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)
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... )
<< 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... )
"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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