Archive of Our Own ^beta

The first one is a postcard. The front is, in a word, ugly. The handwriting on the back is chicken scratch, and the scrawl at the bottom can only roughly be interpreted as “Havok.” Hank looks at it for a moment, and then he brings it downstairs.

Raven is leaning against the wall in corridor to the kitchen on one leg, the phone cupped against her ear and the cord spiraling towards the ground before going up again. She holds up one blue hand, and Hank retreats to the kitchen and collapses into one of their wooden chairs, waiting.

When Raven’s done she comes in and sits down across from him.

“So?” she says. “What is it?”

“Was that Erik?” Hank asks, and Raven nods.

“Magneto, yes,” she replies.  

“Yes,” Hank echoes.

“Brotherhood stuff,” she says. “I know this is--”

“No, sorry,” Hank mutters. “Of course it was him. Stupid question. I know we aren’t talking about it.”

Raven nods, and offers Hank half a smile. It’s been heavy with everything unspoken since they moved in together, the truth caught in quick glances and the gaps between words. Hank holds up the postcard, between the claws of his thumb and forefinger, and Raven squints at it.

“Ugly,” she says.

“It’s from Alex,” he says, and slides it across the table to her. Raven flips it over and reads the back, then sets it down.

“Huh,” she says.

“Yeah, I don’t know what he wants,” Hank says. “I promise that’s not secret code.”

“You promise? Secret code?” Raven says. “How old are we?”

“Not old enough,” Hank mutters, and rubs his temples. “Or young enough.”

“Wow,” she says, sitting down. “You really sound like a genius.”

“I’m not one who has to sound like a genius,” Hank says. “You do.”

“And I’ve done well thus far, haven’t I?” Raven says, and midsentence she shifts, and she’s Hank.

It always makes him a little sick to see himself as he was before: blue eyes, dark hair, human. But now he’s the Beast, and he has a fellowship at Berkeley, and he has to have Raven pose as him for meetings, so no one knows that Dr. Hank McCoy is actually a beast or a mutant or whatever it is he is.

Furred, essentially. And large.

Raven’s watching him with his own eyes, bright and sharp. Hank was never fully aware of what his face looked like, by virtue of inhabiting it, but now he thinks he can see Raven there, rather than himself.  

After a moment she takes pity on him, and shifts back. Hank wonders what someone would think if they looked in the window and saw two blue people sitting in the living room, and one of them was nude and scaled and the other was oversized, shirtless, furry.

He goes down to the basement to work in the lab. It’s cool, dank and dark, and in the lab everything falls into a neat rhythm. He is Dr. Hank McCoy, regardless of his skin, regardless of the fact that he’s only living half of his own life while Raven lives the other half, regardless of his newfound clumsiness with glassware. 

When he comes back upstairs, Hank finds a scrap of paper, writes on it, and stuffs it into an envelope that will be winging its way towards Westchester County eventually, whenever Raven next goes out.

Hank doesn’t get out of the house at all, frankly. He wishes that the best fellowship he got wasn’t somewhere where so many people could see him. He’s been living like a shut-in for the past few months, going out only occasionally in the dim hours between midnight and morning, and if it weren’t for the fellowship--the work he’s doing is fascinating, and his hours in the lab pass in a blur of discovery. It’s the other hours, the ones where he’s waiting around for Raven, that don’t go so well. And it’s a rather unfortunate fact that the Beast, as he is, is somewhat better suited to being outside.

Raven comes home the next, slipping out of her disguise as soon as she shuts the door.

“Recruiting’s going along,” she says, grinning like a sphinx.

“Any interesting powers?” he says, then quickly addends, “Or, you know, don’t tell me.”

“I can’t give away our team” she says, almost apologetic. Erik had permitted her and Hank to cohabit only grudgingly, after Raven pointed out that his chess matches with Charles were not exactly in the spirit of extreme secrecy on either side.

“There should be a certain camaraderie among mutants, shouldn’t there?” she had said. “There are few enough of us at it is.”

“Okay, so let’s talk about something else,” Hank offers, and Raven looks at him speculatively.  

“You and Alex aren’t friends now, are you?” she asks. “Since I left.”

“He’s pretty close with Sean, I think. And Darwin, since he got back,” Hank says. “Can I tell you that?”

“We know Darwin’s back, dumbass,” Raven snorts. “Emma picked up on that pretty quick.”

“Right, Emma,” Hank said. “How is she? Still frigid?”

“She’s not all bad,” Raven says, and Hank can feel his face growing skeptical.

“Frigid might be one word I would use,” Raven admits. “But I would also use other words. And it’s not like you ever properly met her.”

“Yeah, but you know, rumors,” Hank says, and waves one large hand in an imitation of airiness.

Raven’s lips curl into a grin.

“You got another one,” Raven says, dropping the postcard on the long lab table in front of Hank. On the front there’s a picture of the Statue of Liberty, the oxidized copper far too green. Hank imagines the entire statue smells like pennies, though he’s aware that the scent has as much to do with the oil found on human hands as the metal itself: his hands no longer pick up or hold the scent, and when he touches copper it always seems like something’s missing.

“He does realize that we have an agreement for this, doesn’t he?” Raven asks. “This house is Switzerland.”

“I think he’s trying to be clever,” Hank says, turning the postcard over. “Why are you reading my mail?”

“It’s a postcard, Hank,” Raven says. “Of course I read it.”

Hank allows himself a small smile at that, and puts the postcard down on the counter.

“Want to hear about the status of the research?” he asks, and Raven sighs and sits down on the stool next to his.

“So?” she says. “How’s it going?”

Well, is the answer. It’s going well. Everything in the lab is fitting together in the neat way things rarely fit together in the lab; a reminder that science, for all its untidiness, is slightly tidier than life. Somewhat. In a very small way. Part of the fellowship, for Hank, is trying to keep tighter control on his research, to make sure he doesn’t make mistakes (or rather, magnificent fuck-ups) like the one he made with the serum, and he doesn’t seem to be.

“It’s cute, you know,” Raven says when she takes the envelope from him, “You and Alex getting all friendly, writing notes.”  

“Sure,” Hank says, looking at the letter, which seems smaller in her hands, although maybe it should look larger, given the contrast in their sizes.

“What’s it like, being Mystique?” Hank asks, and Raven purses her lips. They’re standing in front of the front door, in the tiny space that serves as a foyer. The walls and door are dark wood, and the mail comes in the brassy slot and piles on the floor. They leave the junk there until one of them gets tired of looking at it and scoops it up to dump in the trash.   

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, when I changed it--hurt, right? And, after, I didn’t know which body was my own,” Hank says. He spreads out his hands. “If this is the fruition of my mutation, it’s who I’m supposed to be, I guess? How I’m supposed to be?”

“This is me,” Raven says simply. “The blonde girl was just a convenient disguise. Everyone else--is just a skin, you know? A different skin. And it was hard to accept that my skin didn’t, doesn’t, look human, but.”

Hank nodded. He wondered if it might be somewhat easier for Raven, because she wasn’t bifurcated so much as she was fractured. But what someone else had always seemed easier--easier for Alex and the rest because they looked right, easier for Raven because she could swim back and forth.

He’d tried to fix it, hadn’t he, though. With Raven’s DNA and the serum. And instead it had changed everything.

It should’ve made everything harder, but eventually it just made everything truer, simpler: it was all on the surface, now. He couldn’t go back. He was a mutant, he was the Beast, there was nothing to hide.

Except when he wasn’t in the surface, when he was working in his sub-surface lab, quietly puttering through the darkened rooms of the house he and Raven shared. Then there was everything to hide, wasn’t there, and he was hiding it.

He could see in the dark, now. It didn’t make things clearer.

Hank checks the mail slot daily until the next letter shows up, a thin envelope that slides in almost too easily in a pack of catalogs and bills. Alex’s handwriting verges on illegible to the point where Hank’s not entirely sure how his end of their correspondence continues to arrive intact, but there’s something satisfying about getting a proper envelope, with a neat, tri-folded sheet of paper enclosed. The letterhead says Charles F. Xavier, and seeing it makes Hank wince with a forgotten fondness. He likes the Professor, who proofed his application for the fellowship for him despite everything that happened in the wake of that day on the beach, with Erik and Raven leaving, and the bullet--Charles was astoundingly present, perhaps more present than he had been prior, as if he had suddenly realized how vast the stakes were.

The X-Men were recruiting too, of course, quietly filling up the School. And Hank’s research was to help them all, to make a point, trying to use mutant genetic material to understand who they were, essentially, reading the smallest maps to trace the path they came down. Hank had met Watson and Crick, just once, when he was still working for the CIA. That was before Watson had come out publicly against mutants and Crick had started encouraging them to breed, to improve the human race. That was a long time ago, or at least it seemed that way.

The DNA itself, though. Hank kept the information about his sources and his motives opaque, but the techniques he was developing alone were significant enough to be of interest to the fellowship committee. The rest of his work was for the X-Men and for himself, to fill the hollow pieces of his knowledge, to provide something to the mutant community that might allow them to understand who they were.

