b&b
I am finally getting my shit together with some of my long-fermenting WIPs. There should be an Inception fic coming later this week, too, although after that there will probably be another long gap, because real life just keeps getting busier.
As for this--this is the modern Beauty & the Beast retelling I've wanted to write for this pairing since before I started writing for this pairing (even though there's already a really lovely Beauty & Beast fic--I couldn't resist). It doesn't hew too closely to the original, but, um, the inspiration is there (although inspiration is also borrowed from a couple other stories).
.b&b
alex accidentally burns down the grocery store and also a gas station. as punishment, they send him to live with the beast in the hill towns.
pg13 . 7714 words
The witch from the county commission is a bitch. Alex is certain of it as soon as he sees her, and it’s depressing, because he had to drive all the way up from the south part of the county for his trial, and now he knows he’s not going to get off easy. He sees the witch in the courtroom, and when he makes eye contact with her it’s like there’s an ice cube sliding down his spine.
“They call her Emma Frost,” Alex’s public defender hisses from his side.
“That’s because that’s her name,” Alex mutters, but it doesn’t make him feel any better. He’d seen the signs around town when she was running. She’d been part of the group that ran with Erik Lehnsherr, so of course she won despite having been the county witch when Shaw was commissioner and everything was shit (not that everything was much better now, but the county commission didn’t have that much power, as far as Alex could measure). At the time Alex hadn’t been overly concerned because county politics were lame, but then his powers had manifested, and then he’d accidentally burnt down an entire grocery store and also a gas station, and now he had to make eye contact with Emma Frost and wait for her to read his verdict.
“I don’t usually do cases involving magic,” his public defender had said when they first met, fluttering his hands like they were trying to mate with a butterfly. “Too touchy. But it was an accident, so I’m sure it will be fine.”
Alex should’ve known then, but he was still recovering from his foster brother skipping town (and county, and state) with some chick he met at the bar just across the state line, the one where they only checked i.d. sporadically and seemed to forget everything they should know about their patrons’ ages.
Point being, Darwin had been pretty much the only thing Alex had resembling friend or family, and also he paid half the rent, and then he’d baled to go seek his fortune in the big city and fuck this chick, and Alex had set fire to a few things (accidentally!), and now he was here, sitting in front of a judge and a jury when everyone knew that all that really mattered was whatever came out of Emma Frost’s mouth, and it was apparent, now, that Emma Frost was a bitch. And this was mostly irrelevant and his public defender said it wouldn’t hold up in court, but in March Alex’s dog had gotten mouth cancer and kicked the bucket.
Truth be told, it had been kind of a shit year thus far, and it seemed unlikely that winding up in county court in April was a sign of better things to come, especially since the owners of every gas station in the county, and also a few over the state line, had decided that Alex’s punishment would be jacked up gas prices for the rest of his natural born days. And they knew his car, probably had little pictures of it pinned up next to those signs that told them what birthdate meant a person was allowed to buy cigarettes or lotto tickets or beer, so he couldn’t even get someone else to buy for him.
But Emma Frost is speaking, and when she speaks, everyone listens, because this is the sentence, and also because her voice is so quiet it might dissolve if interrupted. When she talks she sounds like the dry legal document she’s reading, and she emphasizes words seemingly at random, at Alex considers, in the back of his mind, that Emma Frost might be crazy as well as a bitch, which seems like a terrible combination in a woman who holds political office, especially political office that could send Alex Summers to prison.
But Emma Frost is speaking:
“Alex Summers is found guilty of uncontrolled use of magic, and two counts of arson.
“Uncontrolled use of magic is a criminal misdemeanor, and it demands a solution as well as a punishment. Analysis of Mr. Summers’ magic suggests training will be needed in order for him to function safely within a mixed community. After some discussion, Dr. Henry McCoy has agreed to take on Mr. Summers’ case. Ergo Mr. Summers will be placed under house arrest in the household of Dr. McCoy until his powers are deemed sufficiently controlled by the county witch and magic warden.
“On the counts of arson: an anonymous donor has agreed to cover the cost of Mr. Summers’ damages. In addition, Mr. Summers will be expected to perform community service.”
When Emma is done, she sits down, and Alex lets out a long whistle of breath he didn’t know he was holding, because someone paid the damages, and after that he didn’t give a fuck.
His public defender is looking at him, and then starts shoving papers in his suitcase.
“Well,” he says. “Not too bad, not too bad. At least they bought the accident explanation, and that dipshit professor is probably paying your dues. Pity about the Beast, though.”
“The Beast?” Alex asks, replaying the verdict in his head.
“Dr. McCoy? Too bad he’s the only one they could get to work with you,” the public defender continues. “Seeing as he’s mad and all. And, you know, the Beast.”
The Beast lives in one of the hill towns, in what used to be a bed and breakfast. They say his entire body is covered in fur and he eats a fresh young goat (a kid) for every meal. They say he was the valedictorian of the graduating class at the regional high school not many years ago, and he went off to university and got some degrees and was a promising young scientist, and then he tested one of his experiments on himself and something went direly wrong, and he had to move back to obscurity in shame. They say he returns to his true form during the full moon. They say he was--is--a witch. They say his familiar is a raven the color of lapus lazuli. They say if you can pluck a hair from his mane, you’ll meet your one true love. They say he’s the state animal.
They say a lot of things about the Beast. Alex is aware that some of them are more farfetched than others. For instance, eating three goats a day is clearly bullshit, because no one could sustain that many goats on the shit land they have up in the hill towns, and if he were actually a witch he would probably just magic himself back, and the state animal thing is such utter bullshit it’s not even worth discussing.
Here are the things they say about the Beast Alex believes are true: He is a beast. He brought it upon himself. His real name is Dr. Henry McCoy. If he’s from around here, he probably went to high school with everyone else down in the valley, but who the fuck cares? He is, for all intents and purposes, a mad scientist.
That’s all, but that’s more than enough for Alex to know that his assessment of Emma Frost was correct. Because Alex is going to have to live with the Beast in the hill towns, until he stops burning shit down or his powers chill out or Emma Frost gives him the thumbs up to leave, and the county may not be, like, the seat of culture, but at least there was a grocery store until Alex burned it down and that bar across the state line.
In the hill towns there isn’t enough shit to support three goats a day, okay? Even without the freaky ass Beast, the hill towns suck.
Though if Alex is under house arrest, it may not matter either way, and if he’s under house arrest with the Beast--it’s not actually worth pursuing. The Beast is the sort of thing mothers tell children about to keep them from going to deep into the woods, or from becoming scientists.
The sheriff goes with Alex back to the apartment to pack up his things, only all he really has to take are clothes, which he piles into boxes, because he figures the Beast has everything else, and even if the Beast doesn’t they can always call up the sheriff or something and get him to bring Alex back down to the apartment. It’s half an hour’s drive, at worst, and for all Alex’s griping he will admit that it could be worse, but saying it could be worse is the sort of thing people who bowl a 27 say, because, yes, it could be worse, but they still suck at bowling.
Still, it could be worse. Alex lets himself think it, because when your public defender gets you a shitty, unheard of sentence in the hill towns with the Beast you’re allowed.
Alex takes some books off his shelves, and folds up the quilt from his bed and puts that on top of his box, and then he’s locking up the apartment, getting in his car and following the sheriff up the state highway, and then east on the county road that leads into the hills, and then down a widening network of dirt roads until they reach the B & B.
It’s up a long gravel drive, in a field that’s still laced with snow, because the hill towns don’t thaw completely until May. It’s a curse--not the witchy kind, just the ordinary, hill-towns-suck kind. If Alex is honest with himself the place is in good repair, though he wants it to look haunted, because the Beast lives here. The paint is the color of mustard, but the fact is that it is painted, freshly, and the grass on the hill that runs down to the drive and the stone wall is too long and mixed with blueberry bushes and ferns, but it looks like it’s supposed to be that way.
If Alex didn’t know the Beast lived here, he wouldn’t expect him to.
There’s a red barn around back, and the sheriff indicates that Alex should park inside the opened double doors, and then the sheriff secures Alex’s ankle monitor, shakes his hand (like he’s congratulating Alex for something, like maybe you congratulate people for committing arson and then getting a crappy sentence for it), and disappears down the drive.
Alex considers taking off into the woods, because the monitor should be good for a few hundred feet, and he could just chill there and live off the land and shit until everyone forgets about this, or his ankle monitor breaks or something.
But because Alex isn’t a fucking coward, unlike, apparently, the sheriff, he goes around to the cast iron knocker on the front of the house, and swings it once, twice, thrice.
There’s no response, and for a moment Alex just stands there, and then he slams the knocker into the door several more times, because Alex Summers may be lot of things (an untrained witch, a mediocre mechanic, someone with maybe some minor anger management problems, a halfway decent dancer), but he’s not someone who just stands around waiting until the freaking Beast deigns to speak with him.
There’s a roar, from inside, and Alex does not almost jump out of his skin, or shit his pants, or do anything scared people do in movies.
The Beast roars again, though maybe it’s more like a low rumble, and this time it takes shape into coherent words: “Go around to the side.”
