cross-country
My second X-Men fic...so when I said I probably wouldn't write any more, I lied. But I am kind of a liar.
I'll offer you the same warnings I offered on the original post at the kinkmeme: I used First Class as the only source of canon, and fiddled with pretty much everything else in the X-Men canon. Also, I fiddled with real world history (probably slightly less), but this doesn't take place in the real world, so that's probably okay. This does take place in 1966/1967, a few years after the movie ends, but assumes no significant plot-type advancements since the movie. Um. On with the show!
Afterthought (before the show): So, so far I've made Johnny Cash jokes in both my X-Men fics, and pretty much the same joke at that. Who thinks I should go three for three? Who doesn't love 'Folsom Prison Blues'? Please do not raise your hand on that second one, it will just make me sad.
.cross-country, or the distance between two points on a plane
alex writes hank a letter. hank writes back. eventually, it becomes something else entirely. written for swing_set13 's prompt.
r . 17999 words . AO3
9/12/1966
How’s Cali? You know I’ve been to San Fran, you should ask me for advice.
The first one is a postcard. The front is, in a word, ugly. The handwriting on the back is chicken scratch, and the scrawl at the bottom can only roughly be interpreted as “Havok.” Hank looks at it for a moment, and then he brings it downstairs.
Raven is leaning against the wall in corridor to the kitchen on one leg, the phone cupped against her ear and the cord spiraling towards the ground before going up again. She holds up one blue hand, and Hank retreats to the kitchen and collapses into one of their wooden chairs, waiting.
When Raven’s done she comes in and sits down across from him.
“So?” she says. “What is it?”
“Was that Erik?” Hank asks, and Raven nods.
“Magneto, yes,” she replies.
“Yes,” Hank echoes.
“Brotherhood stuff,” she says. “I know this is--”
“No, sorry,” Hank mutters. “Of course it was him. Stupid question. I know we aren’t talking about it.”
Raven nods, and offers Hank half a smile. It’s been heavy with everything unspoken since they moved in together, the truth caught in quick glances and the gaps between words. Hank holds up the postcard, between the claws of his thumb and forefinger, and Raven squints at it.
“Ugly,” she says.
“It’s from Alex,” he says, and slides it across the table to her. Raven flips it over and reads the back, then sets it down.
“Huh,” she says.
“Yeah, I don’t know what he wants,” Hank says. “I promise that’s not secret code.”
“You promise? Secret code?” Raven says. “How old are we?”
“Not old enough,” Hank mutters, and rubs his temples. “Or young enough.”
“Wow,” she says, sitting down. “You really sound like a genius.”
“I’m not one who has to sound like a genius,” Hank says. “You do.”
“And I’ve done well thus far, haven’t I?” Raven says, and midsentence she shifts, and she’s Hank.
It always makes him a little sick to see himself as he was before: blue eyes, dark hair, human. But now he’s the Beast, and he has a fellowship at Berkeley, and he has to have Raven pose as him for meetings, so no one knows that Dr. Hank McCoy is actually a beast or a mutant or whatever it is he is.
Furred, essentially. And large.
Raven’s watching him with his own eyes, bright and sharp. Hank was never fully aware of what his face looked like, by virtue of inhabiting it, but now he thinks he can see Raven there, rather than himself.
After a moment she takes pity on him, and shifts back. Hank wonders what someone would think if they looked in the window and saw two blue people sitting in the living room, and one of them was nude and scaled and the other was oversized, shirtless, furry.
He goes down to the basement to work in the lab. It’s cool, dank and dark, and in the lab everything falls into a neat rhythm. He is Dr. Hank McCoy, regardless of his skin, regardless of the fact that he’s only living half of his own life while Raven lives the other half, regardless of his newfound clumsiness with glassware.
When he comes back upstairs, Hank finds a scrap of paper, writes on it, and stuffs it into an envelope that will be winging its way towards Westchester County eventually, whenever Raven next goes out.
09/19/66
I’m sure I can figure out the city on my own. Especially as I don’t get out of the house much.
Hank doesn’t get out of the house at all, frankly. He wishes that the best fellowship he got wasn’t somewhere where so many people could see him. He’s been living like a shut-in for the past few months, going out only occasionally in the dim hours between midnight and morning, and if it weren’t for the fellowship--the work he’s doing is fascinating, and his hours in the lab pass in a blur of discovery. It’s the other hours, the ones where he’s waiting around for Raven, that don’t go so well. And it’s a rather unfortunate fact that the Beast, as he is, is somewhat better suited to being outside.
Raven comes home the next, slipping out of her disguise as soon as she shuts the door.
“Recruiting’s going along,” she says, grinning like a sphinx.
“Any interesting powers?” he says, then quickly addends, “Or, you know, don’t tell me.”
“I can’t give away our team” she says, almost apologetic. Erik had permitted her and Hank to cohabit only grudgingly, after Raven pointed out that his chess matches with Charles were not exactly in the spirit of extreme secrecy on either side.
“There should be a certain camaraderie among mutants, shouldn’t there?” she had said. “There are few enough of us at it is.”
“Okay, so let’s talk about something else,” Hank offers, and Raven looks at him speculatively.
“You and Alex aren’t friends now, are you?” she asks. “Since I left.”
“He’s pretty close with Sean, I think. And Darwin, since he got back,” Hank says. “Can I tell you that?”
“We know Darwin’s back, dumbass,” Raven snorts. “Emma picked up on that pretty quick.”
“Right, Emma,” Hank said. “How is she? Still frigid?”
“She’s not all bad,” Raven says, and Hank can feel his face growing skeptical.
“Frigid might be one word I would use,” Raven admits. “But I would also use other words. And it’s not like you ever properly met her.”
“Yeah, but you know, rumors,” Hank says, and waves one large hand in an imitation of airiness.
Raven’s lips curl into a grin.
9/29/1966
Yeah, how is Raven doing? Is she spying on the X-Men? You better be feeding her misinformation.
“You got another one,” Raven says, dropping the postcard on the long lab table in front of Hank. On the front there’s a picture of the Statue of Liberty, the oxidized copper far too green. Hank imagines the entire statue smells like pennies, though he’s aware that the scent has as much to do with the oil found on human hands as the metal itself: his hands no longer pick up or hold the scent, and when he touches copper it always seems like something’s missing.
“He does realize that we have an agreement for this, doesn’t he?” Raven asks. “This house is Switzerland.”
“I think he’s trying to be clever,” Hank says, turning the postcard over. “Why are you reading my mail?”
“It’s a postcard, Hank,” Raven says. “Of course I read it.”
Hank allows himself a small smile at that, and puts the postcard down on the counter.
“Want to hear about the status of the research?” he asks, and Raven sighs and sits down on the stool next to his.
“So?” she says. “How’s it going?”
Well, is the answer. It’s going well. Everything in the lab is fitting together in the neat way things rarely fit together in the lab; a reminder that science, for all its untidiness, is slightly tidier than life. Somewhat. In a very small way. Part of the fellowship, for Hank, is trying to keep tighter control on his research, to make sure he doesn’t make mistakes (or rather, magnificent fuck-ups) like the one he made with the serum, and he doesn’t seem to be.
10/06/66
Alex--
Raven sees the mail, as if that wasn’t a given. You might want to try envelopes. Things are going well here, though--my research is moving along, I think I may be able to publish soon. And Raven is more than capable of being me for the meetings, presentations, etc.
She’s doing well, if you were genuinely interested. Recruiting for the Brotherhood, you know. How are our new recruits? And the rest? The Professor is in touch, but he tends to skimp on the details.
Law banning LSD came into effect today, that’s the news. People are rather pissed, I believe. Have you done any hallucinogenic drugs?
-HM
“It’s cute, you know,” Raven says when she takes the envelope from him, “You and Alex getting all friendly, writing notes.”
“Sure,” Hank says, looking at the letter, which seems smaller in her hands, although maybe it should look larger, given the contrast in their sizes.
“What’s it like, being Mystique?” Hank asks, and Raven purses her lips. They’re standing in front of the front door, in the tiny space that serves as a foyer. The walls and door are dark wood, and the mail comes in the brassy slot and piles on the floor. They leave the junk there until one of them gets tired of looking at it and scoops it up to dump in the trash.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, when I changed it--hurt, right? And, after, I didn’t know which body was my own,” Hank says. He spreads out his hands. “If this is the fruition of my mutation, it’s who I’m supposed to be, I guess? How I’m supposed to be?”
“This is me,” Raven says simply. “The blonde girl was just a convenient disguise. Everyone else--is just a skin, you know? A different skin. And it was hard to accept that my skin didn’t, doesn’t, look human, but.”
Hank nodded. He wondered if it might be somewhat easier for Raven, because she wasn’t bifurcated so much as she was fractured. But what someone else had always seemed easier--easier for Alex and the rest because they looked right, easier for Raven because she could swim back and forth.
He’d tried to fix it, hadn’t he, though. With Raven’s DNA and the serum. And instead it had changed everything.
It should’ve made everything harder, but eventually it just made everything truer, simpler: it was all on the surface, now. He couldn’t go back. He was a mutant, he was the Beast, there was nothing to hide.
Except when he wasn’t in the surface, when he was working in his sub-surface lab, quietly puttering through the darkened rooms of the house he and Raven shared. Then there was everything to hide, wasn’t there, and he was hiding it.
He could see in the dark, now. It didn’t make things clearer.
10/17/1966
Beast:
Right, envelopes. You are cleverer than they give you credit for. Though next time, try to keep your hair out of everything. Are you shedding? That is a seasonal thing, isn’t it? Do you shed? I know most cats do, but there’s never been anyone quite like you--
Raven, Raven, Mystique, whatever, blah, blah, blah. Everything is groovy here, the Prof keeps saying. I think he may not be entirely sober, though. Recruits are coming in, mostly good, but they do tend to make the place a bit of a mess. We’ve locked up your lab, though that doesn’t do much good for some of the recruits. We have this chick, Kitty Pryde? She can walk through walls and shit, right? And Darwin’s a being of pure energy now, whatever the fuck that means, but I’m pretty sure it does mean that he goes where ever he likes.
-Havok
p.s. If you’re trying to figure why I was in jail, you’ll have to try harder than that, bozo.
Hank checks the mail slot daily until the next letter shows up, a thin envelope that slides in almost too easily in a pack of catalogs and bills. Alex’s handwriting verges on illegible to the point where Hank’s not entirely sure how his end of their correspondence continues to arrive intact, but there’s something satisfying about getting a proper envelope, with a neat, tri-folded sheet of paper enclosed. The letterhead says Charles F. Xavier, and seeing it makes Hank wince with a forgotten fondness. He likes the Professor, who proofed his application for the fellowship for him despite everything that happened in the wake of that day on the beach, with Erik and Raven leaving, and the bullet--Charles was astoundingly present, perhaps more present than he had been prior, as if he had suddenly realized how vast the stakes were.
