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Hank is ransacking the medical supplies in the second floor left wing bathroom (Charles's—only Charles's, not Charles's and Raven's—house is sort of disgustingly huge) when Alex opens the door, stops and stares at him.
"What?" Hank growls. He can't seem to stop it—whenever he gets even the least bit irritated, now, his words come out over the background of a throaty, animal sound.
"What are you doing?" Alex asks. His gaze flicks from Hank to the floor, where most of the contents of the medicine cabinet are strewn wildly, and then back up.
"Trying to find some kind of painkillers that can work," Hank says. He doesn't say although maybe I should be contacting the nearest veterinarian instead or not that they make meds for being stabbed in the back by your best friend or my hands are too big to fit into drawers now, it's easier to tip everything out and sort through it afterwards.
Alex takes a step further into the room. Hank considers baring his teeth—that works for Moira and Charles, anyway, and even Sean has a tendency to shut up if Hank looks fierce enough—but Alex has proved annoyingly immune to all kinds of intimidation so far.
"You hurt?" Alex asks.
It's Hank's turn to stare. "Were you there?" he asks, because he's pretty sure that anyone who ever even shook hands with that red, Russian bastard came out of the experience bruised, and Hank went up against him in a fistfight.
Still, he's healing better than expected. Hank knows he left the battle on the Cuban beach with at least a fractured rib—he broke four during a summer break in middle school; he knows the feeling—but he ran himself through the X-ray in the lab the evening after and couldn't find any signs of damage on the bone itself (although they still hurt like hell). He's always healed rapidly, ever since he was a kid, but the transformation seems to have kicked his cells into overdrive.
So there's one upside, to balance out the hundred or so downsides.
Alex is frowning at him now. "You didn't say," he says. Hank snorts.
"What should I have done, counted and named all my bruises, like Sean?" he says.
It's not as though they show up underneath all this fucking fur, he adds silently, almost shocked at his own profanity. There's no way to see the bruises, but Hank can still feel them all—nebulas of pain blooming on his chest and elbows and shoulder blades, for some reason not handled by his body's new, efficient immune system even now, three days later. Possibly they aren't important enough.
Maybe he should start naming them, like Sean, Hank muses. The bruise by his right kidney could be named after the American ship where Hank landed on some kind of hatch handle, and the one on his left ankle could be called Alex, after the person who gripped it, panicky-tight, trying not to fall to his death.
With that thought, the realisation dawns that Alex hasn't exactly been counting his bruises aloud after dinner, either.
"What do you want, anyway?" Hank says, trying not to snap.
Alex shrugs, but there's a twist to his mouth that suggests there might be a smile hiding somewhere under there. "I was looking for something to stabilise my wrist," he says, gesturing awkwardly to his left arm. "I feel it more when I'm twisting it, so I thought if I try to keep it straight, perhaps it'll heal better."
Alex has been wearing long-sleeved shirts for the last three days. Now that he's wearing short sleeves again, a green and yellow bruise is visible, encircling his wrist and extending up his forearm.
Perhaps he could name it Hank.
"We should probably X-ray that," Hank says grudgingly, feeling oddly remorseful. "There could be some fracturing." Considering that Hank has broken four coffee cups so far, the china shattering in his hands like thin ice, it's actually quite probable.
Alex raises his eyebrows. "We?" he says, and now there's definitely a wry smile on his face.
Hank rolls his eyes. "Come on," he says. "Bring those bandages."
Charles is hopelessly, sharply cheerful these days. Dinners are painful affairs, with Charles chatting brightly about mutant children and teaching and giving them an identity and a home and a place where they can truly be themselves, I think we could really help people, Moira wincing every time Charles laughs—which he does all the time—and the rest of them eating quickly and silently and avoiding one another's eyes. None of them ever mention Charles's legs, because the one time Sean did, Charles's expression froze solid for one single, revealing moment before he pulled himself together and cracked a couple of jokes that were so far from funny it made Hank want to break something.
Most of the time, Hank shuts himself away to work on his projects, but Charles has insisted that they all at least eat together. It's all part of his plan to meld them into a unit and a team and a family, Hank suspects, but it would probably work better if they weren't all sitting there counting the minutes until the meal's over.
Hank's new lab looks onto the lawn, and he often looks up from his work bench to see Moira wheeling Charles around. He's glad. The walks with Moira are the only times Charles lets his fixed smile drop, and whenever Hank runs across them afterwards, it's as if the tension that coils through the house—like some taste or smell in the air, of burning metal and blood—has eased a little. Hank dares to hope, then, that the day might be coming when they can all look up voluntarily over dinner, and when conversations aren't conducted on careful tiptoe.