Alex passed the side door when he came around to the front of the house: it’s tucked in, across from the barn, behind a garden that’s still retreated beneath rich brown earth. Alex raps on the door there, knuckles on wood, and it swings open from the inside. The Beast is standing in the doorframe, not fully in the sunlight. From here Alex can only see the size of him, which is, in a word: large. He fills the doorframe without effort, and it’s clear that’s just how he is--large, too big for the house he’s selected for himself or been exiled to, Alex isn’t entirely sure.
“Well?” the Beast asks. “Are you coming in?”
So Alex goes up the brick steps and follows him inside.
Once his eyes adjust to the dim light inside, the second word Alex would use to describe the Beast is blue. It’s not any color found in nature, or at least not found in natural fur. It looks the way tropical sinkholes appear in photographs, like a pure form of pigment, bright and vibrant and surprisingly soft.
“So what type of animal are you?” Alex asks, because his mouth works faster than his brain.
The Beast doesn’t say anything for a moment, two moments, three moments.
The Beast doesn’t say anything in response to Alex’s question for half an hour, during which time he shows Alex to his room, tells him to come down for dinner at six and not to go in the basement, and then comes back upstairs and knocks on the door, when Alex is sitting on the bed with his quilt newly spread across it, contemplating a variety of things, none of which his mind seems able to focus on.
“What type of animal are you?” the Beast asks, when he comes back.
Alex blinks at him.
“That’s my comeback,” the Beast says. “You insulted me when you arrived, and that’s my comeback.”
“Your comeback is repeating my own jab back at me?” Alex asks, and the Beast scowls slightly. It should be intimidating. It would be intimidating, if the conversation weren’t so stupid.
“Yes. So?”
“Dude,” Alex says. “You need to work on your insults.”
“It’s not like you had a comeback for me,” the Beast replies. He’s still standing in the door, and Alex is sitting on the bed and wondering when the Beast starts cutting him up or whatever, so he can control his magic and leave. He’s also wondering where the Beast finds clothes that fit, because he’s dressed like a nerd when he could probably run around naked and be considerably more terrifying.
“Do you wear your pants like that because you can’t find ones that fit, or because you’re trying to expose your dainty ankles?” Alex says, and the Beast turns around and shuts the door. Alex can hear him padding downstairs, footsteps muffled by fur. When he goes down for dinner, he notes the fine grooves on the wooden stairs: claws, he realizes, sharp and long and curving downwards, like a bear’s.
“Your hair is stupid,” the Beast says when Alex finds him in the kitchen, sitting at a large wood table. There’s what might be a pot of stew and a hank of bread on the table, and it’s set with two thick ceramic plates.
“Seriously?” Alex says, sitting down. “I thought you were clever.”
The Beast shrugs. He doesn’t seem terribly put-out by any of this, and Alex wonders if it’s some sort of long form trick, a cat toying with its prey, or if the Beast just realizes that he has an advantage on Alex simply by virtue of being the Beast, and so doesn’t have the time to be bothered by insults. Or maybe he is--his expressions don’t seem to follow normal human expressions all that closely, or at least no closely enough for Alex to read them.
The Beast stands up and spoons stew into twin bowls, then hands one across the table to Alex.
“So, Doctor Henry,” Alex starts. “When are we going to start working on my magic?”
“Hank,” the Beast corrects, spinning a spoon through his stew. “My name’s Hank.”
“That’s not what Emma Frost said,” Alex says, and the Beast’s--Hank’s--huge face wrinkles into a frown.
“Well, it’s not my given name, but no one calls me Henry,” the Beast says.
“So, Hank,” Alex says, and he’s trying so hard to make it sound light and conversational that he knows it falls flat. “When do we start?”
“We can run some tests tomorrow,” the Beast says. “But you need to understand--I can’t promise this will be quick. I’m doing this because I owe someone a favor and--”
“Right,” Alex says. “So I’m stuck here forever.”
The Beast looks at him and doesn’t say a word. Alex considers calling him out for being a freak, but he realizes that, being a beast, the Beast might take it the wrong way. And, being a beast, the Beast could eat him or some shit.
So Alex eats his dinner. It’s good.
“Did you cook this?” he mumbles through a mouthful of food, pointing at the bowl with his spoon. “Because it’s actually decent.”
“You’ve heard the goat story,” the Beast says, sounding a little put-out. “It’s not true. Most of them aren’t.”
“Of course not,” Alex says, because he doesn’t want the Beast to think he’s dumb or something.
The rest of the meal passes in silence. Alex doesn’t know what to say to the Beast, who is supposed to be some sort of freak genius; what do you do with freak geniuses, when you aren’t in high school and trying to get them to do your homework? Alex had kind of figured all the freak geniuses left town after high school, because everyone he met at work or the one bar across the state line seemed more or less average; smart enough, but without the extra thing that made them really need to keep going to school or whatever. Alex went to community college for long enough to do what he wanted, has a few books he sometimes even reads, isn’t dumb, you know, but has never wanted more than what he has. He hadn’t wanted magic, either, but now he has that.
Although now he does want to be back in his apartment, even if the rent’s a bit steep without Darwin to help out.
After dinner the Beast disappears, goes upstairs or downstairs or where ever. Alex goes back to his room, a small one with dormer windows in the peak of the house, and he curls up under his quilt to sleep.
When he wakes, it takes a moment to remember where he is. The quilt’s the same, but the light is wrong, and the ceiling is a clean white and not cracked and stained like the one in his apartment.
He remembers, mostly because there’s a thudding knock at the door.
He gets up and opens it, and the Beast is blinking owlishly at him.
“Put on a shirt,” the Beast growls momentarily, with a little more force than seems necessary. Alex wonders if the Beast gets hungry when he sees bare flesh; if he’s only just controlling his desire to eat Alex because Alex wears clothes.
“We’re going to run some tests,” the Beast says, like that’s any sort of explanation for being in Alex’s room and all growly. Though Alex supposes all the rooms belong to him--still, if the Beast needed to use this one it seems like he wouldn’t have set Alex up here.
“If you need this room for something I can go somewhere else,” Alex offers, and the Beast looks at him blankly.
“You have an ankle monitor,” the Beast says.
“Okay,” Alex says. “Just offering.”
“We’re going to run some tests,” the Beast repeats. “Come on.”
Running tests with the Beast turns out to kind of crappy. He keeps asking Alex to do things with magic that Alex can’t do, which is why they need to run the tests in the first place, and whenever Alex points this out the Beast just blinks patiently at him. For a freak genius there’s something stupid looking about him, but maybe it’s just because his eyes are huge and yellow and kind of inhuman.
Even when Alex doesn’t do the things the Beast asks him to do, he measures things with weird, spinning instruments and takes down everything in a spiral-bound notebook (probably college ruled, because his large hand looks cramped from trying to write small).
They do the same thing the next day, and the next. A week passes with Alex in the Beast’s house. He’s been given free reign of the rooms, though there aren’t many; he loses interest quickly, and pulls on a jacket and spends most of his time in the gardens, the yard, as far as he can go into the woods before his ankle monitor starts beeping. It’s funny, he hadn’t thought of it before, but it surprises him now that they don’t use magic for ankle monitors--he asks the Beast about it, one evening when they’re at dinner.
“The government doesn’t trust magic,” the Beast says mildly, carefully slicing the meat off a chicken leg. He actually eats tidier than any human-shaped person Alex has known, like he’s trying to make up for the way he looks.
“We have a witch on the county commission,” Alex points out, and the Beast lifts his heavy head to look directly at him. His yellow eyes flickr, because of or despite the incandescent bulbs.
“To keep an eye on things,” he says. “It’s really a figurehead position.”
Alex considers pointing out that the figurehead sent him up here, but instead he asks other questions, after that, ones that don’t make the Beast look heavy and tired. He asks him what he uses the laboratory for when Alex isn’t around, he asks if they shared any high school teachers (the Beast hated Mr. James, who Alex loved; conversely, the Beast was apparently held in high regard by Ms. Winchenden, who hated Alex), he asks about the hills around the B & B. It makes dinners bearable: they’d been passing them largely in silence, and even though the Beast is slow to warm up, he does. When Alex jabs at him he jabs back, and if his insults are still weak, well, practice makes perfect.
At the end of the week, the Beast produces something. It looks sort of like a cheap harness, maybe something rock climbers use. Alex isn’t sure where he would’ve found it, but he indicates that Alex should put it on.
“You need something to focus your powers through,” the Beast tells Alex when they’re down in the basement lab, which feels like wet and smells like mildew. “And since you said your powers came out of your chest, I thought this might work.”
“So it doesn’t actually do anything?” Alex asks, looking down at it.
It looks stupid.
“No,” the Beast says. “It makes you do something.”
“Right, of course,” Alex says. “I thought you were an inventor.”
“I am,” the Beast says. “I’m just not sure you need an invention.”
Alex kind of wants to punch him. He’s here so the Beast can do something and make him control his magic and then Alex can be done and go home, not so the Beast can wave his hands and say the solution was inside him all the time.
