oh if we just knew
Story: film the world before it happens
Summary: Alex Summers has a problem with authority.
Notes: Part of my tremendously overgrown AU genderswap collection-in-the-making. LADIES, LADIES, EVERYWHERE. I made Scott younger than Alex for lots of reasons, none of which have any bearing on anything.
~
Alex Summers has a little brother. He is the singularly most annoying individual she has ever had the misfortune to share air space with.
“Listen, twerp,” she says, sixteen and angry and trying to fit into her mother’s red party dress, “if you don’t scram I’m going to hang you out of the window by your toes.” Her hair is pulled into a high, tight ponytail and the bottom curls against the nape of her neck. The sweetheart neckline of the dress plunges into a teeny tiny waist and then flares out with reckless drama. Alex has every intention of being out of this dress by midnight.
“I’m gonna tell on you,” whines Scott from where he is kicking his heels against her bed. With a quick intake of breath, Alex manages the final few buttons and the dress is on. She gives it a twirl and winks at herself in the mirror. She looks fantastic. She looks like a heart attack on legs.
With a breathy screech Scott throws himself back onto her bed as she carefully lines her eyes into full, dark swoops. “Not fair not fair not fair,” he yells. As far as six-year-olds go, he is not very creative. Alex successfully finishes her eyeliner and uncaps her mother’s reddest, brightest lipstick. She may not be destined for Radcliffe like Brains McQueen and she may not have a chest like Tits Klein or money like Lulu Richardson, but Alex knows when subtlety is best thrown out the window, and baby that time is now.
Ignoring Scott as he descends into a full-fledged tantrum, Alex breezes down the hall to where Rachel Houston is sitting on her parents’ couch, legs crossed demurely at her ankles. Rachel is wearing a cardigan and a high-necked blouse with her skirt and is doing her algebra homework where the textbook is perched on her lap, disdain for the sags in the sofa and the ratty carpet evident in her entire body. “And you’ll fix my father’s car?” she says, not looking up. Her pencil continues on its resolute path, never wavering.
“You got it,” says Alex.
Downstairs, Rhys Powell is waiting in his car, the top down, tapping his fingers along the back of the passenger seat. As Alex shuts the front door behind her, he looks up and grins. He’s got one of those quick, dangerous ones-the ones Alex always has a hard time resisting and an easy time imitating. “Alexandra,” he says, winking and leaning across the seat to throw the door open.
“Thanks for opening the door for me, you gentleman you,” says Alex, sliding into the seat.
“Oh, I certainly know how to treat a lady,” says Rhys, and to prove it he kisses her there, in the middle of a semi-populated street, at ten o’clock at night. She doesn’t need to be clairvoyant to know that old Mrs. Johnston in 1A is twitching at her living room curtains right now, ready to tell Alex’s parents about all the terrible things their daughter got up to while they were out of town for a funeral.
Faintly, Alex hears Scott’s screaming fade and then die. Rachel has already earned her free car repair, in Alex’s opinion, and she raises a very dirty eyebrow and nods her head down the street. “I think you might be all talk, Powell.”
(Alex is, indeed, out of the dress by midnight. By twelve-thirty, half of the trees by the reservoir have burned down, and Rhys Powell is being carried on a stretcher towards an ambulance parked by the road. Wrapped in a thick wool blanket, Alex is handcuffed and stowed in the back of a police car and as they drive back to the station, Alex cries silently and the tears make black lines down her face.)
~
Alex survives the group house by punching another girl in the face her first day there. “I am not a square, bitch,” she says, and a scandalized-looking nurse comes to guide Alex back to the quiet room, where the girls are supposed to sit and practice embroidery to soothing waltzes on the wireless.
“What are you looking at?” she asks the room at large. Alex knows what she looks like-slight, blonde, big eyes and cupid-bow lips-and she knows, like she knew that she was going to take Rhys Powell’s virginity and that Rusty Weirs’ carburetor was shot just from the sound of him driving down the street and how to steal a pack of cigarettes, that this group home business is not going to work out.
“N-nothing,” stammers a thickset brunette with glasses (Alex, from the doorway, gives her a once-over and critically diagnoses her with faint nerves-Alex’s Aunt Wanda has those, so she knows the type) as she stabs at a doily with a crochet needle.
“Good,” says Alex, and to make a point, she licks the blood off her knuckles. It tastes a little salty, like her mother’s Christmas pot roast.
(Word gets around that Alex Summers is crazy, and Alex only has to get in two more fights before people start listening and stop trying to cut her hair off as she sleeps. The second fight, some princess from the South Bronx tries to drown her in the pond behind the group home, and Alex evaporates most of the water in the pond and almost blasts the girl’s arm off. After that, they keep Alex in isolation. She can tell that they’re counting down the days until she turns eighteen and they can turn her over to the women’s prison in Buffalo.)
~
“There are some gentlemen here to see you,” says the head nurse, throwing open the door to Alex’s room. At the desk, Alex is sitting with her bare feet propped against the tabletop, chewing on her thumbnail idly and trying to sketch the innards of Rhys Powell’s 1950 Coronet from memory. She’s given up on style and panache now that no one is around to see her posture, so she’s wearing a ratty cardigan and an old housedress. Her legs are bare and smooth, dappled with freckles from where she tans them by draping them out between the bars on her window.
“Gentlemen?” says Alex. Her parents haven’t been to see her-hardly shocking-and Rhys Powell’s brother came by once, over a year ago, to tell her when Rhys got out of the hospital. Apparently he hadn’t just been playing at a bad boy, and really was still interested in Alex even after she almost killed him (probably something to do with Alex sucking him off against the hood of his Coronet).
Behind the head nurse file in two tall, kind of intensely attractive men that Alex wouldn’t call gentlemen by any stretch of the imagination, except maybe the smaller one. She recognizes the look of the taller one-a look Rhys Powell only wished he had-and she leans back in her chair, letting the muscles in her calves tense as the gingham of her housedress falls back to show a bit of her thighs.
Because of Alex’s lack of what her mother calls shame, her thighs are just as tan and freckled as the rest of her legs. “Hi,” she says. She loses interest in the sketch, and lets it fall back onto the table.
“We were hoping to talk to you,” says the shorter one.
“Are you done with playing delinquent?” finishes the taller one, with an eyebrow so eloquent Alex is immediately stabbed with envy.
“Oh honey,” she says, swinging her legs around and crossing them, thigh over thigh, so she can rest her elbow on her knee and her chin on her fist, “I never play.”
She finishes strong, with a wink.
We are offering you an opportunity to control your gift, says the shorter one. Alex, to her credit, does not immediately panic about a small British man’s voice in her head. Personally, she thinks calling the blasts a gift is a bit of a stretch, but the Brit reeks of money-like, actually smells deeply and thoroughly of cash, Alex has never been in a room with a man this wealthy before-and Alex is probably going to kill someone if they don’t let her out of this room eventually (and she will probably accidentally kill someone when they do, so).
(“What do you drive?” she asks the taller one. His grin is hard and angry and bright from his teeth, and Alex’s fingers itch to feel the heat of the metal, the rigidity of the frame, smell the slickness of the oil and that familiar scent like burning copper, the way she smells after a blast.)
~
Once Alex packs all of her belongings-a couple of dresses, some shirts, the coveralls she used to wear at her uncle’s garage, and three lopsided needlepoint squares that say, respectively, home is where the heart is, a woman’s love is in her home, and children and gardens both grow through affection, which Alex plans on pinning to a cement wall and blasting as soon as possible-she and the two gents pile into a taxi that is loitering on the curb outside of the home.
“Hey,” says the driver as she throws herself into the back seat. “You joining the FBI, too?”
“Apparently,” says Alex. “They needed a pretty face, I thought why the hell not.”
He grins at her and offers a hand through the divider. Outside, her new bosses are listening, as the head nurse no doubt outlines the many facets of Alex’s unsociable personality and how she shouldn’t be allowed near fire, gas, hoses, or chickens, all of which have resulted in the past in someone almost dying. “Armando,” he says, “but everyone calls me Darwin.”