The X-Men were recruiting too, of course, quietly filling up the School. And Hank’s research was to help them all, to make a point, trying to use mutant genetic material to understand who they were, essentially, reading the smallest maps to trace the path they came down. Hank had met Watson and Crick, just once, when he was still working for the CIA. That was before Watson had come out publicly against mutants and Crick had started encouraging them to breed, to improve the human race. That was a long time ago, or at least it seemed that way.
The DNA itself, though. Hank kept the information about his sources and his motives opaque, but the techniques he was developing alone were significant enough to be of interest to the fellowship committee. The rest of his work was for the X-Men and for himself, to fill the hollow pieces of his knowledge, to provide something to the mutant community that might allow them to understand who they were.
10/26/66
Alex--
I don’t shed anymore than you’re shedding when your hair clogs the drain. I just have more of it. I don’t know why I’m telling you about this.
A publication called the San Francisco Oracle has started showing up in our mail slot. You know anything about this, since you’re an expert on the city? It’s rather peculiar. They gave me the impression outlawing LSD was something of an unpopular decision. Raven says she had nothing to do with it, but I think we might be subscribed?
All the same here. Raven and I mostly try to avoid talking about recruitment, because it’s rather awkward. But good to hear that Darwin’s back. Is there anyway I could get ahold of his genetic material? Pure energy, sounds iffy, but if there’s something--
-H
p.s. If it’s not drugs, I imagine you shot a man in Reno.
Raven comes in when the letter’s on the table to be brought out to the postbox, and she hangs up Hank’s body like a coat as soon as the door shuts behind her.
“They think you’re brilliant,” she says, grabbing him by the shoulders. “Fucking amazing.”
“You’re brilliant,” he says quietly. “It wouldn’t work if you didn’t understand everything, you know.”
She smiles at him, all bright teeth and yellow eyes.
“You know how much it means that you’re letting us see this, don’t you?” he arms are still on his shoulders, and there’s something about this nearness Hank would have wanted, once, but now they share DNA and it feels like Raven could be his sister.
He had only ever really liked the idea of Raven, he realizes: of being able to shift out of his mutation, of having anyone, really, look at him like he was something, because of rather than despite his feet.
“It seemed fair,” Hank says after a moment. “It doesn’t give either group any advantage to know. You know, camaraderie. There are few of us as it is, and so on.”
“Turning my words back on me?” she says.
Hank is caught between a shrug and a grin, but mostly he’s glad to have Raven back--not Mystique, but Raven, who might be his friend and isn’t constantly caught up in the differences between the Brotherhood and the X-Men, but who instead just sees them, mutants.
“How’s the city?” he asks.
“Oh, you know--” she says. “After the meeting, I took the Bay Bridge in to ‘Cisco, right? They’re talking about mutants, out there. They want to meet us.”
“Meet us,” Hank echoes.
“Well, not us, precisely, but mutants in theory,” Raven says. “It’s a bit idealistic--I’m not entirely convinced, but it’s something.”
“I thought the Brotherhood didn’t trust humans,” Hank says, and Raven shrugs.
“It’s more--well,” Raven says. “We’re more than them. But don’t you want to get out of the house? Maybe you could try, with them.”
“Yes, maybe,” Hank says, looking at the heavy curtains over the window. It’s cooling off, but not enough, and the house is still damp and weighted. When he peels back the curtains at night he can see strings of streetlamps, the curve of a hill shimmering wet. But it feels like too long since he’s seen the outside properly, and his image of San Francisco is replaced by something else--in his mind he holds the Professor’s School, the vast building, the rings of trees that will be turning red and gold now, shifting autumnal.
He knows that’s not what it looks like, here, but he rather wishes it did. Next fall he’ll be back--the Professor will come and fetch him, cloak him in an illusion of normalcy, and then he’ll be back at the School, in the lab that’s properly his, and he and Raven will go back to being on different sides.
Their Switzerland, in a way, is a return to the days before the beach, training and reveling in their powers, their brilliance. In the peripheral parts of his mind, Hank knows that nothing like that can last forever. And in the same way his life’s been bifurcated, between being human and being the Beast, he’s torn between wanting it to last forever and missing something else, something that’s back in New York.
11/5/1966
Beast:
I think the pape in San Fran’s called the Chronicle, man, I don’t know what bullshit you’re talking about. And you seem unusually interested in the legality of LSD. Didn’t a scientist invent that? Wasn’t you, was it?
Don’t think I’m going to be able to get you any of Darwin’s genetic material. We tried with, you know, a needle from the Professor and so on, but there’s not really anything to put the needle in? So maybe there was something in it, but nothing we could see. How to you mail that shit, anyway? Can’t just stuff it in an envelope. And have you taken a look at mine yet? I know I gave something before you left.
And what were you for Halloween? We did trick-or-treat with the kids at the School. I was--guess. Didn’t involve a gun, or hallucinogenic drugs, and I’ve never been to Reno.
-H.
p.s. We share an initial.
Each letter from Alex feels a little stranger to Hank, because he hadn’t really expected them to keep coming. Even though Hank himself continues to respond, and now he has two postcards and two letters as evidence. Third time’s the charm, he decides. And the postcards don’t count. So if he gets a third letter, it’s a proper thing.
“Still writing Alex, are you?” Raven asks when she sees him at the kitchen counter with the new envelope and a sheet of graph paper spread flat in front of him, empty.
“I guess so,” he says, and Raven sits down opposite.
“You guess?”
He shakes his head, “Well, obviously we’re still writing. I’m working on a letter, here.”
Raven gets up and turns her back to him, shaking her head.
“Here,” she says. “I’ll make you a hot cocoa, while you work it out. If you’ve looked outside you’ll know, but it’s a shit miserable day. Hell, you can feel it in here.”
Hank nods although Raven can’t see him, and looks at his hands on either side of the graph paper, big and clumsy. They make his handwriting likewise, unlike the way he recalls his handwriting looking before the shift. He tries to tidy it up as much as possible, but the shapes still don’t seem tight enough, everything looks looser and larger than it once was. He notices, if he flips through his lab notebooks: there’s a distinction between who he is now and who he once was, and it permeates every aspect of his life.
11/17/66
Alex--
Happy Thanksgiving, by the time you get this.
I really am not equipped to answer any of the questions in your previous letter. I think Raven dressed the human me as--the Beast. She thought it was quite clever. Still, not sure about Oracle. Raven is making me hot chocolate, though I doubt it will give me any grand insights.
When did you realize you were a mutant? My feet got worse as I aged, but I didn’t know what it meant. We tried to have a surgeon cut off the extra bits, but--they grew back.
I guess I should have known I couldn’t hide forever.
-H
p.s. It wasn’t theft, was it? When I was five, I stole a pack of gum from the grocery.
“Were you born blue?” Hank asks once his words are down on paper and the envelope’s sealed. Raven looks at him, her eyes like two sharp stones, and she sets a mug of hot chocolate down in front of him before sitting down.
“Yeah,” Raven says. “Real shock for the parents, or so I hear. It’s amazing I made it as far as I did.”
“You think they would’ve--”
“I don’t know,” Raven says. “They gave me up for adoption, and a nurse took me in for long enough for me to figure out how to shift, but once I started changing she didn’t like it. She didn’t like not having a hold on me.”
“And then you found Charles,” Hank says, and Hank shrugs.
“Something like that,” she says. “But I’m nobody’s pet.”
There’s a sharpness in the way she says it, a reminder that something inside Raven is still trying to gain footing. There’s no precedent for mutants. There have been other groups that didn’t fit, of course, but none that arose in the way the mutants did, with sudden, radical genetic shifts, with sudden, radical powers.
Genetically, there’s on group: those with Downs syndrome, though Hank’s mother still called it mongolism. Hank was beginning to suspect that the mutations were the result of two extra chromosomes: not just a twenty-first but a twenty-second, more genes than any human had business having. The Professor disagrees, but Hank has his suspicions, quiet ones that he knows are correct, with the confidence of someone who is in the habit of being right about a very narrow and specific set of things.
Raven’s conversation circles around, and then she has to go out the grocery, so she picks up Hank’s letter off the table and puts on Hank’s body, then she’s gone.
Hank goes down to the lab to look at Alex’s genes. He ran the same tests on them that he ran on everybody else and they’re not--the results are not particularly distinctive. Some of the genes seem to imply the powers of the mutant, but Alex’s don’t. Like Alex, they could be human.
That’s what Hank had thought on the first look, but now he’s looking under the scope, just staring, and there’s a flash of red.
He stays at the scope all evening, watching the flashes like fireflies. When Raven comes back, she has two bulky bags of groceries, and there’s something in her eyes that manifests itself as a question for Hank.
“So I met someone at the store,” she starts, and Hank looks at her.
“Yeah?”
“Well, it turns out you already knew him,” she continues, and Hank gives her a sharp glance.
“Elias Sill? Mean anything to you?”
Hank is grateful that the fur covers his skin, because if he didn’t he knows his face would be going pale, draining of blood, and then probably flushing. It’s not that Elias Sill is anyone particularly terrible, it’s just that--
“So,” Raven says, sitting down. “You know, I rather thought you had a crush on me, when we first met. And you seemed so virginal.”
“Well I’d never done it with a girl, had I?” Hank spits out before he can stop himself, take a moment to measure his concerns about what this will change. Sometimes being part of a minority makes other minorities worse, like being ostracized might increase exponentially as you associate with more fringe groups.
Raven grins and shakes her head.
“Hank,” she says. “There is so much more to you than I expected.”
“Isn’t that true of everyone?” he asks, and it comes out more weary than he intended. He’s tired of the annals of his own secrets, tired of trying to understand the hidden fragments of everyone else.
12/3/1966
Beast:
Thanksgiving here was almost a disaster, you know. Wolverine--you haven’t met him, but Wolverine completely destroyed the turkey, and then Sean screamed at him wicked loud, broke some shit. Turkey was terrible, but the sides were alright. I assume Raven took care of you two?
About my powers. I--damn, okay, I killed a cat.
I like cats, we had this cat at my foster home, and she was asleep in the drive, and I was hula hooping. That was back when they were sort of a fad, I might’ve been six or seven, and somehow the thing happened, my power, and the cat got all sliced up.
They sent me to another foster home, after that, and I tried to stand very straight and walk without moving my hips in any particular way--that was before I learned to feel the heat rising in me, when something was going to happen. But no one tried to cut any bits off me, so I guess on that count I’m better off.
-H
p.s. Theft? Sorry, no cigar, and not even particularly close. But I’m sure the gum got you in a fat lot of trouble. I should’ve known you were a hardened criminal.
December means they’re coming up on semester break, and there will be fewer meetings for everyone to go to, and Raven and Hank will have to figure out some bastardized holiday to celebrate. Raven’s already suggested solstice, but Hank’s not entirely sure what you do on solstice.