It doesn't occur for Hank to wonder what Sean and Alex are busying themselves with, but two weeks after Cuba—that's how everything is measured now, before and after Cuba—Charles announces over breakfast that the new gym is finished, and Hank recalls the closed-off rooms on the ground floor.
"Is that what you've been working on?" he asks, turning to Alex and startling him into dropping the toast he's just reaching for. Things are slowly getting better, but still, none of them tend to talk much at meal times.
Alex nods, as Sean quickly takes the piece of toast instead with an expression of childish glee. "It's just a regular gym," he says. "Charles has ideas for something much bigger later on, but it's something for now, at least."
"Alex and Sean have done a splendid job," Charles says brightly. "I can hardly recognise the place. We should have some sort of celebration party, I think."
"A bonfire," Sean suggests indistinctly, through a mouthful of toast and butter and jam. "We need to get rid of what's left of all those paintings and stuff that was in those rooms before. Maybe we could sell something though. I think one of the chairs was only partly damaged."
There's a moment of frozen silence, and then Sean sprays breadcrumbs all over the table (and mostly over Alex). "Your faces!" he giggles, hugging himself. "Your faces!"
Moira and Hank exchange a glance, but then Alex is fighting back a smirk, Charles has started to snort in the undignified way he does when he's actually, truly laughing and Hank can feel a laugh fighting its way out of his own throat. Moira starts giggling, too, and soon they're all howling with laughter. It isn't actually all that funny, but it's the first time they've lost control in front of each other since Cuba and they keep laughing until Hank's stomach aches. Charles is drying tears out of his eyes, and if it looks like they aren't only from laughter, no one points this out.
"Seriously, what did you do with the things from those rooms?" Charles asks eventually. "Not that I would be distraught to see those oils go up in flame, but my ancestors will definitely find some way to come back from the dead and strangle me if great-aunt Patricia's portrait or something has been destroyed."
"We put everything in the attic," Alex says. He's looking at Hank and smiling slightly, and Hank grins back. "Great-aunt Patricia should be fine."
"So what were those ideas for something bigger?" Hank asks. Charles grins, too, large and stupid and more real than most smiles from him lately.
"I have some ridiculous and probably very impractical plans," he says happily. "I want a room where we can train properly—train our powers, I mean. I have an idea about having some kind of obstacles that are unpredictable and changeable, like they would be in a real battle. It's a grandiose project, but if we manage to make a go of this school I think that could be something that really makes a difference."
They all listen while Charles elaborates on his plans for the school, arms waving enthusiastically, and Hank leans his chin on his hand and for the first time thinks that maybe, this could be something worth sticking around for.
Alex comes into the gym when Hank is trying it out for the first time. Hank briefly considers leaving—he's self-conscious enough as it is without someone watching him try to figure out how to build muscle—but then decides that would be stupid.
"Hey," he says. Alex nods.
"Hey."
Alex heads over to the far corner and picks up a skipping rope. Hank watches him out of the corner of his eye for a while, then forces himself to relax and concentrate on his bench press. He's getting into a good flow, he thinks, when he senses that he's being watched and looks up to see that Alex has stopped his skipping and is looking at him.
"What?" he snaps. Alex shrugs, then walks over.
"Have you ever actually worked out before, Beast?" he asks.
Hank stops the snarl that wants to leave his mouth, rifles through possible answers and settles at last on the truth. "No," he admits. "I wasn't exactly expecting to be part of the fight. I was expecting to pilot and think and build things."
"And now?" Alex says, looking down at him. It's hard to read his expression from this angle, but it doesn't look like he's being mocking, only interested.
"Well, I have to do something with this body now that I have it," Hank says, grinning mirthlessly. Alex just keeps looking at him, so Hank rests the weights on their stand, sits up and shrugs. "I think that for what's coming, we'll all need to fight. What do you think?"
Alex appears to consider this, then nods. "So are you building muscle?" he says. "Because in that case, you should put a lot more weight on. You're not really giving yourself anything to work with, right now. You should focus on short sets, few repetitions, and you should have enough weight that the last few reps are difficult for you. I'll spot you if you want."
Hank gives him a look. "So what, you're a physical trainer now?" he asks.
Alex snorts. "I was in prison," he says. "There's a limited amount of ways to spend your free time there."
There's something sharp and frightening underneath that, a suggestion of edges and darkness, and Hank doesn't dare examine closer.