“Alex,” she says, and shakes his hand. In his seat, he has perfect posture, the sort of posture Alex imagines her mother wanted her to have, when Alex was little and her dad still had a job and things like ballet lessons were actual possibilities instead of foreign dreams.
The British one must be saying something clever, because the head nurse’s face is beginning to turn purple. Instinctively, Alex curls up a little in her seat. “So, how long have they been fucking, you think?”
She looks back at Darwin to see him smirking a little at her, the smoothness of his skin broken by how bright his teeth shine. “Doubt they’ve even started. The English are all about please and thank you.” Thinking about this, Alex looks at the figures, how relaxed their shoulders are in the face of the head nurse yelling-even through the shut car door, Alex recognizes the beginning of that girl is a menace to the world and shouldn’t be allowed to walk out with normal people, I don’t care what the government or the Constitution says, which is old news after two years-and the way they tilt a little towards each other.
“I’m not sitting back here with that,” she says, and she gets out and joins Darwin in the front seat. “How long have you been driving with them?”
“Two days,” he says, and he adds, “if you don’t want me to ask about your powers, I won’t. You don’t need to distract me.”
“Oh,” says Alex, and she blinks at him and feels minutely grateful that she doesn’t have to recoup with something clever about the sexual tension between (Charlie and…Ulric?) that got old three minutes after sharing a room with them. “Great, man.” Because she’s being nice, she gives him a light punch in the shoulder, like she used to with her cousins at the garage, and she promptly falls asleep.
(She wakes up at nine or ten that night, blinking at the lights on the dashboard and the deep shadows of Darwin’s face as he looks straight ahead. He drives with steadiness that she envies, a thoroughness that means he probably changes his oil regularly and vacuums the upholstery and gets it waxed. He drives a cab, but he loves it, and Alex likes people who appreciate their cars.)
~
What is very immediately clear to Alex is that Hank McCoy has never broken a rule in his life. His entire existence bleeds lame and straight-laced and home before ten. Alex would sort of be impressed, if she hadn’t gone to high school with fifty other people just like him. She sort of wants to sleep with him, just to see if he’ll change, if she can smudge engine grease onto the smooth whiteness of his life.
“What can you do?” she asks, mostly rudely, and Angel gives her a look and Alex gives it right back because she sure as hell didn’t knock out three of Prezzie Pond’s teeth to get stared down by someone five steps out of the group home.
“Um, well,” says Hank, and cautiously he slides off his shoes, and then his socks, flexing the muscles in his calves underneath the starchy primness of his pants, and then with a quick, soundless jump he is upside-down, swinging from the overhead lamp.
Alex tries not to stare and locks her teeth. From this angle, the shadows across Hank McCoy’s face are dramatic and full, and his cheekbones are sharp under his eyes. His glasses are hanging precariously to his nose, sort of adorable and bumbling.
Hank McCoy is not Alex’s type.
“I’m impressed,” she says, and she is-at the amount of disdain she manages to fit into a single word. Looking slightly less pleased is Raven, who has already taken in Geeks McCoy as her personal charity case.
Alex decides, as Hank blushes and fumbles his dismount and Raven politely claps and Sean looks incredibly uninterested in everything, that she is breaking out her hot pants tomorrow.
But first. She gives Angel the new eyebrow, the one she’s been practicing since she drove back from outside Rochester with Erik, Charles, and Darwin and had plenty of time to observe Erik roll it out. Angel gently bits her lip and then smiles, a smile that says Do you think you can handle me? Alex already knows the answer to that one.
(After Erik and Charles yell at them for what is probably twelve years, they retreat meekly to their rooms and Alex picks the lock on Angel’s door and they spend the night playing Alex’s favorite game. They do so with far more delicacy and fewer grunts, which Alex decides is probably the best variation she’s come across so far.)
~
It isn’t that Alex was in love with Angel-because she wasn’t-and it isn’t that she’s not knocked all over the place by Darwin-because she is-but Alex is not the sort of woman that Raven is. She can see that this confuses Raven, who has always been surrounded by Charles (who is kind of an ass), and that Raven wants a female friend really badly; especially the kind that isn’t guarding precious virginity and has a fast hand with eyeliner.
Raven drops hints about it, offers magazines, compliments Alex’s favorite shirt. She wants to tell someone that she thinks Hank is cute, she wants to giggle about the constipated look on Charles’ face when Raven takes on the shape of a man and hits on women in bars, she wants to share shoes. Mostly, she wants to talk about what happened with Shaw.
It is more than just that Alex and Raven don’t share a shoe size and Alex doesn’t want to be Raven’s friend. Alex is not really equipped to be anyone’s friend, because Alex is an asshole and a slut and she likes car engines better than she likes people.
As a reward to herself for practicing all morning on increasingly mocking dummies, Alex attacks the garage after lunch and immediately begins to take apart the nearest engine. After a while, the singed smell of her hair begins to melt into the smell of the garage in the summer heat, and she strips off the top of her coverall and ties the sleeves around her waist. When her hair gets in the way, she knots it in a handkerchief and continues, through the afternoon and into the evening.
“You liked Angel,” Raven says, startling Alex. With a short curse, Alex drops her wrench and it cracks into two pieces. From the darkness, Raven steps forward, and as she does so her skin flickers from pink to brown in a thick flutter of blue. She gets a lot about Angel right, even the way that she walks, but she doesn’t sounds right; she doesn’t have Angel’s smirk and loose-lidded eyes.
“Jesus,” says Alex, “Raven, seriously, don’t do that.”
“You don’t talk to anyone,” says Angel-Raven, standing in a classic Raven pose with her legs firmly planted in an upside-down V, her hands on her hips. “Except Hank, when you’re calling him a monkey.”
“He looks like a monkey,” murmurs Alex rebelliously, and then she says, “Raven, turn back to yourself. I’m going to explain something to you, okay?” and she waits until Raven has shifted into her usual self, blonde and tall, and then she explains in a patient voice, “I was having sex with Angel, Raven, and I don’t think you’re offering that.”
She can’t help the amusement in her voice, and Raven’s slightly scandalized look almost induces giggles. “You what?” says Raven.
Alex resists the temptation to point out that Raven must have some idea of what Alex is talking about, as she shares a house with Erik and Charles, but Alex wouldn’t want anyone connecting Scott and sex even in the hypothetical, let alone saying your brother is the least subtle person on the planet, I hear him sneaking into Erik’s room almost every night, so she stays her tongue.
Because she is being nice about Raven’s brother’s illicit affair, she turns back to her engine and lets silence return to the garage. After a while, Raven curls up at a bench and watches. She is getting better at not talking.
(That night, Alex sneaks into Hank’s lab and steals a replacement wrench. Because she’s filled up her good deeds quota of the week with her discussion with Raven, she steals a few fiddly-looking tools to be a bitch and then something electronic and impressive that she thinks might actually be useful with a pair of hoses that are acting up.)
~
Usually Charles oversees her practices, but one morning he’s caught up in trying to convince Hank to practice some limbering stretches in the gymnasium and he sends her an apologetic thought, Erik will help you today.
When she meets him by the bunker, Erik looks like he woke up, went for a 5K run, ate an entire pig, and then kicked some school children. It’s nine in the morning. Alex looks like she hasn’t slept in four days, which is because she hasn’t.
“Hey,” she says, voice wary but doing her best to hide it. Alex has known a lot of men like Erik, and she wouldn’t really trust any of them around her blasts.
“What does Charles have you doing?” Erik asks. He flicks a look at the pile of charred dummies by the door to the bunker, and raises an eyebrow. “Something useless and placating, then?”
Alex shrugs and stuffs her hands into the pockets of her sweats. “He doesn’t want me accidentally frying someone.”
Erik looks at her critically, as though he is peeling away the parts of her that irritate him and attempting to find something useful underneath. The last time she’d seen him looking like that, he’d pushed Sean off of a satellite dish twenty minutes later. Alex takes an unconscious step back. Regretting the movement immediately, she firms her stance, spreads her legs and takes her hands out of her pockets, to make up for it a little.