“We can just do Christmas then,” she says. “Charles and I always did.”
Thanksgiving had been heavy with the ghost of Charles and the others not there, because Switzerland was far too awkward for guests. They’d tried to chase out the ghosts by getting Chinese and observing precisely zero traditions; Raven had picked up the take-out boxes from a place in Chinatown she swore was wonderful, and the food was delicious but the house was thick with their silence.
But then Raven comes home one afternoon shaking off icy rain and Hank’s skin, and she says, “Guess who I saw today?”
Hank schools his face into careful blankness, because he has no idea who Raven saw today, but he doesn’t want to get his hopes up one way or the other.
“Moira MacTaggert,” she says, when Hank says nothing, and he blinks at her very rapidly in response.
“Yeah,” she says, hanging her rain jacket on a hook. “I know. I--she was good to me, once.”
“She remembers,” Hank says, rather stiffly. “Could you tell?”
“I thought--Charles told Erik,” Raven starts, and Hank shakes his head.
“He lied,” he says, simply, and Raven purses her lips into a frown. “We could invite her to Christmas.”
“I don’t--” Raven says, but she trails off.
Hank just shrugs.
“She might not be here long, anyway. But Charles forgave her.”
“Charles forgives everyone,” Raven says. “Or he would, if they’d let him.”
Hank knows she’s talking about Erik, now, but it’s not a line of discussion he wants to ride. He listens to the water hitting the roof and sliding down, and if he concentrates he can hear each individual droplet, every single one.
12/12/66
Alex--
Multiples of 6 today. Auspicious? Inauspicious? Do you believe in that shit?
We had Chinese for Thanksgiving here, since you seem concerned about whether Raven is ‘taking care of’ me. You do realize her being here is a rather large favor, don’t you? The sort of awkward thing that’s not supposed to happen between groups at war?
Incidentally, I can take care of myself if need be, though lately that sometimes that manifests itself as an inclination to eat rabbits.
Your cat story makes me a little squeamish, to be frank. I think I may be part cat now? Or ape? But I suppose humans are apes already. Still; killing a being you cared for by accident seems worse than having toes chopped off, in its way. It never hurt terribly.
No news here, been raining almost an entire week. I think it may be a mutant, but Raven and I don’t talk about these things. Is the Professor picking up anyone in the area?
-H
They decide to invite Moira to Christmas. Raven sees her again, when she’s out as Hank.
“She watched me,” she says. “She has to know what we’re doing. She knows you’re--”
“Yes,” Hank says. “She knows.”
There are a lot of things Moira is, impetuous, maybe, but dumb is not one of them.
Raven comes back home one day, dumps her satchel on the floor, and says, “She’s coming.” It’s a fluid motion, and Hank is picking the satchel up and putting it on a chair before he fully comprehends what she said.
“You told her what it was going to be like, right?” Hank asked, and Raven nodded.
“She said she knows a place with great dumplings.”
Which sounds alright.
So that’s how Hank ends up having Christmas dinner with Raven and Moira MacTaggert, who shows up on their stoop looking tired and apologetic in a sort of vague way, like she’s not entirely sure why she agreed to this, but she’s carrying a brown paper bag that smells of dumplings, and Hank and Raven have already set a third place at the table.
“It’s good to see you,” Hank says, and he’s surprised that it’s genuine, then more surprised when Moira takes his hand and gives it a tight squeeze.
“You too,” she replies.
They eat largely in silence, but then Moira breaks it by saying, “So, have you been reading the Oracle?”
“I don’t even understand why we get it,” Hank says, and Moira smiles a little.
“I put you on a list,” she says. “The CIA wanted to keep an eye on the hippies, you know, because they figured--”
“They figured it wouldn’t matter much if you fucked it up,” Raven finishes, her eyes bright. Moira doesn’t look contrite or ashamed, just nods.
“I think there might be a place for mutants, there,” she says. “In the counterculture, I mean.”
“Do you think they’d actually be able to handle it if they met with us?” Raven asks, and Moira shrugs.
“There’s only one way to know,” she says, but her voice is gentle, like she knows she’s pushing something. “I don’t know any mutants who are actively involved, but I think if you married your cause to theirs--”
“Everyone would think we were drug-addled as well as dangerous?” Raven interjects, and Moira looks at her.
“Maybe,” she says. “Or maybe you would gain human supporters, and Hank would be able to leave the house during daylight hours.”
“Have you been spying on us?” Raven asks, and Moira shrugs.
“There are some things you don’t have to see to know,” she says.
Hank changes the subject. He doesn’t know whether he wants to ally himself with any group in particular, but he feels like his opinion is the one that matters if Moira’s going to use his housebound status to argue her point.
He doesn’t want to talk about it. He can take care of himself.
12/26/1966
Beast:
Sorry, Christmas got a little hectic here. Havok, you might say. The Prof found out some of the kids hadn’t ever had a goose dinner (hell, I hadn’t ever had a goose dinner) and he got in his head we needed to do that--you can take it from there.
Can’t believe you cussed in your last letter. Hank! You really are a hardened criminal. Stealing gum, cussing. What other badass shit do you get up to? Since you didn’t mention anything in your last letter, I have to assume it’s pretty ridiculous.
Hope you had a happy Christmas. New Year’s coming up. You and Raven going to get it on at midnight? None of the new recruits are what I would call smoking.
-H.
Hank folds the letter and puts it back in its envelope. New Year’s has already come and gone. He and Raven split a bottle of champagne and went to bed early, but Alex is talking about making out like it was a possibility.
Elias Sill was a long time ago, when Hank was an undergraduate who could pass as human and Elias Sill was an undergraduate who could pass as older, and who taught Hank the things he couldn’t teach himself, with chapped lips and calloused hands. At the time, Hank could hardly believe that Elias wanted him, and now he found himself pondering it again.
Elias had wanted Hank when he was barely old enough to be legal, sharp hip bones, pale skin, blue eyes. Slim, young, human, with at least the appearance of fragility.
He was no longer any of those things, and he wasn’t sure why Alex couldn’t see it. Probably because Alex wasn’t currently present, and maybe he’d forgotten about the blue fur, the blue skin, the flattened nose and yellow eyes.
With the letter folded and ensconced in its envelope, Hank doesn’t need to think about it, and then there’s a knock at the front door, and he has even fewer reasons to think about it.
It’s Moira, carrying an issue of The San Francisco Oracle.
“Human Be-In,” she says. “On the 14th.”
“What?” Hank asks. She holds up the paper, and on the front it says, “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In,” swirling letters around a strange picture--a man with flowing locks and three eyes, a man who could almost be a beast.
“Huh,” Hank says. “Sounds like crap.”
Moira shrugs.
“It might be,” she says. “It might be a place for you to go public. There’ll be LSD--some of them won’t even know if what they’re seeing is real.”
“And how’ll I get there?”
“Big coat,” Moira offers, and Hank furrows his brow.
“Think about it,” she says. “I really need to go.”
And so Moira leaves, and Hank leaves the paper on the kitchen table. Now there are two things he doesn’t want to think about, which is the way it usually goes, when he doesn’t want to think about something. Problems travel in packs, like dogs--it makes his hair riffle, just thinking about packs of dogs, which suggests there might be some tenure to the feline hypothesis.
Now might be the time to think of other things, not about how he should live his life: out in the open or cloistered, like he had before the change or closeted. There's an unfortunate frisson of a memory that rises up here, a reminder that Raven is the first person he's told about Elias in his life, and even her he hardly told at all. So there are those secrets again, and once again he just wants to turn his back on them and focus on something else.
He descends to the lab, and tests the simpler hypotheses: the ones he can actually prove.
He doesn’t tell Raven about the Human Be-In. Or, more accurately, he doesn’t tell her until the day before it actually happens.
“I think I might go out,” Hank says, and Raven’s face flashes up towards his. She’s sitting at the kitchen counter, looking at her own hands. Hank knows she just got off the phone; the cord is looped around the leg of her chair, and she hadn’t bothered to disentangle it when she hung up.
“What?” she says.
“Moira told me about a thing.”
“Not that thing on the cover of the Oracle, Hank,” Raven says.
“What?” Hank says, startled.
“They aren’t--Moira’s wrong,” Raven says. “They accept humans of all kinds, but they’re human, Hank. They won’t know what to do with you.”
“I don’t know what to do with me,” Hank replies, and Raven falls silent.
“Beast,” she says, after a beat. “Hank. Your research is amazing. You know that, right?”
“Don’t you think it’s strange that my mutation is purely physical?” Hank says. “Just a little?”
“Should I?” Raven asks, and Hank shrugs. He’s standing in the doorway, and he might be looming, but something in Raven is bristling in a way that makes him uncertain about sitting down.
“I’m not using any of that, here,” he says. “If I’m not using my mutation, if I’m only using my human abilities, am I really a mutant at all?”
“Of course you are,” Raven says, and Hank shakes his head.
“This isn’t what Schrödinger intended it for,” he says, “but I’m like the cat. If no one sees me, I could be either a mutant or a human--I could be Hank McCoy, or I could be Beast, or I could be both or neither.”
Raven is quiet again, and the reverberations of Hank’s words hum through the room.
“Which do you want to be?” Raven asks, finally.
“Both,” he says. “But I don’t want it to be a question. I don’t want to be something in a box that might be both.”
It’s not the truth, not precisely: he doesn’t want to be both, but he can’t keep living as half.
Raven looks at him, the close sort of look people give things they are uncertain about, like she’s squinting to read a book with very fine print.
“I’ll go with,” she says, after a moment. “But not as Mystique. Just in case something happens.”
Hank has a feeling that the irony of Raven being the one going as a human escapes neither of them, so he doesn’t draw attention to it.
“Do you even know how many people will be here?” Raven asks him in the morning. They’re leaving the house while it’s still dark out, so Hank won’t draw attention, and Raven’s fidgeting with human Hank’s hair in a way Hank suspects he used to do quite often.
Hank shrugs.
“This is a terrible idea,” Raven breaths, weary and exasperated.
“I suspect Moira will be there,” Hank says. “She has firearms. And you can hide.”
“So it’s all on you,” Raven says. “And possibly Moira.”
“I guess it is,” Hank replies, and shrugs on his coat.
The city is quiet in the morning, and the people who pass them sometimes stare and Hank and sometimes give the illusion of failing to notice. It almost reminds Hank of travelling with the Professor, who would cast some sort of psychic magic on onlookers so Hank looked less like a beast and more like a human, and with whom Hank could walk through LAX the day before Thanksgiving without even earning a second glance.
But it’s not quite like that. Hank suspects most of the onlookers think he’s in some sort of very elaborate costume, but as they approach Golden Gate Park there are people condensing into the crowds, the long-haired hippies that occasionally appear in photographs in the newspaper, protesting things.
“They look unwashed,” Raven hisses at Hank. “And they smell rank.”
