Work Text:
There are reasons Hank McCoy wanted to be a research assistant, not a teaching assistant. Good reasons; reasons to do with his experience and his C.V. and the sort of work that it made sense for him to be doing, the sort of work his experience is directed at.
Good reasons, all of them, but reasons that some higher power chose to disregard because at the end of the day or the application process he’s a T.A. If Hank wasn’t working with Professor X--who took him on even though he was an engineering student and the class is genetics--and Hank was prone to violent outbursts he’d probably try to kick in someone’s head.
As it is, he gathers the most recent lab reports into a pile, aligns their edges, and drops them into his satchel before leaving the department offices. The sole benefit of grading is that it can be done anywhere, and Hank bikes from campus to Marvel Coffee, mentally calculating how long he’s likely to be working and what size latte he can justify buying, given that he’s paid hourly and lab reports are impossible to deal with without some sort of caffeinated support system.
The guy working the counter is in the class Hank T.A.s for, and Hank nods to him stiffly before sitting down, then waits for Raven and his coffee by turn. There’s probably something in the realm of chaos theory that can explain why they both appear simultaneously, and the guy--Alex Summers, Hank recalls vaguely--appears at Hank’s elbow precisely when Raven passes in front of the picture window, mere moments before she opens the door with a jangle.
“Grading, hey?” Alex says, setting down Hank’s drink. “You know we call you the Beast.”
“What?” Hank says, peering up. Alex doesn’t talk much in class, and his grades are about middle of the pack, like he’s sliding through without putting in much effort.
“Because you grade like a bitch,” Alex adds, but he’s smirking like he knows why Hank thought they called him the Beast, and it makes Hank want to pull out some of the shit that’s going around about Alex--that the reason he’s an undergraduate at Hank’s age is that he was in jail for some time, that he killed a man (in Reno, just to watch him die). Hank also considers pointing out that he grades Alex’s homework.
Hank doesn’t say any of these things. Somewhere in grade school he started to deal with mockery by shutting down, and since then he’s never quite been able to spit out the responses he wants to, the way Raven does. She’s tried to teach him, but Hank finds it easier to shrink away from confrontation.
Water off a duck’s back. But he’s maybe more like another bird, because some of the water holds, and he always needs to dry off before he can fly.
Alex continues, “Also, your feet are huge. Like fucking bigfoot.”
Which is still not what Hank expected him to say, and so maybe it throws him off a little bit, because he’s gaping when Raven pulls out the chair opposite his and says, “You know what they say about big feet.”
Hank can feel himself coloring, but he leaves it be. He does know what they say about big feet, and although he doubts it has any scientific tenure, it is, in his case, accurate.
But you can’t really pick up guys by saying “I know I have an angry purple birthmark on my face, but my dick is rather impressive,” and apparently being well-endowed does nothing to deter mockery from undergraduates, so it doesn’t do him much good.
“Have fun with your girlfriend,” Alex tosses back as he leaves, undeterred by Raven’s comment (because being well-endowed does nothing to deter mockery from undergraduates, according to this experiment, sample size: 1). Hank considers saying it, then--“I’m gay.” People say it all the time. Being queer is the one part of the whole freaky package that is Hank McCoy that he’s okay with, and it’s not like it’s a secret just because it's something he's not going to tell the class he T.A.s for.
He doesn’t say it. He doesn’t watch Alex go back behind the counter, either, and instead he turns to Raven and says, “Thanks, I guess.”
Raven grins at him, but her smile is tight-lipped. He knows she hates the way he deals with his birthmark, and he wants to tell her that it must’ve been different for her, because--he doesn’t know. Because she’s beautiful.
A week after they first met, walking home from dinner at Professor X’s a little tipsy, he told her that she’d be beautiful if she didn’t have the portwine stain on her cheek, and she’d slapped him. Later she’d apologized for the slap and said she pitied him, and that had been worse.
Somehow they’re still friends, because Raven is gracious and because Hank likes her. He had never met anyone else with a birthmark like his before, even though Raven’s was smaller and she was beautiful and acted like it, like having a splotch of darkened skin on the fringe of her face made no difference at all.
Maybe it didn’t. Hank wasn’t entirely sure, anymore, but there had been times in the past when things were too painful for him to be convinced, now, that having a birthmark covering half his face doesn’t make him ugly.
