was preposterous, they said, so he showed them, just once, on a tree in the backyard. He was lucky; they didn't understand but they stood by him, hatching a plan for Scott so that he could fake blindness. He finished the rest of his senior year at home but graduated with his class, and then his life changed when he went to university.
There, he met Jean.
"She was unreal," he says, a slow smile spreading across his face. Alex imagines Scott's eyes beginning to unfocus as he remembers, as he loses himself in the memory. "Here was another mutant, and beautiful to boot. She showed me so much, and introduced me to this community that I had no idea existed. We graduated together. She's still in California, but wanted me to let her know what I thought about this place. You know she's the one who clued me in to you?"
This jerks them both out of their reminiscing, and Alex's jaw locks tight. "What do you mean?"
"She got this feeling, this hunch, and I think Charles may have had something to do with it, too. She told me to seek out this place."
"So, what? You wouldn't have come if she hadn't told you to? You wouldn't have even looked?"
"It's not like that. I mean - I don't know if I would have found you, and, besides, it's not like you were looking for me, right?" Scott realizes his mistake too late and can't backtrack, even though he tries. "No, Alex, what I meant was--"
"Look for you? I just helped divert a nuclear war while you were sitting in the sun worrying about homework! I've spent three years in prison after the hospitals and the foster family and the street. Why would I look for you? You abandoned me. You left me." By the time he's finished, he's yelling and standing over Scott, and there's a ringing in his years, loud and constant. His chest is heaving, palms sweaty. He takes little comfort in the fact that he sees Scott with red in his cheeks and a tense line in his lips, too. The ringing in his ears lessens gradually until it's replaced by a heavy silence. Alex sits, exhausted and slumped over his injury. "I pretended you were dead," he says, calmer now. Then, in almost a whisper: "I missed you so much."
He feels his body shaking, a wetness on his cheeks, and then Scott is there, awkward at first but growing bolder when Alex doesn't push him away. He puts a hand on his younger brother's shoulder, then doesn't stop until they are sitting tightly side by side, Alex's face pressed against his chest. "Can I apologize, now?" He feels Alex nod against him and breathes away the anxiety he had been holding onto, shuddering. "I'm sorry," he tries. "I'm so, so, so very sorry. I should have looked harder, in the beginning. I know that now. But I can't change that. I'm sorry, Alex."
The last time he was held like this, Alex thinks, was when Victoria saw him cut through a branch on their neighbor's tree with his power. She had made a lot of promises, and then she had left him, too. Everyone leaves in the end. Maybe it mattered, though, if someone had left you before. Maybe they couldn't leave you again.
"I'm sorry, too," Alex admits against Scott's shirt, dark where his tears had fallen. He pushes himself away gingerly, swiping at his cheeks with his own shirt. "For being...difficult."
Scott ruffles his hair with something dangerously close to affection. "Difficult? Not at all." They smile at each other; it's a start.
"Listen," Scott continues. "Being here, with you and Charles and everyone else - we're going to be okay."
He says it so earnestly that Alex has to believe him. "Yes," he says, and hands over the last bunch of nails.
-fin
Rating pg-13 for language and some violence
Summary Alex's past finds him. (Alex + Scott, hints of pre-Alex/Hank/Sean, beware total disregard for movieverse timeline)
Disclaimer Will never own, boo.
Before Charles and Erik, before solitary and the detention center and foster care, before the hospital, there had been his mother, father, Scott, and Alex on a plane. Alex was three. "You look tired, my angel," his mother had crooned, gently combing back his blonde hair from his eyes as he nuzzled into her side. The seats on the plane were uncomfortable, but she smelled as she always did, a small comfort - like a dusty library and lavendar and talcum powder. "Go to sleep. We'll be there when you wake."
Alex slept.
The next thing he remembered was waking up in the hospital, fighting, shaking, reaching for his mother but finding a strange nurse instead. "You'll be okay," the nurse said, voice like dry paper. "You'll be taken care of." They kept him in the hospital for what felt like months but was probably only a few weeks. Scott visited sometimes, but he wasn't mom or dad, and every time his big brother came without them, Alex resented him more. Later, he would of course learn that they were dead, killed in the plane crash that Alex and Scott somehow walked away from. For now, though, Alex wondered why his parents never visited. He must have done something bad, he thought. That was why. If he had just stayed awake on the plane, maybe none of this would have happened.
One day, Scott visited and told him it would be the last time for a while. He was sorry. Alex was sitting against the headboard of his bed, white sheets like a cloud all around him. His brother sat hunched over in the chair next to him. He looked old, then, like their dad, blue eyes dark and shadowed.
"But you're my big brother," Alex said, not understanding.
The nurses had given him some toy cars to play with. He pretended the shiny red one was a plane and made it crash into his leg, over and over again. He liked to pretend that he made it explode.
"I'll still be your big brother, Alex. Just. I'll be far away, and you'll be far away. But I'll write to you, and call, and maybe when they find you a family, we can visit each other."
"But I have a family," Alex complained. "You. Mom, dad." Sometimes, he thought, Scott was dumber than he was.
Scott didn't say anything after that. He was only ten at the time, Alex supposes now, so what would he have been expected to say? They played with the toy cars for a little while longer. Scott pretended that his was actually a motorcycle. Alex crashed his pretend-plane into his pretend-motorcycle, just because. Then the nurse came to take Scott away, and he hugged his brother for what seemed like ages, because Scott wouldn't let go and it was starting to hurt his chest. His brother mumbled, "Goodbye, Alex," into his hair and then ruffled it when he pulled away. It felt final.
"Bye," Alex said back. He rolled the red toy car back and forth on the white sheets. "I won't crash into your motorcycle next time, okay?"
Scott took a deep, shuddering breath. "Okay," he managed.
Then he was gone. Alex didn't see him again for thirteen years.
x
For three years he had a new mom and dad and sister, who was older than he was by two years. Ann and Mark put up with his obsession with planes and destroying them, but sometimes they persuaded him to put the broken toys back together, too. They taught him his letters again, and they told him to always mind his manners so he wouldn't get into trouble. Sometimes, they called him 'Todd' with a strange, faraway look in their eyes, but Alex could ignore that. He made mistakes, too.
After a year, he started to believe that maybe Scott had died in the crash, too, and that was why he never heard from him. Scott wasn't breaking any promises, because Scott was dead. It was just Ann and Mark and his sister Victoria and Alex, now, and he could live with that. He could believe in his new family.
x
So he believed in them, right up until the beginning of the first grade, when suddenly, accidentally, Ms. Jane's desk was on fire and Alex was crying because his chest hurt, and before that John had told him that his real parents had died because he was bad and he was being punished, and Ann and Mark only got him to replace their dead son Todd, so they probably didn't really love Alex. At least, that's what John's mom had told him.
