Archive of Our Own ^beta

You were fiddling with Alex's sunglasses.

The small group of you walked into the room that held Cerebro, with you and Alex standing near the back. When Charles used the machine, the entire room lit up with people, mutants, and humans.

"Jesus Christ, that's bright," you whispered as you shielded your eyes with your hand. Alex huffed with a smile and pulled his sunglasses out of his pocket.

"Here, these'll probably help."

You didn't get to return them before...

They were the only thing you had left from him, most of his other possessions going either to Scott or being kept by his parents. You guessed this was the problem of not being able to get married as two gay men, let alone having his parents accept you and allow you some of your dead boyfriend's things.

It had been two months exactly since Alex passed, since En Sabah Nur, or whatever he called himself, tried to take over the world, and just 6 weeks since school started up again for the kids here. Every day you were slowly inching towards being stable again. Alex and you always had that in common; your powers could be fickle and dangerous. You guess now Scott shares that problem with you.

Speaking of Scott, you were worried about him. After the loss of Alex, he seemed to just bottle everything up, taking his anger and sadness out on the old sentinels Raven and Hank used to train the new team. Then again, you weren't much better. Currently you have been balancing trying to get your powers under control and grieving the loss of your boyfriend while also trying to show the younger mutant that it was okay to talk about this kind of stuff.

Every chance you got, you checked up on Scott, letting him know you were there if he wanted to talk about it. In true Summers fashion he hasn't, but still you kept the offer open in case he changed his mind one day. It was hard trying to be patient with him like you were with Alex all those years ago. Occasionally Scott will say something or do something similar to Alex, and you go spiraling again. You've tried your best to not show the teen how much the things he says hurt you. You know he's dealing with the grief as much as you are, but you don't know how well you've been hiding it.

A sigh escaped your lungs as you looked out at the pond in the backyard of the mansion, the light blue sky reflecting off of the pond. Winter was right around the corner, and you knew these bright sky days would soon turn into cloudy, cold ones. As ironic as it was, you hoped a bit of summer stayed with you. This would be the first winter without Alex at least sending you a holiday card of some kind.

The telltale sound of the squeaky, outdoor wheelchair Charles used came up behind you, him locking the wheels as he sat by your side.

"You here to tell me you understand my pain?" You managed a scoff in the direction of the professor. Really, you weren't feeling all that confrontational at the moment; more than anything, you were just trying to play the facade you made for everyone, forgetting momentarily that Charles was a telepath.

"He loved you a lot, you know?"

You put a somber smile on your face even though in that moment you wanted nothing more than to walk away from this conversation, lock yourself in your room again, and cry your eyes out. Escape reality in a TV show or a book for a while and let your emotions simmer out.

"You can read my mind, Charles. You know I know that."

"Yes, and I know that grief can warp people's perception of their life before their loved one died."

When you took an incredulous look over at him, he had his hands folded in his lap. Always the calm and collected teacher.

"I don't want to talk about this right now."

"Anger is one of the stages of grief—"

"I know that, Charles. My whole fucking life has been centered around grief for the past two months! Every second of my life since then I have been trying to cope with my grief and pretend everything is okay for Scott. Every second of my life since he passed I have been measuring my emotions, trying to temper myself so I don't set your stupid fucking school on fire!" You could feel the warm sensation of fire on your palms, not burning you, but singeing the grass close to your hands.

Charles took a light breath in as you put out the fire, eyebrows pulled together.

"You feel responsible for Scott?"

"He's my dead boyfriend's younger brother; am I supposed to ignore him? Pretend he doesn't exist because every sentence out of his mouth reminds me of..." Saying his name had become hard as of late, trailing off where his name would've fallen from your lips in any context before two months ago.

"You want him to know he's not alone in his grief over his brother."

You nodded, words not leaving your mouth like you wanted to, and choked on a sob stuck in your throat.