Raven comes in when the letter’s on the table to be brought out to the postbox, and she hangs up Hank’s body like a coat as soon as the door shuts behind her.

“They think you’re brilliant,” she says, grabbing him by the shoulders. “Fucking amazing.”

“You’re brilliant,” he says quietly. “It wouldn’t work if you didn’t understand everything, you know.”

She smiles at him, all bright teeth and yellow eyes.

“You know how much it means that you’re letting us see this, don’t you?” he arms are still on his shoulders, and there’s something about this nearness Hank would have wanted, once, but now they share DNA and it feels like Raven could be his sister.

He had only ever really liked the idea of Raven, he realizes: of being able to shift out of his mutation, of having anyone, really, look at him like he was something, because of rather than despite his feet.

“It seemed fair,” Hank says after a moment. “It doesn’t give either group any advantage to know. You know, camaraderie. There are few of us as it is, and so on.”

“Turning my words back on me?” she says.

Hank is caught between a shrug and a grin, but mostly he’s glad to have Raven back--not Mystique, but Raven, who might be his friend and isn’t constantly caught up in the differences between the Brotherhood and the X-Men, but who instead just sees them, mutants.

“How’s the city?” he asks.

“Oh, you know--” she says. “After the meeting, I took the Bay Bridge in to ‘Cisco, right? They’re talking about mutants, out there. They want to meet us.”

“Meet us,” Hank echoes.

“Well, not us, precisely, but mutants in theory,” Raven says. “It’s a bit idealistic--I’m not entirely convinced, but it’s something.”

“I thought the Brotherhood didn’t trust humans,” Hank says, and Raven shrugs.

“It’s more--well,” Raven says. “We’re more than them. But don’t you want to get out of the house? Maybe you could try, with them.”

“Yes, maybe,” Hank says, looking at the heavy curtains over the window. It’s cooling off, but not enough, and the house is still damp and weighted. When he peels back the curtains at night he can see strings of streetlamps, the curve of a hill shimmering wet. But it feels like too long since he’s seen the outside properly, and his image of San Francisco is replaced by something else--in his mind he holds the Professor’s School, the vast building, the rings of trees that will be turning red and gold now, shifting autumnal.

He knows that’s not what it looks like, here, but he rather wishes it did. Next fall he’ll be back--the Professor will come and fetch him, cloak him in an illusion of normalcy, and then he’ll be back at the School, in the lab that’s properly his, and he and Raven will go back to being on different sides.

Their Switzerland, in a way, is a return to the days before the beach, training and reveling in their powers, their brilliance. In the peripheral parts of his mind, Hank knows that nothing like that can last forever. And in the same way his life’s been bifurcated, between being human and being the Beast, he’s torn between wanting it to last forever and missing something else, something that’s back in New York.

Each letter from Alex feels a little stranger to Hank, because he hadn’t really expected them to keep coming. Even though Hank himself continues to respond, and now he has two postcards and two letters as evidence. Third time’s the charm, he decides. And the postcards don’t count. So if he gets a third letter, it’s a proper thing.

“Still writing Alex, are you?” Raven asks when she sees him at the kitchen counter with the new envelope and a sheet of graph paper spread flat in front of him, empty.

“I guess so,” he says, and Raven sits down opposite.

“You guess?”

He shakes his head, “Well, obviously we’re still writing. I’m working on a letter, here.”

Raven gets up and turns her back to him, shaking her head.

“Here,” she says. “I’ll make you a hot cocoa, while you work it out. If you’ve looked outside you’ll know, but it’s a shit miserable day. Hell, you can feel it in here.”

Hank nods although Raven can’t see him, and looks at his hands on either side of the graph paper, big and clumsy. They make his handwriting likewise, unlike the way he recalls his handwriting looking before the shift. He tries to tidy it up as much as possible, but the shapes still don’t seem tight enough, everything looks looser and larger than it once was. He notices, if he flips through his lab notebooks: there’s a distinction between who he is now and who he once was, and it permeates every aspect of his life.

“Were you born blue?” Hank asks once his words are down on paper and the envelope’s sealed. Raven looks at him, her eyes like two sharp stones, and she sets a mug of hot chocolate down in front of him before sitting down.

“Yeah,” Raven says. “Real shock for the parents, or so I hear. It’s amazing I made it as far as I did.”

“You think they would’ve--”

“I don’t know,” Raven says. “They gave me up for adoption, and a nurse took me in for long enough for me to figure out how to shift, but once I started changing she didn’t like it. She didn’t like not having a hold on me.”

“And then you found Charles,” Hank says, and Hank shrugs.

“Something like that,” she says. “But I’m nobody’s pet.”

There’s a sharpness in the way she says it, a reminder that something inside Raven is still trying to gain footing. There’s no precedent for mutants. There have been other groups that didn’t fit, of course, but none that arose in the way the mutants did, with sudden, radical genetic shifts, with sudden, radical powers.

Genetically, there’s on group: those with Downs syndrome, though Hank’s mother still called it mongolism. Hank was beginning to suspect that the mutations were the result of two extra chromosomes: not just a twenty-first but a twenty-second, more genes than any human had business having. The Professor disagrees, but Hank has his suspicions, quiet ones that he knows are correct, with the confidence of someone who is in the habit of being right about a very narrow and specific set of things.

Raven’s conversation circles around, and then she has to go out the grocery, so she picks up Hank’s letter off the table and puts on Hank’s body, then she’s gone.

Hank goes down to the lab to look at Alex’s genes. He ran the same tests on them that he ran on everybody else and they’re not--the results are not particularly distinctive. Some of the genes seem to imply the powers of the mutant, but Alex’s don’t. Like Alex, they could be human.

That’s what Hank had thought on the first look, but now he’s looking under the scope, just staring, and there’s a flash of red.

He stays at the scope all evening, watching the flashes like fireflies. When Raven comes back, she has two bulky bags of groceries, and there’s something in her eyes that manifests itself as a question for Hank.

“So I met someone at the store,” she starts, and Hank looks at her.

“Yeah?”

“Well, it turns out you already knew him,” she continues, and Hank gives her a sharp glance.

“Elias Sill? Mean anything to you?”

Hank is grateful that the fur covers his skin, because if he didn’t he knows his face would be going pale, draining of blood, and then probably flushing. It’s not that Elias Sill is anyone particularly terrible, it’s just that--

“So,” Raven says, sitting down. “You know, I rather thought you had a crush on me, when we first met. And you seemed so virginal.”

“Well I’d never done it with a girl, had I?” Hank spits out before he can stop himself, take a moment to measure his concerns about what this will change. Sometimes being part of a minority makes other minorities worse, like being ostracized might increase exponentially as you associate with more fringe groups.

Raven grins and shakes her head.

“Hank,” she says. “There is so much more to you than I expected.”

“Isn’t that true of everyone?” he asks, and it comes out more weary than he intended. He’s tired of the annals of his own secrets, tired of trying to understand the hidden fragments of everyone else.   

December means they’re coming up on semester break, and there will be fewer meetings for everyone to go to, and Raven and Hank will have to figure out some bastardized holiday to celebrate. Raven’s already suggested solstice, but Hank’s not entirely sure what you do on solstice.

“We can just do Christmas then,” she says. “Charles and I always did.”

Thanksgiving had been heavy with the ghost of Charles and the others not there, because Switzerland was far too awkward for guests. They’d tried to chase out the ghosts by getting Chinese and observing precisely zero traditions; Raven had picked up the take-out boxes from a place in Chinatown she swore was wonderful, and the food was delicious but the house was thick with their silence.

But then Raven comes home one afternoon shaking off icy rain and Hank’s skin, and she says, “Guess who I saw today?”

Hank schools his face into careful blankness, because he has no idea who Raven saw today, but he doesn’t want to get his hopes up one way or the other.

“Moira MacTaggert,” she says, when Hank says nothing, and he blinks at her very rapidly in response.

“Yeah,” she says, hanging her rain jacket on a hook. “I know. I--she was good to me, once.”

“She remembers,” Hank says, rather stiffly. “Could you tell?”

“I thought--Charles told Erik,” Raven starts, and Hank shakes his head.

“He lied,” he says, simply, and Raven purses her lips into a frown. “We could invite her to Christmas.”

“I don’t--” Raven says, but she trails off.

Hank just shrugs.

“She might not be here long, anyway. But Charles forgave her.”

“Charles forgives everyone,” Raven says. “Or he would, if they’d let him.”

Hank knows she’s talking about Erik, now, but it’s not a line of discussion he wants to ride. He listens to the water hitting the roof and sliding down, and if he concentrates he can hear each individual droplet, every single one.

They decide to invite Moira to Christmas. Raven sees her again, when she’s out as Hank.

“She watched me,” she says. “She has to know what we’re doing. She knows you’re--”

“Yes,” Hank says. “She knows.”

