Prompt Post: ROUND TWO
ROUND TWO IS CLOSED
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Rules post.
Flat view.
ROUND TWO: Updates Post (WIPs only)
ROUND TWO: Fills Post (completed Fills only)
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<< ROUND ONE | ALL ROUNDS | ROUND THREE >>
Rules post.
Flat view.
ROUND TWO: Updates Post (WIPs only)
ROUND TWO: Fills Post (completed Fills only)
damalur's firstclasskink on Delicious.
Volunteers always welcome.
Please use the Discussion Post if you want to talk about community alterations or get my modly attention. Do not ( Read more... )
Alex Summers' known associates list is about five people long, and all of those awful, terrible, incredibly embarrassing aliases dead end in one Hank McCoy, 19, given to twitching, pleading eyes, and sitting in Erik's office looking pathetic and clutching a briefcase he'd clearly purchased at the K-Mart in Astor Place.
"Seriously?" Erik asks, standing in the doorway of his office, and turns over his shoulder. "Who the hell let this kid in here?"
Angel points at Armando who points at Sean who points at Raven, who shrugs, unabashed. Erik scowls.
"You can't fire us," Raven reminds him. "Charles would be so upset."
"Charles thinks I can do no wrong and would tearfully understand if I were forced to throw all of you out," Erik lies, and turns back to Hank, who is looking - if possible - even more scared and waifish, perched on the uncomfortable seats in front of Erik's desk. "All right, out with it, McCoy, what do you want?"
Hank sucks in a steadying breath here, obviously shooting for bravery. "I want to make a deal."
Erik settles into his desk chair and favors Hank with a flat, unimpressed stare.
"Help Alex get out of prison - "
"Not happening," Erik says.
" - And Alex will help you get Shaw," Hank finishes in a rush, hands fumbling with his briefcase, digging out papers he spills all over Erik's meticulously neat desk, jarring his WORLD'S MEANEST BOSS mug (from Raven) and the revoltingly twee silver frame photo of Charles, hair in wild disarray, in three-days-old clothes, balls deep in his dissertation and half-crazy, staring stunned at the camera.
Erik rights the picture reflexively, nudging it back into place, and as an afterthought he reaches out to touch the corner of it in automatic reassurance. In the back of his head he can feel Charles, beavering away at something hideously nerdy across the city, perfectly fine and completely distracted, not paying attention except where Charles is always paying attention - his unconscious telepathy strong enough even unfocused to blanket most of the state.
"Shaw," Erik says, voice very even.
"Sebastian Shaw," Hank clarifies, as if there could be another, and points at this paper and that document all over Erik's desk now. "Alex, when he was just starting out - for a while he worked with Arthur Florick's team."
The paperclips on Erik's desk start fisting into tiny knots. "And Florick is?"
"Is Shaw," Hank babbles, dragging out photographs. "I swear it. I knew about Shaw - I mean obviously everybody knows about Shaw, but I didn't know what he looked like until I got the FBI file on him and made the link."
"Setting aside the fact that you're not supposed to have access to the FBI file on Shaw," Erik starts, and ignores Hank's perfectly adolescent eye-roll at that, "so say I believe you - Alex worked with Shaw. So what?"
"He worked with Shaw years ago," Hank says, overeager, cuffs dragging papers around. "Before he got polished. He said all sorts of stuff - too much stuff - "
"What sorts of stuff?" Erik asks, tense.
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"How do I know this is legitimate?" Erik asks reasonably, because he can either veer off into one of his fugue states, where he terrifies his agents and makes probes cry and gets reprimanded by his immediate managers for reckless disregard and commended by his manager's manager for bravery and has to go home and sleep in one of the 15 guest rooms because Charles is furious at him and projecting his misery like a fucking foghorn.
There's a telling moment of hesitation here, a beat where Hank's obviously deciding whether not to do whatever he's probably about to do. He's got tells: the way he dips his gaze somewhere away from Erik's face, tugging at the wrist of his left sleeve, the way he rubs his thumb along the sharp edge of a page - skin too thick with callouses to be be worried about a papercut.
"Back then," Hank starts, faltering, "Shaw wasn't so polished. He bragged a lot."
The balls of paperclip liquefy now, pooling with the heat in Erik's stomach in their ceramic dish. "Oh?"
"Alex said - Alex said Florick, I mean, Shaw. That Shaw said he'd made your powers manifest," Hank finishes awkwardly. "That you'd be nobody without him."