"Fine, I guess I could use some tips," he says instead. "Help me out?"
A few days later, Moira is absent from dinner. Hank doesn't ask, but when she hasn't returned by the evening after, he finally broaches the subject with Charles.
Charles looks away.
"It was time for her to go back," he says. "It's OK. She won't tell them anything."
She won't remember anything, Hank hears.
"Are you OK?" he asks.
Charles still doesn't look at him, but he doesn't smile or joke, which Hank sees as an improvement.
"I think I will be," he says.
Hank has started to work out every morning now, one hour after breakfast with Alex helping him out with the weights—spotting, Hank thinks, smiling at the jargon—and him helping Alex out in turn. He sometimes runs before breakfast, too, now and again joined by Alex or even Sean, but preferably by himself. There's something liberating about being able to stretch his legs and speed up until the world is blurring around him and his feet feel like they're only lightly anchoring him to the ground.
For the remainder of each day, he works—fast, non-stop, wanting to give his mind the same amount of work-out as his body. (He has more mutant powers than his blue fur and agile feet. He is more than his fur and feet.) He emerges with some difficulty for meals, shaking himself awake from a dream of numbers and equations and trying to remember how to act human.
"What are you working on, anyway?" Alex asks one day at lunch.
What am I not working on, Hank thinks, but replies, "Mainly? Cerebro."
"The brain thing Charles used to find us?"
"Right, that," Hank says. "We were only getting started when the attack on the CIA happened and Cerebro was destroyed. There were meant to be a lot more of us."
"What, you mean they weren't planning to battle the forces of evil with five twenty-year-olds?" Alex asks, raising his eyebrows, and Hank grins at him.
"I think they were hoping for a larger division," he says. "We had lots of potential mutants still to approach, but all the records were destroyed with Cerebro. If I can rebuild it, we have the chance to seek out all those mutant kids out there that might be in need of help."
Alex nods. "So how are you doing?"
"Getting there," Hank says. "I'm still trying to reconstruct what I can recall of my original research, but I think I have most of it. Think I can make some improvements, too. I might even be ready for some prototyping soon."
"Do you need a hand?" Alex asks, speaking quickly and then blinking for a moment. "I mean—I can't do any clever sums or anything, but if you need an extra hand with a screwdriver or something—" He nods towards the other two, who are discussing something where Charles waves his hands a lot and Sean makes very interesting wincing faces (Hank has been trying not to hear anything they're saying). "Whenever we don't have anything else to do, Sean keeps trying to make me play cards with him. He wins all the time and is a fucking awful gloater."
Hank laughs. "Sure," he says. "Why not. You can come and hide in the lab when you need to."
Alex lifts one corner of his mouth in a smile, squinting at him. "Good," he says. "I'll have something to look forward to."
Me, too, Hanks thinks but doesn't say, looking away from Alex's stupid, lopsided, pretty smile.
Cerebro finally stands finished in January. It means that Alex starts spending less time sitting in Hank's lab, telling stories and asking questions and keeping Hank grounded in a reality not inhabited solely by numbers, and more going on recruiting missions with Charles and Sean. It's slow work and largely unsatisfying, Alex complains over beers, but by early March they have a dozen teenagers of varying powers housed in what has just been christened Xavier's School for gifted youngsters.
Hank is pulled from his research into a Vice Principal position or, as it should really more aptly be called, Full Time Con Man position. Setting the house up as a school means feeding the government some rather intricate lies (all without ever meeting anyone face to face because, well, blue fur), and between that and preparing his Maths and Physics classes, Hank is worked to the bone. He and Alex still work out together every day, though, fitting their hours in between their respective classes—Alex teaches Physical Education and Basic Self Defence, while Sean, displaying a level of intelligence and commitment Hank suspects they're all equally surprised by, handles English and Arts.
Hank never saw himself as a teacher, and teenagers have frightened him ever since he was one himself, but the class is small and the students are grateful enough to be anywhere but their homes that they behave themselves unusually well, and he manages to get by.
He never, ever thought he would eventually be longing for the days when the house was huge and empty and meal times were silent, fraught affairs, but the mansion seems increasingly small as the days go by. The kids are taking up enough space for fifty, and making noise for twice as many. Once the novelty of their situation wears off, too, the usual teenage problems start to arise—fights break out, alliances and cliques are formed and every single one of them seems to be romantically entangled with at least two of the others. Hank soon feels like he became a father before his time.
"At least you get to beat them up," he tells Alex, who laughs at him.
In the second week of April, Hank finds an envelope in his lab. It's addressed to him, in a round hand he thinks he recognises.