There are a lot of things Moira is, impetuous, maybe, but dumb is not one of them.

Raven comes back home one day, dumps her satchel on the floor, and says, “She’s coming.” It’s a fluid motion, and Hank is picking the satchel up and putting it on a chair before he fully comprehends what she said.

“You told her what it was going to be like, right?” Hank asked, and Raven nodded.

“She said she knows a place with great dumplings.”

Which sounds alright.

So that’s how Hank ends up having Christmas dinner with Raven and Moira MacTaggert, who shows up on their stoop looking tired and apologetic in a sort of vague way, like she’s not entirely sure why she agreed to this, but she’s carrying a brown paper bag that smells of dumplings, and Hank and Raven have already set a third place at the table.

“It’s good to see you,” Hank says, and he’s surprised that it’s genuine, then more surprised when Moira takes his hand and gives it a tight squeeze.

“You too,” she replies.

They eat largely in silence, but then Moira breaks it by saying, “So, have you been reading the Oracle?”

“I don’t even understand why we get it,” Hank says, and Moira smiles a little.

“I put you on a list,” she says. “The CIA wanted to keep an eye on the hippies, you know, because they figured--”

“They figured it wouldn’t matter much if you fucked it up,” Raven finishes, her eyes bright. Moira doesn’t look contrite or ashamed, just nods.

“I think there might be a place for mutants, there,” she says. “In the counterculture, I mean.”

“Do you think they’d actually be able to handle it if they met with us?” Raven asks, and Moira shrugs.

“There’s only one way to know,” she says, but her voice is gentle, like she knows she’s pushing something. “I don’t know any mutants who are actively involved, but I think if you married your cause to theirs--”

“Everyone would think we were drug-addled as well as dangerous?” Raven interjects, and Moira looks at her.

“Maybe,” she says. “Or maybe you would gain human supporters, and Hank would be able to leave the house during daylight hours.”

“Have you been spying on us?” Raven asks, and Moira shrugs.

“There are some things you don’t have to see to know,” she says.

Hank changes the subject. He doesn’t know whether he wants to ally himself with any group in particular, but he feels like his opinion is the one that matters if Moira’s going to use his housebound status to argue her point.

He doesn’t want to talk about it. He can take care of himself.

Hank folds the letter and puts it back in its envelope. New Year’s has already come and gone. He and Raven split a bottle of champagne and went to bed early, but Alex is talking about making out like it was a possibility.

Elias Sill was a long time ago, when Hank was an undergraduate who could pass as human and Elias Sill was an undergraduate who could pass as older, and who taught Hank the things he couldn’t teach himself, with chapped lips and calloused hands. At the time, Hank could hardly believe that Elias wanted him, and now he found himself pondering it again.

Elias had wanted Hank when he was barely old enough to be legal, sharp hip bones, pale skin, blue eyes. Slim, young, human, with at least the appearance of fragility.

He was no longer any of those things, and he wasn’t sure why Alex couldn’t see it. Probably because Alex wasn’t currently present, and maybe he’d forgotten about the blue fur, the blue skin, the flattened nose and yellow eyes.

With the letter folded and ensconced in its envelope, Hank doesn’t need to think about it, and then there’s a knock at the front door, and he has even fewer reasons to think about it.

It’s Moira, carrying an issue of The San Francisco Oracle.

“Human Be-In,” she says. “On the 14th.”

“What?” Hank asks. She holds up the paper, and on the front it says, “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In,” swirling letters around a strange picture--a man with flowing locks and three eyes, a man who could almost be a beast.

“Huh,” Hank says. “Sounds like crap.”

Moira shrugs.

“It might be,” she says. “It might be a place for you to go public. There’ll be LSD--some of them won’t even know if what they’re seeing is real.”

“And how’ll I get there?”

“Big coat,” Moira offers, and Hank furrows his brow.

“Think about it,” she says. “I really need to go.”

And so Moira leaves, and Hank leaves the paper on the kitchen table. Now there are two things he doesn’t want to think about, which is the way it usually goes, when he doesn’t want to think about something. Problems travel in packs, like dogs--it makes his hair riffle, just thinking about packs of dogs, which suggests there might be some tenure to the feline hypothesis.

Now might be the time to think of other things, not about how he should live his life: out in the open or cloistered, like he had before the change or closeted. There's an unfortunate frisson of a memory that rises up here, a reminder that Raven is the first person he's told about Elias in his life, and even her he hardly told at all. So there are those secrets again, and once again he just wants to turn his back on them and focus on something else.

He descends to the lab, and tests the simpler hypotheses: the ones he can actually prove.

He doesn’t tell Raven about the Human Be-In. Or, more accurately, he doesn’t tell her until the day before it actually happens.

“I think I might go out,” Hank says, and Raven’s face flashes up towards his. She’s sitting at the kitchen counter, looking at her own hands. Hank knows she just got off the phone; the cord is looped around the leg of her chair, and she hadn’t bothered to disentangle it when she hung up.  

“What?” she says.

“Moira told me about a thing.”

“Not that thing on the cover of the Oracle, Hank,” Raven says.

“What?” Hank says, startled.

“They aren’t--Moira’s wrong,” Raven says. “They accept humans of all kinds, but they’re human, Hank. They won’t know what to do with you.”

“I don’t know what to do with me,” Hank replies, and Raven falls silent.

“Beast,” she says, after a beat. “Hank. Your research is amazing. You know that, right?”

“Don’t you think it’s strange that my mutation is purely physical?” Hank says. “Just a little?”

“Should I?” Raven asks, and Hank shrugs. He’s standing in the doorway, and he might be looming, but something in Raven is bristling in a way that makes him uncertain about sitting down.

“I’m not using any of that, here,” he says. “If I’m not using my mutation, if I’m only using my human abilities, am I really a mutant at all?”

“Of course you are,” Raven says, and Hank shakes his head.

“This isn’t what Schrödinger intended it for,” he says, “but I’m like the cat. If no one sees me, I could be either a mutant or a human--I could be Hank McCoy, or I could be Beast, or I could be both or neither.”

Raven is quiet again, and the reverberations of Hank’s words hum through the room.

“Which do you want to be?” Raven asks, finally.

“Both,” he says. “But I don’t want it to be a question. I don’t want to be something in a box that might be both.”

It’s not the truth, not precisely: he doesn’t want to be both, but he can’t keep living as half.

Raven looks at him, the close sort of look people give things they are uncertain about, like she’s squinting to read a book with very fine print.

“I’ll go with,” she says, after a moment. “But not as Mystique. Just in case something happens.”

Hank has a feeling that the irony of Raven being the one going as a human escapes neither of them, so he doesn’t draw attention to it.

“Do you even know how many people will be here?” Raven asks him in the morning. They’re leaving the house while it’s still dark out, so Hank won’t draw attention, and Raven’s fidgeting with human Hank’s hair in a way Hank suspects he used to do quite often.

Hank shrugs.

“This is a terrible idea,” Raven breaths, weary and exasperated.

“I suspect Moira will be there,” Hank says. “She has firearms. And you can hide.”

“So it’s all on you,” Raven says. “And possibly Moira.”

“I guess it is,” Hank replies, and shrugs on his coat.

The city is quiet in the morning, and the people who pass them sometimes stare and Hank and sometimes give the illusion of failing to notice. It almost reminds Hank of travelling with the Professor, who would cast some sort of psychic magic on onlookers so Hank looked less like a beast and more like a human, and with whom Hank could walk through LAX the day before Thanksgiving without even earning a second glance.

But it’s not quite like that. Hank suspects most of the onlookers think he’s in some sort of very elaborate costume, but as they approach Golden Gate Park there are people condensing into the crowds, the long-haired hippies that occasionally appear in photographs in the newspaper, protesting things.

“They look unwashed,” Raven hisses at Hank. “And they smell rank.”

Hank’s nose is more sensitive than Raven’s, he’s certain of it, but he doesn’t have it in him to point out that most of what he smells is rich and herbal, with an undercurrent of human that he finds enviable rather than distressing.

“What are we doing?” Raven continues.

“I really, really, do not know,” Hank replies, and then they’re at the park, and there are so many people there in the early morning light, clumped together in a thick pack, and Hank knows he can run fast enough to leave this all behind like a bad dream. The water on the harbor is flat and bright, and Hank is torn being delighted to see and smell it and terrified, because the world outside the house is so much vaster than he remembered.

There’s a hand threading through the fur on his back.

It’s Moira.

“Where’d you get this coat?” she slurs, eyes wide. “It’s--groovy.”

“Moira,” he says, and her lips curve into a grin.

“You came,” she says, sounding again like herself.

“I was just thinking of leaving--”

“Don’t,” she says, simply. “I can introduce you to some people.”

Raven is there, too, glancing between the pair of them.