Hank’s nose is more sensitive than Raven’s, he’s certain of it, but he doesn’t have it in him to point out that most of what he smells is rich and herbal, with an undercurrent of human that he finds enviable rather than distressing.
“What are we doing?” Raven continues.
“I really, really, do not know,” Hank replies, and then they’re at the park, and there are so many people there in the early morning light, clumped together in a thick pack, and Hank knows he can run fast enough to leave this all behind like a bad dream. The water on the harbor is flat and bright, and Hank is torn being delighted to see and smell it and terrified, because the world outside the house is so much vaster than he remembered.
There’s a hand threading through the fur on his back.
It’s Moira.
“Where’d you get this coat?” she slurs, eyes wide. “It’s--groovy.”
“Moira,” he says, and her lips curve into a grin.
“You came,” she says, sounding again like herself.
“I was just thinking of leaving--”
“Don’t,” she says, simply. “I can introduce you to some people.”
Raven is there, too, glancing between the pair of them.
“I don’t think this is a good idea, Moira,” she says. “There are too many of them.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Moira says, and her voice is sharp and calm, and then she’s leading Hank through the crowd, her slim hand clasping only three of his fingers. Hank fumbles for Raven, and they make a sort of chain, only they keep needing to stop because Moira knows people, and they’re offering her joints, tabs of LSD. Raven catches Hank’s eyes and there’s a wild bewildered look in her eyes, and suddenly someone behind her catches Hank’s eyes and says, “Dude, what are you?” with something that is plainly awe.
Hank blinks.
“I’m the Beast,” he says, and the guy’s face breaks into a loopy grin.
Moira leads them on, and it occurs to Hank that they’ve gone down the rabbit hole and come out the other end, because nothing that’s happening right now is in the realm of things he expected to happen, today or ever in his life.
And then they’re approaching a man in a white shirt with a curling mane of hair, and Moira says, “Allen,” and he turns around.
It’s Allen Ginsberg. Hank’s not entirely sure how he knows what he looks like; maybe his picture was on the back of Howl, which Hank read a long time ago because he wasn’t supposed to but failed to understand. There was a moment with Elias when some small part of Howl had made slightly more sense, but then that had slipped out sideways and--
“Moira,” Allen Ginsberg is saying, grinning like the Buddha, holding out his arms and enfolding her. She draws back.
“This is the person I wanted you to meet,” she says, gesturing towards Hank, and then Allen Ginsberg comes forward, right hand extended, and says “Hello.”
It’s strange. Ginsberg starts talking about October 6th, ‘66, and the Beast, and Hank thinks he may be high, but he’s also sharp and present. He is, strangely enough, exactly the sort of human--exactly the sort of person--Hank needed to speak with; he wonders how Moira knew.
There’s a group that looks at Hank in abject horror, of course, and another faction that asks him if he was involved in that terrible violence, and Raven sort of hangs off to the side making faces that are supposed to encourage Hank to break loose, run off.
He doesn’t. It’s remarkable, because the hate and the fear is tempered by the fact that some of these people are looking at him with a frank curiosity, and it’s been so long since Hank was away from mutants that he’d forgotten how similar humans without mutations were, good and bad in equal measure, and one girl threads her fingers through his fur and starts to braid it, and Allen Ginsberg offers Hank a drag on a joint, and Hank coughs and everyone laughs and Raven puckers her lips just like the thin, angry, anti-war girl across the circle, and Ginsberg smiles beatifically and talks about all they have in common, and how more mutants need to come out and show themselves, and harmony, and Hank finds himself returning the grin in kind. There’s music twisting through the air, and people are saying things beautiful and maybe too hopeful or maybe true, and Hank wraps it around himself like something safe, like a coat of fur.
It isn’t until they’re walking home that the situation goes pear-shaped. Somewhere between the pot and the day, Hank’s forgotten about his hood, about wrapping his coat tight around him, and even with it he’s obviously not normal, so maybe what happens should come as no surprise.
Someone shouts something, almost incoherent, but then Hank recognizes it as “mutant,” said with a hiss of hatred and almost unfathomable anger. Raven looks at Hank with a blaze in her eyes, and Hank runs.
He’s fast, he’s still fast, despite being cooped up inside for so long. He exhales a hope for Raven, or a prayer, but he knows she doesn’t need it, and then he falls into the rhythm of his feet and his body and his strength, which flows warm and lively beneath everything. Charles taught him this, but there’s something--Hank knows he should feel afraid, but he just feels free.
When he gets home, he’s not even breathing hard, only then he has to pace and wait for Raven. He goes up and down the stairs and circles the kitchen table at least thirty-seven times before she shows up.
“I told you,” she says, and then leans down and puts her hands on her knees, and shifts back to herself.
Hank looks back at her.
“We’re fine now,” she says. “But it’s going to be in the papers. Or something. And they know about mutants, but only in theory, and they aren’t going to be able to handle it--”
“Of course they can’t handle it,” Hank says. “We’re all cloistered away, and no one sees us except when we’re fighting.”
Raven shakes her head.
“They’ll always be afraid, Hank,” she says. “We’re too much.”
01/14/67
Alex--
It’s after midnight, so the date might actually be for the day before. Is that acceptable?
Moira introduced me to Allen Ginsberg today. It was--I guess it was psychedelic. And, yes, Moira’s in the city, did I tell you that already? The CIA has her infiltrating the countercultre. She invited Raven and I down to something called a Human Be-In in the park, and introduced me to Ginsberg. And it was good, I guess. It’s been a long time since I’ve been mutant among humans, and it was no Eden, but it was better than being inside the house.
Something happened on the way home, though, and Raven doesn’t want to go again. I just--I tend to believe that the more we hide, the more afraid people will be. If they know what we can do, they’ll also know our limits. What are your thoughts?
Oh, and I’m sure I forgot to tell you this: I took another look at your cells. They flash red--it’s like even the smallest parts of us manifest our powers, and I think that means something, but I don’t know what. Maybe that we can never hide.
In response to your previous letter: about New Year’s Raven and I didn’t even manage to stay awake for the year’s passing. How were things at the School? I’m sure someone must meet your high standards.
-H
p.s. What about drugs? If you insist on discussing my relative badassness, I’m no longer entirely inexperienced in that regard.
Raven is terse with Hank for at least a week, after that, though he can’t neatly measure it. They discuss his research, but rarely go beyond that--they prepare separate meals and eat at different times, and the house falls into a sort of heavy, uncomfortable silence.
Hank wants to say it parallels Charles’ disagreement with Erik, but he doesn’t actually think it does. It’s their own problem, something between him and Raven, and if only he could completely probe its edges he thinks he may be able to resolve it, but Raven’s not as easy to probe as her DNA.
“What do we do then?” Hank asks her when he catches her in the kitchen. “If they’ll always be afraid?”
“Maybe they have a reason to be,” Raven says, very softly. “Maybe we’re better, and that’s okay.”
“So we do--”
“We fight,” Raven says. She’s leaning against the stove, and her eyes are flint. “And we win.”
“Is that what you think? Or is that what Erik thinks?”
“And are you yourself or Charles?”
“Myself,” Hank says, and he’s startled by his own confidence. “I can only ever be myself, Raven.”
“Maybe I prefer Mystique,” she says.
1/22/1967
Beast:
Has ‘67 made you suddenly serious? Or stoned? I’m not sure from your last letter. But I hope things went okay when you were coming back from--whatever that thing was, where you met Ginsberg. Was anyone hurt? The Prof gets the Chronicle, there wasn’t anything in there.
I don’t know what’s going on with you and Raven, but I tend to think--well, the prison thing. I think you probably knew it had something to do with my powers and were just being purposefully dense, otherwise you’re thicker than I thought (bozo). It has to do with fear, I think, but the reason I wanted solitary confinement (did the Prof tell you about that?) was because I was afraid of my own powers. What that means we should do, I don’t know. We need to learn our own limits, maybe.
Since you seem to be nosing for gossip, I’ll tell you again that no one at the School meets my high standards, although if the Prof were interested, I probably wouldn’t turn him down, and also Darwin if he weren’t so busy being a being of pure energy and shit and insisting he superior because he’s evolved out of everything. You know.
-H
p.s. Drugs? What’s next, a motorcycle?
Hank considers replying to Alex’s letter with precisely what he’s thinking: I don’t know what’s next. But then Raven comes home, looking tired.
“I have a mutant I think should stay here,” she says.
“With us?” Hank asks, glancing around. There’s a hand towel crumpled up on the bar on front of the oven, a pile of dishes in the sink that Hank will probably do in the morning. They have a spare room, which doesn’t mean they need someone to fill it, and bringing a mutant who may not have had contact with other mutants before into the middle of their tenuous truce seems like a terrible idea.
“Yes, with us,” Raven says, granting Hank a withering look. “Where else?”
“I’m just not sure we’re in the best--I’m just not sure we should be having guests.”
“You keep having Moira and that poet over,” Raven says, and makes poet sound like a dirty word.
“So, what, we should bring another mutant into the middle of our shit?” Hank asks. “Someone who doesn’t know any of this, and probably just wants to know there are other people in the world like them, and doesn’t want to be immediately asked to pick sides.”
“Hank,” Raven says, and then she sits down at the table, reaches across and puts her hands on his shoulders.
“Yes?”
“His name’s Scott Summers,” Raven says. “I suspect he’s Alex’s brother.”
Hank says something that might be fuck.
Raven nods.
“He thinks all his siblings are dead,” she continues. “Which is why I want him to stay with us until we can ascertain whether they might be related. You could--could you do something with their genes?”
“What does he do?” Hank asks, and Raven smiles tightly.
“It looks like what Alex does, but it comes out of his eyes. He can’t control it--if you could develop something--”
“Siblings,” Hank says, nodding. “Would be great for my research.”
Raven grins for real this time, and Hank writes Alex a letter that consciously skirts the issue.
01/31/67
Alex--
1967 hasn’t made me anything, including hurt--which is to say, Raven and I made it home from the Be-In fine. Worried about me?
You probably have a point about limits. My mutation has never seemed particularly frightening, just physically disfiguring, though I supposed I am stronger now than I would be without the extra chromosomes. Speaking of, are you up-to-date on my research? I’m trying to pin down how our mutations work on a genetic level, developing new techniques in the process (hence the fellowship, as Charles is really the only one providing funding for genetic research on mutants). Probably spreading my intellect too thin. But I’m becoming more interested in how differentiated mutations are--do you know if anyone at the school had siblings with powers? I, unfortunately, am an only child.
Speaking of, is your suit still working to control your powers? I think your mutation is considerably more fearsome than mine; I can understand how it would be a trial.