"All I want to know is why it couldn't have been me. Why wasn't it me? If I were gone, Scott would be fine; he'd live his life, and Alex would be around, and the two could finally bond over their powers." You felt a bit of rage bubble underneath your skin again. The heat of your emotions was showing; your arms cracked away slightly to show the burning hot lava underneath. "That blue douche took that away from him. He took Alex from me—from us—and didn't even have it in his heart to be sorry."

Your breathing came in smokey puffs, short and filled with regret, panic, sadness, anger, and every emotion you had been stuffing down since Alex passed. Every emotion you told yourself not to feel because if you did, you could hurt someone, you could hurt yourself. You would never forgive yourself if Scott lost one of the few people in the school who understood his pain in losing Alex.

Quickly you reached down into the grass by accident while trying to put your hands into the water, setting it ablaze while all you could think about was the pain, the loss. Distantly you heard Charles call out your name. For the briefest moment you heard him too. You heard Alex. In the flames you saw his face. It was the face he pulled when you accidentally hurt yourself while using your powers.

"Don't fucking look at me like that, Summers. You control your powers as well as I do." Your words were scathing and angry. You had let your emotions get the best of you an hour ago, accidentally setting one of the trees in the yard on fire

Currently you were in the living room of the giant mansion, bandaging the cracks that had formed on your skin where the lava seeped out. The cracks would mend themselves over time, not needing stitches, but they were bad enough that when you calmed down blood would drip from them, thus needing clean wraps. There were some minor burns from it, but nothing compared to when you were a kid; you thanked whatever managed to keep you in control. Maybe Charles' training really had worked.

Alex just continued to stare, but finally he sat down next to you on the ornate couch—that probably was more than both of your net worths combined. Sighing, he took the bandage roll from you and wrapped both of your arms tightly, not minding when you hissed in pain. He had obviously been watching you wind the bandages too loose and got annoyed, yet instead of telling you how you were doing it wrong, he took care of it for you.

Wordlessly Alex showed his care for you, in his own arrogant way, making sure the bandages were secure before putting everything back into the med kit.

After a few minutes of silence between you, you spoke up, though still a bit quiet, "Thank you."

He looked over at you, staring at your bandages; he had a feeling no one had ever done that for you before.

"Don't mention it."

You could never quite put your finger on what emotions that face held, but you always saw it as he firmly wrapped your arms over and over. Scars had long since formed. As your relationship progressed and you got older, it was easier to control your emotions. Your powers in turn got easier, leading to you seeing that face he made less and less. Even so, you can recognize it immediately. It made your heart break. You'd only ever see that face again in your memories. You'd bandage your arms up yourself now.

An agonizing scream ripped from your throat. All you could see was fire and smoke. Memories danced in the flames, painful and excruciating to watch. And yet you couldn't stop. Each memory made the fire grow bigger; the bigger the fire got, the more memories were dug up.

You and Alex had gotten in a pretty big fight, blowing up at each other over something petty. It had almost turned physical before Charles and Erik stepped in, separating you two in an attempt to get you both to calm down.

There was this balcony off the side of one of the hallways you had found your first night here; it was secluded and quiet. No one ever walked by, all of your rooms being on the other side of the house; it gave you a great space to think about things.

You had escaped to your secluded balcony to try and dress your wounds by yourself, though they probably wouldn't be as good as Alex's.

"He cares about you so much more than you realize, you know."

You hadn't even heard Charles walk out here, startling you and causing you to jump slightly before turning to look at him.

"You care about him so much more than you let on."

Rolling your eyes as you pulled the bandage tight and secured it. "What do you know about what I feel? You've been digging around in my head again?"

The professor sat down next to you on the bench, laying his hands on his lap. "Your thoughts are very loud when you think about Alex."

A pause. A quick huff of a breath before you started laughing. He had been so blunt it took you off guard, causing you to nearly double over, wheezing and trying to catch your breath.