“I don’t think this is a good idea, Moira,” she says. “There are too many of them.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Moira says, and her voice is sharp and calm, and then she’s leading Hank through the crowd, her slim hand clasping only three of his fingers. Hank fumbles for Raven, and they make a sort of chain, only they keep needing to stop because Moira knows people, and they’re offering her joints, tabs of LSD. Raven catches Hank’s eyes and there’s a wild bewildered look in her eyes, and suddenly someone behind her catches Hank’s eyes and says, “Dude, what are you?” with something that is plainly awe.

Hank blinks.

“I’m the Beast,” he says, and the guy’s face breaks into a loopy grin.

Moira leads them on, and it occurs to Hank that they’ve gone down the rabbit hole and come out the other end, because nothing that’s happening right now is in the realm of things he expected to happen, today or ever in his life.

And then they’re approaching a man in a white shirt with a curling mane of hair, and Moira says, “Allen,” and he turns around.

It’s Allen Ginsberg. Hank’s not entirely sure how he knows what he looks like; maybe his picture was on the back of Howl, which Hank read a long time ago because he wasn’t supposed to but failed to understand. There was a moment with Elias when some small part of Howl had made slightly more sense, but then that had slipped out sideways and--

“Moira,” Allen Ginsberg is saying, grinning like the Buddha, holding out his arms and enfolding her. She draws back.

“This is the person I wanted you to meet,” she says, gesturing towards Hank, and then Allen Ginsberg comes forward, right hand extended, and says “Hello.”

It’s strange. Ginsberg starts talking about October 6th, ‘66, and the Beast, and Hank thinks he may be high, but he’s also sharp and present. He is, strangely enough, exactly the sort of human--exactly the sort of person--Hank needed to speak with; he wonders how Moira knew.

There’s a group that looks at Hank in abject horror, of course, and another faction that asks him if he was involved in that terrible violence, and Raven sort of hangs off to the side making faces that are supposed to encourage Hank to break loose, run off.

He doesn’t. It’s remarkable, because the hate and the fear is tempered by the fact that some of these people are looking at him with a frank curiosity, and it’s been so long since Hank was away from mutants that he’d forgotten how similar humans without mutations were, good and bad in equal measure, and one girl threads her fingers through his fur and starts to braid it, and Allen Ginsberg offers Hank a drag on a joint, and Hank coughs and everyone laughs and Raven puckers her lips just like the thin, angry, anti-war girl across the circle, and Ginsberg smiles beatifically and talks about all they have in common, and how more mutants need to come out and show themselves, and harmony, and Hank finds himself returning the grin in kind. There’s music twisting through the air, and people are saying things beautiful and maybe too hopeful or maybe true, and Hank wraps it around himself like something safe, like a coat of fur.

It isn’t until they’re walking home that the situation goes pear-shaped. Somewhere between the pot and the day, Hank’s forgotten about his hood, about wrapping his coat tight around him, and even with it he’s obviously not normal, so maybe what happens should come as no surprise.

Someone shouts something, almost incoherent, but then Hank recognizes it as “mutant,” said with a hiss of hatred and almost unfathomable anger. Raven looks at Hank with a blaze in her eyes, and Hank runs.

He’s fast, he’s still fast, despite being cooped up inside for so long. He exhales a hope for Raven, or a prayer, but he knows she doesn’t need it, and then he falls into the rhythm of his feet and his body and his strength, which flows warm and lively beneath everything. Charles taught him this, but there’s something--Hank knows he should feel afraid, but he just feels free.

When he gets home, he’s not even breathing hard, only then he has to pace and wait for Raven. He goes up and down the stairs and circles the kitchen table at least thirty-seven times before she shows up.

“I told you,” she says, and then leans down and puts her hands on her knees, and shifts back to herself.

Hank looks back at her.

“We’re fine now,” she says. “But it’s going to be in the papers. Or something. And they know about mutants, but only in theory, and they aren’t going to be able to handle it--”

“Of course they can’t handle it,” Hank says. “We’re all cloistered away, and no one sees us except when we’re fighting.”

Raven shakes her head.

“They’ll always be afraid, Hank,” she says. “We’re too much.”

Raven is terse with Hank for at least a week, after that, though he can’t neatly measure it. They discuss his research, but rarely go beyond that--they prepare separate meals and eat at different times, and the house falls into a sort of heavy, uncomfortable silence.

Hank wants to say it parallels Charles’ disagreement with Erik, but he doesn’t actually think it does. It’s their own problem, something between him and Raven, and if only he could completely probe its edges he thinks he may be able to resolve it, but Raven’s not as easy to probe as her DNA.

“What do we do then?” Hank asks her when he catches her in the kitchen. “If they’ll always be afraid?”

“Maybe they have a reason to be,” Raven says, very softly. “Maybe we’re better, and that’s okay.”

“So we do--”

“We fight,” Raven says. She’s leaning against the stove, and her eyes are flint. “And we win.”

“Is that what you think? Or is that what Erik thinks?”

“And are you yourself or Charles?”

“Myself,” Hank says, and he’s startled by his own confidence. “I can only ever be myself, Raven.”

“Maybe I prefer Mystique,” she says.

Hank considers replying to Alex’s letter with precisely what he’s thinking: I don’t know what’s next. But then Raven comes home, looking tired.

“I have a mutant I think should stay here,” she says.

“With us?” Hank asks, glancing around. There’s a hand towel crumpled up on the bar on front of the oven, a pile of dishes in the sink that Hank will probably do in the morning. They have a spare room, which doesn’t mean they need someone to fill it, and bringing a mutant who may not have had contact with other mutants before into the middle of their tenuous truce seems like a terrible idea.

“Yes, with us,” Raven says, granting Hank a withering look. “Where else?”

“I’m just not sure we’re in the best--I’m just not sure we should be having guests.”

“You keep having Moira and that poet over,” Raven says, and makes poet sound like a dirty word.

“So, what, we should bring another mutant into the middle of our shit?” Hank asks. “Someone who doesn’t know any of this, and probably just wants to know there are other people in the world like them, and doesn’t want to be immediately asked to pick sides.”

“Hank,” Raven says, and then she sits down at the table, reaches across and puts her hands on his shoulders.

“Yes?”

“His name’s Scott Summers,” Raven says. “I suspect he’s Alex’s brother.”

Hank says something that might be fuck.

Raven nods.

“He thinks all his siblings are dead,” she continues. “Which is why I want him to stay with us until we can ascertain whether they might be related. You could--could you do something with their genes?”

“What does he do?” Hank asks, and Raven smiles tightly.

“It looks like what Alex does, but it comes out of his eyes. He can’t control it--if you could develop something--”

“Siblings,” Hank says, nodding. “Would be great for my research.”

Raven grins for real this time, and Hank writes Alex a letter that consciously skirts the issue.

The night Scott moves in, Hank and Raven attempt to cook together and end up overcooking the spaghetti and burning the sauce.

“Well,” Hank says. “Not ideal.”

“You have a flare for understatement,” Raven replies, and orders in Chinese.

“Flare,” Hank echoes. “I like the sound of that.”

Raven twists the phone cord around her wrist and when she hangs up she blinks at Hank.

“When’d you get so punchy?” she asks, and Hank shrugs. He tends to get like this when he’s tired, but also when he’s nervous, and he is nervous--if they are, in fact, meeting Alex’s brother, it seems devastatingly important. Even if he’s not Alex’s brother, he’s still another mutant, a potential new recruit.

“Is this about Alex?” Raven continues, narrowing her eyes, and it makes Hank start.

“Why would it be?” he asks, and Raven shrugs.

“Because of all those letters,” she says. “What’s the deal with all those letters?”

“We just--write letters?” Hank says, and Raven frowns.

“But it’s not like you were particularly close before you moved away, was it?”

“Alex was about the same,” Hank says. “Quips, you know. Mockery.”

“But not exactly the same?” Raven presses, and it’s Hank’s turn to frown.

“Well, no--where are you going with this?”

Raven goes back to frowning, and then she goes out to her foyer for her coat and leaves to fetch dinner, which leaves Hank in his armchair in the parlor, trying to pin down Raven’s thought process like a butterfly, and, like butterflies, it repeatedly eludes him. Which is why Hank never expressed any particular interest in entomology.

You would think his bestial nature would help with those things, but even thinking that makes Hank twist slightly inside, because he’s not an animal at all, and he knows it. He’s just not completely clear on what he is, and he wishes he had a sibling who was like him, but Raven is as close as he’s got, and they’re currently fighting about whether or not Allen Ginsberg should be allowed in the house.

And then there’s a knock at the door, and Hank hopes to all that’s holy that it’s Scott Summers, and then he opens it.

“Come in quick,” he says, angling himself so he’s behind the door.

Scott Summers, who is wearing sunglasses and has a flop of dark hair, comes in. He’s almost disconcertingly calm: Hank imagines Raven warned him, but he doesn’t so much as start, and with the sunglasses on Hank can’t read his eyes.

“Scott,” he says, voice flat and formal, and holds out a hand.

“Hank,” Hank echoes, and they shake hands.

“Raven said you were called the Beast,” Scott says.

