Archive of Our Own ^beta

Alex comes back from the war to a changed country. A changed world. They all do, of course, but for those of them with a little something X-tra (wasn’t he cute; next stop, Johnny Carson), the change is more pronounced.

There’s no more hiding for people like them. This is supposed to be a good thing, and maybe it is. Alex was never an A-student, but he figures the human race didn’t magically become more tolerant while he was getting his ass shot at north of Saigon.

He doesn’t expect any miracles, is the point. Mostly, he just wants to find a log cabin in the armpit of nowhere and milk the VA dry in a desperate but sincere attempt at justice.

But he has unfinished business...and it turns out, his business has changed too.

“Alex!” he greets him warmly, rising from his desk, scattering papers pellmell in his haste, “You’re back.”

“More or less,” he smiles, “You just shave?”

“What?” his mouth purses, slightly less lined than the last Alex saw him, on account of he’d had a muzzle at the time, “Oh,” his lips twitch, and Alex can’t help but notice that, while his face has smoothened, the ridges at his eyes have deepened, “I’m on a copious amount of drugs.”

“Shit, me too,” Alex claps him on the shoulder, hard enough to shake anybody who looked like Hank McCoy did…reedy, loose-limbed, bandy-legged…and, seeing him hold his ground, gave up the ghost and pulled him into an embrace, “Jesus, but I’ve missed the hell out of you.”

Hank lets out a tiny, almost surprised gasp but returns the embrace, “Don’t get too surprised,” his heart is beating under those tweeds: quick and short and human, “But I’ve missed you too.”

“You better have, you animal,” Alex pulls away just long enough to catch the flicker of scandalized alarm in Hank’s eyes, “You got a class?”

“Several.”

“Now, Teach.”

He rolls his eyes, “It’s 4:30 in the afternoon,” and, evidently seeing this didn’t produce an immediate reaction, “I’ve got the night.”

“Good,” Alex nods, “Me too.”

“Alex…” but he catches himself, gripping his shoulder as if for fortitude, “I’ve changed my room.”

“Better view?”

“Worse, but it’s closer to the lab.”

“Egghead,” he laughs roughly and begins to say he hasn’t changed except, of course, that's a lie.

“If I’d known you were coming,” Hank reprimands lightly, “I’d have stocked up on scotch.”

“I’m spontaneous,” Alex shrugged.

“Gin and tonic fine?”

“It won’t kill me.”

“That’s a dubious statement,” but he mixes their drinks anyway and sits across from him, by a poky window looking out on the old service driveway that connects to the kitchen.

He isn’t lying. It is a shitty room.

For a while, they just sit, looking across at each other, taking each other in.

“Have you seen anyone else?” Hank asks finally.

“The Grand Poobah let me in,” he shrugs, “Aside from that, I reckon maybe a dozen pimply rubbernecks got a load of me, but if they know me, I don’t know them,” he watches the waning light play on his glass, “All tapped out on familiar faces, huh?”

“Yes,” he says at length, “Yes, that’s true,” the fingers of his free hand move vaguely in the air, like a stage magician pulling a trick…reaching for something that isn’t there (or is it, aha, and if you’d just look behind your ear…), “You look good.”

“It’s the clean living.”

“Cultivating new hobbies out East?”

“Cultivating new complexes is more like it. You know I lost 15 pounds?”

“Where?”

“Fuck if I know. I figured I got dysentery or some shit.”

Hank blanches, but his smile doesn’t falter, “I’ve missed your provincial charms.”

“I’ve missed your condescending fluff,” he smiles slowly, “Speaking of which…”

“You had that one loaded up and ready, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I know, I’ve got no home training. Folks were too busy keeping me from blowing up the living room to bother with the Ps and Qs,” he sets the glass on his knee, “Is it permanent?”

Hank breathes out through his nose, turning the glass slowly against his fidgeting thigh, “No.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you…like it?”

There’s a silence. Hank surveys him over the tops of his glasses, “Why else would I do it to myself?”

He shrugs, “Fair enough.”

They sit and stare for a while longer. There’s a muscle working in Hank’s throat, but Alex isn’t anyone to judge.

“You thought maybe I’d been pressured?” Hank suggests eventually.

“I never said that.”

“There’s a lot of things you don’t say, Private…”

“That’s Corporal, actually,” he points lazily, “But we were a small unit and I was the only one command could look at without going green, so…”

“You’re touching on a point, I think.”

He sighs, “I did think, when I saw you, that maybe you had…” he rubs his brow, feeling like a prize jackass, “Maybe you had someone…”

“Someone to get pretty for?” Hank laughs, taking another drink, briefly squeezing his eyes shut as he swallows, “There’s been nobody.”