Erik thinks that there's more to Hank McCoy than an obvious target for bullying after all.
"Well played," he says mildly, because it's been long enough that his immediate burst of fury at the memory of how Shaw had helped Erik manifest his powers has calcified in its intensity. Erik's unyielding on this point, but he's not reactive anymore, either. "Something not in any records, unknown to most, so verifying - and at once utterly useless in terms of current information on Shaw's whereabouts in order to maximize your leverage."
Hank doesn't look triumphant. He's too baby-faced and blue-eyed for that, but he does tip his glasses further up his nose with shaking fingers and say, "You get Alex out, we'll help you out."
Aside from being the most dangerous man in the world, having tastes that lean toward the unforgivably flamboyant, hideous fucking sideburns, and having arranged for Charles to be assassinated, Erik can now add "spreading lies about me" to the list of reasons that he's going to murder Shaw with extreme prejudice. Erik had needed Shaw to know about his powers like he'd needed another hole in the head, but the difference between being able to win coin tosses every time and coax open every jar and ripping holes into the sides of buildings was apparently Sebastian Shaw threatening to shoot Erik's mother at the mutant integration center, just to see if he couldn't push Erik a little bit harder. Marvelous, Shaw had called Erik's skill back then, and Erik wishes he'd taken Shaw out like all of the light fixtures in the outside hallway - he'd been a minor, a few years in juvie and a purged record at 18 seemed like an easy trade off for preemptively erasing Sebastian Shaw from the face of the earth: started off as a specialist in mutant discovery and integration, turned mutant supremacist and mass murderer. Powers and magnitude of power unknown, highly dangerous, top of every domestic and international terrorist watch list.
"Let me make some calls," Erik says finally, thinking about Alex rotting in a cell and Charles gritting his teeth through PT three times a week to keep up the muscles in the legs he can't feel anymore. "I'll see what our options are."
And Hank just stares at him, grateful in a way that's embarrassing, and breathes, "Thank you."
"Christ," Erik says, and shouts out the door of his office, "Hey, Cassidy - get this kid out of the building!"
***
TBC
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This is the most perfect fic and this line in particular made me dieeee lol that k-mart sucks!
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Scott Summers visits like clockwork every week on Thursday for the allotted one hour with Alex in supermax, chattering through the bullet and shatter-proof glass. Prison mail says that Scott also sends a weekly package. Nothing worth currency or effort in prison, just stuff he thinks is funny or that he thinks Alex would like: a couple of comic books, a car mag or two, weirdly, maps, with Post-It notes stuck all over them with defamatory asides about the various locations. All of this, and everything else in Alex's cell - stripped clean now, in punishment - is delivered to Erik that afternoon, and he sifts through all of the soundless footage of Alex and Scott's last visit looking for something that would have triggered this.
"Walk me through it," Erik says.
Angel leans back in her seat, suit jacket bunching up around her shoulders. He wishes she wouldn't wear it around the office - it must be nervewracking to think that if she ever needed to get away, she wouldn't be able to easily unfurl her wings, but she'd said something about wearing backless shirts at the work as unprofessional and then distracted him by asking when Erik was going to man up and make Charles an honest man.
"Alex and Scott Summers, orphaned when Alex was 18 and Scott was 10," Angel says, flipping through Alex's file. "Tried to make ends meet working a couple of different jobs for a while, but they didn't have much of a chance."
The mutant registry had passed in the 1970s, before even Charles was old enough or savvy enough of the world to protest against it, and although subsequent blessings and generations had seen fit to keep it more or less quiet save for medical reason and for law enforcement, people were still suspicious. Nobody paid much attention to laws saying you couldn't discriminate against hiring mutant humans, and Erik had no doubt Alex had lost dozens of jobs before he'd said, "fuck it" and turned to something easier for him, harder to swallow, and far, far more dangerous.
"No, I'm sure they didn't," Erik murmurs.
In the monitor, Alex is laughing, eyes crinkled and young, and Scott is leaning forward, hands pressed against the glass, animated and happy. Nothing bad happened that day. Something bad must have happened after.
"Rap sheet starts when Alex was about 19, mostly petty stuff, theft, car theft," Angel says, distracted. "No drugs, good for him, and nothing violent - sometime after he turn 21 he falls off the police radar for a bit." She holds up another file - Scott's. "This is when Scott starts showing up in school records, but the reasons are redacted."