“They call me that, also,” Hank replies, and then he finds himself at a loss. He ultimately ends up asking Scott stupid questions--“How long have you been in San Francisco?”, “Where are you from?”--and in return he receives tight, terse responses. Hank doesn’t see anything of Alex in this man, but then he wonders if he remembers Alex clearly, anyway. Scott’s hair is dark while Alex’s is light, he knows. Maybe their noses are similar.

Raven saves him, bearing bags of Chinese food and shutting the door with her hip before shifting back to her own skin.

“Scott!” she says. “You found us. Did Hank show you your room?”

“No,” Hank mutters, before Scott himself can say the incriminating word.

“It’s perfectly alright,” Scott interjects smoothly. “We were just chatting.”

And Hank wonders on what planet that was chatting, but for whatever reason Scott is saying this, so he leaves it. As he trails up the stairs after Scott and Raven Hank wonders if he and Scott might be the same age; it’s been a few years since Hank became the Beast, and it makes it harder for him to gauge relative ages. He knows Alex is a few years younger than he is, and he suspects Scott is the older brother, but Scott seems closed in a way Alex never has; it surprises Hank, in retrospect, that Alex would be open at all, given his time in prison, but he suspects Alex’s biting mockery serves as a protective shell, and Scott might do the same with his smooth withdrawal.

Hank does occasionally have flashes of brilliant insight into human nature. They startle him.

Dinner--dinner is mediocre at best. Raven and Hank share the burden of the conversation, and Hank’s not sure how to deal with Scott’s almost preternatural terseness, so maybe he talks too much. He manages not to mention Alex once, not even obliquely, but Alex is present there, in the conversation, if only because he’s purposefully not being mentioned. Raven and Hank describe the powers of some of the other mutants in an attempt to offer something to Scott that Hank can’t completely describe, and Scott seems to be collecting this information in his head without responding to it.

“He makes me nervous,” Hank says to Raven when Scott goes up to bed.

“He’s shy,” she says. “Be patient. Do you remember when all this was new?”

Hank does; certainly he does. But mostly he remembers being delighted to meet others who were fumbling through their powers like him. He remembers when he was in university, younger than his classmates, stumbling through puberty: finding other mutants was like when he finally, stupidly, realized that there were people his age in the world, people whose voices cracked and who got too tall too quick, people who were growing hair in unfortunate places. Everyone in college was already done with that, unfairly, and they looked at Hank with a benign amusement, like they forgot what it was like and didn’t know how to be sympathetic.

He wonders if, to Scott, he and Raven seem like those college students seemed to him--done with the first part of dealing with their mutations, already caught up in this sort of battle. On some level, it makes sense, and maybe that’s why Hank hazards a grin when Scott comes down in the morning, and asks him how he likes his eggs.

“Whatever you’re having is fine,” Scott replies, and Hank sets about making scrambled. He cracks a full dozen into the bowl, and when he turns back towards Scott there’s something on his face that might be surprise.

“Do you eat that much?” he asks, and Hank blinks.

“Since I changed, yes,” he says. He wonders if changed is the right word, but he doesn’t have a better one. Since he became? Since he transformed?

“So you weren’t--” Scott starts, and it occurs to Hank that this was one story they failed to tell last night.

“No,” he replies. “No, it used to be that I just had big feet.”

“My feet are big,” Scott says, glancing at them. “Is that a mutant thing?”

Hank laughs, tries to make it light and not mocking, though he really has no control over his laughter. To his ear it always sounds the same--a little coarse, a little rumbling.

“My feet were really, really, big. And ugly. And my toes looked like something you’d find on a gorilla.”

“Oh,” Scott says, and falls into silence.

“How did you find out about your powers?” Hank asks, and turns out to be the worst and the best question, because Scott is willing to answer it, to quietly ruminate on how his powers shocked and terrified him, and Hank wants to tell him about Alex but can’t, not yet.

“I could help you,” he says. “But I think the Professor--Charles Xavier, Raven’s brother--might be able to help you more.”

Scott nods.

“But I might be able to develop something external that could help you control it.”

“Glasses,” Scott suggests.

When Raven gets back, they’re both down in the lab, and Hank can’t help but think that Scott and Alex’s powers might be exactly the same, only with a different physical source, so he pulls up his notes on Alex’s suit and uses them to draw up a prototype for glasses.

They have to be brothers. It makes too much sense.

Through some vagary of fate and the U.S.P.S., Hank gets Alex’s letter on Saint Valentine’s Day (and you would think the post office would have too much to do, delivering actual valentines, to get the regular letters through). Raven gives Hank a significant look when she hands the letter over to him, but Hank suspects that’s because they’re still trying to decide how, and when, to tell Alex that his brother is alive. And a mutant. And living with them.

“Call him,” Raven says, very gently, placing the letter in his hands. “You should call him.”

“We aren’t sure--” Hank says, even though it’s a lie.

“We’re sure,” Raven says. They haven’t told Scott yet, won’t until they tell Alex.

“Call him,” Raven repeats like a mantra, and then she disappears, and leaves Hank staring at the phone in the hallway. It’s black, sitting on a small wood table. It had never seemed particularly intimidating before, even though it was Magneto’s line into the house, but now--Hank doesn’t know what to do with this information that he has. It’s full of potential, and Hank isn’t clear on how the potential will manifest itself, if, like Alex’s and Scott’s powers, it might come surging out and burn them all.

He dials.

The Professor picks up the phone, and Hank has to ask for Alex, because he can’t imagine telling Charles first, even if he already knows. And then he was to wait for an interminable moment at the end of the empty line, and then there’s muffled sounds, and then Alex.

“Hello?” Alex says, his voice abstracted by the long-distance connection, and Hank wraps the cord of the phone around his hand, a nervous tick he didn’t even realize he had.

“Alex--it’s--” Hank starts, and then Alex says, “Beast, I know it’s you, calling to wish my a happy Valentine’s Day?” and damn Hank had completely forgotten that it was, even though he had known only moments beforehand, when he read Alex’s letter.

“Happy Valentine’s Day?” Hank offers, weakly.

“What is it?” Alex asks, like he knows something’s off.

“Raven and I--” Hank starts, and then Alex interrupts him to say, “Raven and you what?” and Hank has to say, “You aren’t making this easy for me, okay?” and he doesn’t know why he’s so angry, and Alex sounds angry and then he, Hank, says--

“Raven and I may have found your brother.”

And everything is silent. It echoes down the line, and it expands from the phone to fill the hall, and Hank thinks that he might actually hate Alexander Graham Bell, even though, prior to this moment, he’d always admired his ingenuity.

“My brother’s dead,” Alex says, flat.

“Scott Summers,” Hank says. “He can shoot beams from his eyes. He has brown hair. He’s 28. He has some sort of amnesia about his childhood but Raven found him, and he’s here--”

Alex hangs up on him, and Hank is certain that he hates Alexander Graham Bell, and he’s staring, helpless, at the phone’s receiver, like it might hold some sort of secret.

He hangs up the phone. He redials the School’s number, his fingers too large, clumsy and shaking as he spins the rotary.

“This better not be a fucking joke,” Alex says, and Hank can almost feel the heat through the line.

“Why would I joke about this?” he asks, weary, and Alex sighs, crackly across bad wires.

“No,” he says. “You wouldn’t joke about this.”

“Alex--” Hank starts.

“I need to come out and meet him,” Alex interjects. “Does he know about me?”

“Not yet, no,” Hank says.

“I need to meet him,” Alex repeats, and Hank nods before he realizes you can’t hear a nod.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, you should.”

Hank hangs up and goes to talk to Raven.

They tell Scott after Hank finishes the prototype for his glasses.

He cries, and Hank can see a surge of power flash behind the lenses, and then he glances at Raven because he doesn’t know what to do. He pats Scott on the shoulder, awkward.

“I just--” Scott says. “I didn’t think--I remember him.”

Hank and Raven wait.

“There was an airplane--I was supposed to take care of him.”

“He’s fine,” Raven soothes. “He’s doing well.”

“When’s he coming?” Scott asks.

“We’re ironing out the details right now,” Hank says. “Within the month.”

Hank’s actually been talking with Alex on the phone about it; when he should come, how long he can stay. The switch from letters to phone has been weird for all the things they don’t mention: Hank doesn’t joke about what Alex went to prison for, Alex doesn’t mock Hank by calling him a badass when he clearly isn’t, they don’t mention the fact that they’re both attracted to men. Their conversations are starched and white, swathed in an odd formality. Which maybe explains why Hank sits down to write Alex a letter, after they’ve booked Alex on a train for the end of March, even though he says he can hitchhike, hop train cars. They haven’t talked for a week, and Hank misses their stilted conversations, though he doesn’t want to delve into those feelings.

When Hank gives the envelope to Raven, she looks at it and then at Hank, and raises an eyebrow.

“Seriously, Hank.”

“What?” he says.

“It’s just--” she sighs and shakes her head. “Nevermind. I’m glad your friend is coming out to visit.”