No one could say how the fire was started, but everyone, somehow, knew it had been the little blonde boy. It was serious to be labelled an arsonist at the tender age of six, so his foster parents did what they were told, and they signed all the right papers. Alex was going to be sent to a residential treatment center in upstate New York, where they could love and train the psychopathic tendencies right out of him. "It'll be like summer camp," Ann had told him with a glisten in her eye. "You'll like it." Victoria had refused to speak to him for days, like it was his fault that he was being sent away.
x
There had been land and trees, art and music classes, and something that the teachers liked to call 'group therapy.' There had also been other boys. Older, meaner, angrier boys. Alex hadn't liked it.
He still remembers Bill, ten years old at the time with a huge scar around his throat like someone had cut him open and left him to die (someone had). On his third day there, Bill had cornered Alex during free play when the teachers and care workers weren't looking and growled, "Teaches like you, boy. Which mean I don't. Watch where you sleep 'cause I'll do you like my daddy did me." He had pointed at the ugly scar at his neck, and then knocked Alex hard into the wall for good measure. Alex waited for one of the adults to notice. His heart beat fast in his chest and his vision swam in and out of focus. He pushed past Bill with little fists, fled through the door of the classroom and down the hallway and out into the courtyard. People probably chased after him, but Alex could only remember the thrum of his heart, blood pounding in his ears, then - fire.
They found him shaking near the border of the woods, smelling of smoke and ash. An acre of the forest had been aflame.
x
This time they hospitalized him at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital so he could be examined and treated, but it's a hospital so security is pretty much nonexistent and Alex had escaped, slipping past the doors and through the government system, after a week of blood tests and building with blocks. He could only destroy so many buildings and, besides, they were just going to kick him out later, anyway.
x
There are two years of his life that Alex hasn't told anyone - anyone - about before. Ever. Alex imagines that even if the Professor tried, he wouldn't be able to find anything about those lost years. The time from when he was six until when he was eight is a black void in his memory. The next thing he remembers is setting fire to some man's car and being caught by the police. It was a small fire. They asked him why he would do such a thing; they hadn't gotten all of his papers yet, or else they wouldn't have bothered.
"He dropped his wallet. I took some money before giving it back," Alex had said, voice devoid of affect. The psychologist with the force had noted the vacant look in his eyes. "He was gonna hurt me, officer. So I hurt him first."
The officers were silent. Somehow, Ann and Mark were contacted, and they took him home with a monitor strapped around his right ankle.
x
Victoria was the one who taught him how to calm down.
"I learned something at school today," she said when they were walking home together from the bus stop one afternoon. Victoria was a fifth grader going on high schooler, and Alex loved her more than he loved anything else - of that he was sure. She had long blond hair and clear blue eyes, besides, so they even looked like they could really be siblings. Maybe Alex loved that about her, too.
"Uh huh," he said, waiting. Being a third grader meant always waiting for Victoria to impart her vast and every-expanding knowledge to him. He jumped over the cracks in the sidewalk, imagining that he was actually bounding over rivers. If he stepped in one he would drown.
"I think you'll like it," she continued, all important. "You're always getting in trouble for being so hyper." She looked at him to gauge his reaction but Alex just shrugged. It was true, after all. He was always brimming with extra energy that made him jump out of his seat during lessons and push the other kids too hard when they played tag at recess, especially when it was sunny out, for some reason. Alex jumped over a particularly crooked crack. They were just a few houses away from home.
"Well?" Victoria prompted. "Don't you want to know what I learned?"
Alex paused on one foot. "Sure."
"Let's go to the backyard. Race you!" And then she dashed off on her coltish legs, blond hair flying behind her. Alex followed, used to the headstart; he allowed it because he knew he was faster. They reached their backyard, a small grassy lawn enclosed on three sides by a fence that used to be white, at the same time, both panting hard.
"Tie," Alex huffed, throwing his bookbag to the ground. Victoria did the same but said wickedly, "My foot stepped on the grass first! So, technically, I win!"
"Well," Alex started, conceding. "That's because I let you." He earned a shove for that.
"Do you want me to teach you this, or not?"
"Yeah, okay." They let their breathing return to normal before Victoria adopted her familiar Teaching Pose, meaning that she put her hands on her hips and picked up a stick from the grass that she could use as a pointer. Alex stood with his hands behind his back.
"Ready?"
Alex nodded. Victoria cleared her throat. "Sometimes students get very excited or frustrated during the day," she began, obviously trying to remember an adult's words. "And they don't know how to calm their bodies. This gets them into trouble because they can't control themselves and may hurt other friends. So, this is what I do to calm myself down so I don't hurt others." She breathed in deeply, held her breath, and then exhaled slowly.
Alex watched, a little confused. Impatient, his sister cued, "Now you try!"
He tried it. He didn't feel any different.
"Do you feel calmer?" Victoria The Teacher asked.
"Um." He hesitated. That was enough for Victoria.
"Maybe it only works if you get really mad or hyper. Come on, Alex, what's something that gets you really mad?"
Alex really didn't want to think about it. "I don't know," he hedged.
"But you get angry all the time," Victoria persisted. "Come on--what makes you really angry? I won't tell."
Maybe because it's Victoria, looking at him so earnestly, and he wants her to be pleased, to be happy with him, maybe. But he lets his mind go, thinks about that time in first grade with John, and then before that, even earlier, a hazy memory but one stained black with anger and a little betrayal. His brother leaving him in the hospital, breaking promises, disappearing. The air crackled around him. He saw Victoria backing away, eyes worried.
"Um, Alex?" she was saying in a small voice. "You should take that breath now. Please."
He did. For five sweet seconds he inhaled, the pressure building in his blood, the thrum in his chest loud and erratic. He closed his eyes, seeing Scott's face, feeling all that confusion and hurt and rage again at being left behind, forgotten.
"Breathe out, Alex. Open your eyes. Don't panic. Breathe out," his foster-sister coaxed.
He opened his eyes, tried to remember not to panic like his sister said when he saw what had her edging away from him. Snakes of something red and crackling twisted around his arms, around his hips and torso. He exhaled, too quickly, an aborted scream, and watched with horror as the bands took shape into rings and then exploded from his body, one of the rings slicing into the fence and another straight through a branch of a tree in their neighbor's yard. Victoria threw herself to the ground.
For a few moments, Alex could only see the smoke rising from the damage, could only hear his and his sister's heaving breathing. Then, he started to cry, still standing, knees locked from shock.