-H
p.s. Since you’ve told me so much about yourself, and you’ve revealed something about your jailtime (it wasn’t arson, was it?) I’ll give you one in exchange: I lost my virginity to someone named Elias Sill. Who was, yes, male.
part 2
I'll offer you the same warnings I offered on the original post at the kinkmeme: I used First Class as the only source of canon, and fiddled with pretty much everything else in the X-Men canon. Also, I fiddled with real world history (probably slightly less), but this doesn't take place in the real world, so that's probably okay. This does take place in 1966/1967, a few years after the movie ends, but assumes no significant plot-type advancements since the movie. Um. On with the show!
Afterthought (before the show): So, so far I've made Johnny Cash jokes in both my X-Men fics, and pretty much the same joke at that. Who thinks I should go three for three? Who doesn't love 'Folsom Prison Blues'? Please do not raise your hand on that second one, it will just make me sad.
.cross-country, or the distance between two points on a plane
alex writes hank a letter. hank writes back. eventually, it becomes something else entirely. written for swing_set13 's prompt.
r . 17999 words . AO3
9/12/1966
How’s Cali? You know I’ve been to San Fran, you should ask me for advice.
The first one is a postcard. The front is, in a word, ugly. The handwriting on the back is chicken scratch, and the scrawl at the bottom can only roughly be interpreted as “Havok.” Hank looks at it for a moment, and then he brings it downstairs.
Raven is leaning against the wall in corridor to the kitchen on one leg, the phone cupped against her ear and the cord spiraling towards the ground before going up again. She holds up one blue hand, and Hank retreats to the kitchen and collapses into one of their wooden chairs, waiting.
When Raven’s done she comes in and sits down across from him.
“So?” she says. “What is it?”
“Was that Erik?” Hank asks, and Raven nods.
“Magneto, yes,” she replies.
“Yes,” Hank echoes.
“Brotherhood stuff,” she says. “I know this is--”
“No, sorry,” Hank mutters. “Of course it was him. Stupid question. I know we aren’t talking about it.”
Raven nods, and offers Hank half a smile. It’s been heavy with everything unspoken since they moved in together, the truth caught in quick glances and the gaps between words. Hank holds up the postcard, between the claws of his thumb and forefinger, and Raven squints at it.
“Ugly,” she says.
“It’s from Alex,” he says, and slides it across the table to her. Raven flips it over and reads the back, then sets it down.
“Huh,” she says.
“Yeah, I don’t know what he wants,” Hank says. “I promise that’s not secret code.”
“You promise? Secret code?” Raven says. “How old are we?”
“Not old enough,” Hank mutters, and rubs his temples. “Or young enough.”
“Wow,” she says, sitting down. “You really sound like a genius.”
“I’m not one who has to sound like a genius,” Hank says. “You do.”
“And I’ve done well thus far, haven’t I?” Raven says, and midsentence she shifts, and she’s Hank.
It always makes him a little sick to see himself as he was before: blue eyes, dark hair, human. But now he’s the Beast, and he has a fellowship at Berkeley, and he has to have Raven pose as him for meetings, so no one knows that Dr. Hank McCoy is actually a beast or a mutant or whatever it is he is.
Furred, essentially. And large.
Raven’s watching him with his own eyes, bright and sharp. Hank was never fully aware of what his face looked like, by virtue of inhabiting it, but now he thinks he can see Raven there, rather than himself.
After a moment she takes pity on him, and shifts back. Hank wonders what someone would think if they looked in the window and saw two blue people sitting in the living room, and one of them was nude and scaled and the other was oversized, shirtless, furry.
He goes down to the basement to work in the lab. It’s cool, dank and dark, and in the lab everything falls into a neat rhythm. He is Dr. Hank McCoy, regardless of his skin, regardless of the fact that he’s only living half of his own life while Raven lives the other half, regardless of his newfound clumsiness with glassware.
When he comes back upstairs, Hank finds a scrap of paper, writes on it, and stuffs it into an envelope that will be winging its way towards Westchester County eventually, whenever Raven next goes out.
09/19/66
I’m sure I can figure out the city on my own. Especially as I don’t get out of the house much.
Hank doesn’t get out of the house at all, frankly. He wishes that the best fellowship he got wasn’t somewhere where so many people could see him. He’s been living like a shut-in for the past few months, going out only occasionally in the dim hours between midnight and morning, and if it weren’t for the fellowship--the work he’s doing is fascinating, and his hours in the lab pass in a blur of discovery. It’s the other hours, the ones where he’s waiting around for Raven, that don’t go so well. And it’s a rather unfortunate fact that the Beast, as he is, is somewhat better suited to being outside.
Raven comes home the next, slipping out of her disguise as soon as she shuts the door.
“Recruiting’s going along,” she says, grinning like a sphinx.
“Any interesting powers?” he says, then quickly addends, “Or, you know, don’t tell me.”
“I can’t give away our team” she says, almost apologetic. Erik had permitted her and Hank to cohabit only grudgingly, after Raven pointed out that his chess matches with Charles were not exactly in the spirit of extreme secrecy on either side.
“There should be a certain camaraderie among mutants, shouldn’t there?” she had said. “There are few enough of us at it is.”
“Okay, so let’s talk about something else,” Hank offers, and Raven looks at him speculatively.
“You and Alex aren’t friends now, are you?” she asks. “Since I left.”
“He’s pretty close with Sean, I think. And Darwin, since he got back,” Hank says. “Can I tell you that?”
“We know Darwin’s back, dumbass,” Raven snorts. “Emma picked up on that pretty quick.”
“Right, Emma,” Hank said. “How is she? Still frigid?”
“She’s not all bad,” Raven says, and Hank can feel his face growing skeptical.
“Frigid might be one word I would use,” Raven admits. “But I would also use other words. And it’s not like you ever properly met her.”
“Yeah, but you know, rumors,” Hank says, and waves one large hand in an imitation of airiness.
Raven’s lips curl into a grin.
9/29/1966
Yeah, how is Raven doing? Is she spying on the X-Men? You better be feeding her misinformation.
“You got another one,” Raven says, dropping the postcard on the long lab table in front of Hank. On the front there’s a picture of the Statue of Liberty, the oxidized copper far too green. Hank imagines the entire statue smells like pennies, though he’s aware that the scent has as much to do with the oil found on human hands as the metal itself: his hands no longer pick up or hold the scent, and when he touches copper it always seems like something’s missing.
“He does realize that we have an agreement for this, doesn’t he?” Raven asks. “This house is Switzerland.”
“I think he’s trying to be clever,” Hank says, turning the postcard over. “Why are you reading my mail?”
“It’s a postcard, Hank,” Raven says. “Of course I read it.”
Hank allows himself a small smile at that, and puts the postcard down on the counter.
“Want to hear about the status of the research?” he asks, and Raven sighs and sits down on the stool next to his.
“So?” she says. “How’s it going?”
Well, is the answer. It’s going well. Everything in the lab is fitting together in the neat way things rarely fit together in the lab; a reminder that science, for all its untidiness, is slightly tidier than life. Somewhat. In a very small way. Part of the fellowship, for Hank, is trying to keep tighter control on his research, to make sure he doesn’t make mistakes (or rather, magnificent fuck-ups) like the one he made with the serum, and he doesn’t seem to be.
10/06/66
Alex--
Raven sees the mail, as if that wasn’t a given. You might want to try envelopes. Things are going well here, though--my research is moving along, I think I may be able to publish soon. And Raven is more than capable of being me for the meetings, presentations, etc.
She’s doing well, if you were genuinely interested. Recruiting for the Brotherhood, you know. How are our new recruits? And the rest? The Professor is in touch, but he tends to skimp on the details.
Law banning LSD came into effect today, that’s the news. People are rather pissed, I believe. Have you done any hallucinogenic drugs?
-HM
“It’s cute, you know,” Raven says when she takes the envelope from him, “You and Alex getting all friendly, writing notes.”
“Sure,” Hank says, looking at the letter, which seems smaller in her hands, although maybe it should look larger, given the contrast in their sizes.
“What’s it like, being Mystique?” Hank asks, and Raven purses her lips. They’re standing in front of the front door, in the tiny space that serves as a foyer. The walls and door are dark wood, and the mail comes in the brassy slot and piles on the floor. They leave the junk there until one of them gets tired of looking at it and scoops it up to dump in the trash.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, when I changed it--hurt, right? And, after, I didn’t know which body was my own,” Hank says. He spreads out his hands. “If this is the fruition of my mutation, it’s who I’m supposed to be, I guess? How I’m supposed to be?”
“This is me,” Raven says simply. “The blonde girl was just a convenient disguise. Everyone else--is just a skin, you know? A different skin. And it was hard to accept that my skin didn’t, doesn’t, look human, but.”
Hank nodded. He wondered if it might be somewhat easier for Raven, because she wasn’t bifurcated so much as she was fractured. But what someone else had always seemed easier--easier for Alex and the rest because they looked right, easier for Raven because she could swim back and forth.
He’d tried to fix it, hadn’t he, though. With Raven’s DNA and the serum. And instead it had changed everything.
It should’ve made everything harder, but eventually it just made everything truer, simpler: it was all on the surface, now. He couldn’t go back. He was a mutant, he was the Beast, there was nothing to hide.
Except when he wasn’t in the surface, when he was working in his sub-surface lab, quietly puttering through the darkened rooms of the house he and Raven shared. Then there was everything to hide, wasn’t there, and he was hiding it.
He could see in the dark, now. It didn’t make things clearer.
10/17/1966
Beast:
Right, envelopes. You are cleverer than they give you credit for. Though next time, try to keep your hair out of everything. Are you shedding? That is a seasonal thing, isn’t it? Do you shed? I know most cats do, but there’s never been anyone quite like you--
Raven, Raven, Mystique, whatever, blah, blah, blah. Everything is groovy here, the Prof keeps saying. I think he may not be entirely sober, though. Recruits are coming in, mostly good, but they do tend to make the place a bit of a mess. We’ve locked up your lab, though that doesn’t do much good for some of the recruits. We have this chick, Kitty Pryde? She can walk through walls and shit, right? And Darwin’s a being of pure energy now, whatever the fuck that means, but I’m pretty sure it does mean that he goes where ever he likes.
-Havok
p.s. If you’re trying to figure why I was in jail, you’ll have to try harder than that, bozo.
Hank checks the mail slot daily until the next letter shows up, a thin envelope that slides in almost too easily in a pack of catalogs and bills. Alex’s handwriting verges on illegible to the point where Hank’s not entirely sure how his end of their correspondence continues to arrive intact, but there’s something satisfying about getting a proper envelope, with a neat, tri-folded sheet of paper enclosed. The letterhead says Charles F. Xavier, and seeing it makes Hank wince with a forgotten fondness. He likes the Professor, who proofed his application for the fellowship for him despite everything that happened in the wake of that day on the beach, with Erik and Raven leaving, and the bullet--Charles was astoundingly present, perhaps more present than he had been prior, as if he had suddenly realized how vast the stakes were.