Probably him manifesting, Erik thinks, because puberty didn't suck hard enough on its own without the advent of your mutation, too, for a lot of kids these days. Erik had figured his out during nursery school, when he'd terrified all the nice German fraus by entertaining himself by deconstructing his crib and playpen for escape, his mother liked to remind him. Charles hadn't even known telepathy wasn't normal until he'd turned four and no other children at some society party his parents were holding were able to hear him when he'd reached out to them in his head.
"When was it for you?" Erik asks, non-sequitur, but Angel just looks thoughtful.
"I was lucky - 20? Something like that? Old enough to know what was happening," she answers, and turns back to the monitors. "Anyway, off the grid for about three years, and then he shows up again: same low-level stuff, etcetera etcetera, and then there comes the accidental car-jacking."
Erik sighs. "Dumbass," he mutters.
Of course Alex Summers would have the luck of trying to steal a car with someone still inside of it, pulled over onto a side street to catch a nap before he drove into oncoming traffic.
"They would have gone a lot easier on him if he hadn't panicked when that guy pulled out his taser," Angel says philosophically. "Although at least he only sliced the car in half, and not the owner."
"Did Scott ever come back?" Erik asks, still watching the monitor, for the way Alex stared after Scott as the guards hustled him away. "After this visit here?"
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Erik twirls the pen hovering over his palm, sending it spinning round and round in thought.
"So he wasn't expecting it, whatever kept Scott away," Erik mumbles. "Whoever is keeping Scott away."
Angel closes her files, stopping the video, now showing some other people now having an argument through the shatterproof glass. "So?" she asks. "He's a nonviolent offender - and he may have some real info on Shaw."
Armando chooses this moment to stick his head into the room. "Plus he only broke out for his little brother," he says, too casually, which means that Sean's perch near the glass doors, texting, was a lookout after all. Sometimes Erik hates his fucking team. "You can't really fault a man for caring about family."
Probably because she can't help himself, Raven yells through the glass of his office walls:
"Come on, do it, Boss - if you don't, Hank's just going to sit in your office and cry some more."
Glaring at Angel, Erik says, "You guys planned this, didn't you?"
"It wasn't a formal tactical discussion or anything," she admits, smiling and gathering up the papers. "But we figured if we couldn't prevail upon your good nature, we could always call Charles."
Erik points at the door. "Go away."
"Yes, Boss," Angel laughs. "Right away, Boss."
***
Ordinarily, the process of certifying a CI is arduous enough, with paperwork thick enough to murder entire Amazonian rainforests and vast troves of undiscovered species. When the CI in question is a mutant, multiply it by five. But Erik likes this done in orderly ways, "Sorted," as Charles likes to say, and so he calls Charles's assistant at the university to say he'll be late home tonight, and powers through all of the forms in one five-hour sitting, swearing at himself for being a pushover every step of the way.
But Alex, for all that he's over 21, is just a dumb kid who ever had a chance, and he's lived his whole life probably scared out of his mind his powers would hurt somebody. If Erik's not going to look out for him, nobody is, and the thought of Alex rotting in supermax, wasting his whole life there because he'd loved his brother too much just to give up on him when he'd gone missing and there'd been no one to help isn't one he can swallow.
By the time he's done, the office is more or less deserted, just Raven still puttering around on a couple of old cold cases that have a Shaw connection and lying about it. Erik's tried to reason with her about it, but she doesn't have an outlet for her obsession the way Erik does, she just goes home and lies in her bed, unpeels herself from her preferred skin of blond hair and round cheeks and stare the ceiling with her cat-yellow eyes. She'd slept at the mansion for a solid two months during Charles's recovery, after he'd come home from the hospital and his seven separate surgeries, and fought with him for hours when all Charles wanted to do was fight with someone.
"Want to come over for late dinner?" Erik asks, because Charles would be glad to see her.
She shakes her head. "No, I just wanted to put together some stuff for Alex to look at, when he gets here."
"That confident the request will go through?" Erik asks, amused. Raven claims that she and Charles are completely different, that she finds his endless optimism annoying, that Charles's relentless determination to see the good in everybody is nauseating, but Erik thinks Raven likes to ignore the ways they've rubbed off one another.
Shrugging, she says, "Don't see why not. Shaw's bigger fish than Alex, and there's no other task force that would be capable of handling his powers."