Victoria looked up, finally, from her prone position on the lawn. Shock passed through the light features of her face, then uncertainty, then, at last, she crawled over to her little brother, clasped his hands in hers, and brought him down to his knees. "Oh, Alex," she said. "It's okay. No one was hurt. It's okay." She pulled him close to her body while Alex struggled, terrified. "Hush," she said, hugging him fiercely. "You are safe. I won't tell anyone; I promise." She rubbed soothing circles onto his back. Eventually, his cries died down into hiccoughs. She brought him inside and told her parents that one of the neighborhood boys had wanted to play with fireworks, when they asked about the fence.
x
Without Victoria, Alex thinks now, he probably would have gone to prison a lot sooner than he did. He has no doubts that he would have ended up there regardless, so really Victoria was only delaying the inevitable.
They grew closer, even when she had to go to a different school for grade six, and she became fiercely protective of him. If he were a little older, Alex probably would have been embarassed. "You get angry when people make fun of you," she said plainly to him once while they were at the local park; Ann and Mark had let them go after dinner and they just had to be back before sundown. "So don't let them make fun of you."
Her solution? Be the bully every once in a while and then people will leave you alone. Alex would get into trouble a few times, but then there would be fewer chances for him to get angry for real and set fire to something or someone, so it would be a good trade-off, right? Alex had grudgingly agreed.
Ann and Mark were even getting better at not calling him 'Todd,' or perhaps they didn't want to associate their dead son with the burgeoning delinquent they saw in Alex. Or perhaps it had something to do with a conversation he had overheard in the kitchen between Victoria and her mother, when Victoria had said while putting the dishes back into the cupboard, "I wish you and dad would stop calling him that," and Ann had frozen.
"Call him what?"
"You know."
"No, honey. I'm sorry, but I don't know what you're talking about."
And his sister had practically thrown a bowl back onto its shelf, the ceramics clanking dangerously. "He's dead, okay, mom?" she had said. "He's dead, and Alex isn't, and Alex is his own person, okay?" Then she had burst out of the kitchen and Alex had to flatten himself against the wall to prevent from being caught eavesdropping. In the kitchen, Ann picked up where she left off, wiping some of the dishes dry, occasionally reaching up to swipe at something on her cheek with her sleeve.
For nearly five years, all was well.
x
His life shattered on the day that he and Victoria had been at the park a little too late, the sky already dark.
Alex was amusing himself on the monkey bars, counting how many he could skip without falling. His sister let her feet drag along the mulch as she swayed gently in a swing at the opposite end of the play structure. A man approached. "Hey, kids," he had said, smacking his lips. He slinked over to Alex's sister as the children eyed him warily, but this had always been a safe neighborhood, so. Then he leaned over, whispered a few things into Victoria's ear, and grabbed her roughly by the forearm. He was dragging her away, to his car parked along the side of the enclosure, and she was struggling. She yelled, "Alex, help me! Don't just stand there!"
The stranger was halfway to his car with Victoria by the time Alex could react. Red sparked in his vision as he ran towards them. A patch of dirt and grass exploded by the kidnapper's feet, startling him.
"What the hell?" He turned, saw Alex glowing red, and cursed. "Fuck this!" He dropped Victoria where they were and ran, stumbling in his haste, to his car. Victoria collapsed, dead weight, sobbing. Alex couldn't possibly let the guy get away, could he? And when the man climbed into the driver's seat, Alex screamed, and then the car was gone in a blaze, engulfed by a sudden, roaring fire.
He'll never forget the look on his sister's face as he dragged her from the smoking car, back towards the playground as the police arrived. She was afraid of him.
"You killed him," she kept saying, even as an officer was draping a blanket over her shoulders and leading her to an ambulance. "You've killed him."
But didn't she understand that he had been protecting her? That he would never do that to her? That she was everything to him? That she promised she'd never tell? He needed her to understand, so he struggled when two officers tried to sit him in their cruiser, desperate to reach her as his foster-parents appeared, frantic, rushing to their daughter's side. He spoke in half-formed sentences and thoughts, lost. "I didn't - he was going to - he was bad, and I saved you, didn't I? Didn't I?"
The way they looked at him when the car door shut him inside, muffling the sirens and voices in the park -- they were all afraid of him.
x
Alex was thirteen - old enough to be put into a high security detention center. Reasonble enough to enjoy solitary after the first time they put him there in that grey four-by-six, when he had sent two other inmates into the infirmary with severe burns because they called him 'pretty' in the showers. Victoria never visited, and it hurt, but he had expected it, in a way.
Three years later is when Charles and Erik find him and ask him to join the team, join the family. Alex says yes to the team; he'd rather not talk about family. Erik grimaces when he says that, but they share a look and come to an immediate understanding, so they don't talk about it, and Charles leaves them in their silence.
x
Then, there is Shaw. After, there is a wheelchair and the people he's lost.
He should have known that Erik never would have stayed.
x
Hank's transformation changes all of them. Or maybe it's how big the mansion feels now that even Moira is gone. Charles tries to fill the empty space with new recruits, but without Erik's banter and the threat of nuclear war, his enthusiasm leaves something to be desired. A shroud of melancholy covers the mansion, not quite oppressive enough to dampen everyone's spirits, but still palpable enough that Alex itches to get away. So he spends most of his time in the bunker testing out Hank's new plates or messing with targets on the field with Sean.
It's a Monday, start of a whole new week, and Charles had said during breakfast, "If you aren't going to open a book today, at least go outside to sharpen your skills." Alex stuffs a whole rasher of bacon in his mouth and nods, ignoring the slightly disgusted looks of the two children who have just joined them at the mansion this past Saturday. There's Ororo, a wiry girl with a broad, open face, ebony skin with a shock of white hair and blue eyes. She speaks slowly most of the time, every word carrying equal weight. Charles had told them that it thunderstorms when Ororo's upset, so Alex assumes that she must be in a good mood today; the sky is blue like the ocean, cloudless and endless.
"At least pretend like you weren't raised by wolves," Sean says, smirking. He leans purposefully across Alex and the table to whisper loudly to the little boy - Jamie - at Ororo's right, "He was, you know." The boy's eyes widen as he glances at Alex uncertainly. Alex thumps Sean on the back of his head. "Hey!" Sean rubs the spot vigorously, returning to his seat, pouting.
"Personal space," the blond grumbles.
"Boys," Charles say very deliberately, eyebrows raised.
"Where's Hank?" he quips back immediately, so that they can avoid having to sit through any horrible Talk about conflict resolution.