She says it like it means so much more, and Hank could use those psychic powers right about now, frankly. He knows it’s invasive--sometimes he feels the invasiveness of those powers, in the smug way Charles recognized his mutation before he could reveal it himself, in other, smaller ways. But sometimes people seem like the most cryptic puzzle. Hank’s own flashes of insight are thin and limited, to the point where he isn’t even sure they’re insightful at all, and he thinks that even if he had one chance to view the human mind under a microscope, clear and true, he might be able to extrapolate that into patterns of understanding.

But maybe the point is that you can never do that with the human mind, because humans are gnarled and idiosyncratic, and Hank should be satisfied with just being the Beast.

He is, in a strange way. He had never expected to find in himself so much strength. It’s a different blessing from Charles’, but a blessing nonetheless.

The letter arrives before Alex does, actually by a full week, but the house is already in a flurry: they’re putting another bed in Hank’s room, because they were worried having Scott and Alex share a room would be too much pressure. The expectation of a guest is weighing on everyone: Scott is twitchy with excitement, and his uncontrolled powers keep flashing behind his glasses, and Hank really needs to refine the prototype, and, perhaps more significantly, get Scott to the east coast and the Professor for training. Raven might be concerned about being overwhelmed with X-Men, but if so, she’s a cipher and hides it well. And in the background there’s still research, and Raven putting on Hank’s body for meetings. Hank is quietly anxious for summer, especially August, when his fellowship ends.

But Alex comes first.

Raven goes to meet Alex, with Scott. She always goes out in Hank’s old body, to keep the neighbors from getting suspicious, but at Hank’s request she shifts into the body she used to wear in a phone booth on the way. For some reason it makes Hank uncomfortable to imagine his body greeting Alex without his actual presence; he figures it would be somewhat more comfortable for Alex to see the blonde Raven, even though it’s a form she has all but abandoned.

With the other two gone, Hank is left to pace the house and reread Alex’s letters, looking for some trick to bridge the gap between the easy way they write one another and the stiff way they spoke on the phone, because as much as Hank wants to blame the phone he suspects it’s the speaking, and the discomfort will just elevate when they’re physically present with one another.

And then Hank feels terribly egocentric about this whole thing, because Alex is here to see his brother, and Hank is just a bystander.

He tries to take a nap, but the empty bed on the other side of the room is there, and he can’t sleep.

He’s downstairs in the kitchen, tearing hunks off a loaf of bread, when they get back. Raven’s shaking off her blonde locks like a dog shakes off water, and Scott is trailing after her, and then there’s Alex, close behind him.

“Hey,” Hank says, around a mouthful of soggy bread, still bright with the bite of sourdough.

“Hank,” Raven says. “That was supposed to be sandwiches for a week.”

Alex laughs.

“Well you should’ve known it wouldn’t last a week,” Hank says, frowning. “There are four of us here, now, and Allen and Moira are coming by in a few days, and you know how I need carbohydrates.”

“I still don’t actually believe that,” Raven says. “Now say hello to our guest.”

“Alex, welcome,” Hank says, and Alex grins at him cockeyed. “How was the trip?”

“Nothing untoward happened,” Alex says, and it’s Hank’s turn to grin, and then Alex adds, “Good, you got my letter.”

In the evening, Hank and Raven retreat to the parlor to sit in the uncomfortable armchairs and leave Alex and Scott alone in the kitchen for sibling bonding. Hank wonders what kind of bonds siblings make: covalent, ionic, something else entirely.

“Do you think it’s going alright?” he asks Raven.

“It’s fine,” Raven says. “Don’t fret. They’re just catching up. Getting to know one another.”

“Do you think--would you be okay if Scott joined the X-Men?” Hank asks.

Raven shrugs. It’s been a long time since they discussed their teams, and Hank feels brave for bringing it up, even as Raven takes it completely in stride.

“They’re siblings,” she says. “I count Charles as my brother, but I left him, though that was different entirely. I wouldn’t be surprised if Scott wants to go to Charles’ school, or at least stay close to his brother. At least he knows what the Brotherhood is all about, if he ever decides he wants something else.”

Hank nods. Raven’s response is measured and reasonable, and he’s filled with a surge of affection for her.

“I’m sorry,” he says, after a moment. “For pushing you with the Human Be-In, and everything. I’ll still be meeting with Ginsberg and Moira--but I’m still figuring out what it means to be like this.”

Hank gestures to himself, and it’s Raven’s turn to nod, and there’s a rekindling of their tentative truce, there. It’s something they’ve been approaching since Scott moved in, but Hank had never had the courage to voice it, and it’s astoundingly comforting to have Raven back.

“I count you as a sister, you know,” he says.

“I know,” Raven says, and then they fall into silence again, but it’s warm and comfortable, heavy across Hank’s shoulders but also lighter than any silence in the house has been for a long while.

By contrast, the silence in Hank’s room that night is heavy, Hank lying flat on his back on his bed and looking straight up at the ceiling, Alex somewhere across the room. Hank can see in the dark, but he consciously doesn’t look, because he doesn’t want to know if Alex is doing the same thing, or curled up on his side, or lying on his stomach with his arms criss-crossed under his pillow. It seems too intimate, like knowing too much, and Hank has seen Alex’s genes but he doesn’t want to see this.

He knows Alex is awake, though, because he can hear him breathing, and that’s what he hears until he falls asleep.

The morning is, by all measures Hank can think of, worse. Hank is making breakfast for everyone, because Raven has a meeting, and he’s coaching her on his research and helping her select clothes for his body when Alex comes downstairs, stumbles slightly, and blinks between the pair of them.

“Woah,” he says, and the way he’s looking at Raven, who is shirtless and looks like Hank looked once, makes Hank irrationally jealous.

Raven looks at Hank, quick, and shifts back.

Alex rubs his eyes.

“Damn,” he mutters. “Sorry, that threw me. I mean I knew but I guess I forgot.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Hank says, although he is worried about it. “How do you like your eggs?”

“Scrambled, runny,” Alex says. “It was just so weird to see both of you, you know? I mean, you probably don’t, but--ah, fuck it. You guys go back to whatever you were doing, okay? I’ll just--”

“Don’t worry about it,” Hank repeats. “Raven’s more than ready for the meeting, she’s leaving in a few minutes, just sit down and I’ll make your eggs.”

“No--” Alex starts.

“Sit down,” Hank hisses, and Alex does. Raven comes up behind Hank and places one blue hand on his shoulder before she leaves, squeezing so her fingers dig into the soft spot beneath the joint. Hank cracks eggs into the pan, and Alex is silent behind him. It had been a long time since Hank wanted to forget about his old body completely, because he’d slowly come to consider it part of the trajectory of his life, but now he does.

He knows why, and it’s a stupid reason. He knows--he knows Alex is attracted to men, and he knows in a removed, empirical way that he was not a bad looking man, once. Despite the glasses. His chest, anyway, was decent, and Raven probably makes it look better than it actually was.

He knows, now, that he’s some sort of amalgam of human and animal that no one in their right mind would ever be attracted to. He had always assumed that monasticism had come hand-in-hand with his transformation, but seeing someone attracted to his old self makes Hank envy all the opportunities he had. Sure, he’s not a virgin, but only just barely, enough to know what he’s missing. And now all those doors have slammed shut.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that it was Alex, because that’s a door in his mind Hank wants to keep shut entirely, under lock and key. They share a room. Hank has fur. Alex is younger than him by three years, which is not much, but is something. It’s just--not. That would be inappropriate, invasive, wrong.

Scott comes downstairs. Hank slides Alex’s eggs onto a plate, and makes another batch of scrambled, slightly firmer, for Scott and himself.

After about a week, Hank learns to pretend Alex just isn’t there when goes to sleep. He can smell him, and hear him breathing, but he just concentrates on something else, until his head aches and everything goes bleary and he eventually, finally, falls asleep. It actually is no better than it was before, but Hank pretends that it is.

During the day Alex is mostly off with Scott--sibling bonding, almost constant. Hank is pleased that they’re still getting along, but it makes the time he does spend with Alex feel weirder, like they’re still strangers and not the people who spent so much time writing one another letters. He considers reinstating the letter writing, but that strikes him as pathetic, when they’re sharing a room.

Moira and Allen come over the beginning of the next week, and Hank lets Alex know so he can join them, which means of course Scott tags along. A group of five instead of three, they wind up in the parlor instead of the better-lit kitchen: Alex and Scott tight together on the love seat, Hank in his oversized chair and Moira and Allen in the twinned armchairs by the windows.

Hank makes them tea, pours it out into teacups that taunt him with their delicacy until Moira rises to help him distribute them. He flashes her what he hopes is a grateful grin, though he knows his teeth sometimes obscure any expression other than vaguely menacing, or hungry.

Allen starts talking, in the way he usually does, words whirling around like a dervish. Hank can feel Alex watching him, like he doesn’t entirely take this seriously, and it makes Hank feel skittish. If he had a tail, he would be thrashing it.