"So, what, you're here to tell me Alex is in love with me or something? That we only fight 'cause we like each other? That Alex is a fag like me?"

Charles seems taken aback by your defensiveness and you use of a slur to refer to your sexuality. As soon as it shows, he measures his face again and goes back to the steady and patient demeanor he had before.

"I think that is something for Alex to tell you."

In that small sentence you knew the answer to your question.

"You really like meddling where you don't belong, don't you, Charles?"

You confronted Alex about it the next morning. Just after breakfast, before training started, you were walking with him to the bunker. He had on his usual training outfit, the same as all of yours, but with the sleeves hacked off of the hoodie. You had done the same, only leaving a small amount like a short-sleeve shirt.

"Charles mentioned something to me after our... fight." You spoke up first, trying to break the somewhat awkward silence. Alex looked at you from the corner of his eye before puffing a breath out of his lungs.

"Yeah, he mentioned something to me too." You couldn't help but laugh, Alex cracking a smile alongside you.

"It seems he's trying to play matchmaker with us."

"Why give him the satisfaction?" The smirk on his face told you he was going to try to pull something.

"What'd you have in mind, Havok?"

Muffled screams, those of the students of the school, could be vaguely heard over the roaring of burning plant life.

Alex had been drafted. You wished more than anything for him to stay, to be the first person to burn his draft card. Instead of trying to convince him to ignore the draft, you resigned yourself to helping him pack. You knew that he would go no matter what you said.

As much as it broke your heart, you understood; he felt like it was something finally using his powers for good. The X-Men were amazing, but they didn't do much; this was a chance to make something of himself, even if you disagreed that what he was doing was right.

You gently folded the t-shirts he had set aside, placing them in his bag. When he walked into your shared room at the mansion, he sucked in a breath. A solemn look was on your face as you packed his things for him, almost looking like a robot with how stiff and repetitive your motions were.

"You didn't have to pack for me." His voice was soft and comforting. All you could feel was sadness. A few cracks started to show on your arms, no matter how much you tried to control them.

"I wanted to do something for you before you shipped out, plus you were never that good at folding clothes anyways." A chuckle escaped you, a bit breathy and humorless, unlike your regular one. Alex shook his head.

"I'm going to come back, I promise."

You looked up to meet his eyes for the first time since he walked in.

"Don't make promises you can't keep, Summers."

Your arms hurt; even without looking, you could tell the skin on your arms had nearly all cracked away, leaving melting hot magma in its place. It burned. Your whole body burned. Your clothes had most likely caught fire by now, leaving you only in your fire-resistant undergarments Hank had made for you.

When Alex had been serving, you had moved away from the mansion, the school shutting down just months after he left. Hank had been hesitant to let you go out into the world; your powers could still be unstable at times, so he had built you several "flame suits," as he called them. You could wear them under your clothes so that if you were to catch fire, you would still be covered by something.

The small apartment you had gotten was now occupied by both you and Alex. It was the domestic life you had always dreamed of, even if you couldn't get married. Outside of the walls of your home, you made sure to call you and Alex "roommates" as an attempt to stay under the radar, but everyone seemed to not question it.

Life was still stressful, seeing Erik on TV nearly killing the president, and mutants becoming feared. Sometimes you would have to save a fellow mutant from being beaten in a back alleyway. But life carried on, with you and Alex surviving it, even thriving. Sometimes this felt like the only heaven you'd get.

Alex's little brother, Scott, had been born after he came back from Vietnam; both of you visited his mom in the hospital and came home for holidays. Occasionally you would make the drive up there to babysit Scott, always telling his parents that you and your boyfriend were just good friends and you didn't really have a family to spend time with. It wasn't a complete lie; your parents had passed in the house fire caused by your powers, but you had more family outside of them. They had just never bothered to try to contact you after the funeral. You knew they blamed you.

One day Alex received a call from his parents, asking him to come home. He had approached you after you got off of work, taking your hands gently.