“We’ll do it his way, then,” murmurs Erik. Whatever expression he makes then, it sure as hell doesn’t look like any smile Alex has ever seen. It is thick and bares his teeth and Alex remembers years of being told not to talk to strange men, before she took up waitressing and car repair and human interaction became moderately required.
Alex spends thirty fruitless minutes aiming her blasts at dummies before Erik gets frustrated, pulls a gun from the waistband of his pants, and examines the contents of the chamber. “This isn’t working,” he says, and Jesus fuck, Alex knew he was a psychopath, she’d been able to smell them ever since Mr. Johnston went crazy and killed all the cats in their neighborhood with a knife he’d lifted off a dead Nazi in Algiers.
The last time Alex had been in the same room with a gun, it’d been at the diner where she worked nights and weekends for a dollar an hour, plus tips. She’d spent the entire eleven-minute experience with her face pressed against linoleum, trying to calm the hot flutters in her chest that usually preceded a blast.
This time, Alex picks up a dummy leg and aims for the back of Erik’s head. She’s gone for a piece where the metal bolts have fallen out, and the plaster connects before he has time to notice she’s within range. He’s swearing in German and trying to recover as Alex hits him again, this time in the stomach. They’re out in the hallway, and Alex doesn’t want to risk a blast and have it slice through half the mansion.
Erik is a secret agent or whatever, so he gets a grasp on the situation-and the dummy leg-fairly quickly. He disarms her almost too fast, and pins her to the floor with his knee on her chest, the gun’s safety on, and he shows her the gun slowly before putting it on the floor and pushing it away. “I’m impressed, Summers,” he says. “Calm down, I wasn’t going to shoot you.”
“Says the psychopath,” Alex points out in a slightly high-pitched voice.
“Takes one to know one,” he says cheerfully. He looks a little happy, now that she’s given him some bruises from the dummy leg and a moderate amount of degree of resistance. “I was worried Charles was blunting your edges.”
“Oh please,” says Alex, “where I grew up gives you edges that don’t blunt.” She tries to make it sound feisty; she can’t get enough air in her lungs to manage it. “Get off,” and she scissor-kicks her legs around his stabilizing ankle and tries to knee him in the balls as she throws his weight to her left. She gets him off, but her knee misses.
The rush of air back into her lungs is incredibly nice; she scrambles into a crouch and then scuttles into a corner to protect her back as she reacquaints herself with breathing. Erik is kneeling on the floor twelve feet away, rubbing his shoulder with a rueful grimace. “You might actually be useful in the field, Summers,” he says.
“I’m not Geeks McCoy,” she snaps. “You’re fucking right I’m useful.” Any bravado in the statement is murdered by her gasping breaths. She glares at him to get her point across, and he smirks at her faintly. Erik scares her-of course he scares her, he walks like a mob boss and he can bend metal with his mind-but Alex has been a dumb fuck of a teenager and she’s been in bad situations with people who scare her before.
(It takes her two days to realize it, but apparently Erik likes her now. He especially seems to like her after she yells at Sean and Hank for leaving the milk out on the counter-“Milk goes bad, I realize Sean was born with half a brain and can be excused for not knowing that, but Jesus fuck you went to Harvard at ten, bozo”-and he shows it in that he kidnaps her one afternoon from the garage and teaches her how to clean, load, and shoot his gun.)
~
There are many things about Charles that annoy Alex, not limited to his personality, his face, and his ability to rummage her mind whenever he feels like it-but what Alex dislikes the most is that Charles always wants to talk. He is remarkably like his sister in that respect, except Alex has been training Raven in the art of silence and Charles still has no idea what the word means.
“I would be worried about an eighteen-year-old taking apart the contents of my garage, but they all seem to run better when you’re done,” Charles comments mildly as he strolls in, hands in the pockets of his slacks, wearing a sweater that makes him look like Alex’s grandfather. For a brief moment, Alex appreciates that her being a girl doesn’t come into play, and then she realizes that was probably deliberate and then, like she usually does, she gets a little angry and imagines herself holding a large sign that says GET THE HELL OUT OF MY HEAD in thick, black print.
Charles chuckles. He does that a lot, and it also rubs Alex the wrong way. She appreciates Charles when they’re training, because just like silence and boundaries he also doesn’t understand limits, and he refuses to let Alex accept that she has no control over her power. That doesn’t mean she has to like Charles out in the garage at four in the morning, when she is trying to drown herself in engine grease.
“I know, on occasion, you must think of them,” he says to her, running a finger lightly along the curve of the Model-T Ford that Alex is examining with something akin to devotion. It’s his car, but the casual way he treats it makes her want to cut his finger off.
“Who?” she says, deliberately not considering the many nuances of his question.
“Scott,” he says. “Your parents.” Out of the many potential answers to her question (Darwin, Angel, the sanctity of her own mind) this is perhaps the most unexpected, if simply because Alex doesn’t think about her family. It only comes up vaguely, when Alex gets lost and finds a whole wing of the damn mansion that is dusty and out of use, and she can’t avoid the helpless anger at how casually Charles and Raven live, how they have never dropped out of school to pick up two extra jobs, that they have never skipped dinner to feed their little brother. She does not consider Scott or her parents in anything other than an abstract, nameless fashion.
“Scott’s a brat,” she finally says, examining the engine of the Ford, the contrast of the size of the engine against the delicacy of its parts. It reminds her of Hank, a little, with his big feet and his moronically low tolerance for her insults. Because she doesn’t expect Charles to have left her mind, she unwraps a small nugget of information; the two years she spent locked up, the four letters that went unanswered, the seventeen phone calls that got mysteriously disconnected, before Alex wised the hell up and stopped trying.
“They are your family,” Charles reminds her gently. Alex’s arms are stiff as she props herself up, and she doesn’t want to cry. That would be dumb, Alex hasn’t cried since she was a child.
“I thought you’re my family,” she snaps.
Charles laughs again, softly, and Alex does not even try to hide her quick mental image of how satisfyingly Charles’ patrician nose would snap if Alex hit him. “We are indeed, all of us. But perhaps it would not be so bad, to send your parents a letter and tell them that you are safe? They worry.”
“They always worry,” says Alex. “Mostly about whether or not their crazy daughter has snapped and killed someone.” She almost has, five times now, so perhaps they are a little justified.
Charles has this vaguely expectant look on her face, like he is waiting for Alex to finish connecting the dots rather than shove the whole parcel into her mind like Raven says he used to, when she was trying to learn her multiplication tables. Alex may not have finished high school, but she’s got more of a certain kind of smarts than anyone else here (with the obvious exception of Erik).
“You think Scott is going to be like this?” she finally says, her voice more startled than she had thought. Wow, poor Scott. Her parents are going to murder him, if he turns out just as troublesome as Alex. He’s only eight now, but Alex’s blasts manifested themselves when she hit puberty. It’ll be another two or three years, but a second child might be the last straw-Alex’s parents will probably plead abject poverty, turn him over to a home, and get the hell out of Dodge.
“What, do you want my permission to keep tabs on my brother?” she asks, meeting Charles’ eyes because she hasn’t seen Scott in two years, and he was always a brat. Alex has no patience for brats, spoiled or otherwise.
“I thought you might like to do it yourself,” says Charles, and, with that disturbing bit of information imparted, off he goes. Alex actually waits for him to get out of the range of her arm before she lobs the wrench she stole from Hank at a wall. Alex played softball in high school, before she had to drop out, and the wrench shatters against the cement with a satisfyingly loud noise.
(When she sneaks into Hank’s lab to steal another one, he is there, working on something, and he stares at her, probably at the bareness of her shoulders where they bunch against her stained white undershirt, and the dirty handkerchief she has knotted her hair up in, and she stares back, and he hands her the wrench without a single word.)