"I'm glad you asked, actually." Charles taps two fingers to his temple briefly before continuing. "He's got some new tools he'd like for the both of you to test. He'll be in the bunker shortly. And I thought today you would both like to try hitting some moving targets?"
Sean whistles through his teeth. "Well, how novel," he says in that way of his that's simultaneously admiring and sarcastic. The Professor glances over at Alex, rolling his eyes, but doesn't elaborate or comment. Alex takes this as a good enough dismissal and claps the redhead on his shoulder. Jamie's fork clatters against his plate in surprise. "Look at that, you're scaring the kids!" Sean says around a mouthful of toast, amused.
"Whatever. You ready to go?"
"Yeah, yeah." Sean takes about half a second to shove everything left on his place into his mouth. "Let's go," he tries to say through the food.
Alex makes a face. "That's disgusting." Then, because he's not a completely horrible person who hates all children, he huffs out, "Don't be too hard on the Professor, okay? He's getting old."
Jamie nods, mute and staring. Ororo is either really enjoying her scrambled eggs or has been ignoring everyone for the entire duration of the meal (Alex thinks the latter).
Charles allows the jab, graciously.
x
Hank is, just as Charles said, in the bunker, setting up one out of the seemingly endless supply of mannequins at the far end of the bomb shelter. He looks up when Alex and Sean enter in their sweats. Hank's taken to wearing his lab coat and pants since every shirt he's owned before no longer fits over his blue chest. Alex makes a mental note to pick up some shirts for him the next time he and Sean go into the city, and then promptly discards the note because why would he do that?
"Good. You're here," Hank acknowledges before launching into an explanation of Sean's new cape - now completely fire-resistent - without any further preamble, striding towards them near the entrance. "Oh, and I've got something for you, too, Alex." He takes something black out of a giant pocket of his lab coat and hands it to the other boy. Alex stares at what Hank's dropped into his hands.
"Um, leather gloves?" Perhaps Hank thought they would go well with his leather jacket. The look of confusion must be evident on his face.
"Not just leather gloves. Look carefully." Alex does, and then Hank proceeds to put the gloves onto Alex's suddenly numb hands, turning them over so his palm is facing the grey domed ceiling. "I think I've managed to scale down the chest plate I had developed earlier for you, and I'll have to find a more flexible material because it's your hands, but these should work the same way, and you should be able to channel and shoot the plasma from this area, here." He traces a little circle on Alex's palm, still upturned.
"Man," Sean interrupts, a sudden presence at Alex's side. "That's awesome. You could, like, shoot two things at once."
"Conceivably. It's still in the testing phase."
"So let's test it." And damn it all if Sean's energy isn't contagious. Alex feels a smile tugging at his lips.
"I'll thank you if it works, Beast."
Hank smirks. Despite his transformation, his self-assuredness in his intelligence has never suffered. "It'll work. Sean and I will just step outside, here. We'll know when to come in again."
They leave through the door and it shuts heavily behind them. He waits until he hears the bolt click into place before willing his adrenaline to speed up. The pressure builds quickly in his blood. Feeling silly, he takes aim with his right hand at the naked model across the way. It's different, focusing his energy into a hand rather than at his chest. He lets the plasma linger a little bit as his palm, cataloguing this new sensation of heat and hands. Then, he exhales.
And is promptly thrown back into the cement wall behind him, right shoulder aching like no one taught him properly how to shoot a rifle. "Mother of--" he manages to grit out, lungs protesting. He sucks in a breath before he hears the door creak open. For such a little blast, there is surprisingly no difference in observable damage, meaning of course that half the bunker is on fire and that Hank will probably use up the fire extinguisher that he brought in with him entirely.
"You missed," Sean supplies gleefully. Alex glares at the redhead as he's returning himself upright. "Mannequin's okay." Alex moves to jab him in the upper arm, more amused than irritated, but a knife-sharp pain in his shoulder has him curling his arm to his chest with a rather pathetic, "Ow."
"How was it?" asks Hank, approaching the two with a now-empty extinguisher. "Precision? Power?"
"I think I dislocated my shoulder." Alex's right arm hangs limply at his side.
"The power output seems adequate, judging by the amount of damage done to the bunker--"
Sean says, "Alex! What are you--?" at the same time Alex forces his shoulder back into its socket, grunting.
"--but the precision may need some fine-tuning," Hank finishes.
"It's fine. I just wasn't expecting it." He rolls his shoulder experimentally and winces at the twinge, but other than that it seems fine. Sean's eyes look like they're about to bug out of his head. "Power output can be taken down a little, actually." He peels the gloves off his fingers and tosses them towards Hank, who catches them only because of his now-heightened reflexes. "Nice work, Beast."
"You don't want to test them again?"
Alex shakes his head. "Later. Take the power down a notch and I'll be able to use 'em without knocking myself out."
"Oh, is your arm okay?"
To which Sean gives Hank this look like how are you even serious right now? and then because he's Sean, can't keep his mouth shut: "His arm is like the opposite of okay! How did you not see him, like, putting his bones back into place?"
Hank huffs out of his nose like an agitated wildcat. "I was merely working to gather necessary feedback as quickly as possible from the source. Of course I noticed--"
"Oh my god," Sean interrupts. "You animal." He laughs.
Hank growls menacingly at that, even though it's been weeks, frankly, and it makes the little hairs on Alex's neck stand on end.
Unexpectedly, he intervenes. "Quit trying to get a rise out of him, Cassidy."
"I'm just messin' around," Sean amends, and well, he's always messing around.
"I'll take him out for target practice, you adjust my awesome gloves, and we'll check back in an hour or so, okay?"
Hank blinks at Alex. This is new. The blond guides Sean out of the bunker with a curt nod while the other boy rambles, "You know I'm just messin' around, right, Hank? Beast? I'm just messin' with you!"
x
"why'd you do that?" Sean asks after he misses shooting down the clay plate that Alex had thrown into the air like a frisbee. The plates crashes into the field and splits neatly in two.
"Do what?" Alex tosses another place into the air, higher. Sean forces a tight ring of sonic waves from his throat and whoops when it hits his target. The plate shatters on its way down. "Lucky shot."
"Defend Hank's dignity from my unlearned ways."
Alex pauses mid-toss so that his elbow is crooked awkwardly at his side. "Don't know," he says finally, rearing back again before letting the plate fly. Sean misses. He's hit three out of seven and they've got three more to go. His shoulder aches.
"Hey, I'm not sayin' it's a bad thing, just. You know. You've never done that before."
"He also wasn't massive and blue with the ability to rip your arms off before, so. I don't know. There's this thing. It's called self-preservation." Alex tosses another plate, this time low and nearly skimming the grass in the field.