"Scott got his powers. I'm taking a trip up to see him and possibly take him to see Charles." He held his hair out of his face with those sunglasses of his; you reminded yourself to get some headbands or hair clips for him. Alex's face was worried; obviously whatever powers his brother got ran in the family, probably bringing up some not-so-savory memories of when he got his. He had never really talked about how he found out about his, nor really what landed him in prison, but you always had the feeling they were connected.

"I'm coming with you," you insisted. "I want to see them again. Charles, Hank, the students. I have some vacation days at work; I'll use them."

You had quit your job after Alex died and moved permanently back into the mansion, unable to pay your rent or utilities and unable to face the apartment you used to call home with him.

Charles' voice was in your head. He was trying to calm you down. You had no idea what was going on outside the circle of flames surrounding you, and your thoughts still raced a million miles per minute.

"Calm down, you've got to calm down," his voice was almost panicked and rushed. You hadn't heard him this scared in months.

Finally you got a deep breath in, just barely able to tell what was going on. You had set fire to the grounds; grass and trees were scorched, some still on fire. All of your tears were evaporating as soon as they left your eyes. All of the students who had been in the yard had evacuated, probably ushered to the front lawn or inside the house.

Slowly you took a few more deep breaths in, a few catching on sobs that ripped out of your throat. The fire that was in your immediate vicinity was blue. You had never gotten it that hot before; it shocked you to your core that your grief had gotten that bad.

As you evened out the flames, they died down into grey smoke and charred dirt, and the lava dripping slowly stopped. At some point the professor managed to get away from you, no longer sitting next to you in front of the pond.

Tears now freely fell down your face, no longer turning to steam. You looked down at your arms, blood pooling out of the cracks in your skin and onto the pavement below you.

"Holy shit." Turning around to see where the voice came from, you were met with blue fur.

Hank was standing behind you, staring at the blood seeping from your arms, the burns along your skin, and the destruction around you.

You barely managed a "sorry" before passing out.

Bright lights were above you. Your brain was foggy as you woke up. Tight bandages were around your arms.

As you looked around, you took in Hank's lab that often doubled as an infirmary. You were lying on one of the hospital-style beds in the room, a few machines hooked up to you. An IV in your arm. A heart monitor is standing beside your bed. The gentle beeps sent nervous chills down your spine.

Testing out your movement, you started with your fingers, trying to flex them in and out while taking a few deep breaths. You remember what happened. Your arms ache where Hank had obviously stitched you up. The feeling of the tight bandages reminds you of Alex.

"You're awake. You feeling okay?" Hank was back in his non-blue form, picking up a clipboard and writing a few things.

"How long was I out?" Your voice was harsh; you desperately needed a glass of water. You assumed it was because of the screaming you did before you managed to control yourself.

Hank made a ghost of a grimace. "You've been here, unconscious, for two full days now, not including today. It's 12pm currently. You used up all of your energy burning half the backyard down." He helped you sit up and handed you a glass of water.

After downing a third of the glass, you whispered, "Jesus Christ..." pulling a hand down your face in exhaustion.

"Now if you don't mind, I'm going to go find Scott; he's been worried about you."

"Scott? Summers? Has been worried about me?"

Hank stared at you blankly, giving you a look that told you, "Yes, you idiot."

"You worry about the kid, but then you're surprised when he worries about you?"

You let out a puff of smoke from your nose. "You know the Summers. They're terrible at showing that they care."

"And I would think that you would be able to read them by now." Hank smiled and patted your shoulder just above the top of the bandages, walking out the door to supposedly find Scott.

Once he left, your ears honed in on the beeping of the heart monitor again. You could go crazy hearing that sound over and over.

The lab was extremely sterile-feeling, with white walls and white floors. The only pops of color were the bright red biohazard trash cans and sharps boxes, and you couldn't really call those a design choice.