~
Charles has very few rules about living in the mansion, but the ones he does have he refuses to budge on. Meal times are team times. No one is allowed in his father’s study. For god’s sake, Alex, wash your hands before you eat.
Alex learns, after breakfasts, lunches, and dinners of full observation that Erik dislikes Hank almost as much as Alex does. She thinks they might even have the same reason: Hank is a moron. Sean knows this, too, especially after being knocked out of that window and picking leaves out of his hair for twenty minutes, but he manifests this knowledge in not allowing Hank near his food, his hair, or his clothing. Alex manifests it in actually calling Hank out on being an idiot. Erik manifests it in never talking to Hank, ever.
At dinner, Hank is talking to Raven about his cure. “Hank,” Alex interrupts when Raven looks uncomfortable and Erik looks murderous and Sean is tired and falling asleep in his peas, “shut up. I do not give a shit about your self-esteem problems.”
Hank stares at Alex. It is as though no one has ever been mean to him before. Alex would almost feel guilty, except-nope, actually, she doesn’t. “Alex,” says Charles in a lightly warning voice.
She thinks loudly, EVERYONE AT THIS TABLE LOOKS EXACTLY HOW THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO LOOK. She says, “Raven, you wanted to paint my nails or something, right? Let’s go do that now.” She immediately pushes her chair back and stands up.
Sean jerks back from his peas and blinks at her, and her empty plate, before muttering, “Bed time?” and makes a half-hearted move to stand before falling back into his chair. Hank is still gaping at her, uncomprehending. Alex puts all of her thoughts, most of which consist of, you are a moron, and your feet look fine, and do you have no idea how fragile the psyche of a teenage girl is, how did you survive into adulthood, into her eyes and she glares at him.
“Come on, Raven,” she says, and as they leave she hesitantly loops her arm through Raven’s and thinks of the girls on TV and says with them in mind, “I think you should paint your nails red, like your hair.” Raven is blonde right now, but she doesn’t have to be, and Alex wants her to know that.
(As Alex slips from Raven’s room that night, she finds Erik in the hallway looking supremely suave and not at all like he’s been caught sneaking into Charles’ room at one in the morning. They look at each other for a while, and Erik nods slightly. It is the nod that breaks her, and she whispers at him tightly, “I am an eighteen-year-old girl with anger issues, I am in no position to be the most emotionally mature person in this house. So step up your game,” before she stomps off to the garage.)
~
“So listen,” half-shouts Sean over the roar of the plane. “Are you, I don’t know, in love with Hank or whatever?”
Alex stares at Sean for what feels like a long time. “What.”
“Because I know you were dating Angel for a couple seconds, until she turned evil,” Sean continues blithely, as though they’re back in the kitchen at the mansion having colas before an afternoon of getting tortured and pushed off of the tops of buildings by Erik and Charles, “but now you seem to be in love with Hank. And I didn’t know if you wanted to talk about it before we die.”
Next to Alex, Erik is doing a very good job of looking like he is bored out of his fucking mind. He probably is, because he and Charles must have a very satisfying relationship judging by the amount of time they spend “playing chess.”
“No,” Alex says, and then she shouts, “No,” because the plane engines are getting louder. “Who the hell do you think I am? In love? Jesus.”
Next to Sean, Charles is grinning. Of course he’s grinning. Alex bares her teeth at him, and turns back to Sean, who appears to be having a mental breakdown while contemplating their imminent death at the hands of (a) the US military, (b) the Soviet military, and/or (c) Sebastian Shaw. “Why do you think that?”
“You named him Beast,” says Sean.
A few seconds of blissful silence descend, as Alex waits for Sean to give some other reason for his sudden brilliant deduction of Alex having lost her brain and become desirous of going steady with Hank. It takes her a while to realize this is it.
Taking her life into her own hands, Alex unbuckles the shoulder harness, leans across the aisle, and punches Sean in the arm. She then leans back and rebuckles her shoulder harness. “Get a life, June Cleaver,” she says, and he sticks his tongue out at her and she mimes cutting it off.
(At forty-thousand feet, Charles’ mind-voice tentatively offers, It is a long flight, Alex, we can talk about this, if you want to, and Alex imagines a smooth white space and then thinks into it, Have dirty mind-sex with Erik if you’re bored, Professor, neither of us is drunk enough for this, and she feels his quiet laughter and then he retreats.)
~
Exactly two weeks after the doctors let the Professor out of the hospital and he sends Moira back to DC, Hank is sitting on Alex’s bed when she gets back from a run. None of his old clothes fit him anymore, but the Professor’s stepfather was a large man and most of his things at least cover the important bits.
“Hank? Jesus,” says Alex, as she relaxes from her immediate defensive pose to hang limply against the doorframe. “What are you doing here?” She does her best to not completely ignore him as she strips off her sweatshirt and wipes her face with a towel. Underneath the sweatshirt she’s wearing her usual undershirt, the ribbing damp with sweat and clinging along her shoulder blades and to her stomach. She scrubs half-heartedly at her shoulders and gives up on looking clean for whatever heart-to-heart Hank’s decided they’re going to have.
“You used to hate me,” Hank says, “and I guess I was wondering why you don’t anymore.”
He sounds so pathetically sad, Alex actually physically cannot handle it and she slumps onto her desk chair. “Oh, for the love of-” she mutters as she buries her head in her hands and wonders when this became her life. She ponders for a second if this is going to be a word-for-word reproduction of that conversation about Angel, ages ago, and then she shuts down that line of thinking as fast as she can without giving herself an aneurism.
“We’re going to be the only ones who remember,” Hank says, his voice remarkably gentle, even in his new low baritone. “You and Sean and I. None of the new students are going to know that the Professor used to walk.” He doesn’t need to tell her all the other things the new children won’t know-about Erik, about Raven. About Angel and Darwin. (About Shaw.)
Nice words are not really Alex’s forte. “Um,” she tries anyway, “I never hated you. I was just kind of sick of you complaining about your feet all the time.”
Behind his glasses, Hank blinks at Alex. “Complaining about my feet,” he echoes, a little incredulously.
“Yeah,” she says, and gives in to the urge to fidget a little. “Have you ever met a teenage girl? Raven was going crazy, thinking that she was ugly when she was blue. And as I’m the only girl, she came to me to cry about it. All the time.”
After a couple seconds, Hank starts to laugh. He might even begin to cry after a while, Alex can’t really tell. She pats him on the shoulder, and then his fur feels really soft and she tries hugging him, which isn’t something she’s done to anyone since Scott was four. Apparently it’s like riding a bike, though, and she blusters her way through it.
Hank’s claws are sharp, and they catch in bits of fabric like a cat’s would, but like a cat he can curl them against his fingers and be very gentle. Alex knows this mostly from observation of his fussing with the new pad on her suit, but also because as Hank kisses her right now, he lets a finger wind through the edge of her ponytail, and the hair sifts through easily.
Alex waits two seconds, decides she likes kissing Hank, and climbs into his lap. He is warm and soft and his tongue is pebbled (also like a cat’s, she notices). He kisses her awkwardly but thoroughly, and nips at her bottom lip. “Alex,” he murmurs, and he rips through the tie holding up her hair with a fleck of one of his claws. Her hair is damp from the morning humidity, and it falls like a curtain, heavy and musky, across her shoulders and down her back.
Carefully, Alex lines her hands against the planes of Hank’s face. The wide-eyed terror with which he looks at her indicates that most of the particulars haven’t changed-Hank is still a moron, he’s probably going to leave her right now and go make something in the lab that will make Sean more uncomfortable with combat exercises, and he is still going to leave food on his plate at dinner. Apparently, however, he wants to kiss her, now. Alex takes a moment to consider how this makes her feel.
She lasts a microsecond of examining her feelings. “Okay,” she tells him. “But just so we’re clear-you’ve learned your lesson about injecting yourself with shit you made up in a beaker in your basement, right?”
Hank’s face clearly indicates he has not. “Sure,” he says, and using a set of muscles Alex didn’t even know he had, he flips them over and pins Alex to her bed. She lets him.