Alex feels something but like hell is he going to put it in writing, even if he could find the words for it, “I thought maybe Raven…”

“Mystique,” he interrupts.

“I know she was here.”

“She was,” he shrugs, “In the parlance of the paperback novels, we want different things now.”

“Hank…” Alex begins.

“You sound almost disappointed.”

“It’s not that,” he sets the glass down on the end table, watching the G&T swishing around down at the bottom.

Hank sighs, mutters something about getting a coaster, but Alex stands up and intercepts him, “You know how many times I thought of this?”

“My liquor cabinet?”

“You, you blue bastard,” and of course he isn’t blue anymore, not really, except for his eyes and he must be exhausted, he must be depressed, he must be upset but who even knows over what, “How many times I’ve thought of coming back here and seeing you and…”

“There’s been nobody else.”

“I don’t care about anybody else!”

“Then I’m not sure what your problem is.”

He doesn’t know either. But he looks (up, the bastard’s taller than him, and stronger, though you wouldn’t know to look, not like this) into his eyes and feels his breath hot on his face.

“I’ve been away from home too long, man,” he says finally, “Seven goddamn years. I’ve got a little brother back home who barely knows who the fuck I am…”

“And it seems to me, Alex, that if you wanted to fix that you could have gone to him first…”

“I know who my brother is. I may not know him, but I know who he is. You…” he stops himself.

“You know me,” Hank interrupts.

“Then what happened to you?” he asks hoarsely, “What changed?”

“Don’t be ridiculous…”

“When I got drafted, you were 6’3, 250 pounds, and Pantone Blue…”

“Pantone isn’t a shade. It’s a classification.”

“And you were fine with it. Shit, you were more than fine, you were proud. I remember, Hank…”

His bed, this house, a different (better) room. Playing records that weren’t at all to their taste just to drown out the noise from their too nosy housemates…not, of course, that this would have been any use against the man of the house.

“You could run,” his eyes shimmered gold in the darkness, “Hop the border.”

“High talk coming from Mister Law and Order.”

Hands, heavy and padded, against his back. So many nights he’d laid in his cot and stared at the ceiling, trying desperately to recall the way the brush of those claws had felt on his skin, the way every inch of him seemed to prickle to attention in a terrible, beautiful tension, always between fear and desire.

“I’ve been debating the finer points of anarchism,” his teeth gleam like a kid’s plastic fangs, “It is, you may have heard, a slippery slope.”

“I can’t run. I’ve got my folks to think about.”

“There’s other ways,” he shrugs, foot the size of a dishpan maneuvering between Alex’s thighs, tracing the contours of his knees, “You could go missing.”

“Same difference.”

“Not quite. Investigators find a few bloody scraps of slacks, write the whole thing off as a tragic accident…animal attack. What a shame, they might say…”

“Someone ought to put that beast down,” Alex smirks and, for the last time, drags the monster down onto him as the record by the door keeps spinning, the Daughters of Eve chanting out ‘Hey, hey, hey, lover…’ like a band of pagan priestesses.

“What do you want me to say?” Hank asks, “Because if it’s an apology, Alex, I don’t see what I did wrong…”

“Why do you do it?” he asks, “The drugs?”

“Don’t say it like that.”

“What do you want me to call it? The sauce? The juice? The mystery mumbo jumbo? You told me before…”

“You make it sound like I’m an addict…”

“Why do you do it?”

“Alex, you may be used to people writing you off as a country moron, but we both know you’re sharper than that, so don’t insult our intelligence…”

He scoffs, stepping back, “I don’t want to get angry. I’ve come a long way, Hank, for you, for…”

For this, for us, for your hands in my hair and your cock inside me, and all those stupid multi-syllabic words pouring sweet nothings into my ear like honey.

“We’re too old for this,” Hank interrupts, “And, as it happens, it’s a school night, so if you really want to stand here and expect me to defend why I’d rather not have to don a disguise to go to the A&P…”

“You are in a disguise!” he explains incredulously, “And, I don’t want to shock your sensibilities, Teach, but there are a lot of dead kids in another country who never had the choice whether to swap their faces for something more presentable.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. He knows this and so doesn’t flinch when Hank crosses to him in a single stride and hurls him against the wall.

He’s still strong.

“I don’t think I like what you’re implying,” he informs him, voice dangerously low.