The X-Men were recruiting too, of course, quietly filling up the School. And Hank’s research was to help them all, to make a point, trying to use mutant genetic material to understand who they were, essentially, reading the smallest maps to trace the path they came down. Hank had met Watson and Crick, just once, when he was still working for the CIA. That was before Watson had come out publicly against mutants and Crick had started encouraging them to breed, to improve the human race. That was a long time ago, or at least it seemed that way.
The DNA itself, though. Hank kept the information about his sources and his motives opaque, but the techniques he was developing alone were significant enough to be of interest to the fellowship committee. The rest of his work was for the X-Men and for himself, to fill the hollow pieces of his knowledge, to provide something to the mutant community that might allow them to understand who they were.
10/26/66
Alex--
I don’t shed anymore than you’re shedding when your hair clogs the drain. I just have more of it. I don’t know why I’m telling you about this.
A publication called the San Francisco Oracle has started showing up in our mail slot. You know anything about this, since you’re an expert on the city? It’s rather peculiar. They gave me the impression outlawing LSD was something of an unpopular decision. Raven says she had nothing to do with it, but I think we might be subscribed?
All the same here. Raven and I mostly try to avoid talking about recruitment, because it’s rather awkward. But good to hear that Darwin’s back. Is there anyway I could get ahold of his genetic material? Pure energy, sounds iffy, but if there’s something--
-H
p.s. If it’s not drugs, I imagine you shot a man in Reno.
Raven comes in when the letter’s on the table to be brought out to the postbox, and she hangs up Hank’s body like a coat as soon as the door shuts behind her.
“They think you’re brilliant,” she says, grabbing him by the shoulders. “Fucking amazing.”
“You’re brilliant,” he says quietly. “It wouldn’t work if you didn’t understand everything, you know.”
She smiles at him, all bright teeth and yellow eyes.
“You know how much it means that you’re letting us see this, don’t you?” he arms are still on his shoulders, and there’s something about this nearness Hank would have wanted, once, but now they share DNA and it feels like Raven could be his sister.
He had only ever really liked the idea of Raven, he realizes: of being able to shift out of his mutation, of having anyone, really, look at him like he was something, because of rather than despite his feet.
“It seemed fair,” Hank says after a moment. “It doesn’t give either group any advantage to know. You know, camaraderie. There are few of us as it is, and so on.”
“Turning my words back on me?” she says.
Hank is caught between a shrug and a grin, but mostly he’s glad to have Raven back--not Mystique, but Raven, who might be his friend and isn’t constantly caught up in the differences between the Brotherhood and the X-Men, but who instead just sees them, mutants.
“How’s the city?” he asks.
“Oh, you know--” she says. “After the meeting, I took the Bay Bridge in to ‘Cisco, right? They’re talking about mutants, out there. They want to meet us.”
“Meet us,” Hank echoes.
“Well, not us, precisely, but mutants in theory,” Raven says. “It’s a bit idealistic--I’m not entirely convinced, but it’s something.”
“I thought the Brotherhood didn’t trust humans,” Hank says, and Raven shrugs.
“It’s more--well,” Raven says. “We’re more than them. But don’t you want to get out of the house? Maybe you could try, with them.”
“Yes, maybe,” Hank says, looking at the heavy curtains over the window. It’s cooling off, but not enough, and the house is still damp and weighted. When he peels back the curtains at night he can see strings of streetlamps, the curve of a hill shimmering wet. But it feels like too long since he’s seen the outside properly, and his image of San Francisco is replaced by something else--in his mind he holds the Professor’s School, the vast building, the rings of trees that will be turning red and gold now, shifting autumnal.
He knows that’s not what it looks like, here, but he rather wishes it did. Next fall he’ll be back--the Professor will come and fetch him, cloak him in an illusion of normalcy, and then he’ll be back at the School, in the lab that’s properly his, and he and Raven will go back to being on different sides.
Their Switzerland, in a way, is a return to the days before the beach, training and reveling in their powers, their brilliance. In the peripheral parts of his mind, Hank knows that nothing like that can last forever. And in the same way his life’s been bifurcated, between being human and being the Beast, he’s torn between wanting it to last forever and missing something else, something that’s back in New York.
11/5/1966
Beast:
I think the pape in San Fran’s called the Chronicle, man, I don’t know what bullshit you’re talking about. And you seem unusually interested in the legality of LSD. Didn’t a scientist invent that? Wasn’t you, was it?
Don’t think I’m going to be able to get you any of Darwin’s genetic material. We tried with, you know, a needle from the Professor and so on, but there’s not really anything to put the needle in? So maybe there was something in it, but nothing we could see. How to you mail that shit, anyway? Can’t just stuff it in an envelope. And have you taken a look at mine yet? I know I gave something before you left.
And what were you for Halloween? We did trick-or-treat with the kids at the School. I was--guess. Didn’t involve a gun, or hallucinogenic drugs, and I’ve never been to Reno.
-H.
p.s. We share an initial.
Each letter from Alex feels a little stranger to Hank, because he hadn’t really expected them to keep coming. Even though Hank himself continues to respond, and now he has two postcards and two letters as evidence. Third time’s the charm, he decides. And the postcards don’t count. So if he gets a third letter, it’s a proper thing.
“Still writing Alex, are you?” Raven asks when she sees him at the kitchen counter with the new envelope and a sheet of graph paper spread flat in front of him, empty.
“I guess so,” he says, and Raven sits down opposite.
“You guess?”
He shakes his head, “Well, obviously we’re still writing. I’m working on a letter, here.”
Raven gets up and turns her back to him, shaking her head.
“Here,” she says. “I’ll make you a hot cocoa, while you work it out. If you’ve looked outside you’ll know, but it’s a shit miserable day. Hell, you can feel it in here.”
Hank nods although Raven can’t see him, and looks at his hands on either side of the graph paper, big and clumsy. They make his handwriting likewise, unlike the way he recalls his handwriting looking before the shift. He tries to tidy it up as much as possible, but the shapes still don’t seem tight enough, everything looks looser and larger than it once was. He notices, if he flips through his lab notebooks: there’s a distinction between who he is now and who he once was, and it permeates every aspect of his life.
11/17/66
Alex--
Happy Thanksgiving, by the time you get this.
I really am not equipped to answer any of the questions in your previous letter. I think Raven dressed the human me as--the Beast. She thought it was quite clever. Still, not sure about Oracle. Raven is making me hot chocolate, though I doubt it will give me any grand insights.
When did you realize you were a mutant? My feet got worse as I aged, but I didn’t know what it meant. We tried to have a surgeon cut off the extra bits, but--they grew back.
I guess I should have known I couldn’t hide forever.
-H
p.s. It wasn’t theft, was it? When I was five, I stole a pack of gum from the grocery.
“Were you born blue?” Hank asks once his words are down on paper and the envelope’s sealed. Raven looks at him, her eyes like two sharp stones, and she sets a mug of hot chocolate down in front of him before sitting down.
“Yeah,” Raven says. “Real shock for the parents, or so I hear. It’s amazing I made it as far as I did.”
“You think they would’ve--”
“I don’t know,” Raven says. “They gave me up for adoption, and a nurse took me in for long enough for me to figure out how to shift, but once I started changing she didn’t like it. She didn’t like not having a hold on me.”
“And then you found Charles,” Hank says, and Hank shrugs.
“Something like that,” she says. “But I’m nobody’s pet.”
There’s a sharpness in the way she says it, a reminder that something inside Raven is still trying to gain footing. There’s no precedent for mutants. There have been other groups that didn’t fit, of course, but none that arose in the way the mutants did, with sudden, radical genetic shifts, with sudden, radical powers.
Genetically, there’s on group: those with Downs syndrome, though Hank’s mother still called it mongolism. Hank was beginning to suspect that the mutations were the result of two extra chromosomes: not just a twenty-first but a twenty-second, more genes than any human had business having. The Professor disagrees, but Hank has his suspicions, quiet ones that he knows are correct, with the confidence of someone who is in the habit of being right about a very narrow and specific set of things.
Raven’s conversation circles around, and then she has to go out the grocery, so she picks up Hank’s letter off the table and puts on Hank’s body, then she’s gone.
Hank goes down to the lab to look at Alex’s genes. He ran the same tests on them that he ran on everybody else and they’re not--the results are not particularly distinctive. Some of the genes seem to imply the powers of the mutant, but Alex’s don’t. Like Alex, they could be human.
That’s what Hank had thought on the first look, but now he’s looking under the scope, just staring, and there’s a flash of red.
He stays at the scope all evening, watching the flashes like fireflies. When Raven comes back, she has two bulky bags of groceries, and there’s something in her eyes that manifests itself as a question for Hank.
“So I met someone at the store,” she starts, and Hank looks at her.
“Yeah?”
“Well, it turns out you already knew him,” she continues, and Hank gives her a sharp glance.
“Elias Sill? Mean anything to you?”
Hank is grateful that the fur covers his skin, because if he didn’t he knows his face would be going pale, draining of blood, and then probably flushing. It’s not that Elias Sill is anyone particularly terrible, it’s just that--
“So,” Raven says, sitting down. “You know, I rather thought you had a crush on me, when we first met. And you seemed so virginal.”
“Well I’d never done it with a girl, had I?” Hank spits out before he can stop himself, take a moment to measure his concerns about what this will change. Sometimes being part of a minority makes other minorities worse, like being ostracized might increase exponentially as you associate with more fringe groups.
Raven grins and shakes her head.
“Hank,” she says. “There is so much more to you than I expected.”
“Isn’t that true of everyone?” he asks, and it comes out more weary than he intended. He’s tired of the annals of his own secrets, tired of trying to understand the hidden fragments of everyone else.
12/3/1966
Beast:
Thanksgiving here was almost a disaster, you know. Wolverine--you haven’t met him, but Wolverine completely destroyed the turkey, and then Sean screamed at him wicked loud, broke some shit. Turkey was terrible, but the sides were alright. I assume Raven took care of you two?
About my powers. I--damn, okay, I killed a cat.
I like cats, we had this cat at my foster home, and she was asleep in the drive, and I was hula hooping. That was back when they were sort of a fad, I might’ve been six or seven, and somehow the thing happened, my power, and the cat got all sliced up.
They sent me to another foster home, after that, and I tried to stand very straight and walk without moving my hips in any particular way--that was before I learned to feel the heat rising in me, when something was going to happen. But no one tried to cut any bits off me, so I guess on that count I’m better off.
-H
p.s. Theft? Sorry, no cigar, and not even particularly close. But I’m sure the gum got you in a fat lot of trouble. I should’ve known you were a hardened criminal.
December means they’re coming up on semester break, and there will be fewer meetings for everyone to go to, and Raven and Hank will have to figure out some bastardized holiday to celebrate. Raven’s already suggested solstice, but Hank’s not entirely sure what you do on solstice.