(For now.)
Summary: Alex Summers has a problem with authority.
Notes: Part of my tremendously overgrown AU genderswap collection-in-the-making. LADIES, LADIES, EVERYWHERE. I made Scott younger than Alex for lots of reasons, none of which have any bearing on anything.
~
Alex Summers has a little brother. He is the singularly most annoying individual she has ever had the misfortune to share air space with.
“Listen, twerp,” she says, sixteen and angry and trying to fit into her mother’s red party dress, “if you don’t scram I’m going to hang you out of the window by your toes.” Her hair is pulled into a high, tight ponytail and the bottom curls against the nape of her neck. The sweetheart neckline of the dress plunges into a teeny tiny waist and then flares out with reckless drama. Alex has every intention of being out of this dress by midnight.
“I’m gonna tell on you,” whines Scott from where he is kicking his heels against her bed. With a quick intake of breath, Alex manages the final few buttons and the dress is on. She gives it a twirl and winks at herself in the mirror. She looks fantastic. She looks like a heart attack on legs.
With a breathy screech Scott throws himself back onto her bed as she carefully lines her eyes into full, dark swoops. “Not fair not fair not fair,” he yells. As far as six-year-olds go, he is not very creative. Alex successfully finishes her eyeliner and uncaps her mother’s reddest, brightest lipstick. She may not be destined for Radcliffe like Brains McQueen and she may not have a chest like Tits Klein or money like Lulu Richardson, but Alex knows when subtlety is best thrown out the window, and baby that time is now.
Ignoring Scott as he descends into a full-fledged tantrum, Alex breezes down the hall to where Rachel Houston is sitting on her parents’ couch, legs crossed demurely at her ankles. Rachel is wearing a cardigan and a high-necked blouse with her skirt and is doing her algebra homework where the textbook is perched on her lap, disdain for the sags in the sofa and the ratty carpet evident in her entire body. “And you’ll fix my father’s car?” she says, not looking up. Her pencil continues on its resolute path, never wavering.
“You got it,” says Alex.
Downstairs, Rhys Powell is waiting in his car, the top down, tapping his fingers along the back of the passenger seat. As Alex shuts the front door behind her, he looks up and grins. He’s got one of those quick, dangerous ones-the ones Alex always has a hard time resisting and an easy time imitating. “Alexandra,” he says, winking and leaning across the seat to throw the door open.
“Thanks for opening the door for me, you gentleman you,” says Alex, sliding into the seat.
“Oh, I certainly know how to treat a lady,” says Rhys, and to prove it he kisses her there, in the middle of a semi-populated street, at ten o’clock at night. She doesn’t need to be clairvoyant to know that old Mrs. Johnston in 1A is twitching at her living room curtains right now, ready to tell Alex’s parents about all the terrible things their daughter got up to while they were out of town for a funeral.
Faintly, Alex hears Scott’s screaming fade and then die. Rachel has already earned her free car repair, in Alex’s opinion, and she raises a very dirty eyebrow and nods her head down the street. “I think you might be all talk, Powell.”
(Alex is, indeed, out of the dress by midnight. By twelve-thirty, half of the trees by the reservoir have burned down, and Rhys Powell is being carried on a stretcher towards an ambulance parked by the road. Wrapped in a thick wool blanket, Alex is handcuffed and stowed in the back of a police car and as they drive back to the station, Alex cries silently and the tears make black lines down her face.)
~
Alex survives the group house by punching another girl in the face her first day there. “I am not a square, bitch,” she says, and a scandalized-looking nurse comes to guide Alex back to the quiet room, where the girls are supposed to sit and practice embroidery to soothing waltzes on the wireless.
“What are you looking at?” she asks the room at large. Alex knows what she looks like-slight, blonde, big eyes and cupid-bow lips-and she knows, like she knew that she was going to take Rhys Powell’s virginity and that Rusty Weirs’ carburetor was shot just from the sound of him driving down the street and how to steal a pack of cigarettes, that this group home business is not going to work out.
“N-nothing,” stammers a thickset brunette with glasses (Alex, from the doorway, gives her a once-over and critically diagnoses her with faint nerves-Alex’s Aunt Wanda has those, so she knows the type) as she stabs at a doily with a crochet needle.
“Good,” says Alex, and to make a point, she licks the blood off her knuckles. It tastes a little salty, like her mother’s Christmas pot roast.
(Word gets around that Alex Summers is crazy, and Alex only has to get in two more fights before people start listening and stop trying to cut her hair off as she sleeps. The second fight, some princess from the South Bronx tries to drown her in the pond behind the group home, and Alex evaporates most of the water in the pond and almost blasts the girl’s arm off. After that, they keep Alex in isolation. She can tell that they’re counting down the days until she turns eighteen and they can turn her over to the women’s prison in Buffalo.)
~
“There are some gentlemen here to see you,” says the head nurse, throwing open the door to Alex’s room. At the desk, Alex is sitting with her bare feet propped against the tabletop, chewing on her thumbnail idly and trying to sketch the innards of Rhys Powell’s 1950 Coronet from memory. She’s given up on style and panache now that no one is around to see her posture, so she’s wearing a ratty cardigan and an old housedress. Her legs are bare and smooth, dappled with freckles from where she tans them by draping them out between the bars on her window.
“Gentlemen?” says Alex. Her parents haven’t been to see her-hardly shocking-and Rhys Powell’s brother came by once, over a year ago, to tell her when Rhys got out of the hospital. Apparently he hadn’t just been playing at a bad boy, and really was still interested in Alex even after she almost killed him (probably something to do with Alex sucking him off against the hood of his Coronet).
Behind the head nurse file in two tall, kind of intensely attractive men that Alex wouldn’t call gentlemen by any stretch of the imagination, except maybe the smaller one. She recognizes the look of the taller one-a look Rhys Powell only wished he had-and she leans back in her chair, letting the muscles in her calves tense as the gingham of her housedress falls back to show a bit of her thighs.
Because of Alex’s lack of what her mother calls shame, her thighs are just as tan and freckled as the rest of her legs. “Hi,” she says. She loses interest in the sketch, and lets it fall back onto the table.
“We were hoping to talk to you,” says the shorter one.
“Are you done with playing delinquent?” finishes the taller one, with an eyebrow so eloquent Alex is immediately stabbed with envy.
“Oh honey,” she says, swinging her legs around and crossing them, thigh over thigh, so she can rest her elbow on her knee and her chin on her fist, “I never play.”
She finishes strong, with a wink.
We are offering you an opportunity to control your gift, says the shorter one. Alex, to her credit, does not immediately panic about a small British man’s voice in her head. Personally, she thinks calling the blasts a gift is a bit of a stretch, but the Brit reeks of money-like, actually smells deeply and thoroughly of cash, Alex has never been in a room with a man this wealthy before-and Alex is probably going to kill someone if they don’t let her out of this room eventually (and she will probably accidentally kill someone when they do, so).
(“What do you drive?” she asks the taller one. His grin is hard and angry and bright from his teeth, and Alex’s fingers itch to feel the heat of the metal, the rigidity of the frame, smell the slickness of the oil and that familiar scent like burning copper, the way she smells after a blast.)
~
Once Alex packs all of her belongings-a couple of dresses, some shirts, the coveralls she used to wear at her uncle’s garage, and three lopsided needlepoint squares that say, respectively, home is where the heart is, a woman’s love is in her home, and children and gardens both grow through affection, which Alex plans on pinning to a cement wall and blasting as soon as possible-she and the two gents pile into a taxi that is loitering on the curb outside of the home.
“Hey,” says the driver as she throws herself into the back seat. “You joining the FBI, too?”
“Apparently,” says Alex. “They needed a pretty face, I thought why the hell not.”
He grins at her and offers a hand through the divider. Outside, her new bosses are listening, as the head nurse no doubt outlines the many facets of Alex’s unsociable personality and how she shouldn’t be allowed near fire, gas, hoses, or chickens, all of which have resulted in the past in someone almost dying. “Armando,” he says, “but everyone calls me Darwin.”