Sean misses again. "Come on, man! Too low," he whines.
Alex grins. "Three out of eight."
"Whatever. You want to know what I think?" Sean waits for an answer.
"You're going to tell me anyway, so, what?"
"I think you're finally settling in, and you care." His friend looks positively euphoric when he says this. Alex stomps down on his urge to chuck the plate he's holding at Sean's face, because that would not be okay, and yeah, of course he cares about his strange little family - Xavier's ragtag team of misfits - because how could he not, after all that they've been through? After the shock and grief of death, the sting of betrayal, the exhaustion of running and fighting and worrying? And Alex hadn't wanted to care, at first. He had thought he'd run with this gang for a little while - it got him out of prison, you know - and then he'd part ways or disappear when he got tired or bored. Sure, he got bone-tired. But, bored? No; suddenly everyone, everything, had become so interesting, and the other mutants had slowly wormed their ways into his heart or brain or wherever, and he knows now that before flying, Sean had sort of wished that he could breathe underwater, and that he never washes his favorite pair of lucky jeans because he thinks he'll wash the luck right out of them. He knows that he and Hank are more alike than he previously thought - that as a boy Hank and held the strength and heightened senses from his mutation inside himself for so long that some unfortunate high-schooler said the wrong thing at the wrong time and Hank had exploded and the guy had to be carried out of the school in a neck-brace - and that was when the genius' search to become normal really began, because he didn't want to hurt anyone else, ever again. Alex can understand the kind of constant worry over not knowing your own strength. He knows Charles had grown up pretty much alone in this giant mansion until Raven came into his world. He scowls at the thought of Raven and Angel and Erik. Fuck it all, but he cares about them, too. But why does Sean have to ruin the whole thing and point it out?
"You're getting red," Sean says, still high on his glee.
"You're a bastard," Alex grumbles back. Not the most creative of insults but it'll have to do. "We're just - we're a team, you know? And we should act like one."
Sean gets it; Alex knows he does. He can tell by the way his shoulders slump a little and he knows he's thinking, yeah we're a team and we can't lose anyone else - same thing as Alex is thinking.
"Yeah, okay," Sean says finally, breaking the tension and jolting them back into the present. "You gonna throw the last two, or what?"
Alex prepares to throw another target but stops when he feels the slow creep of Charles' psychic presence at the base of his skull, like he's knocking at their front door. Stop, the Professor says in his mind. By Sean's sudden shift in stance, like a dog that's just heard a squirrel dart up a tree, Alex reasons that Charles is talking to him, too. Train later. There is something that requires your attention in the East living room. There is no urgency in his voice; only a soft, pleased undercurrent. "Did you get that?" Alex asks Sean.
Sean shrugs. "Wonder what it is."
"Pick this back up later?" he asks, even though he's already turning back to the house and trekking up the gentle slope of green. The sun is at high noon in the sky.
"Can we tell the Professor that I got seven outta eight?" Sean follows, then catches him up. He smiles, impish.
"He'll know we're lying."
"Worth a shot." They shove each other good-naturedly, but somehow it's turned into Alex forcing Sean into a headlock and the younger boy feebly punching his captor's shoulderblades by the time they reach the living room. The teens pause in their rough-housing when they see Hank already sitting on the edge of the cushion in the armchair, Charles looking rather comfortable and pleased with himself in his wheelchair between Hank and the couch. And on the couch--
Alex's breath hitches. A man. Unfamiliar to him, but at the same time so familiar it hurts. He has dark brown hair and heavily tinted sunglasses and a leather jacket. Undeniably collected normally, but drumming his fingers against his knee at this moment, his only tell. Early twenties, maybe. He shouldn't know this man, and yet--
"Ah," Charles says. "Alex and Sean. I'd like for you to meet someone. Well, Alex, you may not need the introduction, but for Sean's sake. This is Scott Summers, Alex's older brother."
Sean wiggles his way out of Alex's limp hold and launches himself at Scott, hand outstretched. "Oh man, oh man," he's saying, shaking his head in disbelief. "Alex, I can't believe you never told me you had a brother." He clasps Scott's hand enthusiastically. "I'm Sean Cassidy."
"Scott," the man on the couch says with a tight smile. "Good to meet you." He turns his head to the side, towards where Alex is still standing, frozen to his spot. "Alex?" he says uncertainly, rising slowly. "Are you...?"
"He's here," Hank says.
Scott's staring at him. Or maybe he's not staring, because he's wearing sunglasses indoors and that may or may not mean he's blind, and how did that happen anyway? But he's waiting and here. Jesus Christ.
"Please. Say something. You look...well." Not blind, then. Just the kind of dick who wears sunglasses indoors.
Alex is aware that everyone is staring at him, now. He's breathing hard like he's just run around the grounds twice, his vision swimming like trying to peer through the haze on a hot summer day. Everyone's just staring and they can't hear the blood pounding in his ears, his heart hammering in his ribcage, dull and painful. Hank reacts before anyone - even Alex - knows what's about to happen, sniffing the sudden spike of something dangerous and metallic in the air.
There's a flash of blue Alex barely registers, a roar of "Get down!", and then the breath is knocked out of him when Hank hauls him into the air, turning as they crash through the window and into the flower bed below it. He's literally shaking as the momentum carries them over the gravel of the driveway and onto the gigantic front lawn, where Hank finally lets go and Alex does, too. Angry red rings explode from his skin - he uses the little conscious thought he has to force them away from the mansion - leaving trails of yellow fire in their wake. He's going to black out like he used to before; he can feel it. He's never been so enraged before, so angry that his body doesn't even know what to do.
And then he hears Scott saying, "Oh my god, Alex, are you okay?" and fuck Scott for coming and finding him now, after all these years, after years of him not caring. He's vaguely aware of the smell of singed fur and of the crunch of feet on the pebbles of the driveway as Sean wheels out Charles and Scott follows. Then they're crouching around him, close. Too close. The sprinkler system hisses to life. Alex curls up on his knees, pushing his forehead to the ground and covering his hears with both hands. He doesn't want to see him; he doesn't want to see anyone.
Someone puts a hand on his shoulder. "Al," says Scott softly, like he's coaxing some injured baby animal out of a trap. "I'm sorry," and that just makes Alex furious. He has no fucking right to be making any stupid, useless apologies. He feels his body moving before it registers. Scott gets thrown back by a pulse of plasma to his chest. He falls to the ground, winded but otherwise unharmed. It's not enough.