The worst that in the empirical part of his mind, he’d analyzed his features and determined that he might even be handsome if it weren’t for the stain. Raven said it was the way he carried himself-- “You always look like you’re waiting for someone to hit you” she said, “So they do.”
“I don’t actually think the nick has to do with your birthmark,” Raven is saying now. “You know Charles has to curve everything you grade?”
“That’s because the class is full of dumbasses,” Hank mutters, and Raven grins at him.
“Like that kid,” she says, jerking her chin towards where Alex is standing behind the register.
“Exactly,” Hank says.
“So maybe you shouldn’t pay attention to his opinion,” Raven continues. "If he's a dumbass and all."
She's right and she knows it, which is probably why she lets him change the subject.
Hank finishes his grading and his latte. At some point midway through the pile, Alex starts skulking around in the background, wiping off the tables behind where Hank is sitting, and Hank ignores him as pointedly as possible. With the exception of some vigorous cleaning, Alex returns the favor.
Hank tries not to think about the Beast thing, or any of it, after that. He stops reading the names on the lab reports he’s grading, because he may grade harshly, but he likes to think he grades everyone equally harshly, and it wouldn’t be fair if Alex’s grades took a sudden turn for the worse.
Even if he is an ass.
The problem is that Hank can get by like this, but that doesn’t change the fact that he has a stupid nickname in his head, courtesy of his own students, revealed by one Alex Summers.
The second problem is that he starts avoiding Marvel, and a week into his-self imposed exile Alex sidles up to him after class and says, “So the owner says I lost us one of our best customers.”
Hank shoves his glasses up his nose, and doesn’t look at Alex.
“Every action has an equal and opposite reaction,” he says after a moment.
“So if I apologize--” Alex starts, and Hank looks at him. He’s not sure what his expression is, precisely, but he can feel his eyes narrowing, suspicious and annoyed.
“Whatever,” Alex says, instead of something else.
Hank considers shooting that back at him, another ‘whatever,’ equal and opposite, but Alex is already gone.
Hank waits a week and a half after that before going back to Marvel, because nowhere else gets a latte quite right, or makes those swirling flowers in the foam. Alex isn’t there, but the place must have some sort of rumor mill, because one of the lab reports that week has ‘I knew you couldn’t stay away’ scrawled across the top in terrible chicken scratch handwriting, and Hank doesn’t need to look at the name to know whose it is.
“Did something happen?” Raven asks, when Hank calls her to let her know that their standing appointment is back at Marvel.
“Everywhere else sucks,” he says, and she murmurs ascent.
“You need to deal with the kid, anyway,” she says after a moment of silence buzzes across the wires.
“He’s the same age as we are.”
“Whatever,” she says, and Hank is reminded of his conversation with Alex--the way he mumbled around the syllables of the work as if talking through a mouthful of food. It sounds the same coming from Raven’s mouth, and Hank wants to remind them both that there’s something called diction in the world.
“So you suggest I take him out back and beat him up?” Hank asks, and Raven laughs.
“You’re the one who knows jujitsu,” she says, and sounds halfway to serious.
“You’re the one who says self-confidence is all I need,” he reminds her.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” she says.
“He probably won’t even be there,” Hank says.
He is. Of course Alex is there. But he takes and delivers Hank’s order in silence, and apparently his employer has instilled some measure of professionalism in him since he and Hank last crossed paths over a latte, and as a result Hank has no reason to use the quippy comebacks he’d prepared and memorized the night prior while watching episodes of Buffy.
He grades and waits for Raven instead, and after Raven comes and goes he orders another cup of coffee and shifts over to his own homework, sinking into the flawless logic of equations. Equations, for Hank, are life at its best--puzzles with clean angles, correct answers. If someone asks you to calculate something, it’s within the realm of possibility that you might do so, in the way that seemingly unsolvable riddles can be twisted and cracked.
If people were like equations, Hank has a reasonable degree of certainty that his life would be much easier. But behind him Alex is wiping tables, and Hank would like to say that he’s just like the little hellions that tormented him in childhood, but at the same time he kind of doubts it. Not because he thinks Alex is secretly a bastion of decency, just because the little hellions who tormented him in childhood grew up to be other things, some still cruel and some kind, some themselves ashamed and afraid. None of the little hellions that tormented him in childhood turned out to be identical to one another, so there’s no mold for mockery--just a pattern, one Alex could fall into as easily as he could fall out of it.