“I don’t want bullshit about my feelings,” Alex says, instead of punching Beast. “Not from you. You think feelings fix shit? Because you act more like a human being than most human beings, but you’re still a fucking Beast. Why not own it? Why not be like, ‘fuck you, assholes,’ and destroy shit? Isn’t that the point?”
The Beast looks at him.
The Beast looks tired.
The Beast turns around and leaves, shutting the door behind him.
Alex is left with a weird feeling he doesn’t want to think about low in his gut. It sort of feels like he’s gone back to the first day, when Alex was scared and acting like an asshole, and the Beast was--scared?--and acting like a rock. But the Beast keeps asking Alex to do things he can’t do, acting like Alex understands his magic way more than he does--he’s only been a witch for like, a month, most magic users are supposed to manifest by the time they hit puberty, and Alex has fucking pubes, okay, has had them for awhile, it’s just the magic part that’s completely off.
There’s a knock at the door.
“I told you this wouldn’t be quick,” the Beast calls through the door when Alex doesn’t respond.
“How do I even know you know what you’re doing?” Alex asks.
“You aren’t the first witch I’ve helped,” the Beast says simply. “I’m particularly well known for my work with late manifests.”
“Yeah?” Alex asks, because that was not something they said about the Beast in the valley. That’s a new piece of information.
“Yes,” the Beast says mildly. “Why did you think they sent you up here?”
“My lawyer didn’t know,” Alex says, and the Beast glances at him.
“Your lawyer sounds like an idiot,” he says, evenly.
“Got it in one,” Alex replies. He slumps down into a sitting position on the cool concrete floor, pushing his back against the door. There’s a deadened thud, and it sounds like the Beast is doing the same thing on the other side.
“Just because a punishment is not the one we deserve doesn’t mean it lacks merit,” the Beast rumbles, and Alex takes a moment to dissect that statement before deciding it’s crap.
“That’s crap,” he says, mildly. He imagines the Beast shrugs on the other side of the door, and the Beast’s response implies that yes, that was the case.
“Give it time,” he says, and Alex suspects this has something to do with the Beast being, well, the Beast, but he doesn’t push it, and instead he gets to his feet and opens the door.
“Well come in then,” he says, and the Beast doesn’t say a word, just gets to his feet as well, so they can return to their tests.
Some of the Beast’s methods work. Not well but--Alex gets a bit of a handle on his magic, does a few things with it that he actually meant to do an a couple of other things that look controlled enough that he lies to the Beast about meaning to do them.
“It takes time,” the Beast tells him one evening at dinner, at Alex tries to hide a scowl. The Beast doesn’t have magic, so Alex shouldn’t have to put up with any of his bullshit advice, but--here they are.
“The other people you trained,” he says. “What were their powers?”
“A few arsonists, like you,” the Beast says, with a nod and a slow grin. “I was trained by a psychic. And there was--ah--a shapeshifter.”
The way he says it suggests it’s best not to ask.
“So, a shapeshifter,” Alex says, anyway. Shapeshiftings rare--arsonists, as Beast called Alex, witches with more generalized surges of power, are the most common. With the proper training most witches can work outside their talents, but in a late manifest like Alex--he’ll be lucky if he can work at all, in anything. Without training a witch is pretty much useless, and without control a witch is less than useless. A menace. Usually they end up like the Beast, living in the hill towns off unemployment checks and whatever else they can cobble together. Hedgewitches, all of them.
“She was the last one I worked with,” the Beast says.
“She,” Alex repeats.
“Yes,” the Beast says. “Not that this is your business.”
It really, really isn’t. But the Beast has given Alex so little to go on.
“Bad break-up, then?” Alex asks.
“We weren’t dating,” the Beast replies. “But you could say that.”
It’s not quite the reveal Alex had been hoping for, but it’s something.
He teases more information out of the Beast slowly, but it’s not much. The Beast mentions that he worked at a government facility, and he knows Professor X. He doesn’t bring the shapeshifter up again, and the way his face fell into something between shame and sadness the last time she came up makes Alex disinclined to talk about it.
It’s not like he’s going soft or anything. Or using words like disinclined because he’s spending too much time with the Beast. Or calling the Beast Hank, now, because it’s kind of weird not to use his name.
It’s not like he’s going soft or anything, but when he gets Hank outside of himself, outside of his little science shell, Alex kind of likes talking to him as much as he likes talking to anyone.
Then there’s a flood, when spring is edging into summer. There’s a torrent of rain, a gale of wind, and herd of lightning, whatever. Point being, it does dark in midafternoon and the trees start thrashing, and the Beast just sort of shrugs and tells Alex they won’t do any outside work today, and maybe they should make dinner early and fill the bathtub with water just in case. The B & B is fine, the basement doesn’t even flood, but that’s because the hill towns drain quick and easy, it’s in the valley where you really need to worry--
“Fuck, Hank,” Alex mutters. “I bet my basement flooded.”
“Don’t you live in an apartment?” Hank asks, puzzled. They’ve got a few candles and a flashlight running in the living room, and Hank is reading one of the tomes that he claims to have read already. Alex had brought down one of his own books--Return of the King--which Hank had glanced at and given a sort of approving rumble.
“I--yeah--but I keep shit down there,” Alex says. “I need to get permission to go down to the valley.”
“I don’t see why not,” Hank replies. But of course the cell service up here is shit, and the phone’s out, and cops are probably busy with storm damage, anyway.
But as soon as that’s through, Alex calls them up, and the sheriff comes up with a form and talks to Hank a bit, looking distinctly uncomfortable, and at the end of it all Alex has two nights in his own apartment to sort things out.
That’s when things go pear-shaped. He stops by the bar, because everyone said the Beast was going to eat him and he kind of wants to prove that he’s still alive, and Sean is there.
Everyone knows that Sean talks too much and most of it is shit. There’s not much to be done about it, except maybe to ignore him when he starts mouthing off. As it is, Alex can’t ignore him, because Sean is screeching in his ear.
“How’s the Beast?” he says, and Alex kind of wants to point out that Sean doesn’t give a shit about how Hank is doing (which is well, thanks), and just wants to know how Alex is doing living with the Beast.
“Good,” Alex says. It’s kind of not a lie at all, and could serve as an honest answer to either question.
“Yeah?” Sean says. “You ever see what he really looks like?”
“Sure,” Alex says. “I live with him. He’s blue.”
“No,” Sean says, dropping his voice to what he must think is a whisper, but just sounds like the normal speaking voice of a normal person. “What he really looks like.”
“What, you mean did I look up his yearbook picture or something?” Alex asks. “Because even if I were a beast I’d prefer people not go looking up my yearbook picture. Acne, right?”
“Yeah, you’ve still got the scars,” Angel says. Angel might not be her real name. They call her that because it’s the opposite of how she acts.
“Thanks for that contribution, Ange,” Alex says. Sean looks between them for a moment, then continues with his explanation.
“They say when he’s asleep he looks like he did before,” Sean says.
“A lot of the things they say are utter shit,” Alex says. He has never seen Hank asleep.
“They say it’s part of the curse,” Sean says, shrugging. Something about the way he says it is unusual--he seems confident that he’s right, like he no longer needs to prove anything further. It makes Alex worried, because normally Sean would keep talking, and now Alex feels like Sean knows something Alex doesn’t, and Hank isn’t at all the genial, accidentally transformed scientist Alex took him for. There’s a curse.
Hank had a falling out with a late manifesting shapeshifter. It’s kind of obvious, now. You have to be doing some pretty shitty science to turn into a beast based on little more than a lab mishap, and Alex doesn’t think Hank is all that great--but he doesn’t think he’s that magnificently terrible.
Alex supposes he could just go to the library at the high school and wade through yearbooks until Henry McCoy turns up, but it seems easier to squirrel away one of the candles they used during the power outage when he gets back to the B & B and pick the lock to Hank’s bedroom.
Let it never be said that running with the criminal element as a youth doesn’t have its advantages, because it totally does.
Alex hasn’t actually been inside Hank’s room before, so when the match and then the candle flicker to life, it’s slightly disorienting and not really what Alex expected. There are bookcases, to be sure, but only two: not as big as the ones downstairs in the living room, and some of the books look like kids’ books, and some shelves are empty and given over to picture frames. The bed itself isn’t particularly large, the Beast would fill it completely, but--he doesn’t.
Alex goes closer. The figure in the bed is smaller than the Beast, to be sure, but he’s still long and sprawled all over the bed, with pale, moony limbs stretching from the headboard and a foot trailing over the edge of the mattress. There’s a tangle of sheets looped around his waist but otherwise it doesn’t look like he’s wearing anything at all, maybe because clothes get fucked up in the switch.
His body is kind of hot. It’s not what you want to think about the human body of the Beast you live with, but there you have it. There’s a shock of dark hair on his head, and when Alex circles to the other side of the bed--well.
There was this guy Alex had a crush on sophomore year. It was a kind of unfortunate thing, right in the midst of what Darwin liked to call his Big Gay Crisis, and the guy was a senior on the way to graduation and college and Alex was a sophomore who suddenly realized he really, really liked blue eyes behind glasses and on guys and he wasn’t sure which bothered him more.