As you fiddled with your own hands out of boredom, you realized at some point you must have dropped Alex's sunglasses when you were burning down the yard. Panicking, you searched around for them, hoping someone had managed to pick them up and save them from the flames and magma you produced. You wouldn't be able to live with yourself if you knew your powers destroyed the only thing you had left of him.

"Are you looking for these?" Scott was holding out the pair of red-tinted sunglasses. You hadn't even realized he walked in until he spoke up, too busy trying desperately to search for the item he held in his hand. You let out a breath you didn't know you were holding, shoulders slumping down as you relaxed a little.

"They survived..."

"The professor picked them up when your powers started flaring and told me it was better if I gave them to you." Scott shrugged in his usual arrogant high-school-boy fashion. You gently took them from him, running your thumbs over the bridge, then the frame, and down the stems.

He sat down in a chair beside your bed, leaning back and crossing his arms, a near scowl on his face. It reminded you so much of Alex, you gave a weak chuckle.

"You wanna talk about it, Summers?" You couldn't tell if he was looking at you, his own sunglasses covering his eyes, but you could nearly feel them boring holes into you. He was shocked that you read his body language so well. He didn't seem to know it was similar to what Alex would do; anytime he was feeling restless or anxious, he would forget his face, and his lips would pull into a frown. You had teased him about it so much that he brought up that any time you relaxed you looked like a kicked puppy; you called it even.

"You're one of the last people who knew Alex well..." Scott paused as he tried to find the words, fidgeting with a corner of his jacket. "If I lost you, it'd be like losing him again. So don't go acting like you're all alone."

"As long as you promise to do the same," your voice was serious, making sure he knew that you meant it. The two of you have pretended everything was fine for long enough; you knew this. The hard part was trying to be better.

When he nodded in agreement, you smiled and held up your pinky. An eyebrow was raised, and you could sense he rolled his eyes, but he gave in, linking his pinky with yours.

"I promise."

"I promise."

"Come on, show us your powers; even Alex showed us his powers," Raven, or Mystique as she said you should call her, insisted on seeing what you could do. The rest of the group joined in chanting like you all did to Alex.

"Really, I don't think it's a good idea, no matter where I am." You shook your head, trying to be polite but stubborn.

"If I showed my powers, you have to." Alex lifted his bottle while talking to you, even continuing the chanting to try and pressure you into it.

You gritted your teeth, exhaling through them and creating a small fire in the palm of your hand. You showed that you could also create small ones off the tops of your fingertips like they were lighters.

"That's really all of it? I don't get what you were so worried about," Alex smirked and took a sip of his drink.

Suddenly all the eyes in the room felt piercing.

"There is more to my powers, but trust me, you don't want to see the aftermath."

More chanting, and you were on your feet, standing in the courtyard, making sure you were surrounded by as much concrete as possible. You tried to summon all of your rage, your fear, your sadness, and every ounce of negative emotion you could muster.

Small fissures formed on your skin, eventually turning into canyons where instead of blood, lava dripped. You gathered the lava in your hands, forming it into a ball before throwing it in the direction of the statue that had been cut in half by Alex. It melted right through the metal, dropping through onto the concrete. Even as the group cheered, more lava dripped from your arms, unable to control it. Every nerve on your arms hurt, you felt like you were being burned alive, and your skin was ripping apart. You clenched your jaw in pain.

It was getting worse. Every cheer from your friends made you more upset. They wanted this. They wanted you to hurt. Unfiltered rage coursed through you. Before you realized it, the grass in the courtyard was on fire, and your eyes had turned to blazing flames.

You snapped out of it when your name was yelled by the group. Expecting them to be angry, even terrified, you shut your eyes tightly. The sound of a fire extinguisher being used made you open them. Darwin had managed to walk through the fire with his impenetrable skin and put out all of the flames before they caused more damage. Luckily you hadn't burned through your clothes.

The entire group looked in shock, then Sean resolutely yelled, "Hell yeah!" and all of you broke out in smiles.