"Alex, stop!" he hears Sean shrieking, his ears protesting against the pressure. Charles' reach licks at the corners of his consciousness just as the familiar, horrifying black veil falls over his eyes, his mind. He hopes he doesn't cause too much damage, this time.
x
Alex jolts awake, mind already racing. He's sitting up on a bed with wrinkled sheets and no comforter; it's warm and his right arm is in a sling. He tries to move it and grimaces at the throbbing pain. Beside him, there's a gasp, then something like a hiccough, and when he turns to look there's Jamie, or three of him anyway, slackjawed and unmoving, perched on the bed by the opposite wall. Two bedside tables sit between them, mirror images of each other. One of the duplicates runs off, squeaking, "I'll get the Professor!" and another quickly follows. "And I'll bring some water!" They dash out of the room -- Alex and Sean's room -- leaving behind the original Jamie, his look of surprise amplified by the cowlick near his forehead. They stare at each other for a moment, unable to break the silence.
Finally, Alex says, "Did I hurt anyone?"
Jamie shakes his head frantically no, then pauses to reconsider. Alex's stomach coils tightly in anticipation. "Well, I think you burned Hank, but, you've got some cuts, and the Professor said you hurt your shoulder, somehow." The boy shrugs. "So I guess you were hurt the most." Then Jamie clamps his mouth shut tightly and winces, as if preparing for a backlash.
Alex tries to smile at him but feels like he has too many teeth in it to make it gentle. "Thanks," he says instead, maneuvering himself until he's resting against the headboard, knees drawn up. He's still in his sweats. Gross. "How long was I out?"
Jamie visibly relaxes, brightening immediately now that, it seems, he's sure the older boy isn't going to bite his head off or something. "Only about an hour. Hank and Sean brought you up here after the Professor did his thing. You, like, totally torched the front lawn." Alex glances up sharply, looking for a look of disgust or horror on Jamie's face but finding childish, unabashed awe in its place. "Ororo made it rain for a little bit, so everything's okay," he finishes, bouncing a little bit on Sean's bed. Predictably, Sean's sheets are a mess.
Alex thinks maybe he's starting to like this kid. Then, Jamie ruins it by saying, "And Mr. Scott is with Professor, I think. They wouldn't let me stay and listen to what they were saying in the study." The sudden flare of energy that sings through Alex is alarming, but he feels depleted, wrung out, and knows that for a little while at least, there won't be any unexpected fires.
"Do you have any brothers?" he asks the kid suddenly. The boy gives him a look and Alex reconsiders, sheepish. "Oh, right."
"No," Jamie answers anyway, shrugging. "I've always wanted a big brother, though."
"You know it doesn't work like that, right? You either have one or you don't, if you're the younger one." He doesn't mean for it to come out so aggressively.
Jamie flushes. "I know that!"
Thankfully that is when Sean appears in the doorway with a jug of water, a purpling bruise on his jaw, and one of Jamie's duplicates in tow so that Alex doesn't have to struggle through a bonding moment with the younger mutant, although he suspects that the moment has already happened, sneaking up on them. The duplicate calmly crashes into Jamie on the bed, who shivers as that part of himself reintegrates. "Jamie told me you were up," Sean says in his sluggish way, walking over to stand by the blond's bed. "Professor says to come down when you're ready."
Alex considers this. There are a lot of things he wants to say at this moment. He settles on first: "Got a glass?"
"Nope," Sean returns swiftly. "Forgot. You're drinkin' out of the pitcher." He hands the pitcher to Alex, who takes it awkwardly with his left hand. "Drink up."
The water is cool on his lips, just shy of icy. He swallows two giant mouthfuls before setting the pitcher heavily on his bedside table. "Was that my fault?" Alex asks the other mutant, gesturing to the darkening bruise at Sean's jaw. Sean paws at the mark, smiling.
"You should see the other guy."
Despite himself, Alex cracks a grin at that. No lasting damage, then. "What about--? Is Scott still here?" He wants to curl his knees tighter into his chest or maybe burrow into his sheets and just stay there because he realizes quickly that, actually, he doesn't want to hear the answer to that question. He fights to stay relaxed.
In perhaps the most genuinely sensitive and thoughtful way that Sean has ever managed, he says, "Scott can wait," digging his big toe into the carpet, almost shy. Alex huffs out of a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. "Jamie, go tell Hank that Alex is up." The youngest jumps at being addressed so abruptly but manages to keep himself in one piece. Alex watches him run out of the room with a short, "Okay!" Sean follows behind him to shut the door, closing it with a soft click, then pads over to Alex's bed, sitting down heavily and making the frame groan. Alex does draw his knees up tighter this time, unaccustomed to the nearness of another person. They wait.
When Sean speaks it makes Alex twitch a little in surprise. "Do you want to talk about it?" The question is so loud.
Alex looks down at the fingers of his left hand as they pick at invisible threads in the covers. "No," he says roughly. "Yes."
Sean exhales audibly. "Um," he begins, uncertain. Then, because he has no tact: "He's your brother, man. What's the problem?" He leans back on the bed until he's resting slouched against the wall, twiddling his thumbs. Sean's the only person Alex has met who actually twiddles his thumbs.
And of course Sean wouldn't understand; he's got about a million siblings, so Alex ruminates, taking time to form the sentences before they're coming out of his mouth. "It's different," he starts, slow. Deliberate. "You grew up with your brothers and sisters. You've got this - I don't know - this bond with them because you've been through shit together. For ages. You know you can always go back to them. I don't have any of that with Scott. He's like a stranger with the same blood. We don't have any shared experiences except for that fucking plane crash that killed our parents. And then he left, and now there's nothing for us to go back to." He hasn't spoken this much in years; it exhausts him. He hopes it's enough to make Sean understand.
Sean says, "Did you ever talk about it?" and it throws him. He looks up, making eye contact for the first time since this conversation began and finds Sean staring openly.
"What?"
"Did you ever talk about it?" Sean repeats patiently.
"The crash?" The redhead nods. "Of course not. I was three."
Sean looks away first. "Maybe you should," he says, resuming his twiddling. "Talk about it, I mean."
Alex glares, but Sean is unrelenting.
"Maybe that's where you start, if that's the only thing you share." And then he puts his hand on Alex's knee like Alex is some child and Alex really does not appreciate that, except his hand is warm and heats up quickly, and it's nice, really. Sean says, "Hank'll want to check on your injuries." And then he leaves, the faint warmth of his hand lingering.
x
They do, in fact, start with the crash and build from there, once they start talking, that is. Charles charges them - Alex and Scott - with fixing the giant window that Hank and the younger teen had tumbled through, rather than calling in some experts, but everyone sees through his little guise: he's taking it upon himself to bring or force the two brothers together. Perhaps because Charles had lost a brother in Erik. Alex tries not to think too hard about it.