Alex had never gotten the guy’s name, partly because he didn’t want to go around asking and partly because--it doesn’t matter now, because the guy’s name is, or was, Henry McCoy, and if anything he’s gotten better with age, gotten better with Alex actually knowing things about him, that he’s planted tomatoes and beans in the garden, that he is quietly funny and awkward and, sometimes, strangely wise. Alex looks at his face, quiet and gentle and pale in the flickering yellow light, and it makes perfect sense that this is who was under all that fur. Maybe Alex knew already. It doesn’t matter he just--in the morning, he will kiss the Beast on his cat’s nose and his thick lips, tangle his hands in the blue hair, to hell with it.
Alex moves the candle closer, and a thick drop of wax rolls off the candle and drips onto Hank’s face.
When Hank wakes up, the first bit of information Alex processes is that his eyes are still an impossible shade of blue, and the second piece of information he processes is fuck.
“Fuck,” Hank says, staring and Alex and groping on the side table for his glasses. They’re too big for his face, slipping down his nose, and he stares at Alex a moment longer and then runs a frantic hand through his hair.
“Fuck, Alex,” he says. “You ruined everything.”
Alex does not know what precisely that means and it’s so--he knows this is not where his mind should be right now, but he kind of wants to lick Hank’s chest, to find out what the pool of sheet in his lap is hiding.
“No, seriously,” Hank says, when Alex fails to respond. “You can’t see me like this.”
“Clearly I am,” Alex says, and Hank gets to his feet. There’s a moment there when Alex just wants to look, but Hank is taking him by the shoulders and pushing him towards the door.
“I’ll send the Professor for you,” Hank says. “But I’ll have to leave.”
“So it’s a curse,” Alex says.
“Yes it’s a curse,” Hank hisses, shoving him out the door and slamming it behind him.
If it’s a curse Alex has got this in the bag, he thinks. Most curses can be broken, and he’s a fucking witch, so. He goes downstairs try to read up on it, and he falls asleep in a stiff-backed armchair, and when he wakes up Hank is nowhere to be found.
Professor X shows up around lunchtime, looking flustered and tired. He’s locally famous--Alex had seen his picture in the paper, though hadn’t met him before. Still, when he opens the door and sees the man in the wheelchair, he knows who he’s looking at.
“So, Alex,” he says. “I’ll be finishing your training.”
“What happened to Hank?” Alex asks, and the Professor looks at him, or maybe through him.
“I believe you now,” he replies, and Alex knows but he doesn’t understand, and the Professor probably knows that, given his particularly witchy skill set, but he just sits there looking at Alex and waiting for Alex to move away from the door.
Alex lets him in. The house isn’t set up for wheelchairs at all, but the Professor’s chair doesn’t seem to know that.
“A friend made it for me,” the Professor says, sounding almost sad. “Metalworking.”
Alex wishes he got metalworking magic.
Training’s different, after that, and Alex kind of hates it. To make matters worse he can’t turn up any information on shapeshifting curses, or what he does find is useless. There’s no universal cure, it depends on the curse, and Alex doesn’t know who cast it or how, or why Hank had to leave.
“You’ll find fairy stories as useful to you as anything else,” the Professor says one evening, and Alex glares at him and goes upstairs. The Professor isn’t funny, because Alex had found his stupid high school crush, like some sort of crappy romantic comedy, and found that his high school crush was as good as he had looked, and now he’s just--gone.
Alex would just leave, but he’s still under house arrest in a house not his own because Emma Frost is a witch with a ‘B’, and the training’s going smoothly but not precisely well.
And then it does start to go well, and then it starts to go better. And it still feels kind of crappy, because Alex is sorting through everything he can find about curses and there’s still nothing.
“Did you try the fairy stories yet?” the Professor asks him again one night when Alex is curled up in Hank’s uncomfortable, too-large armchair and sorting through books that are complete shit.
“What?” Alex says, looking up at him.
“They might help,” the Professor says.
“Seriously?” Alex asks, and the Professor nods.
“Just because he was a Beast--this isn’t Beauty and the Beast.”
“No, it isn’t,” the Professor says. “I suggest you look in Greco-Roman mythology or Norse fairy tales.”
Alex finds them, then, two stories about some chick who does the same thing Alex did, looks at her freaky lover--and, well, they weren’t lovers--but this chick looks at him at night, wakes him up with a drop of wax, and then he takes off. But it doesn’t make sense, because this isn’t a story.
“Why’d he have to leave?” Alex asks.
“I’m not at liberty to disclose,” the Professor replies. “And I don’t entirely know. But I suspect that’s a little closer to Beauty and the Beast.”
It doesn’t--Alex wishes he could find a time-travelling witch, just go back and do it over, because he doesn’t know how to fix it otherwise. But if he could roll back the clock, he could just go and kiss the Beast first and then it would be done with.
Instead Alex spends summer in the hilltowns, picks the blueberries in the Beast’s yard and sleeps off hot afternoons, until finally the Professor says that he has his magic under control and signs the release.
“Where is he?” Alex asks, as soon as the ankle bracelet is off.
The Professor looks at him.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“But you know who cast the curse?” Alex asks, and the Professor favors him with a long stare.
“Yes,” he says. “My sister.”
And so Alex goes with the Professor, and meets the Raven the color of lapus lazuli.
“It was a mistake,” she says. She’s curvy and girl-shaped, red-headed and covered in blue scales.
“I didn’t mean to do it,” she tells him. “Which is not to say--Hank wasn’t comfortable with himself. He needed to learn about appearances, about being a witch.”
“But he’s not a witch,” Alex says.
“Yes,” Raven says. “He is.”
“I don’t know where he went,” she says. “But if you find him, you might want to learn to love blue.”
Alex thinks he might be able to do that. He drives back to the valley through verdant fields, down the tourist-clogged highway, and puts his things in his apartment. It looks the same as it did. And then he goes back to work and tries to get them to give him his job back, because soon his savings aren’t going to be enough.
And then, only then, does he go back into the hill towns, just to see if maybe Hank went back home when he found out Alex left.
He actually gets lost on the way to the B & B, because he’d only driven there twice, always following the sheriff. He wonders if it’s Hank’s magic, somehow--he wonders what Hank’s magic is, if it has something to do with being a genius, or maybe he’s the metalworker who made the Professor’s wheelchair. It’s not a question he expects to find answers to, but he squirrels away some hope anyway.
There’s a flash of blue, and Hank is in the garden, stooped over a row of peas. Alex remembers genetics in high school, that monk, and wonders if Hank is doing something like that, making little squares to figure out what the peas will look like. Probably not--but.
Before Alex’s car is even in the driveway, Hank is straightening and then turning to look at him.
For a moment, Alex thinks Hank’s going to run, but he doesn’t, he just waits.
“So you couldn’t finish what you started, huh?” Alex calls, getting out of the car and walking across the garden. The Beast meets his gaze evenly.
“If you’ll recall, that was your fault,” he says.
“Sorry about that,” Alex says.
“You know the story,” the Beast growls. “Now I’m stuck like this.”
“And what, I was supposed to save you?” Alex asks. “Do you even understand why Raven did this to you?”
“You know the story,” the Beast repeats.
“This isn’t a story,” Alex says. “This is real life. What’s your magic, Beast?”
“I don’t--” the Beast starts, and Alex looks at him.
“What is it, witch?”
“It doesn’t matter,” the Beast says. “I never use it.”
“That’s exactly why it matters,” Alex says. “Raven wanted you to use magic, Hank. She didn’t want you to fall in love or whatever happens in fairy stories.”
“My control isn’t--”
“Your control,” Alex repeats. “You trained me.”
And then Hank walks across the yard and picks up Alex’s car like it’s a sheet of paper.
So Hank is a physical witch. Which makes as much sense as anything.
“I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” he says, staring at Alex. “You have to understand that.”
“You can’t just shutter it,” Alex says, because he lit a grocery and a gas station on fire and he knows about this shit. “That doesn’t help anything.”
Hank drops the car to the ground, and Alex is beyond grateful that he installed decent shocks.
And--Alex had kind of expected him to transform here, and maybe he had gotten Hank’s hopes up, because Hank stands there for a moment.
“There,” he says. “Now that you’ve satisfied your curiosity, you can leave.”
“That isn’t--” Alex starts, moving towards Hank and Hank looks at him, eyes sharp and yellow.
Eyes sharp and blue, for a moment.
Alex kisses him. It doesn’t work quite the way he wanted it to, because Hank is taller than him and Alex has to stand on tip-toes and pulls Hank’s head down towards his, but it happens.
It happens.
If anyone asks him, which some people will, Alex will always say that it was doing magic that broke the curse, nothing else. That his kiss just happened to coincide with Hank’s transformation, that the surge of magic that engulfed them at that moment was the most intense thing he ever experienced (that it practically made him come--he doesn’t tell them that) and came from neither of them.
When they pull apart, Hank is breathing heavily, panting, and he is human, and he reaches again for Alex, twines his hands behind his neck, pulls him close for another.