“Alex and Scott are new--” he says. “Should we explain to them what we’re trying to do?”

“My dear Doctor McCoy,” Allen says. “I should think that was completely clear.”

“We’re discussing the possibility of integrating mutants with the counterculture movement,” Moira offers.

“Those people?” Scott says, and his face wrinkles.

“Discussing?” Alex says. “So you aren’t actually doing anything yet?”

“Well what do you suggest?” Moira asks, diplomatic as ever.

“Something,” Alex says. “I don’t know. But you’ve been meeting for, what, months?”

“Since January, yes,” Hank replies.

Alex falls silent; he must hear something in Hank’s tone that Hank himself can’t detect, because he looks at Hank and then he’s quiet.

The rest of the meeting goes about like usual, but only because Alex and Scott are silent. Scott occasionally makes mild efforts to participate, making a peace offering for the incumbents, but Alex is quiet, and Hank himself is removed from the other two because he’s trying to understand how Alex might see what’s happening. Maybe they should be doing something more, but first Hank wants to understand what they could do, whether they’ll be accepted. He wants to understand what was between those who feared him, those who embraced him, and those who tried to attack him on January 14th.

There’s probably the answer, or maybe the answer is in what Alex is saying: in giving up the discussion, and doing something. In being not just strong, but brave.

“Beast,” Alex says, when they’re both in bed that night.

“Hmm?” Hank hums in reply, his coherence blurred by the border of sleep.

“Sorry about tonight,” Alex says, his voice emerging from the dark. “I just thought from your letters--you might be doing something. This feels like something where you gather people without mutations and get them to tell you you’re okay.”

“That’s not what it is at all. Though if it is--it’s because no one else will,” Hank says flatly. “It’s because I can’t go outside here, Alex, and maybe if we could get more humans without mutations involved in this, maybe I could.”

“But you’re more than that, aren’t you?” Alex asks. “The Beast.”

“Are you more than who you are?” Hank asks. He stretches his arms above his head, feels the curve of his own spine. “Is Havok more than Alex?”

“No,” Alex says.

“Would he be, if Havok looked a little more like me?”

“I don’t know,” Alex says, after a moment.

“So,” Hank says. He lumps himself over so he’s lying on his side, his back to Alex and his voice, insistent and straining against the shuttered light of the room.

“Beast,” Alex says, after a moment. “Hank.”

“I’m sleeping,” Hank says, though it’s plainly a lie.

“You’re okay,” Alex says.

Hank sleeps less that night than the six nights prior, and it’s Alex who wakes him in the morning: Alex wearing the harness Hank made him to help with his control like a life vest.

“Do you sleep like that?” Hank asks, because he can’t remember, because Alex was wearing a sleep shirt the night before.

“We aren’t so different after all,” Alex says. “Come on, we’re going outside.”

Hank can see light slivering beneath the blinds.

“It’s morning,” he says. “It’s too late. We can’t.”

“Fuck that,” Alex says, tugging at his arm. “This is what you want, isn’t it?”

Alex is slipping out of his harness, withdrawing his arms from the sleeves, dropping it to the ground. Hank watches him shuck his shell, and Alex watches Hank, eyes bright. There are two things happening here.

First there’s Alex, who is shucking off the limits that have been imposed on his mutation, limits which grant him the control to hide. He’s trying to say something, something radical and good, and Hank sees that--but he also sees the sinew of Alex’s shoulders, the line of his chest angling into his waist, his skin, bare and pale and clean. Hank can see the sharp jut of his hipbones, pointing down, and the soft skin that covers them, and that’s the second thing that’s happening. Alex has to see Hank, seeing this as well as the other thing, although maybe he just mistakes it for Hank’s typical hungry expression.

The truth is that Hank doesn’t know what he wants, not at all. He wants to ask Alex what’s going on here, but that would mean revealing that he himself doesn’t know what’s going on--whether they’re friends, why they’re friends. He wants to ask Alex if this isn’t dangerous, but at least he knows this is as much about bravery as danger, and Hank needs to be brave.

So Hank watches Alex slip into a shirt, and then he spread out his arms like he’s showing Hank something, and then Alex offers Hank a hand and pulls him out of bed, even though Alex should, by all rights, be too small to have that much leverage on Hank.

Hank gets up, and shrugs on his large coat, and they go outside. Hank doesn’t know if Alex’s done something, sent Scott and Raven out on errands, but they aren’t around, and then Hank and Alex are out in the street. The sun is drawing mist off the bay, brilliantly bright, so much better when seen through air than through windows.

They get a block out of their quiet neighborhood when Hank starts to feel the looks, glances and stares, because he doesn’t have his hood up, because he’s being brave, but mostly because he’s large and covered in fur.

Hank wants this to be easy. It’s never going to be easy. He thought maybe talking it through, making it scientific, would make it easy, but--it’s not.

“What if the newspapers get wind?” Hank asks. “Maybe we should go back.”

Alex threads his fingers through Hank’s, his hand strong and coarse--Hank can feel it against the pads of his fingers.

“We won’t go far today,” he says. “We’ll just go for a little, and you can go back the rear way so no one will find the house.”

They do that. Beyond the whispers, nothing happens, which is in some ways worse, because Hank imagines everyone is scared--he sees a girl clutch her mother’s skirts, pull back. He knows mutants have been in the news, featuring as strange and caricatured versions of themselves, and it makes him feel like a yeti or the Loch Ness monster, only more so, worse.

“So what do you do?” Alex asks. “How do you convince them we’re not a threat?”

“I don’t know,” Hank says, weary.

“I don’t, either,” Alex tells him.

They go home.

Raven is there, waiting, leaning against the oven, slim arms crossed, hip jutting out.

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” she says.

“Nothing happened,” Hank says, simply.

“You’re compromising our security.”

“It was my idea,” Alex says, and Raven says, “Of course it was.”

And then the conversation is over. Hank shucks his coat, and he and Alex go upstairs, and then Hank goes downstairs again.

“Raven,” he says, and she shakes her head.

“It’s okay,” she says. “I don’t like it, but it’s okay.”

“Why?” Hank asks, because Raven doesn’t forgive so easily, not usually, and she shrugs.

“Because this is about you and Alex, isn’t it?” she asks. “I might be your friend--your sister--but we’re on different teams. We need to accept that.”

Hank wants to say that they don’t. They don’t need to accept that--she could come back, come back to Charles and to Hank and to them, the X-Men. Raven’s resignation is somehow terrifying, because it means she doesn’t want to change him but nor is she willing to be changed. He doesn’t understand what his friendship (that’s what it is, that’s what he’ll call it) with Alex has to do with any of this, but--

“It won’t change much,” Raven says. “This is how it was always going to be.”

Hank doesn’t know what to say to that. He hugs her, wrapping himself around her because it’s all left to do, one chance to hold on. She squeezes him back, and then there’s a clatter of feet coming down the stairs, and Alex is there, looking at them.

“Oh,” he says. “Sorry.”

“You aren’t interrupting,” Hank says, drawing back. “Do you want lunch?”

“No, it’s okay,” Alex replies, and goes back upstairs.

“Go after him,” Raven says, exhaling a long breath, and Hank turns to look at her.

“What?”

“You heard me, Hank,” she says. “Go on.”

“And do what?”

“Well,” she says, shrugging. “You could make him lunch.”

So Hank puts bread and cold cuts and mayonnaise and mustard on a tray, and brings it upstairs to the room he shares with Alex, where Alex is sitting on the bed and putting his harness back on.

“I brought lunch,” Hank says, and Alex glances up.

“Oh,” he says, then, after a beat, “Thanks for that.”

Hank sits on his bed, opposite Alex, and watches him. He’s not sure what to ask, and by the same measure he’s not sure what Alex wants to know. Does it matter, that he was hugging Raven in the kitchen? Or was Alex just being excessively polite?

Hank doesn’t want to read things that aren’t there, but he wishes he could read something. He starts to put together a sandwich, the way he likes it, with lettuce and too much of both the condiments, and then Alex comes over and sits on the other side of the tray from him, making his own sandwich.

They’re quiet, except for the slick of butter knives across bread, which was a sound Hank never even noticed before he was Beast.

“You know,” he says, trying to keep his tone light. “Raven’s like a sister to me.”

“Yeah?” Alex asks, pausing and peering up at him. Hank can see the feathering of his lashes, the streaks of color in his irises.

“I think we share some genes,” Hank says. “Since I became Beast.”

“Oh,” Alex says, and then he falls silent, again.

“It’s nice to have a sibling,” Alex says. “Does this mean the Professor is your brother?”

“No more than he is yours,” Hank says, and Alex grants him a grin, a quick one.

“Yeah, I didn’t really think so,” he says, and puts the bread on top of his sandwich, squeezing it closed and taking a bite.

“Thanks for making lunch,” he says, his tone dry.

“I didn’t know what you liked on sandwiches.”

“For future reference: everything,” Alex says.

“You don’t call me bozo, so much anymore,” Hank says, and Alex shrugs.