“Well, I’ll tell you what…” he croaks, “I don’t like thinking it. So why don’t you tell me…”

“You have any idea what it’s been like all these years?” he demanded, “You think I don’t wish I could just shed my skin and run wild and…” his grip tightens, his eyes brighten and, in the waning light, his skin tinges turquoise, “let go?”

Alex struggles to catch his breath, “Charlie’s enough to drive anyone nuts.”

“I used to think about it,” he continues, “Every time one of the kids, one of us…” his voice deepens, “Every time they took one of them, I used to think about cutting the leash once and for all, charging to the nearest recruitment center and making like the monster they would call me anyway.”

“I thought things too,” said Alex quietly, “Out there. Melting my balls off in a foxhole, thinking to myself what a damn nice thing it’d be if my big blue buddy Beast was out here with me, to have my back. Because besides being a hogwild force of nature, he’s also an insufferable genius in about a dozen directions and could be real handy dismantling those booby traps.”

Hank’s eyes search him, “I wouldn’t have been much use. Clumsy hands.”

“That’s not how I remember it.”

Hank shudders against him…Alex hears the faint shadow of a growl and he feels something awaken in him that he’s toyed with for so long.

When it started, he’d felt wrong. He was a Rust Belt Episcopalian from a household where I Love Lucy had been considered unsuitable programming. Homosexual activity with a luridly colored Halloween monster was pole vaulting over several cultural DMZs.

There had been this sense of shame: a bitter seasoning in a gumbo of more savory sensations…excitement and laughter and sweet, blessed release.

And, yes, a fear too, the first time the buttoned up professor had laid his paw on his chest to keep him down and he’d realized just what this guy could do to him if he were so inclined, if he were so tempted…if they were not, after all, such chums.

But fear is the spice of life, so the hacks say. Alex, less poetically, would note he wouldn’t have gotten very far, on either side of the planet, without a healthy supply of the stuff.

“You can say you missed me,” he hears himself say, feeling Hank’s fruity cocktail sticking to the roof of his mouth like sealing wax.

“I’m not sure it’s the right word.”

“Don’t hurt my feelings, Hank. It’s been a bitching few years.”

“Just that I’m not sure one can miss somebody who’s been camped out in my hippocampus for half a decade.”

“Only half?” he smirks, “You didn’t have to say a thing,” and proved his point with a touch, pressing his hand into Hank’s twill trousers to feel the new growth there, “But I know that’s not your way.”

He grunts softly, throat working, “You are…really something.”

“Shit, don’t start me blushing.”

“Coming in here, accusing me of…I don’t even know what. Race treachery, perhaps.”

“Farthest thing from my mind.”

“…and now that that’s out of the way, you want to proposition me.”

“Truth be told, Hank, I’ve wanted to proposition you for seven years and change. Everything else was improv,” he works the hard shaft through the too thin fabric, pressing just enough weight to get Hank flustered which, it turns out, isn’t that much.

“I’m not…” his brow furrows, a lock of hair escaping his too disciplined academic coiffe to hang into his eyes, “I’m not ashamed. Y-you have to understand that. There’s just been…oh Jesus, Alex, let me…”

“You don’t have to explain to me.”

Hank grips him by the wrist, vice tight, “I want to,” and the sudden command startles and excites him. So Alex looks at those eyes, now so bright and intense and nods, “Yes, sir.”

“I have responsibilities and work and, for so long, after you all left, it was just the two of us, and he…Charles…he wasn’t well, Alex, and I was at my wit’s end…”

“Hank…”

“I had to take control. I had to be able to show myself at the bank and the post office and yes, the goddamn…” his face flushes cool blue and, for a moment, his pained gasp resembles a pleasurable leer, digging into Alex’s arm with broadening knuckles, “…A&P.”

Alex can feel him under his skin, or maybe he’s just gone too long without being this close to someone who wasn’t trying to kill him…inasmuch as he can assume Hank doesn’t want to kill him, tempted though he may be.

It’s like being next to an unstable generator: feeling the hum shake your nerves and rattle your eyes in their sockets. Hank’s hot, liquored breath is a particularly toxic radiation, and he wants to expose himself to every bit of it and to hell with the consequences.

They’re children of the atom, after all.

“Well, I don’t want to interrupt the lecture, Professor…” with his other hand, Alex finds the topmost button of Hank’s Oxford, inexplicably fastened and struggling for its life for all that, “But you don’t have to be responsible for me.”

The Beast doesn’t need telling twice.