If anyone asks him, which some people will, Alex will not tell them that that moment felt like happily-ever-after.
But it did.
As for this--this is the modern Beauty & the Beast retelling I've wanted to write for this pairing since before I started writing for this pairing (even though there's already a really lovely Beauty & Beast fic--I couldn't resist). It doesn't hew too closely to the original, but, um, the inspiration is there (although inspiration is also borrowed from a couple other stories).
.b&b
alex accidentally burns down the grocery store and also a gas station. as punishment, they send him to live with the beast in the hill towns.
pg13 . 7714 words
The witch from the county commission is a bitch. Alex is certain of it as soon as he sees her, and it’s depressing, because he had to drive all the way up from the south part of the county for his trial, and now he knows he’s not going to get off easy. He sees the witch in the courtroom, and when he makes eye contact with her it’s like there’s an ice cube sliding down his spine.
“They call her Emma Frost,” Alex’s public defender hisses from his side.
“That’s because that’s her name,” Alex mutters, but it doesn’t make him feel any better. He’d seen the signs around town when she was running. She’d been part of the group that ran with Erik Lehnsherr, so of course she won despite having been the county witch when Shaw was commissioner and everything was shit (not that everything was much better now, but the county commission didn’t have that much power, as far as Alex could measure). At the time Alex hadn’t been overly concerned because county politics were lame, but then his powers had manifested, and then he’d accidentally burnt down an entire grocery store and also a gas station, and now he had to make eye contact with Emma Frost and wait for her to read his verdict.
“I don’t usually do cases involving magic,” his public defender had said when they first met, fluttering his hands like they were trying to mate with a butterfly. “Too touchy. But it was an accident, so I’m sure it will be fine.”
Alex should’ve known then, but he was still recovering from his foster brother skipping town (and county, and state) with some chick he met at the bar just across the state line, the one where they only checked i.d. sporadically and seemed to forget everything they should know about their patrons’ ages.
Point being, Darwin had been pretty much the only thing Alex had resembling friend or family, and also he paid half the rent, and then he’d baled to go seek his fortune in the big city and fuck this chick, and Alex had set fire to a few things (accidentally!), and now he was here, sitting in front of a judge and a jury when everyone knew that all that really mattered was whatever came out of Emma Frost’s mouth, and it was apparent, now, that Emma Frost was a bitch. And this was mostly irrelevant and his public defender said it wouldn’t hold up in court, but in March Alex’s dog had gotten mouth cancer and kicked the bucket.
Truth be told, it had been kind of a shit year thus far, and it seemed unlikely that winding up in county court in April was a sign of better things to come, especially since the owners of every gas station in the county, and also a few over the state line, had decided that Alex’s punishment would be jacked up gas prices for the rest of his natural born days. And they knew his car, probably had little pictures of it pinned up next to those signs that told them what birthdate meant a person was allowed to buy cigarettes or lotto tickets or beer, so he couldn’t even get someone else to buy for him.
But Emma Frost is speaking, and when she speaks, everyone listens, because this is the sentence, and also because her voice is so quiet it might dissolve if interrupted. When she talks she sounds like the dry legal document she’s reading, and she emphasizes words seemingly at random, at Alex considers, in the back of his mind, that Emma Frost might be crazy as well as a bitch, which seems like a terrible combination in a woman who holds political office, especially political office that could send Alex Summers to prison.
But Emma Frost is speaking:
“Alex Summers is found guilty of uncontrolled use of magic, and two counts of arson.
“Uncontrolled use of magic is a criminal misdemeanor, and it demands a solution as well as a punishment. Analysis of Mr. Summers’ magic suggests training will be needed in order for him to function safely within a mixed community. After some discussion, Dr. Henry McCoy has agreed to take on Mr. Summers’ case. Ergo Mr. Summers will be placed under house arrest in the household of Dr. McCoy until his powers are deemed sufficiently controlled by the county witch and magic warden.
“On the counts of arson: an anonymous donor has agreed to cover the cost of Mr. Summers’ damages. In addition, Mr. Summers will be expected to perform community service.”
When Emma is done, she sits down, and Alex lets out a long whistle of breath he didn’t know he was holding, because someone paid the damages, and after that he didn’t give a fuck.
His public defender is looking at him, and then starts shoving papers in his suitcase.
“Well,” he says. “Not too bad, not too bad. At least they bought the accident explanation, and that dipshit professor is probably paying your dues. Pity about the Beast, though.”
“The Beast?” Alex asks, replaying the verdict in his head.
“Dr. McCoy? Too bad he’s the only one they could get to work with you,” the public defender continues. “Seeing as he’s mad and all. And, you know, the Beast.”
The Beast lives in one of the hill towns, in what used to be a bed and breakfast. They say his entire body is covered in fur and he eats a fresh young goat (a kid) for every meal. They say he was the valedictorian of the graduating class at the regional high school not many years ago, and he went off to university and got some degrees and was a promising young scientist, and then he tested one of his experiments on himself and something went direly wrong, and he had to move back to obscurity in shame. They say he returns to his true form during the full moon. They say he was--is--a witch. They say his familiar is a raven the color of lapus lazuli. They say if you can pluck a hair from his mane, you’ll meet your one true love. They say he’s the state animal.
They say a lot of things about the Beast. Alex is aware that some of them are more farfetched than others. For instance, eating three goats a day is clearly bullshit, because no one could sustain that many goats on the shit land they have up in the hill towns, and if he were actually a witch he would probably just magic himself back, and the state animal thing is such utter bullshit it’s not even worth discussing.
Here are the things they say about the Beast Alex believes are true: He is a beast. He brought it upon himself. His real name is Dr. Henry McCoy. If he’s from around here, he probably went to high school with everyone else down in the valley, but who the fuck cares? He is, for all intents and purposes, a mad scientist.
That’s all, but that’s more than enough for Alex to know that his assessment of Emma Frost was correct. Because Alex is going to have to live with the Beast in the hill towns, until he stops burning shit down or his powers chill out or Emma Frost gives him the thumbs up to leave, and the county may not be, like, the seat of culture, but at least there was a grocery store until Alex burned it down and that bar across the state line.
In the hill towns there isn’t enough shit to support three goats a day, okay? Even without the freaky ass Beast, the hill towns suck.
Though if Alex is under house arrest, it may not matter either way, and if he’s under house arrest with the Beast--it’s not actually worth pursuing. The Beast is the sort of thing mothers tell children about to keep them from going to deep into the woods, or from becoming scientists.
The sheriff goes with Alex back to the apartment to pack up his things, only all he really has to take are clothes, which he piles into boxes, because he figures the Beast has everything else, and even if the Beast doesn’t they can always call up the sheriff or something and get him to bring Alex back down to the apartment. It’s half an hour’s drive, at worst, and for all Alex’s griping he will admit that it could be worse, but saying it could be worse is the sort of thing people who bowl a 27 say, because, yes, it could be worse, but they still suck at bowling.
Still, it could be worse. Alex lets himself think it, because when your public defender gets you a shitty, unheard of sentence in the hill towns with the Beast you’re allowed.
Alex takes some books off his shelves, and folds up the quilt from his bed and puts that on top of his box, and then he’s locking up the apartment, getting in his car and following the sheriff up the state highway, and then east on the county road that leads into the hills, and then down a widening network of dirt roads until they reach the B & B.
It’s up a long gravel drive, in a field that’s still laced with snow, because the hill towns don’t thaw completely until May. It’s a curse--not the witchy kind, just the ordinary, hill-towns-suck kind. If Alex is honest with himself the place is in good repair, though he wants it to look haunted, because the Beast lives here. The paint is the color of mustard, but the fact is that it is painted, freshly, and the grass on the hill that runs down to the drive and the stone wall is too long and mixed with blueberry bushes and ferns, but it looks like it’s supposed to be that way.
If Alex didn’t know the Beast lived here, he wouldn’t expect him to.
There’s a red barn around back, and the sheriff indicates that Alex should park inside the opened double doors, and then the sheriff secures Alex’s ankle monitor, shakes his hand (like he’s congratulating Alex for something, like maybe you congratulate people for committing arson and then getting a crappy sentence for it), and disappears down the drive.
Alex considers taking off into the woods, because the monitor should be good for a few hundred feet, and he could just chill there and live off the land and shit until everyone forgets about this, or his ankle monitor breaks or something.
But because Alex isn’t a fucking coward, unlike, apparently, the sheriff, he goes around to the cast iron knocker on the front of the house, and swings it once, twice, thrice.
There’s no response, and for a moment Alex just stands there, and then he slams the knocker into the door several more times, because Alex Summers may be lot of things (an untrained witch, a mediocre mechanic, someone with maybe some minor anger management problems, a halfway decent dancer), but he’s not someone who just stands around waiting until the freaking Beast deigns to speak with him.
There’s a roar, from inside, and Alex does not almost jump out of his skin, or shit his pants, or do anything scared people do in movies.
The Beast roars again, though maybe it’s more like a low rumble, and this time it takes shape into coherent words: “Go around to the side.”