There's a red residue on the envelope, and he carefully scrapes as much of it as he can into a test tube and puts it next to several similar tubes, all containing red dust or black strands of hair or, in one case, the sharp tip of a broken nail, plucked from Hank's action suit.
One day he's going to get right down to what makes that red bastard tick and then he's going to invent a barrier that efficiently and completely blocks anyone from teleporting into the mansion (and, for preference, leaves any intruding teleport wishing sincerely they'd never tried it).
Raven's letter, when he at last opens it, is pretty much what he expected. She's apologetic and sad and wishes things were otherwise, but it's obvious through what she says and doesn't say that she's very happy with the road she chose.
Hank almost tosses the letter, but knows he will regret it later if he does. So instead he places it carefully back in its envelope and secrets it in his bottom drawer among the ideas for more or less insane projects that Charles keeps leaving him and that Hank is trying to tactfully ignore.
He likes Raven—can't help liking her, even now, even though she signed her letter Mystique and referred to Cuba as if it had been a meeting where they agreed civilly to fight a war on two different fronts, rather than a difficult and dangerous fight which ended with her joining up with, among other people, the man who had not long before tried to murder Hank and Alex. (Not murder, Charles says in his head, it's not murder in war time. And Hank thinks that he never asked to be a soldier, never signed up for any war, and he knows that it doesn't matter in the slightest.)
He likes Raven, and has done since she stepped into the CIA building, looked at his feet, and smiled. And she had seemed to like him, too, even after he'd sat down with her one day after dinner and said I like you, I really do, you're wonderful, pretty and smart and, and wonderful, but I'm just... it's just..., even though he spent a lot of their friendship saying completely the wrong things and apparently sending a lot of signals he wasn't aware of and which makes him feel awkward and ashamed and guilty whenever he thinks about it. He'd thought they managed well despite all that, and he'd thought he'd finally made the kind of friend who would stay for life, the kind who knew all of him and cared about him regardless. Seeing her leave was like seeing the nightmarish spread of fur over his hands all over again.
He doesn't say anything to the others, but from the way Charles is brittle and too cheerful again at dinner, Hank draws the conclusion that he, too, received a letter. They don't talk about it. There isn't a whole lot to say, after all.
Life settles into a routine. Hank finds himself warming more and more to his teacher's role. The kids are becoming more sure in themselves, too, used to their powers and to their environment. They have started calling Charles, Alex and Sean by the nicknames they were given, way back last autumn when all this started. (Hank suspects Sean is responsible for letting them know about that, because the chance of someone else coming up with the ridiculous name "Havoc" for Alex is smaller than of Hank growing wings.) Thankfully, however, they haven't started calling Hank "Beast" yet.
"Not to your face, at least," Alex says.
Sean has taken up photography, first as part of one of his classes but then as a full-time hobby. He's asked Hank to look into creating a camera that can be brought along for his flights, and because Sean is actually a good person underneath the air of lazy incompetence he cultivates, Hank has bumped the idea up to the list of top ten projects to undertake whenever he gets five minutes to himself.
In June, all the kids go home for their summer holidays, keeping up the pretence of a normal if exclusive boarding school. All, that is, except for Catherine, a young woman with the power to manipulate water. She's graduating to teacher status by the autumn, taking over a few of Charles's classes so that the man can start getting some sleep, and she's staying on over the summer with the rest of them to rebuild and improve.
It should probably be sadder than it is, Hank thinks, that none of them have enough of a life to leave the school for the holidays. Still, when the sun is shining and they're all eating lunch together, outside in the warm summer air after a long and satisfying morning of construction work and improvements, it's hard to make it feel like a let-down.
Hank takes up running again, relishing the feel of the ground rushing away under his feet. He and Sean start free climbing mountains, too—Sean with his flying suit on, which Hank mocks, calling it cheating.
He keeps working out with Alex, keeping their schedule as regular as is possible in their irregular lives. He recognises how pathetic it is to cling to a simple routine as if it has any deeper meaning, as if there was anything behind it—but does so, nevertheless. He eats his meals sitting next to Alex, and when they think they can get away with it they get drunk together on Charles's inherited stash of brandy (knowing Charles never touches the stuff anyway), and they go on recruiting trips together and work together and puzzle over different projects in Hank's lab together and spend more and more of every fucking day together, and Hank is so frustrated he could cry.
"Hey, dude," Sean says, all but walking straight into him in the corridor. In Sean's world, looking where you're going is something that happens to other people. "I was just in your lab, but you weren't there."