“You want me to?”

Hank shrugs back.

“You look less like a clown, now,” Alex says, and Hank doesn’t have a clue what that means.

“You don’t,” he says, and Alex laughs.

They spend the afternoon in their room, lying around and reading. Alex extracts a book from his suitcase, and Hank sees it’s Howl, and he does his best to hide his grin.

“I figured, if I was going to meet someone famous,” Alex says. “Even though he turned out to be a coot.”

Hank laughs outright.

Once Hank is down on the bed Alex climbs up behind him, kneels at the foot of the bed and pulls open the blinds, letting in a stream of sunlight. There’s a bright swirl of dust motes mingled with Hank’s fur, and then Alex clambers down and returns to his own bed and shoots Hank a grin. With the sun on his back everything is warm and languid and far too soft--the light is gentle, and time passes slowly, and Alex is there. Hank looks up, once, to catch Alex watching him, and Alex just keeps watching.

“You’re purring,” he says.

“I don’t--” Hank replies, and Alex gets up off his bed and approaches.

“No,” he says. “I hear it, you’re purring.”

“You know lions don’t purr?” Hank says. “I’m closer to a lion than any housecat--”

Alex reaches out an arm, presses a finger to Hank’s lips, and then leans in until his ear is on Hank’s chest, and Hank is positive he can’t be purring, because he’s fairly certain he’s stopped breathing.

“Hmm,” Alex says. “Nothing. Maybe I have to wait.”

And then he slides up alongside Hank on the bed, with his ear still on Hank’s chest, and Hank is staring at him.

“What?” Alex asks. “Just keep doing whatever it was you were doing that made you purr.”

“I don’t know what that was,” Hank says, slow and honest, and then Alex starts to scratch the fur on his stomach, oddly low, just above the sling of the waistband of Hank’s pants where the skin is soft, the muscles tender.

“Alex,” Hank says, and it comes out a growl, because he can feel himself hardening and he wants Alex off, before it’s too late, before Hank ruins everything.

“Not quite what I was looking for,” Alex says. “But it’ll do.”

And then Alex is using his other hand to pull himself up by Hank’s shoulder, so he’s lying against Hank’s chest, and then he kisses him, on Hank’s bed, in the shaft of sunlight from the bedroom window. Hank catalogues these things, because he’s not sure what’s happening or if it will ever happen again, and he wants to remember what might be the last best thing to happen to him.

Alex’s tongue presses against his lips, begs access, pries, and Hank acquiesces, flicking his own tongue until Alex’s mouth before withdrawing it, because Alex has stopped.

“Your tongue--” he says, and his voice is low and his pupils are blown.

“What?” Hank asks, because apparently something’s wrong with his tongue, he hadn’t even realized it had changed, maybe his tongue has been completely weird, all along.

“It’s ridged,” Alex says, and it sounds like awe rather than disgust. “Like a cat’s--oh god.”

And then Alex’s mouth is back on Hank’s, insistent and warm. His tongue sweeps through Hank’s mouth, and Hank returns the favor and is rewarded with a soft moaning, with Alex pressing his body hard against him and squirming in a way that makes Hank arch his back and bite down hard on Alex’s lower lip.

Alex pulls back, pressing his head into Hank’s shoulder.

“Don’t start something you can’t finish, Hank,” he whispers. “Please don’t.”

And Hank isn’t even sure how this started, but he’s pretty sure Alex started it.

He can finish it, though. He reaches for Alex’s pants, and fumbles, and the Alex reaches down and puts Hank’s hands on the lower seam of his own shirt.

“Here,” he says. “Do this.”

And then he begins to undo his own trousers.

Hank rips the shirt down the middle, from the hem to the collar, and Alex puts his hands back on Hank’s shoulders and teases at his fur.

“So what are you going to do, Beast?” he asks, and Hank flips them over in one smooth motion, so he’s straddling Alex on his knees and Alex is on his back, his legs about Hank’s hips. Hank ducks his head, and Alex’s eyes widen. Hank takes Alex full in his mouth, because if his tongue isn’t a problem, he may as well put it to good use.

When they finish, they’re a tangle of limbs and sweat and smells, strong ones that Hank can’t pick out individually.

“That was Havok,” he murmurs into Alex’s neck.

“You should know, Beast,” Alex replies, and curls his arms around Hank’s shoulders, and then they sleep.

When Hank wakes up Alex is still asleep, snoring lightly on his chest. It’s gone dark outside, and the only light is the dim, drifting light of street lamps, and Hank’s not sure if he should kiss Alex again--not sure if he can, or if that was some sort of fluke where Alex forgot who Hank was, what Hank looked like.

But Alex is still here, warm and soft and golden, hair splayed across his forehead, smelling like sex and sweat and like himself, beneath that, like wheat and and fire and human, and his hand is tangled in the fur on Hank’s chest, fingers twined around blue strands.

Hank inhales all of this, because if kissing was good all of this was magnificent, perfect, and he wants to remember how it smells and feels, to wake up in bed with someone--to wake up in bed with Alex, in a small room at the top of the house, in a bed that really can’t hold both of them.

Then Hank extracts himself, and lifts Alex up and moves him back to his own bed, and takes a pen and paper from his desk downstairs to the kitchen.

“I could hear you, you know,” Raven says. She’s standing in front of the open refrigerator, eating a pickle.

“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” Hank asks.

“It’s not that late,” she says, looking at the clock on the wall. “But I could ask the same of you.”

“I want--I don’t want this to be a mistake for him,” Hank says momentarily. “I want to give him a way out.”

“Because you pushed yourself on him?” Raven asks.

“No,” Hank says, after a moment.

“Because he didn’t like it?”

“No,” Hank says, quieter now.

“Because you’re afraid,” she says, and Hank nods.

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” Raven says. “Just be glad that Scott was out.”

Raven goes upstairs. Hank sits down at the kitchen table like he has so many times before, and writes across the ridges in the wood grain.

Hank slips the letter into an envelope and writes Alex’s name in large block letters on the front, and then he goes upstairs and places it on the floor, beside Alex’s bed, thankful that Alex is still heavily asleep, wrapped up somewhere warm and safe where Hank wishes he could be.

When he gets to the lab, Hank realizes he doesn’t even know what he wants to do there. He winds up curling up and sleeping on the cold cement floor, though he wakes himself periodically from little more than nervous energy. There’s a point in the middle of the night when he goes upstairs and calls Moira, and she answers sharp and quick, with a practiced wakefulness.

“Moira,” he says. “It’s Hank.”

“Hank?” she echoes. “It’s one in the morning.”

“I want to talk,” he says. “To the hippies. A speech.”

“It’s one in the morning,” she says.

“Can you and Allen set it up?”

“Okay,” Moira says. “Go to sleep, Hank.”

The next time he wakes, it’s from a knock on the door, and there’s piece of paper sliding across the threshold.

Hank looks at it, blinking.

“Open the door,” comes Alex’s voice, adamant, and so Hank does, wary and slow.

Alex grabs him by the shoulders, wraps his legs around his waist, and kisses him full on the mouth.

They break more glassware than Hank has in the past month, and he doesn’t mind at all.

Allen and Moira arrange Hank’s talk for one month later, in Haight-Ashbury. Hank wakes to dim pink light and a mass of gold hair pressed up under his nose. He and Alex wind their way through the city, hands intertwined, and the sun is coming up behind them and Hank doesn’t know what’s going to happen, whether this is going to be a disaster or a success. But it’s starting to look like Hank has been operating under a false dichotomy for a long time, one where things he had thought failures had turned up roses, daisies, every flower imaginable.

One where things he had though broken had turned up Alex, who would blanch at being called a flower, but who needed to be called something other than Havok, because he was so much more than that.

But then again, maybe they all were. The sun is rising on May 15th, and it’s getting warm, but there’s a breeze coming off the ocean, to cut it. People are looking at Hank, because he is, after all, the Beast. But his face is already plastered up all over town, because he has things to say, things people ought to know. The world is big. There are mutants in it. Maybe they can work this out.

There was an afternoon, not so long ago, when Alex had taken off his harness and Hank had bit his shoulder and licked his back and fucked him until he thrust his hips forward and his back arched and he moaned to the ceiling until the rafters vibrated with a blooming hope and Hank was grateful that Scott had gone off to the school and Raven was out for the afternoon, when the sun was warm and bright on their faces and backs and bared bodies.

That was an afternoon, not long ago, when they had been both brave and neither afraid, and this morning feels like that, with the long expanse of the future stretching before them like the ocean, like an experiment that can only produce pure results.

They go forth.

They--the people who write news, and later historians--wind up calling the summer of ’67 the Summer of Love. They also call it the Long, Hot Summer. Hank tries not to read too much into either of those things. It’s not perfect, by any means: there are riots that summer, fires and hate and rage. And there’s worse to come. But there’s also a note from Alex, folded up in Hank’s pocket that morning in May, that reads Idiot but means something else entirely.