Alex passed the side door when he came around to the front of the house: it’s tucked in, across from the barn, behind a garden that’s still retreated beneath rich brown earth. Alex raps on the door there, knuckles on wood, and it swings open from the inside. The Beast is standing in the doorframe, not fully in the sunlight. From here Alex can only see the size of him, which is, in a word: large. He fills the doorframe without effort, and it’s clear that’s just how he is--large, too big for the house he’s selected for himself or been exiled to, Alex isn’t entirely sure.
“Well?” the Beast asks. “Are you coming in?”
So Alex goes up the brick steps and follows him inside.
Once his eyes adjust to the dim light inside, the second word Alex would use to describe the Beast is blue. It’s not any color found in nature, or at least not found in natural fur. It looks the way tropical sinkholes appear in photographs, like a pure form of pigment, bright and vibrant and surprisingly soft.
“So what type of animal are you?” Alex asks, because his mouth works faster than his brain.
The Beast doesn’t say anything for a moment, two moments, three moments.
The Beast doesn’t say anything in response to Alex’s question for half an hour, during which time he shows Alex to his room, tells him to come down for dinner at six and not to go in the basement, and then comes back upstairs and knocks on the door, when Alex is sitting on the bed with his quilt newly spread across it, contemplating a variety of things, none of which his mind seems able to focus on.
“What type of animal are you?” the Beast asks, when he comes back.
Alex blinks at him.
“That’s my comeback,” the Beast says. “You insulted me when you arrived, and that’s my comeback.”
“Your comeback is repeating my own jab back at me?” Alex asks, and the Beast scowls slightly. It should be intimidating. It would be intimidating, if the conversation weren’t so stupid.
“Yes. So?”
“Dude,” Alex says. “You need to work on your insults.”
“It’s not like you had a comeback for me,” the Beast replies. He’s still standing in the door, and Alex is sitting on the bed and wondering when the Beast starts cutting him up or whatever, so he can control his magic and leave. He’s also wondering where the Beast finds clothes that fit, because he’s dressed like a nerd when he could probably run around naked and be considerably more terrifying.
“Do you wear your pants like that because you can’t find ones that fit, or because you’re trying to expose your dainty ankles?” Alex says, and the Beast turns around and shuts the door. Alex can hear him padding downstairs, footsteps muffled by fur. When he goes down for dinner, he notes the fine grooves on the wooden stairs: claws, he realizes, sharp and long and curving downwards, like a bear’s.
“Your hair is stupid,” the Beast says when Alex finds him in the kitchen, sitting at a large wood table. There’s what might be a pot of stew and a hank of bread on the table, and it’s set with two thick ceramic plates.
“Seriously?” Alex says, sitting down. “I thought you were clever.”
The Beast shrugs. He doesn’t seem terribly put-out by any of this, and Alex wonders if it’s some sort of long form trick, a cat toying with its prey, or if the Beast just realizes that he has an advantage on Alex simply by virtue of being the Beast, and so doesn’t have the time to be bothered by insults. Or maybe he is--his expressions don’t seem to follow normal human expressions all that closely, or at least no closely enough for Alex to read them.
The Beast stands up and spoons stew into twin bowls, then hands one across the table to Alex.
“So, Doctor Henry,” Alex starts. “When are we going to start working on my magic?”
“Hank,” the Beast corrects, spinning a spoon through his stew. “My name’s Hank.”
“That’s not what Emma Frost said,” Alex says, and the Beast’s--Hank’s--huge face wrinkles into a frown.
“Well, it’s not my given name, but no one calls me Henry,” the Beast says.
“So, Hank,” Alex says, and he’s trying so hard to make it sound light and conversational that he knows it falls flat. “When do we start?”
“We can run some tests tomorrow,” the Beast says. “But you need to understand--I can’t promise this will be quick. I’m doing this because I owe someone a favor and--”
“Right,” Alex says. “So I’m stuck here forever.”
The Beast looks at him and doesn’t say a word. Alex considers calling him out for being a freak, but he realizes that, being a beast, the Beast might take it the wrong way. And, being a beast, the Beast could eat him or some shit.
So Alex eats his dinner. It’s good.
“Did you cook this?” he mumbles through a mouthful of food, pointing at the bowl with his spoon. “Because it’s actually decent.”
“You’ve heard the goat story,” the Beast says, sounding a little put-out. “It’s not true. Most of them aren’t.”
“Of course not,” Alex says, because he doesn’t want the Beast to think he’s dumb or something.
The rest of the meal passes in silence. Alex doesn’t know what to say to the Beast, who is supposed to be some sort of freak genius; what do you do with freak geniuses, when you aren’t in high school and trying to get them to do your homework? Alex had kind of figured all the freak geniuses left town after high school, because everyone he met at work or the one bar across the state line seemed more or less average; smart enough, but without the extra thing that made them really need to keep going to school or whatever. Alex went to community college for long enough to do what he wanted, has a few books he sometimes even reads, isn’t dumb, you know, but has never wanted more than what he has. He hadn’t wanted magic, either, but now he has that.
Although now he does want to be back in his apartment, even if the rent’s a bit steep without Darwin to help out.
After dinner the Beast disappears, goes upstairs or downstairs or where ever. Alex goes back to his room, a small one with dormer windows in the peak of the house, and he curls up under his quilt to sleep.
When he wakes, it takes a moment to remember where he is. The quilt’s the same, but the light is wrong, and the ceiling is a clean white and not cracked and stained like the one in his apartment.
He remembers, mostly because there’s a thudding knock at the door.
He gets up and opens it, and the Beast is blinking owlishly at him.
“Put on a shirt,” the Beast growls momentarily, with a little more force than seems necessary. Alex wonders if the Beast gets hungry when he sees bare flesh; if he’s only just controlling his desire to eat Alex because Alex wears clothes.
“We’re going to run some tests,” the Beast says, like that’s any sort of explanation for being in Alex’s room and all growly. Though Alex supposes all the rooms belong to him--still, if the Beast needed to use this one it seems like he wouldn’t have set Alex up here.
“If you need this room for something I can go somewhere else,” Alex offers, and the Beast looks at him blankly.
“You have an ankle monitor,” the Beast says.
“Okay,” Alex says. “Just offering.”
“We’re going to run some tests,” the Beast repeats. “Come on.”
Running tests with the Beast turns out to kind of crappy. He keeps asking Alex to do things with magic that Alex can’t do, which is why they need to run the tests in the first place, and whenever Alex points this out the Beast just blinks patiently at him. For a freak genius there’s something stupid looking about him, but maybe it’s just because his eyes are huge and yellow and kind of inhuman.
Even when Alex doesn’t do the things the Beast asks him to do, he measures things with weird, spinning instruments and takes down everything in a spiral-bound notebook (probably college ruled, because his large hand looks cramped from trying to write small).
They do the same thing the next day, and the next. A week passes with Alex in the Beast’s house. He’s been given free reign of the rooms, though there aren’t many; he loses interest quickly, and pulls on a jacket and spends most of his time in the gardens, the yard, as far as he can go into the woods before his ankle monitor starts beeping. It’s funny, he hadn’t thought of it before, but it surprises him now that they don’t use magic for ankle monitors--he asks the Beast about it, one evening when they’re at dinner.
“The government doesn’t trust magic,” the Beast says mildly, carefully slicing the meat off a chicken leg. He actually eats tidier than any human-shaped person Alex has known, like he’s trying to make up for the way he looks.
“We have a witch on the county commission,” Alex points out, and the Beast lifts his heavy head to look directly at him. His yellow eyes flickr, because of or despite the incandescent bulbs.
“To keep an eye on things,” he says. “It’s really a figurehead position.”
Alex considers pointing out that the figurehead sent him up here, but instead he asks other questions, after that, ones that don’t make the Beast look heavy and tired. He asks him what he uses the laboratory for when Alex isn’t around, he asks if they shared any high school teachers (the Beast hated Mr. James, who Alex loved; conversely, the Beast was apparently held in high regard by Ms. Winchenden, who hated Alex), he asks about the hills around the B & B. It makes dinners bearable: they’d been passing them largely in silence, and even though the Beast is slow to warm up, he does. When Alex jabs at him he jabs back, and if his insults are still weak, well, practice makes perfect.
At the end of the week, the Beast produces something. It looks sort of like a cheap harness, maybe something rock climbers use. Alex isn’t sure where he would’ve found it, but he indicates that Alex should put it on.
“You need something to focus your powers through,” the Beast tells Alex when they’re down in the basement lab, which feels like wet and smells like mildew. “And since you said your powers came out of your chest, I thought this might work.”
“So it doesn’t actually do anything?” Alex asks, looking down at it.
It looks stupid.
“No,” the Beast says. “It makes you do something.”
“Right, of course,” Alex says. “I thought you were an inventor.”
“I am,” the Beast says. “I’m just not sure you need an invention.”
Alex kind of wants to punch him. He’s here so the Beast can do something and make him control his magic and then Alex can be done and go home, not so the Beast can wave his hands and say the solution was inside him all the time.