“We can just do Christmas then,” she says. “Charles and I always did.”
Thanksgiving had been heavy with the ghost of Charles and the others not there, because Switzerland was far too awkward for guests. They’d tried to chase out the ghosts by getting Chinese and observing precisely zero traditions; Raven had picked up the take-out boxes from a place in Chinatown she swore was wonderful, and the food was delicious but the house was thick with their silence.
But then Raven comes home one afternoon shaking off icy rain and Hank’s skin, and she says, “Guess who I saw today?”
Hank schools his face into careful blankness, because he has no idea who Raven saw today, but he doesn’t want to get his hopes up one way or the other.
“Moira MacTaggert,” she says, when Hank says nothing, and he blinks at her very rapidly in response.
“Yeah,” she says, hanging her rain jacket on a hook. “I know. I--she was good to me, once.”
“She remembers,” Hank says, rather stiffly. “Could you tell?”
“I thought--Charles told Erik,” Raven starts, and Hank shakes his head.
“He lied,” he says, simply, and Raven purses her lips into a frown. “We could invite her to Christmas.”
“I don’t--” Raven says, but she trails off.
Hank just shrugs.
“She might not be here long, anyway. But Charles forgave her.”
“Charles forgives everyone,” Raven says. “Or he would, if they’d let him.”
Hank knows she’s talking about Erik, now, but it’s not a line of discussion he wants to ride. He listens to the water hitting the roof and sliding down, and if he concentrates he can hear each individual droplet, every single one.
12/12/66
Alex--
Multiples of 6 today. Auspicious? Inauspicious? Do you believe in that shit?
We had Chinese for Thanksgiving here, since you seem concerned about whether Raven is ‘taking care of’ me. You do realize her being here is a rather large favor, don’t you? The sort of awkward thing that’s not supposed to happen between groups at war?
Incidentally, I can take care of myself if need be, though lately that sometimes that manifests itself as an inclination to eat rabbits.
Your cat story makes me a little squeamish, to be frank. I think I may be part cat now? Or ape? But I suppose humans are apes already. Still; killing a being you cared for by accident seems worse than having toes chopped off, in its way. It never hurt terribly.
No news here, been raining almost an entire week. I think it may be a mutant, but Raven and I don’t talk about these things. Is the Professor picking up anyone in the area?
-H
They decide to invite Moira to Christmas. Raven sees her again, when she’s out as Hank.
“She watched me,” she says. “She has to know what we’re doing. She knows you’re--”
“Yes,” Hank says. “She knows.”
There are a lot of things Moira is, impetuous, maybe, but dumb is not one of them.
Raven comes back home one day, dumps her satchel on the floor, and says, “She’s coming.” It’s a fluid motion, and Hank is picking the satchel up and putting it on a chair before he fully comprehends what she said.
“You told her what it was going to be like, right?” Hank asked, and Raven nodded.
“She said she knows a place with great dumplings.”
Which sounds alright.
So that’s how Hank ends up having Christmas dinner with Raven and Moira MacTaggert, who shows up on their stoop looking tired and apologetic in a sort of vague way, like she’s not entirely sure why she agreed to this, but she’s carrying a brown paper bag that smells of dumplings, and Hank and Raven have already set a third place at the table.
“It’s good to see you,” Hank says, and he’s surprised that it’s genuine, then more surprised when Moira takes his hand and gives it a tight squeeze.
“You too,” she replies.
They eat largely in silence, but then Moira breaks it by saying, “So, have you been reading the Oracle?”
“I don’t even understand why we get it,” Hank says, and Moira smiles a little.
“I put you on a list,” she says. “The CIA wanted to keep an eye on the hippies, you know, because they figured--”
“They figured it wouldn’t matter much if you fucked it up,” Raven finishes, her eyes bright. Moira doesn’t look contrite or ashamed, just nods.
“I think there might be a place for mutants, there,” she says. “In the counterculture, I mean.”
“Do you think they’d actually be able to handle it if they met with us?” Raven asks, and Moira shrugs.
“There’s only one way to know,” she says, but her voice is gentle, like she knows she’s pushing something. “I don’t know any mutants who are actively involved, but I think if you married your cause to theirs--”
“Everyone would think we were drug-addled as well as dangerous?” Raven interjects, and Moira looks at her.
“Maybe,” she says. “Or maybe you would gain human supporters, and Hank would be able to leave the house during daylight hours.”
“Have you been spying on us?” Raven asks, and Moira shrugs.
“There are some things you don’t have to see to know,” she says.
Hank changes the subject. He doesn’t know whether he wants to ally himself with any group in particular, but he feels like his opinion is the one that matters if Moira’s going to use his housebound status to argue her point.
He doesn’t want to talk about it. He can take care of himself.
12/26/1966
Beast:
Sorry, Christmas got a little hectic here. Havok, you might say. The Prof found out some of the kids hadn’t ever had a goose dinner (hell, I hadn’t ever had a goose dinner) and he got in his head we needed to do that--you can take it from there.
Can’t believe you cussed in your last letter. Hank! You really are a hardened criminal. Stealing gum, cussing. What other badass shit do you get up to? Since you didn’t mention anything in your last letter, I have to assume it’s pretty ridiculous.
Hope you had a happy Christmas. New Year’s coming up. You and Raven going to get it on at midnight? None of the new recruits are what I would call smoking.
-H.
Hank folds the letter and puts it back in its envelope. New Year’s has already come and gone. He and Raven split a bottle of champagne and went to bed early, but Alex is talking about making out like it was a possibility.
Elias Sill was a long time ago, when Hank was an undergraduate who could pass as human and Elias Sill was an undergraduate who could pass as older, and who taught Hank the things he couldn’t teach himself, with chapped lips and calloused hands. At the time, Hank could hardly believe that Elias wanted him, and now he found himself pondering it again.
Elias had wanted Hank when he was barely old enough to be legal, sharp hip bones, pale skin, blue eyes. Slim, young, human, with at least the appearance of fragility.
He was no longer any of those things, and he wasn’t sure why Alex couldn’t see it. Probably because Alex wasn’t currently present, and maybe he’d forgotten about the blue fur, the blue skin, the flattened nose and yellow eyes.
With the letter folded and ensconced in its envelope, Hank doesn’t need to think about it, and then there’s a knock at the front door, and he has even fewer reasons to think about it.
It’s Moira, carrying an issue of The San Francisco Oracle.
“Human Be-In,” she says. “On the 14th.”
“What?” Hank asks. She holds up the paper, and on the front it says, “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In,” swirling letters around a strange picture--a man with flowing locks and three eyes, a man who could almost be a beast.
“Huh,” Hank says. “Sounds like crap.”
Moira shrugs.
“It might be,” she says. “It might be a place for you to go public. There’ll be LSD--some of them won’t even know if what they’re seeing is real.”
“And how’ll I get there?”
“Big coat,” Moira offers, and Hank furrows his brow.
“Think about it,” she says. “I really need to go.”
And so Moira leaves, and Hank leaves the paper on the kitchen table. Now there are two things he doesn’t want to think about, which is the way it usually goes, when he doesn’t want to think about something. Problems travel in packs, like dogs--it makes his hair riffle, just thinking about packs of dogs, which suggests there might be some tenure to the feline hypothesis.
Now might be the time to think of other things, not about how he should live his life: out in the open or cloistered, like he had before the change or closeted. There's an unfortunate frisson of a memory that rises up here, a reminder that Raven is the first person he's told about Elias in his life, and even her he hardly told at all. So there are those secrets again, and once again he just wants to turn his back on them and focus on something else.
He descends to the lab, and tests the simpler hypotheses: the ones he can actually prove.
He doesn’t tell Raven about the Human Be-In. Or, more accurately, he doesn’t tell her until the day before it actually happens.
“I think I might go out,” Hank says, and Raven’s face flashes up towards his. She’s sitting at the kitchen counter, looking at her own hands. Hank knows she just got off the phone; the cord is looped around the leg of her chair, and she hadn’t bothered to disentangle it when she hung up.
“What?” she says.
“Moira told me about a thing.”
“Not that thing on the cover of the Oracle, Hank,” Raven says.
“What?” Hank says, startled.
“They aren’t--Moira’s wrong,” Raven says. “They accept humans of all kinds, but they’re human, Hank. They won’t know what to do with you.”
“I don’t know what to do with me,” Hank replies, and Raven falls silent.
“Beast,” she says, after a beat. “Hank. Your research is amazing. You know that, right?”
“Don’t you think it’s strange that my mutation is purely physical?” Hank says. “Just a little?”
“Should I?” Raven asks, and Hank shrugs. He’s standing in the doorway, and he might be looming, but something in Raven is bristling in a way that makes him uncertain about sitting down.
“I’m not using any of that, here,” he says. “If I’m not using my mutation, if I’m only using my human abilities, am I really a mutant at all?”
“Of course you are,” Raven says, and Hank shakes his head.
“This isn’t what Schrödinger intended it for,” he says, “but I’m like the cat. If no one sees me, I could be either a mutant or a human--I could be Hank McCoy, or I could be Beast, or I could be both or neither.”
Raven is quiet again, and the reverberations of Hank’s words hum through the room.
“Which do you want to be?” Raven asks, finally.
“Both,” he says. “But I don’t want it to be a question. I don’t want to be something in a box that might be both.”
It’s not the truth, not precisely: he doesn’t want to be both, but he can’t keep living as half.
Raven looks at him, the close sort of look people give things they are uncertain about, like she’s squinting to read a book with very fine print.
“I’ll go with,” she says, after a moment. “But not as Mystique. Just in case something happens.”
Hank has a feeling that the irony of Raven being the one going as a human escapes neither of them, so he doesn’t draw attention to it.
“Do you even know how many people will be here?” Raven asks him in the morning. They’re leaving the house while it’s still dark out, so Hank won’t draw attention, and Raven’s fidgeting with human Hank’s hair in a way Hank suspects he used to do quite often.
Hank shrugs.
“This is a terrible idea,” Raven breaths, weary and exasperated.
“I suspect Moira will be there,” Hank says. “She has firearms. And you can hide.”
“So it’s all on you,” Raven says. “And possibly Moira.”
“I guess it is,” Hank replies, and shrugs on his coat.
The city is quiet in the morning, and the people who pass them sometimes stare and Hank and sometimes give the illusion of failing to notice. It almost reminds Hank of travelling with the Professor, who would cast some sort of psychic magic on onlookers so Hank looked less like a beast and more like a human, and with whom Hank could walk through LAX the day before Thanksgiving without even earning a second glance.
But it’s not quite like that. Hank suspects most of the onlookers think he’s in some sort of very elaborate costume, but as they approach Golden Gate Park there are people condensing into the crowds, the long-haired hippies that occasionally appear in photographs in the newspaper, protesting things.
“They look unwashed,” Raven hisses at Hank. “And they smell rank.”