“Alex,” she says, and shakes his hand. In his seat, he has perfect posture, the sort of posture Alex imagines her mother wanted her to have, when Alex was little and her dad still had a job and things like ballet lessons were actual possibilities instead of foreign dreams.
The British one must be saying something clever, because the head nurse’s face is beginning to turn purple. Instinctively, Alex curls up a little in her seat. “So, how long have they been fucking, you think?”
She looks back at Darwin to see him smirking a little at her, the smoothness of his skin broken by how bright his teeth shine. “Doubt they’ve even started. The English are all about please and thank you.” Thinking about this, Alex looks at the figures, how relaxed their shoulders are in the face of the head nurse yelling-even through the shut car door, Alex recognizes the beginning of that girl is a menace to the world and shouldn’t be allowed to walk out with normal people, I don’t care what the government or the Constitution says, which is old news after two years-and the way they tilt a little towards each other.
“I’m not sitting back here with that,” she says, and she gets out and joins Darwin in the front seat. “How long have you been driving with them?”
“Two days,” he says, and he adds, “if you don’t want me to ask about your powers, I won’t. You don’t need to distract me.”
“Oh,” says Alex, and she blinks at him and feels minutely grateful that she doesn’t have to recoup with something clever about the sexual tension between (Charlie and…Ulric?) that got old three minutes after sharing a room with them. “Great, man.” Because she’s being nice, she gives him a light punch in the shoulder, like she used to with her cousins at the garage, and she promptly falls asleep.
(She wakes up at nine or ten that night, blinking at the lights on the dashboard and the deep shadows of Darwin’s face as he looks straight ahead. He drives with steadiness that she envies, a thoroughness that means he probably changes his oil regularly and vacuums the upholstery and gets it waxed. He drives a cab, but he loves it, and Alex likes people who appreciate their cars.)
~
What is very immediately clear to Alex is that Hank McCoy has never broken a rule in his life. His entire existence bleeds lame and straight-laced and home before ten. Alex would sort of be impressed, if she hadn’t gone to high school with fifty other people just like him. She sort of wants to sleep with him, just to see if he’ll change, if she can smudge engine grease onto the smooth whiteness of his life.
“What can you do?” she asks, mostly rudely, and Angel gives her a look and Alex gives it right back because she sure as hell didn’t knock out three of Prezzie Pond’s teeth to get stared down by someone five steps out of the group home.
“Um, well,” says Hank, and cautiously he slides off his shoes, and then his socks, flexing the muscles in his calves underneath the starchy primness of his pants, and then with a quick, soundless jump he is upside-down, swinging from the overhead lamp.
Alex tries not to stare and locks her teeth. From this angle, the shadows across Hank McCoy’s face are dramatic and full, and his cheekbones are sharp under his eyes. His glasses are hanging precariously to his nose, sort of adorable and bumbling.
Hank McCoy is not Alex’s type.
“I’m impressed,” she says, and she is-at the amount of disdain she manages to fit into a single word. Looking slightly less pleased is Raven, who has already taken in Geeks McCoy as her personal charity case.
Alex decides, as Hank blushes and fumbles his dismount and Raven politely claps and Sean looks incredibly uninterested in everything, that she is breaking out her hot pants tomorrow.
But first. She gives Angel the new eyebrow, the one she’s been practicing since she drove back from outside Rochester with Erik, Charles, and Darwin and had plenty of time to observe Erik roll it out. Angel gently bits her lip and then smiles, a smile that says Do you think you can handle me? Alex already knows the answer to that one.
(After Erik and Charles yell at them for what is probably twelve years, they retreat meekly to their rooms and Alex picks the lock on Angel’s door and they spend the night playing Alex’s favorite game. They do so with far more delicacy and fewer grunts, which Alex decides is probably the best variation she’s come across so far.)
~
It isn’t that Alex was in love with Angel-because she wasn’t-and it isn’t that she’s not knocked all over the place by Darwin-because she is-but Alex is not the sort of woman that Raven is. She can see that this confuses Raven, who has always been surrounded by Charles (who is kind of an ass), and that Raven wants a female friend really badly; especially the kind that isn’t guarding precious virginity and has a fast hand with eyeliner.
Raven drops hints about it, offers magazines, compliments Alex’s favorite shirt. She wants to tell someone that she thinks Hank is cute, she wants to giggle about the constipated look on Charles’ face when Raven takes on the shape of a man and hits on women in bars, she wants to share shoes. Mostly, she wants to talk about what happened with Shaw.
It is more than just that Alex and Raven don’t share a shoe size and Alex doesn’t want to be Raven’s friend. Alex is not really equipped to be anyone’s friend, because Alex is an asshole and a slut and she likes car engines better than she likes people.
As a reward to herself for practicing all morning on increasingly mocking dummies, Alex attacks the garage after lunch and immediately begins to take apart the nearest engine. After a while, the singed smell of her hair begins to melt into the smell of the garage in the summer heat, and she strips off the top of her coverall and ties the sleeves around her waist. When her hair gets in the way, she knots it in a handkerchief and continues, through the afternoon and into the evening.
“You liked Angel,” Raven says, startling Alex. With a short curse, Alex drops her wrench and it cracks into two pieces. From the darkness, Raven steps forward, and as she does so her skin flickers from pink to brown in a thick flutter of blue. She gets a lot about Angel right, even the way that she walks, but she doesn’t sounds right; she doesn’t have Angel’s smirk and loose-lidded eyes.
“Jesus,” says Alex, “Raven, seriously, don’t do that.”
“You don’t talk to anyone,” says Angel-Raven, standing in a classic Raven pose with her legs firmly planted in an upside-down V, her hands on her hips. “Except Hank, when you’re calling him a monkey.”
“He looks like a monkey,” murmurs Alex rebelliously, and then she says, “Raven, turn back to yourself. I’m going to explain something to you, okay?” and she waits until Raven has shifted into her usual self, blonde and tall, and then she explains in a patient voice, “I was having sex with Angel, Raven, and I don’t think you’re offering that.”
She can’t help the amusement in her voice, and Raven’s slightly scandalized look almost induces giggles. “You what?” says Raven.
Alex resists the temptation to point out that Raven must have some idea of what Alex is talking about, as she shares a house with Erik and Charles, but Alex wouldn’t want anyone connecting Scott and sex even in the hypothetical, let alone saying your brother is the least subtle person on the planet, I hear him sneaking into Erik’s room almost every night, so she stays her tongue.
Because she is being nice about Raven’s brother’s illicit affair, she turns back to her engine and lets silence return to the garage. After a while, Raven curls up at a bench and watches. She is getting better at not talking.
(That night, Alex sneaks into Hank’s lab and steals a replacement wrench. Because she’s filled up her good deeds quota of the week with her discussion with Raven, she steals a few fiddly-looking tools to be a bitch and then something electronic and impressive that she thinks might actually be useful with a pair of hoses that are acting up.)
~
Usually Charles oversees her practices, but one morning he’s caught up in trying to convince Hank to practice some limbering stretches in the gymnasium and he sends her an apologetic thought, Erik will help you today.
When she meets him by the bunker, Erik looks like he woke up, went for a 5K run, ate an entire pig, and then kicked some school children. It’s nine in the morning. Alex looks like she hasn’t slept in four days, which is because she hasn’t.
“Hey,” she says, voice wary but doing her best to hide it. Alex has known a lot of men like Erik, and she wouldn’t really trust any of them around her blasts.
“What does Charles have you doing?” Erik asks. He flicks a look at the pile of charred dummies by the door to the bunker, and raises an eyebrow. “Something useless and placating, then?”
Alex shrugs and stuffs her hands into the pockets of her sweats. “He doesn’t want me accidentally frying someone.”
Erik looks at her critically, as though he is peeling away the parts of her that irritate him and attempting to find something useful underneath. The last time she’d seen him looking like that, he’d pushed Sean off of a satellite dish twenty minutes later. Alex takes an unconscious step back. Regretting the movement immediately, she firms her stance, spreads her legs and takes her hands out of her pockets, to make up for it a little.