“I don’t want bullshit about my feelings,” Alex says, instead of punching Beast. “Not from you. You think feelings fix shit? Because you act more like a human being than most human beings, but you’re still a fucking Beast. Why not own it? Why not be like, ‘fuck you, assholes,’ and destroy shit? Isn’t that the point?”
The Beast looks at him.
The Beast looks tired.
The Beast turns around and leaves, shutting the door behind him.
Alex is left with a weird feeling he doesn’t want to think about low in his gut. It sort of feels like he’s gone back to the first day, when Alex was scared and acting like an asshole, and the Beast was--scared?--and acting like a rock. But the Beast keeps asking Alex to do things he can’t do, acting like Alex understands his magic way more than he does--he’s only been a witch for like, a month, most magic users are supposed to manifest by the time they hit puberty, and Alex has fucking pubes, okay, has had them for awhile, it’s just the magic part that’s completely off.
There’s a knock at the door.
“I told you this wouldn’t be quick,” the Beast calls through the door when Alex doesn’t respond.
“How do I even know you know what you’re doing?” Alex asks.
“You aren’t the first witch I’ve helped,” the Beast says simply. “I’m particularly well known for my work with late manifests.”
“Yeah?” Alex asks, because that was not something they said about the Beast in the valley. That’s a new piece of information.
“Yes,” the Beast says mildly. “Why did you think they sent you up here?”
“My lawyer didn’t know,” Alex says, and the Beast glances at him.
“Your lawyer sounds like an idiot,” he says, evenly.
“Got it in one,” Alex replies. He slumps down into a sitting position on the cool concrete floor, pushing his back against the door. There’s a deadened thud, and it sounds like the Beast is doing the same thing on the other side.
“Just because a punishment is not the one we deserve doesn’t mean it lacks merit,” the Beast rumbles, and Alex takes a moment to dissect that statement before deciding it’s crap.
“That’s crap,” he says, mildly. He imagines the Beast shrugs on the other side of the door, and the Beast’s response implies that yes, that was the case.
“Give it time,” he says, and Alex suspects this has something to do with the Beast being, well, the Beast, but he doesn’t push it, and instead he gets to his feet and opens the door.
“Well come in then,” he says, and the Beast doesn’t say a word, just gets to his feet as well, so they can return to their tests.
Some of the Beast’s methods work. Not well but--Alex gets a bit of a handle on his magic, does a few things with it that he actually meant to do an a couple of other things that look controlled enough that he lies to the Beast about meaning to do them.
“It takes time,” the Beast tells him one evening at dinner, at Alex tries to hide a scowl. The Beast doesn’t have magic, so Alex shouldn’t have to put up with any of his bullshit advice, but--here they are.
“The other people you trained,” he says. “What were their powers?”
“A few arsonists, like you,” the Beast says, with a nod and a slow grin. “I was trained by a psychic. And there was--ah--a shapeshifter.”
The way he says it suggests it’s best not to ask.
“So, a shapeshifter,” Alex says, anyway. Shapeshiftings rare--arsonists, as Beast called Alex, witches with more generalized surges of power, are the most common. With the proper training most witches can work outside their talents, but in a late manifest like Alex--he’ll be lucky if he can work at all, in anything. Without training a witch is pretty much useless, and without control a witch is less than useless. A menace. Usually they end up like the Beast, living in the hill towns off unemployment checks and whatever else they can cobble together. Hedgewitches, all of them.
“She was the last one I worked with,” the Beast says.
“She,” Alex repeats.
“Yes,” the Beast says. “Not that this is your business.”
It really, really isn’t. But the Beast has given Alex so little to go on.
“Bad break-up, then?” Alex asks.
“We weren’t dating,” the Beast replies. “But you could say that.”
It’s not quite the reveal Alex had been hoping for, but it’s something.
He teases more information out of the Beast slowly, but it’s not much. The Beast mentions that he worked at a government facility, and he knows Professor X. He doesn’t bring the shapeshifter up again, and the way his face fell into something between shame and sadness the last time she came up makes Alex disinclined to talk about it.
It’s not like he’s going soft or anything. Or using words like disinclined because he’s spending too much time with the Beast. Or calling the Beast Hank, now, because it’s kind of weird not to use his name.
It’s not like he’s going soft or anything, but when he gets Hank outside of himself, outside of his little science shell, Alex kind of likes talking to him as much as he likes talking to anyone.
Then there’s a flood, when spring is edging into summer. There’s a torrent of rain, a gale of wind, and herd of lightning, whatever. Point being, it does dark in midafternoon and the trees start thrashing, and the Beast just sort of shrugs and tells Alex they won’t do any outside work today, and maybe they should make dinner early and fill the bathtub with water just in case. The B & B is fine, the basement doesn’t even flood, but that’s because the hill towns drain quick and easy, it’s in the valley where you really need to worry--
“Fuck, Hank,” Alex mutters. “I bet my basement flooded.”
“Don’t you live in an apartment?” Hank asks, puzzled. They’ve got a few candles and a flashlight running in the living room, and Hank is reading one of the tomes that he claims to have read already. Alex had brought down one of his own books--Return of the King--which Hank had glanced at and given a sort of approving rumble.
“I--yeah--but I keep shit down there,” Alex says. “I need to get permission to go down to the valley.”
“I don’t see why not,” Hank replies. But of course the cell service up here is shit, and the phone’s out, and cops are probably busy with storm damage, anyway.
But as soon as that’s through, Alex calls them up, and the sheriff comes up with a form and talks to Hank a bit, looking distinctly uncomfortable, and at the end of it all Alex has two nights in his own apartment to sort things out.
That’s when things go pear-shaped. He stops by the bar, because everyone said the Beast was going to eat him and he kind of wants to prove that he’s still alive, and Sean is there.
Everyone knows that Sean talks too much and most of it is shit. There’s not much to be done about it, except maybe to ignore him when he starts mouthing off. As it is, Alex can’t ignore him, because Sean is screeching in his ear.
“How’s the Beast?” he says, and Alex kind of wants to point out that Sean doesn’t give a shit about how Hank is doing (which is well, thanks), and just wants to know how Alex is doing living with the Beast.
“Good,” Alex says. It’s kind of not a lie at all, and could serve as an honest answer to either question.
“Yeah?” Sean says. “You ever see what he really looks like?”
“Sure,” Alex says. “I live with him. He’s blue.”
“No,” Sean says, dropping his voice to what he must think is a whisper, but just sounds like the normal speaking voice of a normal person. “What he really looks like.”
“What, you mean did I look up his yearbook picture or something?” Alex asks. “Because even if I were a beast I’d prefer people not go looking up my yearbook picture. Acne, right?”
“Yeah, you’ve still got the scars,” Angel says. Angel might not be her real name. They call her that because it’s the opposite of how she acts.
“Thanks for that contribution, Ange,” Alex says. Sean looks between them for a moment, then continues with his explanation.
“They say when he’s asleep he looks like he did before,” Sean says.
“A lot of the things they say are utter shit,” Alex says. He has never seen Hank asleep.
“They say it’s part of the curse,” Sean says, shrugging. Something about the way he says it is unusual--he seems confident that he’s right, like he no longer needs to prove anything further. It makes Alex worried, because normally Sean would keep talking, and now Alex feels like Sean knows something Alex doesn’t, and Hank isn’t at all the genial, accidentally transformed scientist Alex took him for. There’s a curse.
Hank had a falling out with a late manifesting shapeshifter. It’s kind of obvious, now. You have to be doing some pretty shitty science to turn into a beast based on little more than a lab mishap, and Alex doesn’t think Hank is all that great--but he doesn’t think he’s that magnificently terrible.
Alex supposes he could just go to the library at the high school and wade through yearbooks until Henry McCoy turns up, but it seems easier to squirrel away one of the candles they used during the power outage when he gets back to the B & B and pick the lock to Hank’s bedroom.
Let it never be said that running with the criminal element as a youth doesn’t have its advantages, because it totally does.
Alex hasn’t actually been inside Hank’s room before, so when the match and then the candle flicker to life, it’s slightly disorienting and not really what Alex expected. There are bookcases, to be sure, but only two: not as big as the ones downstairs in the living room, and some of the books look like kids’ books, and some shelves are empty and given over to picture frames. The bed itself isn’t particularly large, the Beast would fill it completely, but--he doesn’t.
Alex goes closer. The figure in the bed is smaller than the Beast, to be sure, but he’s still long and sprawled all over the bed, with pale, moony limbs stretching from the headboard and a foot trailing over the edge of the mattress. There’s a tangle of sheets looped around his waist but otherwise it doesn’t look like he’s wearing anything at all, maybe because clothes get fucked up in the switch.
His body is kind of hot. It’s not what you want to think about the human body of the Beast you live with, but there you have it. There’s a shock of dark hair on his head, and when Alex circles to the other side of the bed--well.
There was this guy Alex had a crush on sophomore year. It was a kind of unfortunate thing, right in the midst of what Darwin liked to call his Big Gay Crisis, and the guy was a senior on the way to graduation and college and Alex was a sophomore who suddenly realized he really, really liked blue eyes behind glasses and on guys and he wasn’t sure which bothered him more.