Hank’s nose is more sensitive than Raven’s, he’s certain of it, but he doesn’t have it in him to point out that most of what he smells is rich and herbal, with an undercurrent of human that he finds enviable rather than distressing.
“What are we doing?” Raven continues.
“I really, really, do not know,” Hank replies, and then they’re at the park, and there are so many people there in the early morning light, clumped together in a thick pack, and Hank knows he can run fast enough to leave this all behind like a bad dream. The water on the harbor is flat and bright, and Hank is torn being delighted to see and smell it and terrified, because the world outside the house is so much vaster than he remembered.
There’s a hand threading through the fur on his back.
It’s Moira.
“Where’d you get this coat?” she slurs, eyes wide. “It’s--groovy.”
“Moira,” he says, and her lips curve into a grin.
“You came,” she says, sounding again like herself.
“I was just thinking of leaving--”
“Don’t,” she says, simply. “I can introduce you to some people.”
Raven is there, too, glancing between the pair of them.
“I don’t think this is a good idea, Moira,” she says. “There are too many of them.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Moira says, and her voice is sharp and calm, and then she’s leading Hank through the crowd, her slim hand clasping only three of his fingers. Hank fumbles for Raven, and they make a sort of chain, only they keep needing to stop because Moira knows people, and they’re offering her joints, tabs of LSD. Raven catches Hank’s eyes and there’s a wild bewildered look in her eyes, and suddenly someone behind her catches Hank’s eyes and says, “Dude, what are you?” with something that is plainly awe.
Hank blinks.
“I’m the Beast,” he says, and the guy’s face breaks into a loopy grin.
Moira leads them on, and it occurs to Hank that they’ve gone down the rabbit hole and come out the other end, because nothing that’s happening right now is in the realm of things he expected to happen, today or ever in his life.
And then they’re approaching a man in a white shirt with a curling mane of hair, and Moira says, “Allen,” and he turns around.
It’s Allen Ginsberg. Hank’s not entirely sure how he knows what he looks like; maybe his picture was on the back of Howl, which Hank read a long time ago because he wasn’t supposed to but failed to understand. There was a moment with Elias when some small part of Howl had made slightly more sense, but then that had slipped out sideways and--
“Moira,” Allen Ginsberg is saying, grinning like the Buddha, holding out his arms and enfolding her. She draws back.
“This is the person I wanted you to meet,” she says, gesturing towards Hank, and then Allen Ginsberg comes forward, right hand extended, and says “Hello.”
It’s strange. Ginsberg starts talking about October 6th, ‘66, and the Beast, and Hank thinks he may be high, but he’s also sharp and present. He is, strangely enough, exactly the sort of human--exactly the sort of person--Hank needed to speak with; he wonders how Moira knew.
There’s a group that looks at Hank in abject horror, of course, and another faction that asks him if he was involved in that terrible violence, and Raven sort of hangs off to the side making faces that are supposed to encourage Hank to break loose, run off.
He doesn’t. It’s remarkable, because the hate and the fear is tempered by the fact that some of these people are looking at him with a frank curiosity, and it’s been so long since Hank was away from mutants that he’d forgotten how similar humans without mutations were, good and bad in equal measure, and one girl threads her fingers through his fur and starts to braid it, and Allen Ginsberg offers Hank a drag on a joint, and Hank coughs and everyone laughs and Raven puckers her lips just like the thin, angry, anti-war girl across the circle, and Ginsberg smiles beatifically and talks about all they have in common, and how more mutants need to come out and show themselves, and harmony, and Hank finds himself returning the grin in kind. There’s music twisting through the air, and people are saying things beautiful and maybe too hopeful or maybe true, and Hank wraps it around himself like something safe, like a coat of fur.
It isn’t until they’re walking home that the situation goes pear-shaped. Somewhere between the pot and the day, Hank’s forgotten about his hood, about wrapping his coat tight around him, and even with it he’s obviously not normal, so maybe what happens should come as no surprise.
Someone shouts something, almost incoherent, but then Hank recognizes it as “mutant,” said with a hiss of hatred and almost unfathomable anger. Raven looks at Hank with a blaze in her eyes, and Hank runs.
He’s fast, he’s still fast, despite being cooped up inside for so long. He exhales a hope for Raven, or a prayer, but he knows she doesn’t need it, and then he falls into the rhythm of his feet and his body and his strength, which flows warm and lively beneath everything. Charles taught him this, but there’s something--Hank knows he should feel afraid, but he just feels free.
When he gets home, he’s not even breathing hard, only then he has to pace and wait for Raven. He goes up and down the stairs and circles the kitchen table at least thirty-seven times before she shows up.
“I told you,” she says, and then leans down and puts her hands on her knees, and shifts back to herself.
Hank looks back at her.
“We’re fine now,” she says. “But it’s going to be in the papers. Or something. And they know about mutants, but only in theory, and they aren’t going to be able to handle it--”
“Of course they can’t handle it,” Hank says. “We’re all cloistered away, and no one sees us except when we’re fighting.”
Raven shakes her head.
“They’ll always be afraid, Hank,” she says. “We’re too much.”
01/14/67
Alex--
It’s after midnight, so the date might actually be for the day before. Is that acceptable?
Moira introduced me to Allen Ginsberg today. It was--I guess it was psychedelic. And, yes, Moira’s in the city, did I tell you that already? The CIA has her infiltrating the countercultre. She invited Raven and I down to something called a Human Be-In in the park, and introduced me to Ginsberg. And it was good, I guess. It’s been a long time since I’ve been mutant among humans, and it was no Eden, but it was better than being inside the house.
Something happened on the way home, though, and Raven doesn’t want to go again. I just--I tend to believe that the more we hide, the more afraid people will be. If they know what we can do, they’ll also know our limits. What are your thoughts?
Oh, and I’m sure I forgot to tell you this: I took another look at your cells. They flash red--it’s like even the smallest parts of us manifest our powers, and I think that means something, but I don’t know what. Maybe that we can never hide.
In response to your previous letter: about New Year’s Raven and I didn’t even manage to stay awake for the year’s passing. How were things at the School? I’m sure someone must meet your high standards.
-H
p.s. What about drugs? If you insist on discussing my relative badassness, I’m no longer entirely inexperienced in that regard.
Raven is terse with Hank for at least a week, after that, though he can’t neatly measure it. They discuss his research, but rarely go beyond that--they prepare separate meals and eat at different times, and the house falls into a sort of heavy, uncomfortable silence.
Hank wants to say it parallels Charles’ disagreement with Erik, but he doesn’t actually think it does. It’s their own problem, something between him and Raven, and if only he could completely probe its edges he thinks he may be able to resolve it, but Raven’s not as easy to probe as her DNA.
“What do we do then?” Hank asks her when he catches her in the kitchen. “If they’ll always be afraid?”
“Maybe they have a reason to be,” Raven says, very softly. “Maybe we’re better, and that’s okay.”
“So we do--”
“We fight,” Raven says. She’s leaning against the stove, and her eyes are flint. “And we win.”
“Is that what you think? Or is that what Erik thinks?”
“And are you yourself or Charles?”
“Myself,” Hank says, and he’s startled by his own confidence. “I can only ever be myself, Raven.”
“Maybe I prefer Mystique,” she says.
1/22/1967
Beast:
Has ‘67 made you suddenly serious? Or stoned? I’m not sure from your last letter. But I hope things went okay when you were coming back from--whatever that thing was, where you met Ginsberg. Was anyone hurt? The Prof gets the Chronicle, there wasn’t anything in there.
I don’t know what’s going on with you and Raven, but I tend to think--well, the prison thing. I think you probably knew it had something to do with my powers and were just being purposefully dense, otherwise you’re thicker than I thought (bozo). It has to do with fear, I think, but the reason I wanted solitary confinement (did the Prof tell you about that?) was because I was afraid of my own powers. What that means we should do, I don’t know. We need to learn our own limits, maybe.
Since you seem to be nosing for gossip, I’ll tell you again that no one at the School meets my high standards, although if the Prof were interested, I probably wouldn’t turn him down, and also Darwin if he weren’t so busy being a being of pure energy and shit and insisting he superior because he’s evolved out of everything. You know.
-H
p.s. Drugs? What’s next, a motorcycle?
Hank considers replying to Alex’s letter with precisely what he’s thinking: I don’t know what’s next. But then Raven comes home, looking tired.
“I have a mutant I think should stay here,” she says.
“With us?” Hank asks, glancing around. There’s a hand towel crumpled up on the bar on front of the oven, a pile of dishes in the sink that Hank will probably do in the morning. They have a spare room, which doesn’t mean they need someone to fill it, and bringing a mutant who may not have had contact with other mutants before into the middle of their tenuous truce seems like a terrible idea.
“Yes, with us,” Raven says, granting Hank a withering look. “Where else?”
“I’m just not sure we’re in the best--I’m just not sure we should be having guests.”
“You keep having Moira and that poet over,” Raven says, and makes poet sound like a dirty word.
“So, what, we should bring another mutant into the middle of our shit?” Hank asks. “Someone who doesn’t know any of this, and probably just wants to know there are other people in the world like them, and doesn’t want to be immediately asked to pick sides.”
“Hank,” Raven says, and then she sits down at the table, reaches across and puts her hands on his shoulders.
“Yes?”
“His name’s Scott Summers,” Raven says. “I suspect he’s Alex’s brother.”
Hank says something that might be fuck.
Raven nods.
“He thinks all his siblings are dead,” she continues. “Which is why I want him to stay with us until we can ascertain whether they might be related. You could--could you do something with their genes?”
“What does he do?” Hank asks, and Raven smiles tightly.
“It looks like what Alex does, but it comes out of his eyes. He can’t control it--if you could develop something--”
“Siblings,” Hank says, nodding. “Would be great for my research.”
Raven grins for real this time, and Hank writes Alex a letter that consciously skirts the issue.
01/31/67
Alex--
1967 hasn’t made me anything, including hurt--which is to say, Raven and I made it home from the Be-In fine. Worried about me?
You probably have a point about limits. My mutation has never seemed particularly frightening, just physically disfiguring, though I supposed I am stronger now than I would be without the extra chromosomes. Speaking of, are you up-to-date on my research? I’m trying to pin down how our mutations work on a genetic level, developing new techniques in the process (hence the fellowship, as Charles is really the only one providing funding for genetic research on mutants). Probably spreading my intellect too thin. But I’m becoming more interested in how differentiated mutations are--do you know if anyone at the school had siblings with powers? I, unfortunately, am an only child.
Speaking of, is your suit still working to control your powers? I think your mutation is considerably more fearsome than mine; I can understand how it would be a trial.
-H
p.s. Since you’ve told me so much about yourself, and you’ve revealed something about your jailtime (it wasn’t arson, was it?) I’ll give you one in exchange: I lost my virginity to someone named Elias Sill. Who was, yes, male.
part 2