“We’ll do it his way, then,” murmurs Erik. Whatever expression he makes then, it sure as hell doesn’t look like any smile Alex has ever seen. It is thick and bares his teeth and Alex remembers years of being told not to talk to strange men, before she took up waitressing and car repair and human interaction became moderately required.
Alex spends thirty fruitless minutes aiming her blasts at dummies before Erik gets frustrated, pulls a gun from the waistband of his pants, and examines the contents of the chamber. “This isn’t working,” he says, and Jesus fuck, Alex knew he was a psychopath, she’d been able to smell them ever since Mr. Johnston went crazy and killed all the cats in their neighborhood with a knife he’d lifted off a dead Nazi in Algiers.
The last time Alex had been in the same room with a gun, it’d been at the diner where she worked nights and weekends for a dollar an hour, plus tips. She’d spent the entire eleven-minute experience with her face pressed against linoleum, trying to calm the hot flutters in her chest that usually preceded a blast.
This time, Alex picks up a dummy leg and aims for the back of Erik’s head. She’s gone for a piece where the metal bolts have fallen out, and the plaster connects before he has time to notice she’s within range. He’s swearing in German and trying to recover as Alex hits him again, this time in the stomach. They’re out in the hallway, and Alex doesn’t want to risk a blast and have it slice through half the mansion.
Erik is a secret agent or whatever, so he gets a grasp on the situation-and the dummy leg-fairly quickly. He disarms her almost too fast, and pins her to the floor with his knee on her chest, the gun’s safety on, and he shows her the gun slowly before putting it on the floor and pushing it away. “I’m impressed, Summers,” he says. “Calm down, I wasn’t going to shoot you.”
“Says the psychopath,” Alex points out in a slightly high-pitched voice.
“Takes one to know one,” he says cheerfully. He looks a little happy, now that she’s given him some bruises from the dummy leg and a moderate amount of degree of resistance. “I was worried Charles was blunting your edges.”
“Oh please,” says Alex, “where I grew up gives you edges that don’t blunt.” She tries to make it sound feisty; she can’t get enough air in her lungs to manage it. “Get off,” and she scissor-kicks her legs around his stabilizing ankle and tries to knee him in the balls as she throws his weight to her left. She gets him off, but her knee misses.
The rush of air back into her lungs is incredibly nice; she scrambles into a crouch and then scuttles into a corner to protect her back as she reacquaints herself with breathing. Erik is kneeling on the floor twelve feet away, rubbing his shoulder with a rueful grimace. “You might actually be useful in the field, Summers,” he says.
“I’m not Geeks McCoy,” she snaps. “You’re fucking right I’m useful.” Any bravado in the statement is murdered by her gasping breaths. She glares at him to get her point across, and he smirks at her faintly. Erik scares her-of course he scares her, he walks like a mob boss and he can bend metal with his mind-but Alex has been a dumb fuck of a teenager and she’s been in bad situations with people who scare her before.
(It takes her two days to realize it, but apparently Erik likes her now. He especially seems to like her after she yells at Sean and Hank for leaving the milk out on the counter-“Milk goes bad, I realize Sean was born with half a brain and can be excused for not knowing that, but Jesus fuck you went to Harvard at ten, bozo”-and he shows it in that he kidnaps her one afternoon from the garage and teaches her how to clean, load, and shoot his gun.)
~
There are many things about Charles that annoy Alex, not limited to his personality, his face, and his ability to rummage her mind whenever he feels like it-but what Alex dislikes the most is that Charles always wants to talk. He is remarkably like his sister in that respect, except Alex has been training Raven in the art of silence and Charles still has no idea what the word means.
“I would be worried about an eighteen-year-old taking apart the contents of my garage, but they all seem to run better when you’re done,” Charles comments mildly as he strolls in, hands in the pockets of his slacks, wearing a sweater that makes him look like Alex’s grandfather. For a brief moment, Alex appreciates that her being a girl doesn’t come into play, and then she realizes that was probably deliberate and then, like she usually does, she gets a little angry and imagines herself holding a large sign that says GET THE HELL OUT OF MY HEAD in thick, black print.
Charles chuckles. He does that a lot, and it also rubs Alex the wrong way. She appreciates Charles when they’re training, because just like silence and boundaries he also doesn’t understand limits, and he refuses to let Alex accept that she has no control over her power. That doesn’t mean she has to like Charles out in the garage at four in the morning, when she is trying to drown herself in engine grease.
“I know, on occasion, you must think of them,” he says to her, running a finger lightly along the curve of the Model-T Ford that Alex is examining with something akin to devotion. It’s his car, but the casual way he treats it makes her want to cut his finger off.
“Who?” she says, deliberately not considering the many nuances of his question.
“Scott,” he says. “Your parents.” Out of the many potential answers to her question (Darwin, Angel, the sanctity of her own mind) this is perhaps the most unexpected, if simply because Alex doesn’t think about her family. It only comes up vaguely, when Alex gets lost and finds a whole wing of the damn mansion that is dusty and out of use, and she can’t avoid the helpless anger at how casually Charles and Raven live, how they have never dropped out of school to pick up two extra jobs, that they have never skipped dinner to feed their little brother. She does not consider Scott or her parents in anything other than an abstract, nameless fashion.
“Scott’s a brat,” she finally says, examining the engine of the Ford, the contrast of the size of the engine against the delicacy of its parts. It reminds her of Hank, a little, with his big feet and his moronically low tolerance for her insults. Because she doesn’t expect Charles to have left her mind, she unwraps a small nugget of information; the two years she spent locked up, the four letters that went unanswered, the seventeen phone calls that got mysteriously disconnected, before Alex wised the hell up and stopped trying.
“They are your family,” Charles reminds her gently. Alex’s arms are stiff as she props herself up, and she doesn’t want to cry. That would be dumb, Alex hasn’t cried since she was a child.
“I thought you’re my family,” she snaps.
Charles laughs again, softly, and Alex does not even try to hide her quick mental image of how satisfyingly Charles’ patrician nose would snap if Alex hit him. “We are indeed, all of us. But perhaps it would not be so bad, to send your parents a letter and tell them that you are safe? They worry.”
“They always worry,” says Alex. “Mostly about whether or not their crazy daughter has snapped and killed someone.” She almost has, five times now, so perhaps they are a little justified.
Charles has this vaguely expectant look on her face, like he is waiting for Alex to finish connecting the dots rather than shove the whole parcel into her mind like Raven says he used to, when she was trying to learn her multiplication tables. Alex may not have finished high school, but she’s got more of a certain kind of smarts than anyone else here (with the obvious exception of Erik).
“You think Scott is going to be like this?” she finally says, her voice more startled than she had thought. Wow, poor Scott. Her parents are going to murder him, if he turns out just as troublesome as Alex. He’s only eight now, but Alex’s blasts manifested themselves when she hit puberty. It’ll be another two or three years, but a second child might be the last straw-Alex’s parents will probably plead abject poverty, turn him over to a home, and get the hell out of Dodge.
“What, do you want my permission to keep tabs on my brother?” she asks, meeting Charles’ eyes because she hasn’t seen Scott in two years, and he was always a brat. Alex has no patience for brats, spoiled or otherwise.
“I thought you might like to do it yourself,” says Charles, and, with that disturbing bit of information imparted, off he goes. Alex actually waits for him to get out of the range of her arm before she lobs the wrench she stole from Hank at a wall. Alex played softball in high school, before she had to drop out, and the wrench shatters against the cement with a satisfyingly loud noise.
(When she sneaks into Hank’s lab to steal another one, he is there, working on something, and he stares at her, probably at the bareness of her shoulders where they bunch against her stained white undershirt, and the dirty handkerchief she has knotted her hair up in, and she stares back, and he hands her the wrench without a single word.)