"Sean is hopeless with the tools, and I have asked Hank to work on a suit for Jamie. You two seem to be the only ones able to get it done," Charles reasons that night over dinner - roasted root vegetables and chicken - as Alex attempts to spear a carrot with a fork held in his left hand. He feels the need to point out that he is, in fact, not particularly 'able,' seeing as his dominant arm is useless, bound tight against his chest in a sling, but correctly judges that pointing such a thing out would be both redundant and pointless. But then Charles says, "Additionally, you did break the window, so."
Well, if Charles is going to guilt him into doing this - "Fine, okay," he finds himself saying - it works. From the seat next to him, Sean wordlessly snatches the fork out of his hand, sticks the right end into a carrot and a bit of potato, and hands it back to him, grinning. Alex may bite down a little too hard after that.
Then there is near silence, probably brought about by the newest arrival to their dinner table, Scott. It forces Charles to sit at the head, with Jamie, Ororo, and Scott to his left side and Hank, Sean, and Alex to his right. Alex is sitting directly across from his older brother, but refuses to look at him, even when Scott says, "We can go into the city tomorrow to pick up supplies, yeah?"
Alex grunts his assent. He knows he's being a little brat right now, with the silent treatment and all, but really it's for everyone else's good because if he opens his mouth to speak to Scott he's not sure or responsible for what sorts of expletives may come out. "Excellent," Charles says for him, his voice carrying easily down the table. "You can take one of the cars. Jamie, you've got something, just there." He points to a spot on his cheek.
Jamie brushes it away with the sleeve of his arm as Ororo protests, "Use a napkin, goodness."
"Is Mr. Hank really going to make me a suit?" the boy asks Charles.
The Professor smiles, charmed. "Why don't you ask Hank?" As a child, Jamie takes this suggestion literally. He turns to Hank, who is sitting across from him, and repeats, "Mr. Hank, are you really going to make me a suit?" Hank puts his fork down and tents his hands together over his half-finished plate; the politeness with which he eats is a stark contrast to his appearance, but they've grown accustomed to it and, somehow, it doesn't seem out of place.
"I will certainly try," Hank answers diplomatically. The smile he receives in return is mega-watt blinding. "And, ah, Scott? If you'd like, I can also take a look at your eyewear, see if any improvements can be made."
Scott turns to him, considering. "That would be great, thank you." He sounds genuinely pleased. Alex scowls involuntarily and receives a sharp nudge in his side by Sean's elbow in return. "A friend of mine had made them for me, but they have a life of only a few months, so it'd be great to find something more long-term."
Sometime between Alex going apeshit and dinner, Hank and Charles and Scott had had A Conversation about Scott's mutation, likely brought up because he had been unharmed by Alex's dangerous blast of plasma to his chest, but they had neglected to inform Alex about the details of said conversation, leaving him to his guesses, which were: 1) Scott's eyes were a problem, and 2) since they were brothers, they probably had similar mutations, and depending on the validity of his first guess, this meant that Scott could probably shoot lasers out of his eyes like a frickin' cyborg. He was guessing because it's not like he's going to just ask his brother about it, what with the silent treatment and all.
"A friend?" asks Charles, leaning forward intently. "How interesting," he continues in a way that really means yes please tell me more I need to know.
"College was good to me," his brother replies succinctly. "I met some people who...were like me."
"You mean other mutants?"
That was Sean. Alex shoots him a withering look because traitor, he thinks.
"Yeah," Scott says, now smiling, although it doesn't look like something his face is used to, so the smile remains small and twitchy. "Other mutants."
"Did you come across any while you were in high school?" comes Charles' lilting voice and, okay, that just - high school? He wants to talk about high school when Alex was never even able to make it that far, thrown out of public education because he lost his temper and was a danger to society - even though he was protecting someone - and all Scott had to worry about was keeping his eyes closed, and how is that even fair? Alex has absolutely no desire to hear about Scott's fucking high school experiences and college and all those normal life things that he got to have. And then Charles' gaze slides over to him, slightly guilty and worried and Alex knows that he's just heard everything that he was thinking.
"Can I be excused," he says more than asks, already rising from the table just as Charles pleads, "Alex, wait," but he doesn't want to hear it and he gathers his plates with his good hand and makes a beeline for the kitchen, depositing the plates into the sink with a clang.
A few moments pass before Alex realizes the kitchen is dark and he's just standing there in front of the sink, brooding. How pathetic. From the dining room he hears the low murmur of quieted conversation, and then a chair scrapes back and Hank is there, backlit, in the archway between the two rooms. He turns on the light.
There's this small part of him that knows his behavior is unnecessary, that he's being unreasonable, and this part fights its way out as Hank takes the plates that Alex had carelessly flung into the sink and scrapes off the uneaten vegetables into the bin. "I'm not ready," Alex finds himself saying, needing to explain himself, to justify his childishness. His body hunches in on itself, curling into his arm in its sling, as he watches Hank clear his own plate.
"Of course you're not ready," Hank says gently, his voice a low rumble. This catches Alex by surprise, and he glances up sharply. "It was a shock to your system, when Scott suddenly appeared back in your life. You are still recovering from that shock. I suspect that, by tomorrow, after a good night's rest, your stress-response system will have more or less normalized and you won't feel like bolting every time you see his face."
Which, okay? Alex certainly wasn't expecting a scientific explanation to his sudden short fuse, but it's comforting in a way. Even though it makes him feel like a specimen. "Hank," he says, for lack of anything else to say.
He keeps shoveling scraps into the bin. "I've adjusted the power output on your gloves," and the non-sequitur feels a bit like someone's just shoved Alex off the rafters. "They're ready for you, when your shoulder heals up." Hank places his dishes into the sink, now that most of the scraps have been cleared. "It's Sean's turn to wash up," he adds unnecessarily. Then he blinks up at Alex, who's still not sure how Bozo became Beast became Hank, and says, after a pause that seems simultaneously too long and too short, "You know that just because he's here, it's not going to change the way we think of you," which is exactly what Alex needs to hear right at that moment.
"Okay," Alex says, nodding once like it's a promise, because, yeah, maybe it was a worry that he hadn't wanted to acknowledge, that Scott was probably better than he was in so many ways - he had finished high school and gone to college and was nice and reasonable and all Alex had was a criminal record - but it means so much more now that Hank has said it. Hank understands, Alex is sure, because all his life, especially in the past few weeks, he's been working to make people see that he's more than his outward appearance, whether that's the innocent blue-eyed child genius or a furry, blue beast. "Thanks." The word sounds awkward coming from his lips, but it makes Hank brighten, so that counts for something.