"You're right about that," Hank says, because, really.
"I left you some photos," Sean says. "They're in an envelope by your microscope." He sees Hank's expression and adds, "I didn't touch anything."
"Thank you," Hank says, and because he's feeling nice today he does not mention the oscilloscope incident at all.
He still does a quick check of the lab when he gets there. You never know with Sean.
The envelope contains fifteen or so photos, all with Hank somewhere in there. There are pictures from the dining table, from work on the new gym—"The danger room," Charles calls it, excitedly—and from his and Sean's climbing trips. Sean is getting good, Hank thinks. Then he reaches the last photo.
It's of him and Alex. They're leaning back against the southern wall of the house, the one that's deliciously warm on sunny afternoons, sitting close together with their shoulders almost touching. They're both laughing at the camera, huge and toothy.
Hank's stomach heaves. Serves you right, he thinks, staring at sharp teeth and pointed animal tusks, set in a grotesquely wide mouth with blue lips that curve into a doglike pout. Serves you right for forgetting who you are. What you are. Serves you fucking right.
Alex finds him in the gym that night, beating the shit out of a punching bag—one of the reinforced ones, the ones they got after Hank split his first one.
"Hey," Alex says. "You weren't at dinner. What's up?"
Hank doesn't reply. Serves you right for thinking you could be normal, could have a normal life, could have a normal... His wrists are beginning to ache. Hank ignores their protests.
"Hey." Alex is walking towards him. "Hey, come on. Beast, come on, talk to me."
Hank gives the punching bag a last blow and spins around with a roar, furious.
"Shut the fuck up!" he yells, hearing the snarl underlying and echoing the words and taking a savage pleasure in fulfilling his role as the half animal, half man. "Don't you think I know? I know, all right! I see my blue fucking face in the mirror every day, I know I'm a monster, I don't need you rubbing it into my face with your stupid fucking nicknames! I get it, OK? I fucking get it!"
He stops, panting. Alex is staring at him, open-mouthed.
"I didn't need you calling me Bozo to know I was a freak back then, either," Hank continues, marginally calmer. He thinks he should probably stop talking soon, but now that he's started, he realises he doesn't really know where the brakes are. "Well, I tried to do what I could, but look at how well that turned out! So yeah, I guess I am a beast now. There isn't really anything I can do about it. And even if I could—given how my last attempt at self-doctoring turned out, I don't think I should try, do you?"
Alex is still staring, but now he swallows and blinks, taking a few steps closer. "Why the hell would you want to do anything about it?" he asks at last.
Hank is utterly thrown.
"No, seriously, you're awesome," Alex says. "You're, like, I don't know—the fiercest person I know. You're perfect. And I mean," he says, "shit, I don't mean that you weren't cool before. I think you were perfect, then, too. I always thought—"
He stops abruptly and runs a hand through his hair, looks away from Hank for a moment and then back. "Look, I'm not always good with social—whatever, rules or something. I just wanted you to know that it wasn't bothering me. Your feet, I mean, and then your fur and everything. None of that ever bothered me. I don't know. I thought, like, if you can joke about it..." He trails off, shrugging. "I guess it wasn't the smartest way to go about it, but I'm stupid about things like this."
Hank frowns. "Things—" he begins, and then Alex is right there in front of him, his mouth on Hank's and his hands on Hank's face. Hank hardly has time to realise what's happening before Alex is pulling back, looking warily at him.
"Please, please don't say I read that wrong," he says.
"Jesus Christ Almighty," Hank says faintly, and he grabs Alex's arms, pulling him closer, because there is altogether too much space between them right now. Alex laughs against his lips, sounding relieved, and then he doesn't laugh or speak or pull back, only kisses Hank and fists his hands in Hank's hair and one of Hank's arms is pinned between their bodies and the other is pulling Alex ever closer to him, and it's awkward and glorious and perfect.
They pull apart after what might have been a few seconds and might have been an hour, and Hank frowns.
"Wait," he says. "Do you mean that when you were giving me daily grief about my weird feet, you were actually trying to flirt with me?"
Alex smiles his curious half smile, eyes almost shut. "Maybe?"
"You are really terrible at this, aren't you."
"They call me Havoc," Alex says seriously, and Hank laughs.
"Really terrible, honestly," he says.
He can see a future, now. Maybe it won't be for ever, but it's a human future, it's not a lonely future, and it looks brighter than he's dared hope up until now.
"But call me Beast again and I will hurt you," he says, and when Alex only laughs at that, kisses him again.