"Raven, Alex isn't even capable of handling his powers," Erik says, and drops a brief hand to her shoulder good night as he heads for the elevator bank.
It's dark outside, the city throbbing with steamy summer heat, everything gleaming from a brief and violent rainshower they had in the afternoon, and now neon slick like a coat of sweat. He leaves his car in the garage and goes for the subway, taking the 6 up 3rd Avenue.
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And sadly bored is what Charles is when Erik finds him, languishing in the second floor study.
Erik pauses at the door. "Are you - ?"
"I'm trying to see if I can tell what they're thinking just by having a visual fix," Charles says, unmoving from his slouch in the chair, situated in front of the shitty Best Buy bargain bin TV that's balanced precariously on top of a heap of old term papers in one corner. "I think I might be able to."
Charles is watching re-runs of America's Next Top Model, so Erik thinks it's entirely fair to ask, "Even if you did lock in on their thoughts, how could you tell they were thoughts at all?"
Twisting around to grin at him, Charles says, "Cruel - potentially accurate, but cruel."
For reasons Erik prefers not to explore and that Charles knows but pretends not to, he's not given to casual touches, but Charles always says hello not with skin but a sudden sensation of affection, like someone whispering: welcome back, welcome back, I've missed you, welcome back right into the cavities of his heart, bypassing all the unnecessary roadblocks in between.
"How was your day?" Charles asks, wheeling around to face him, and Erik takes the low seat by the window, lets his posture fray completely, melt into the chair. "What happened?" You look tired, gets the direct line.
Erik thinks about Alex's crushed expression, that defeated slump of his shoulders, his own, reflexive ache for the kid. "Alex Summers broke out of prison."
"Alex?" Charles asks, frowning. "He doesn't seem the type."
"He went after his brother," Erik says, because that explains everything, and Charles agrees, from the look on his face.
"Alex didn't find him," Charles says, matter-of-factly.
Erik reaches over and appropriates one of Charles's hands for his own, running his thumb over the lines of Charles's palm and wonders were Scott might be, hopes that he's well and that he's not frightened, but he knows that neither of these are likely. "No, he didn't."
"You think you're about to do something stupid," Charles says suddenly, curious. Erik frowns. "And before you accuse me of reading your mind, your apprehension is so intense it's fairly drowning me through the skin - no additional effort required on my part."
Sighing, Erik folds their palms together. Go on, he thinks. Read me. I'm too tired to talk.
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I just wanted to comment on this part (even as the next chapters are calling out to me) to tell you that Raven being as obsessed with Erik over Shaw because of what happened to Charles chokes me up. (I felt really sad that Raven chose Erik over Charles on that day in the beach and left with Erik. She could have made sure he got to a hospital at least before leaving, although that would not have the same dramatic impact in film.Bottom line, I'm a sucker for Raven being the best sister.)
AND MY FAVE ALEX/HANK FICS WILL ALWAYS BE THOSE THAT HAVE ESTABLISHED CHARLES/ERIK. Charles and Erik here, living together as a couple, just fill me with contentment and peace, as if everything is all right in the world. I love the way Charles greets Erik and how they communicate through a direct line. YOU ARE BRILLIANT, TRULY.
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"Oh," Charles says, after a moment, eyes going from sleepy to wide and aware. "A CI? Really?"
Erik shrugs. "He may know something about Shaw," he says.
Charles arches an eyebrow. "Sure," he says, which sounds like, Of course he does, in Erik's head. "And I'm sure your fondness for him plays no part in this."
"You're the one that's spoiling my entire team," Erik accuses, because even if Charles wasn't the world's most powerful telepath, it would be pretty pointless to try lying to him about this.
Grinning, unrepentant, Charles says, "But they're so splendid, all of them."
"If only you'd been properly bullied during your childhood," Erik sighs, and gives Charles's hand a squeeze. "Is there anything to eat?"
"We can order a pizza," Charles decides, and nods toward the television. "They're showing a marathon of this tonight."
Fucked at the office, fucked at home, Erik thinks, resigned, watching Charles reach for his phone.
He ends up asleep on Charles's shoulder after two slices, listening to Tyra ranting about smizing in the background, and Charles has to shake him conscious before he drowsily staggers up one of the many, many steps in the house, hand steady as he floats Charles's chair up alongside him and toward the bedroom.
***
TBC
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