"Come by the lab if you need anything." He puts a hand on Alex's uninjured shoulder and it's big and warm, except why is it that since Scott's appeared everyone feels like they can just touch Alex and be comforting and nice and - okay, Alex thinks. Stress-response system, right? He swallows the immediate reaction to shrug Hank's hand off and lets it rest there. Hank says, "Or even if you don't need anything." His hand slides away and then Alex is alone in the kitchen wondering, what the hell does that mean?
x
He spends the next few days feeling like a particularly large accessory; with his right hand out of commission, all he can really do is sit or lean against the wall as Scott asks for tools and he hands them over in the East living room. There's a gaping hole where the window used to be, as Charles assumed it would be easiest to just take the old one apart completely and install a new one. It gets drafty at night, but during the day it's relatively pleasant. The weather, Alex means. It's frustrating, because it seems that being men of few words is a Summers family trait, so Scott doesn't talk unless it's to ask Alex for a nail or bolt or hammer, and Alex doesn't talk because he's still holding up his pact of silence. Sometimes, Ororo brings them sandwiches and makes ominous comments about the weather, but mostly it's just them, every morning until the late afternoon, the sound of a hammer like gunshots.
Alex thinks back on the last couple of days around the mansion as he hands Scott yet another bunch of nails. Everyone has been absent and periphery since Scott's come, leaving the two brothers to themselves, so he gets the impression that the entire mansion has gone quiet, but of course that's not the case. Just the other day Jamie had run screaming down the hall after one of his duplicates had refused to reincorporate. Charles has busied himself with testing the new facilities of Cerebro, with Hank at his side, and Sean has just been...away. They see each other at meals and as they're getting ready to turn in for the night, but it feels strange not to train with him. He thinks about the last real conversation they had, when Alex had just come to after his brother's re-emergence, and decides to take his advice.
His voice is scratchy and rough. "Where were you, after the hospital?" he asks, grimacing immediately. He can't pull back the question now. Too late.
Silence. Scott has stopped hammering, and Alex can hear the wind rustling the grass outside. "California," Scott says finally, putting the hammer down and turning toward his brother. He sits cross-legged across from Alex, eye-level. "My foster family lived in San Diego." He pauses for a moment, unsure of how to continue. "What about you?"
Alex shrugs before remembering that his arm is in a sling. "New York, mostly." He lets his gaze drift away, purposefully not maintaining eye contact, and besides, with Scott's eyes perpetually behind those lenses, it's not like he can tell the difference. It just feels like he's always gazing intently at you. "I moved around a lot."
"Alex, I-" Scott begins, hands heavy on his knees, but Alex cuts him off: "Don’t apologize. Not yet."
The older brother sits back, sighs. "Okay. Okay, fine. I just, I don't know anything about you. And I want to. I want to be your big brother again. So, I want to know. Where did you live? What were your foster-family like? What did you like to do? When did you know?"
"How about one at a time." Alex quirks an eyebrow.
Scott mirrors him. "Deal."
This is what he learns: Scott had lived in San Diego with his foster-parents, who told him that, yes, he could contact Alex any time he wanted (but then Alex had been signed out and something had happened to the paperwork and then - nothing). Scott had been a perfectly normal adolescent who brooded a lot over not being able to get in touch with his lost younger brother, but figured that Alex was probably doing just great, just like he was. Then he had turned seventeen. He had woken up from a recurring nightmare about the crash to his sheets on fire. His parents put the fire out. His mom calmed him, asked him to open his eyes. Scott told them he would never open his eyes again. That was preposterous, they said, so he showed them, just once, on a tree in the backyard. He was lucky; they didn't understand but they stood by him, hatching a plan for Scott so that he could fake blindness. He finished the rest of his senior year at home but graduated with his class, and then his life changed when he went to university.
There, he met Jean.
"She was unreal," he says, a slow smile spreading across his face. Alex imagines Scott's eyes beginning to unfocus as he remembers, as he loses himself in the memory. "Here was another mutant, and beautiful to boot. She showed me so much, and introduced me to this community that I had no idea existed. We graduated together. She's still in California, but wanted me to let her know what I thought about this place. You know she's the one who clued me in to you?"
This jerks them both out of their reminiscing, and Alex's jaw locks tight. "What do you mean?"
"She got this feeling, this hunch, and I think Charles may have had something to do with it, too. She told me to seek out this place."
"So, what? You wouldn't have come if she hadn't told you to? You wouldn't have even looked?"
"It's not like that. I mean - I don't know if I would have found you, and, besides, it's not like you were looking for me, right?" Scott realizes his mistake too late and can't backtrack, even though he tries. "No, Alex, what I meant was--"
"Look for you? I just helped divert a nuclear war while you were sitting in the sun worrying about homework! I've spent three years in prison after the hospitals and the foster family and the street. Why would I look for you? You abandoned me. You left me." By the time he's finished, he's yelling and standing over Scott, and there's a ringing in his years, loud and constant. His chest is heaving, palms sweaty. He takes little comfort in the fact that he sees Scott with red in his cheeks and a tense line in his lips, too. The ringing in his ears lessens gradually until it's replaced by a heavy silence. Alex sits, exhausted and slumped over his injury. "I pretended you were dead," he says, calmer now. Then, in almost a whisper: "I missed you so much."
He feels his body shaking, a wetness on his cheeks, and then Scott is there, awkward at first but growing bolder when Alex doesn't push him away. He puts a hand on his younger brother's shoulder, then doesn't stop until they are sitting tightly side by side, Alex's face pressed against his chest. "Can I apologize, now?" He feels Alex nod against him and breathes away the anxiety he had been holding onto, shuddering. "I'm sorry," he tries. "I'm so, so, so very sorry. I should have looked harder, in the beginning. I know that now. But I can't change that. I'm sorry, Alex."
The last time he was held like this, Alex thinks, was when Victoria saw him cut through a branch on their neighbor's tree with his power. She had made a lot of promises, and then she had left him, too. Everyone leaves in the end. Maybe it mattered, though, if someone had left you before. Maybe they couldn't leave you again.
"I'm sorry, too," Alex admits against Scott's shirt, dark where his tears had fallen. He pushes himself away gingerly, swiping at his cheeks with his own shirt. "For being...difficult."
Scott ruffles his hair with something dangerously close to affection. "Difficult? Not at all." They smile at each other; it's a start.
"Listen," Scott continues. "Being here, with you and Charles and everyone else - we're going to be okay."
He says it so earnestly that Alex has to believe him. "Yes," he says, and hands over the last bunch of nails.
-fin