Alex has only just gotten the one button undone, when the rest of them go skittering every which way like shrapnel. He makes a noise somewhere between a laugh and a squawk as Hank grabs him by the lapels of his aviator jacket and hurls him bodily onto the bed, which is a twin bed, mind you, which is funny and a relief and Christ, he’s dizzier than a schoolgirl and high as a kite all at once and he could live in this liminal acid trip, he really could, teetering on this precipice between fear and desire.

He has known much worse fear, and has tempered it with desire for just this.

The bedsprings creak alarmingly, but Alex barely has time to retain this information before Hank hurls himself onto him, his shirt open, hanging like a sodden towel over a body rippling and contorting in real time.

Hank’s face is shifting too, his button nose flattening before Alex’s eyes as his hands find his arms, doubling in size, then tripling…

Alex grins, “Holy hell, you have been holding out for me.”

“Shut…” his voice pitches…in  and out, manful protest and animal growl, “…up.”

His growl is deeper, rougher than it was. They’re getting old.

“Yes, teacher,” he drawls, and sheds his shirt so fast he swears he hears it rip. Hank twists his hand into his hair, yanking his head up, and he’s barely human now, but his face when it twitches is briefly, alarmingly himself.

“Wh-what?” Alex pants, “Oh, I’ve got some rubbers in my glovebox but, if I’m remembering right, they won’t be much use to…”

“Music,” Hank breathes, as if just remembering, “They’ll hear.”

“You know that’s not stopping Charlie. He’s probably been listening the whole time, the nosy bast…”

“There’s kids in the house!”

Alex sighs, “Your taste get better this decade?”

Hank answers this with a canine protest, fumbling artlessly with the record player (same model) on the side table, though his paws are artless and clumsy and soon enough he’s doubled over with a muffled curse, “Damnable things, it’s like wearing cinderblocks…”

Alex tunes this out long enough to grab whatever the first sleeve is in the pile and slap the record on the turntable.

He barely has time to register Andy Kim crooning ‘Ain’t it good/Ain’t it right…?’ and to make the suitable expression of disgusted incredulity before Hank exclaims “Fucking fires of hell!” and the sad leather tongues that had once been his loafers go flying every which way, including right into Alex’s face.

He whirls around in time to get a prize look of Hank’s baby blue boaters before Hank sits up, “You’re footing the wardrobe bill,” and doesn’t give him a chance to lodge a protest, grabbing Alex by the belt and pulling him down to the bed.

They’re a tangle of limbs, hot and heavy over the sheets. Hank rips Alex’s belt off him so hard he can hear it snap. Hank is huge, it has been noted, but you can’t really appreciate this until you’re right flush beneath him, with no room for anything in the world between you.

The thing about Hank McCoy is he makes himself small. In company, at least.

“God,” Alex breathes, feeling like some virginal kid fooling around under the covers, “God, Hank…”

His mouth is wet and his words are mush and Hank drinks them from him anyway, so it all works out. His lips are heavy and warm, the damp softness of his nose startling at first and then, as a few things are in this life, a blessed comfort.

And the whole time Alex is aware of Hank’s cock pressing urgently against his navel, about the only part of him still concealed by his Absent Minded Professor getup.

He knows he should wait for an invitation. But he’s waited too long and…once…Hank had thought his spontaneity was pretty neat.

“I have to ask,” he’d collapsed against him after, the record skipping idly on the turntable, both of them too spent to do anything about it.

“You’re always asking shit.”

“My curiosity compels me.”

Alex’s lazy smile as he found a kinky indigo hair on Hank’s pectoral and wound it around his finger, “I may have grown up country, but you’re the first animal I ever wanted for more than dinner.”

“What a blessed relief,” he chuckled softly, “It may be latent insecurity, but I do wonder if…” he sighed, “Is that the appeal?”

“Hank…” he cocked an eyebrow, “What’re you asking?”

“It’s a natural thing to wonder. Mind you, I can’t imagine you’d be part of a sizable crowd if you were…”

“Into that Beast in you?”

“It’s only nobody’s ever put their hands on me like you have. Nobody’s ever looked at me like you have. God knows, nobody’s ever…” he can’t blush, not like this, but his nose twitched like a flustered dog, and Alex realized that, of course, from Hank’s point of view, this whole thing must be very strange, “Nobody’s ever let me do to them what I do to you. Not in this body or…” he sighed, “The other one.”

And Alex laughed, “Shit, if I’d known you could pull half those tricks before, I’d have invited you in before you sprouted the fur. But as it is…” he pressed his lips to his nose, relishing the soft, contented growl in Hank’s throat, “I’ll take you any way you let me.”