Alex had never gotten the guy’s name, partly because he didn’t want to go around asking and partly because--it doesn’t matter now, because the guy’s name is, or was, Henry McCoy, and if anything he’s gotten better with age, gotten better with Alex actually knowing things about him, that he’s planted tomatoes and beans in the garden, that he is quietly funny and awkward and, sometimes, strangely wise. Alex looks at his face, quiet and gentle and pale in the flickering yellow light, and it makes perfect sense that this is who was under all that fur. Maybe Alex knew already. It doesn’t matter he just--in the morning, he will kiss the Beast on his cat’s nose and his thick lips, tangle his hands in the blue hair, to hell with it.
Alex moves the candle closer, and a thick drop of wax rolls off the candle and drips onto Hank’s face.
When Hank wakes up, the first bit of information Alex processes is that his eyes are still an impossible shade of blue, and the second piece of information he processes is fuck.
“Fuck,” Hank says, staring and Alex and groping on the side table for his glasses. They’re too big for his face, slipping down his nose, and he stares at Alex a moment longer and then runs a frantic hand through his hair.
“Fuck, Alex,” he says. “You ruined everything.”
Alex does not know what precisely that means and it’s so--he knows this is not where his mind should be right now, but he kind of wants to lick Hank’s chest, to find out what the pool of sheet in his lap is hiding.
“No, seriously,” Hank says, when Alex fails to respond. “You can’t see me like this.”
“Clearly I am,” Alex says, and Hank gets to his feet. There’s a moment there when Alex just wants to look, but Hank is taking him by the shoulders and pushing him towards the door.
“I’ll send the Professor for you,” Hank says. “But I’ll have to leave.”
“So it’s a curse,” Alex says.
“Yes it’s a curse,” Hank hisses, shoving him out the door and slamming it behind him.
If it’s a curse Alex has got this in the bag, he thinks. Most curses can be broken, and he’s a fucking witch, so. He goes downstairs try to read up on it, and he falls asleep in a stiff-backed armchair, and when he wakes up Hank is nowhere to be found.
Professor X shows up around lunchtime, looking flustered and tired. He’s locally famous--Alex had seen his picture in the paper, though hadn’t met him before. Still, when he opens the door and sees the man in the wheelchair, he knows who he’s looking at.
“So, Alex,” he says. “I’ll be finishing your training.”
“What happened to Hank?” Alex asks, and the Professor looks at him, or maybe through him.
“I believe you now,” he replies, and Alex knows but he doesn’t understand, and the Professor probably knows that, given his particularly witchy skill set, but he just sits there looking at Alex and waiting for Alex to move away from the door.
Alex lets him in. The house isn’t set up for wheelchairs at all, but the Professor’s chair doesn’t seem to know that.
“A friend made it for me,” the Professor says, sounding almost sad. “Metalworking.”
Alex wishes he got metalworking magic.
Training’s different, after that, and Alex kind of hates it. To make matters worse he can’t turn up any information on shapeshifting curses, or what he does find is useless. There’s no universal cure, it depends on the curse, and Alex doesn’t know who cast it or how, or why Hank had to leave.
“You’ll find fairy stories as useful to you as anything else,” the Professor says one evening, and Alex glares at him and goes upstairs. The Professor isn’t funny, because Alex had found his stupid high school crush, like some sort of crappy romantic comedy, and found that his high school crush was as good as he had looked, and now he’s just--gone.
Alex would just leave, but he’s still under house arrest in a house not his own because Emma Frost is a witch with a ‘B’, and the training’s going smoothly but not precisely well.
And then it does start to go well, and then it starts to go better. And it still feels kind of crappy, because Alex is sorting through everything he can find about curses and there’s still nothing.
“Did you try the fairy stories yet?” the Professor asks him again one night when Alex is curled up in Hank’s uncomfortable, too-large armchair and sorting through books that are complete shit.
“What?” Alex says, looking up at him.
“They might help,” the Professor says.
“Seriously?” Alex asks, and the Professor nods.
“Just because he was a Beast--this isn’t Beauty and the Beast.”
“No, it isn’t,” the Professor says. “I suggest you look in Greco-Roman mythology or Norse fairy tales.”
Alex finds them, then, two stories about some chick who does the same thing Alex did, looks at her freaky lover--and, well, they weren’t lovers--but this chick looks at him at night, wakes him up with a drop of wax, and then he takes off. But it doesn’t make sense, because this isn’t a story.
“Why’d he have to leave?” Alex asks.
“I’m not at liberty to disclose,” the Professor replies. “And I don’t entirely know. But I suspect that’s a little closer to Beauty and the Beast.”
It doesn’t--Alex wishes he could find a time-travelling witch, just go back and do it over, because he doesn’t know how to fix it otherwise. But if he could roll back the clock, he could just go and kiss the Beast first and then it would be done with.
Instead Alex spends summer in the hilltowns, picks the blueberries in the Beast’s yard and sleeps off hot afternoons, until finally the Professor says that he has his magic under control and signs the release.
“Where is he?” Alex asks, as soon as the ankle bracelet is off.
The Professor looks at him.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“But you know who cast the curse?” Alex asks, and the Professor favors him with a long stare.
“Yes,” he says. “My sister.”
And so Alex goes with the Professor, and meets the Raven the color of lapus lazuli.
“It was a mistake,” she says. She’s curvy and girl-shaped, red-headed and covered in blue scales.
“I didn’t mean to do it,” she tells him. “Which is not to say--Hank wasn’t comfortable with himself. He needed to learn about appearances, about being a witch.”
“But he’s not a witch,” Alex says.
“Yes,” Raven says. “He is.”
“I don’t know where he went,” she says. “But if you find him, you might want to learn to love blue.”
Alex thinks he might be able to do that. He drives back to the valley through verdant fields, down the tourist-clogged highway, and puts his things in his apartment. It looks the same as it did. And then he goes back to work and tries to get them to give him his job back, because soon his savings aren’t going to be enough.
And then, only then, does he go back into the hill towns, just to see if maybe Hank went back home when he found out Alex left.
He actually gets lost on the way to the B & B, because he’d only driven there twice, always following the sheriff. He wonders if it’s Hank’s magic, somehow--he wonders what Hank’s magic is, if it has something to do with being a genius, or maybe he’s the metalworker who made the Professor’s wheelchair. It’s not a question he expects to find answers to, but he squirrels away some hope anyway.
There’s a flash of blue, and Hank is in the garden, stooped over a row of peas. Alex remembers genetics in high school, that monk, and wonders if Hank is doing something like that, making little squares to figure out what the peas will look like. Probably not--but.
Before Alex’s car is even in the driveway, Hank is straightening and then turning to look at him.
For a moment, Alex thinks Hank’s going to run, but he doesn’t, he just waits.
“So you couldn’t finish what you started, huh?” Alex calls, getting out of the car and walking across the garden. The Beast meets his gaze evenly.
“If you’ll recall, that was your fault,” he says.
“Sorry about that,” Alex says.
“You know the story,” the Beast growls. “Now I’m stuck like this.”
“And what, I was supposed to save you?” Alex asks. “Do you even understand why Raven did this to you?”
“You know the story,” the Beast repeats.
“This isn’t a story,” Alex says. “This is real life. What’s your magic, Beast?”
“I don’t--” the Beast starts, and Alex looks at him.
“What is it, witch?”
“It doesn’t matter,” the Beast says. “I never use it.”
“That’s exactly why it matters,” Alex says. “Raven wanted you to use magic, Hank. She didn’t want you to fall in love or whatever happens in fairy stories.”
“My control isn’t--”
“Your control,” Alex repeats. “You trained me.”
And then Hank walks across the yard and picks up Alex’s car like it’s a sheet of paper.
So Hank is a physical witch. Which makes as much sense as anything.
“I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” he says, staring at Alex. “You have to understand that.”
“You can’t just shutter it,” Alex says, because he lit a grocery and a gas station on fire and he knows about this shit. “That doesn’t help anything.”
Hank drops the car to the ground, and Alex is beyond grateful that he installed decent shocks.
And--Alex had kind of expected him to transform here, and maybe he had gotten Hank’s hopes up, because Hank stands there for a moment.
“There,” he says. “Now that you’ve satisfied your curiosity, you can leave.”
“That isn’t--” Alex starts, moving towards Hank and Hank looks at him, eyes sharp and yellow.
Eyes sharp and blue, for a moment.
Alex kisses him. It doesn’t work quite the way he wanted it to, because Hank is taller than him and Alex has to stand on tip-toes and pulls Hank’s head down towards his, but it happens.
It happens.
If anyone asks him, which some people will, Alex will always say that it was doing magic that broke the curse, nothing else. That his kiss just happened to coincide with Hank’s transformation, that the surge of magic that engulfed them at that moment was the most intense thing he ever experienced (that it practically made him come--he doesn’t tell them that) and came from neither of them.
When they pull apart, Hank is breathing heavily, panting, and he is human, and he reaches again for Alex, twines his hands behind his neck, pulls him close for another.
If anyone asks him, which some people will, Alex will not tell them that that moment felt like happily-ever-after.
But it did.