~
Charles has very few rules about living in the mansion, but the ones he does have he refuses to budge on. Meal times are team times. No one is allowed in his father’s study. For god’s sake, Alex, wash your hands before you eat.
Alex learns, after breakfasts, lunches, and dinners of full observation that Erik dislikes Hank almost as much as Alex does. She thinks they might even have the same reason: Hank is a moron. Sean knows this, too, especially after being knocked out of that window and picking leaves out of his hair for twenty minutes, but he manifests this knowledge in not allowing Hank near his food, his hair, or his clothing. Alex manifests it in actually calling Hank out on being an idiot. Erik manifests it in never talking to Hank, ever.
At dinner, Hank is talking to Raven about his cure. “Hank,” Alex interrupts when Raven looks uncomfortable and Erik looks murderous and Sean is tired and falling asleep in his peas, “shut up. I do not give a shit about your self-esteem problems.”
Hank stares at Alex. It is as though no one has ever been mean to him before. Alex would almost feel guilty, except-nope, actually, she doesn’t. “Alex,” says Charles in a lightly warning voice.
She thinks loudly, EVERYONE AT THIS TABLE LOOKS EXACTLY HOW THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO LOOK. She says, “Raven, you wanted to paint my nails or something, right? Let’s go do that now.” She immediately pushes her chair back and stands up.
Sean jerks back from his peas and blinks at her, and her empty plate, before muttering, “Bed time?” and makes a half-hearted move to stand before falling back into his chair. Hank is still gaping at her, uncomprehending. Alex puts all of her thoughts, most of which consist of, you are a moron, and your feet look fine, and do you have no idea how fragile the psyche of a teenage girl is, how did you survive into adulthood, into her eyes and she glares at him.
“Come on, Raven,” she says, and as they leave she hesitantly loops her arm through Raven’s and thinks of the girls on TV and says with them in mind, “I think you should paint your nails red, like your hair.” Raven is blonde right now, but she doesn’t have to be, and Alex wants her to know that.
(As Alex slips from Raven’s room that night, she finds Erik in the hallway looking supremely suave and not at all like he’s been caught sneaking into Charles’ room at one in the morning. They look at each other for a while, and Erik nods slightly. It is the nod that breaks her, and she whispers at him tightly, “I am an eighteen-year-old girl with anger issues, I am in no position to be the most emotionally mature person in this house. So step up your game,” before she stomps off to the garage.)
~
“So listen,” half-shouts Sean over the roar of the plane. “Are you, I don’t know, in love with Hank or whatever?”
Alex stares at Sean for what feels like a long time. “What.”
“Because I know you were dating Angel for a couple seconds, until she turned evil,” Sean continues blithely, as though they’re back in the kitchen at the mansion having colas before an afternoon of getting tortured and pushed off of the tops of buildings by Erik and Charles, “but now you seem to be in love with Hank. And I didn’t know if you wanted to talk about it before we die.”
Next to Alex, Erik is doing a very good job of looking like he is bored out of his fucking mind. He probably is, because he and Charles must have a very satisfying relationship judging by the amount of time they spend “playing chess.”
“No,” Alex says, and then she shouts, “No,” because the plane engines are getting louder. “Who the hell do you think I am? In love? Jesus.”
Next to Sean, Charles is grinning. Of course he’s grinning. Alex bares her teeth at him, and turns back to Sean, who appears to be having a mental breakdown while contemplating their imminent death at the hands of (a) the US military, (b) the Soviet military, and/or (c) Sebastian Shaw. “Why do you think that?”
“You named him Beast,” says Sean.
A few seconds of blissful silence descend, as Alex waits for Sean to give some other reason for his sudden brilliant deduction of Alex having lost her brain and become desirous of going steady with Hank. It takes her a while to realize this is it.
Taking her life into her own hands, Alex unbuckles the shoulder harness, leans across the aisle, and punches Sean in the arm. She then leans back and rebuckles her shoulder harness. “Get a life, June Cleaver,” she says, and he sticks his tongue out at her and she mimes cutting it off.
(At forty-thousand feet, Charles’ mind-voice tentatively offers, It is a long flight, Alex, we can talk about this, if you want to, and Alex imagines a smooth white space and then thinks into it, Have dirty mind-sex with Erik if you’re bored, Professor, neither of us is drunk enough for this, and she feels his quiet laughter and then he retreats.)
~
Exactly two weeks after the doctors let the Professor out of the hospital and he sends Moira back to DC, Hank is sitting on Alex’s bed when she gets back from a run. None of his old clothes fit him anymore, but the Professor’s stepfather was a large man and most of his things at least cover the important bits.
“Hank? Jesus,” says Alex, as she relaxes from her immediate defensive pose to hang limply against the doorframe. “What are you doing here?” She does her best to not completely ignore him as she strips off her sweatshirt and wipes her face with a towel. Underneath the sweatshirt she’s wearing her usual undershirt, the ribbing damp with sweat and clinging along her shoulder blades and to her stomach. She scrubs half-heartedly at her shoulders and gives up on looking clean for whatever heart-to-heart Hank’s decided they’re going to have.
“You used to hate me,” Hank says, “and I guess I was wondering why you don’t anymore.”
He sounds so pathetically sad, Alex actually physically cannot handle it and she slumps onto her desk chair. “Oh, for the love of-” she mutters as she buries her head in her hands and wonders when this became her life. She ponders for a second if this is going to be a word-for-word reproduction of that conversation about Angel, ages ago, and then she shuts down that line of thinking as fast as she can without giving herself an aneurism.
“We’re going to be the only ones who remember,” Hank says, his voice remarkably gentle, even in his new low baritone. “You and Sean and I. None of the new students are going to know that the Professor used to walk.” He doesn’t need to tell her all the other things the new children won’t know-about Erik, about Raven. About Angel and Darwin. (About Shaw.)
Nice words are not really Alex’s forte. “Um,” she tries anyway, “I never hated you. I was just kind of sick of you complaining about your feet all the time.”
Behind his glasses, Hank blinks at Alex. “Complaining about my feet,” he echoes, a little incredulously.
“Yeah,” she says, and gives in to the urge to fidget a little. “Have you ever met a teenage girl? Raven was going crazy, thinking that she was ugly when she was blue. And as I’m the only girl, she came to me to cry about it. All the time.”
After a couple seconds, Hank starts to laugh. He might even begin to cry after a while, Alex can’t really tell. She pats him on the shoulder, and then his fur feels really soft and she tries hugging him, which isn’t something she’s done to anyone since Scott was four. Apparently it’s like riding a bike, though, and she blusters her way through it.
Hank’s claws are sharp, and they catch in bits of fabric like a cat’s would, but like a cat he can curl them against his fingers and be very gentle. Alex knows this mostly from observation of his fussing with the new pad on her suit, but also because as Hank kisses her right now, he lets a finger wind through the edge of her ponytail, and the hair sifts through easily.
Alex waits two seconds, decides she likes kissing Hank, and climbs into his lap. He is warm and soft and his tongue is pebbled (also like a cat’s, she notices). He kisses her awkwardly but thoroughly, and nips at her bottom lip. “Alex,” he murmurs, and he rips through the tie holding up her hair with a fleck of one of his claws. Her hair is damp from the morning humidity, and it falls like a curtain, heavy and musky, across her shoulders and down her back.
Carefully, Alex lines her hands against the planes of Hank’s face. The wide-eyed terror with which he looks at her indicates that most of the particulars haven’t changed-Hank is still a moron, he’s probably going to leave her right now and go make something in the lab that will make Sean more uncomfortable with combat exercises, and he is still going to leave food on his plate at dinner. Apparently, however, he wants to kiss her, now. Alex takes a moment to consider how this makes her feel.
She lasts a microsecond of examining her feelings. “Okay,” she tells him. “But just so we’re clear-you’ve learned your lesson about injecting yourself with shit you made up in a beaker in your basement, right?”
Hank’s face clearly indicates he has not. “Sure,” he says, and using a set of muscles Alex didn’t even know he had, he flips them over and pins Alex to her bed. She lets him.
(For now.)