Alex finds Hank, hard and primed and ready, and brings him out. Hank lets out only a short gasp of surprise, but doesn’t resist and…in fact, even preens as Alex fishes him out, eyes widening at the immensity of him.

“Hell, Hank,” he breathes, “All for me?”

“And nobody else, so stop acting surprised,” he puts his hands into Alex’s armpits and begins to lift him, but Alex has the presence of mind to dig his heels into the struggling bedspread.

“Wait,” and Hank hesitates long enough for Alex to muster the words, “It’s been seven years, Hank. Let me look at you.”

And the Beast lowers his shoulders, “Then look at me.”

There has never been a pain so exquisite. Alex, who has always been prized for his toughness, is happy to break here. To open his gritted teeth for a “Hell” that became a howl that become a long, low “Haaank…”

And Hank is being gentle. He doesn’t have to be. God, the way Alex was going after him a few minutes ago, he should be violent.

Alex, who has been a farmboy and an inmate and a soldier and a test subject, wouldn’t mind a bit of violence, not here, not from him.

The bed groans beneath them, then whimpers. Alex’s legs are sweat slick as he curls them around Hank’s broad middle, his feet finding purchase in the great mat of hair there.

“You’re…fuck…” he moans desperately, piteously, his eyes watering up at him, “You animal, you’ve got bigger.”

He scoffs softly, tangling his fingers in his hair, “Maybe you’ve gotten smaller.”

Alex head butts him, which is too much for the bed, which snaps beneath them, spilling them onto the floor, connected at the vital joint.

“Am I paying for that too?” he asks up at Hank, just for the thrill of getting set back on the floor.

They keep at it: among shredded sheets and the ruins of their civilian clothes. Hank grips him by the arms and the chest, his hips driving into Alex’s knees with an untrammeled, desperate rhythm, and all the while the record keeps spinning on the dangerously shaking table as Andy Kim orders everyone listening to rock him gently, rock him slowly, take it easy ’cause (don’t you know?) he’s never been loved like this before.

“God,” Hank purrs into his ear when they’re spent, “God damn you, Alex, for leaving…”

“And God love you for staying,” he catches Hank by the toe. They’re spread eagled upon each other: two Xs conjoined, which was sort of perverse, but life’s like that sometimes. Hank’s legs bracket Alex’s head, and he has to prop himself on his elbows to face him.

He sort of fools around with Hank’s feet for a bit. He’s noticed that Hank seems to like the feeling…his fur sort of bristles, like a cat being stroked.

He doesn’t use the metaphor, of course, not wanting to push his luck, but it occurs to him he must be the only person who knows this about Hank, and that’s pretty fucking sweet, isn’t it.

“You will stay, though?” Hank asks next.

“For a bit,” Alex nods.

“Careful. Not too long ago, I told Charles the same thing.”

“I’ve got a brother to meet.”

“And once you’ve met him?”

“Figure I’ll know better then,” he smiles, “But I’ll come back.”

“I’ll try and be presentable.”

“Don’t go crazy on my account,” he flicks an invisible fleck from the sole of Hank’s foot and gets an affectionate cuff on the ear with the appendage for his trouble, “So.”

“So?”

“You going down to dinner au natural or can I smuggle you some of your stuff? Figure it’s the least I can do.”

Hank sighs breathily, “I can manage a few hours.”

“Good to hear.”

There’s a short silence, “It hurts like hell, you know. Like being squeezed into a potato sack. I can’t even claim it’s for my pretty face either.”

“Can’t you?” he asks wryly.

“Hard as it may be to believe, that face hasn’t produced the same effect as this one.”

“Maybe you have to get out more.”

“Or, possibly, there’s something to be said for crying ‘Havok’.”

“Is that what you said, during?” Alex grins, “Here, I thought you were trying some Latin out on me.”

“I might have. My thoughts got a little scrambled at the critical point.”

Alex kisses the sole of Hank’s foot, which was probably nasty but no more so than a dozen other things that had happened in here in the last hour and change. Whatever the taste level, Hank seems to like it, laughing huskily.

“I didn’t hurt you?”

“Don’t sweat it.”

“It’s just, when I grabbed you by the hair…”

“Tell you what,” he interrupts, “I’ll grow it out, if you like it so much, and next time you can take as much as you want without a worry,” he leans forward, closing the already narrow distance between them, “How’s that sound?”

The Beast bares his teeth which, on an animal, would be a sure sign of danger, but on him…

Well.

“It sounds,” he whispers, pawing his face, “Like a promise.”

“Hold me to it, Teach, will you? I need keeping honest.”

And Hank holds him and holds him and holds him, and dinner be damned.