People have never, in the annals of Hank’s experience, been clean and simple. People have been every difficult part of Hank’s life, the most cryptic riddles of all. Alex Summers is not one Hank is going to try to crack.
That changes slightly after dinner at Professor X’s house the next week. Jean Grey is there. Jean Grey is usually there, actually--she’s doing her thesis under Professor X, and she exists in a strange state of energy that is both quiet and electric. She’s silent throughout the meal, but present in a way Hank has trouble articulating clearly.
And then she speaks.
“Hank,” Professor X (Charles--Hank tries to remember to call him that, but for some reason it won’t hold in his head) starts, spinning his fork in his fingers. “Would you be available for some tutoring?”
Hank mumbles yes through a mouthful of half-frozen peas, courtesy of Professor X’s questionable cooking.
“Wonderful,” Charles continues. “Wonderful. You know Alex Summers? He asked about tutoring.”
“He’s my boyfriend’s brother,” Jean Grey interjects, before Hank can say a word.
And then, suddenly, Alex Summers becomes a riddle necessitating a solution.
“You didn’t know that?” Raven says when Hank calls her. “It seemed like sort of a given.”
Hank doesn’t point out that he had never retained Scott’s surname.
“Scott’s blind,” he says. He’s stating the obvious, but sometimes you need to state your assumptions before drawing a conclusion.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Raven replies, because apparently she doesn’t realized the importance of stating assumptions. Possibly because she’s a contributing member of society, as she’s fond of saying, instead of a graduate student.
“Why would someone with a blind brother be an ass to a kid with a birthmark?” Hank continues.
“Any number of reasons,” Raven says. “It’s not like they’re the same thing. For one, blindness isn’t just cosmetic. Maybe he hates his brother.”
“I have to tutor him,” Hank says, because maybe he’s being an idiot.
“Who, Scott?” Raven asks.
“No.”
“Oh,” she says. “So you’re trying to convince yourself that the ass is secretly decent.”
There are times, and now is one of them, when Hank hates his life. It’s like completing a problem set and then realizing you used the wrong equation for half the questions; suddenly all your assumptions are wrong, and you need to begin again. Not that Hank does that often with problem sets, but he understands the base concept.
After Raven hangs up, Hank does an actual problem set instead of dealing with the fact that, yes, he has to tutor Alex Summers and was apparently dead set on convincing himself that Alex is secretly decent just because he had never mocked the birthmark explicitly. Hank wanted to think that being called Beast was more about his grading than his face. There was something refreshing about being hated on his own merit.
He just couldn’t swallow it completely, because of the way Alex’s lips had quirked after he offered his explanation, like what he just said was a double entendre and he was smug with getting away with it before the joke was even done.
“When should I start?” Hank had said at dinner, after Jean Grey had fallen silent again. And then, because he was a glutton for punishment, he’d taken another helping of peas.
Professor X had given him a phone number, which Hank was dialing now. 8:11 pm, the 12th of October 2010. Dark out--his apartment is on the third and final floor of a small brick building, and out the window Hank can see haloed street lamps through a blur of raindrops.
It isn’t the first time Hank has offered to tutor someone he had thought was an ass, but it is the first time in a long time--in college the mockery had all but disappeared, and Hank and his birthmark had simply faded into the background like so many other students who spent more time at the library than holding Solo cups in frat houses. Now he would’ve thought, at twenty-four, that he was old enough not to be phased by mockery, but here he is.
Another assumption proven wrong.
The phone rings through to voicemail, a dull and straightforward “This is Alex, leave a message.”
“Ah--Alex,” Hank finds himself saying. “Hank McCoy, your genetics T.A.? Professor X said you needed a tutor? Right, then, you can call me back--” he leaves his number, and feels like such an idiot that he considers deleting the message altogether, except he knows if he records another one it will just be worse. He lets it be.
The next three days pass uneventfully, and Hank lulls himself into thinking that Alex must have found a tutor among the other students or given up on the idea altogether when he found out that Hank was involved, and then he sees him at Marvel.
“Hey,” Alex says. “Latte again? You didn’t return my call.”
“You called me?” Hank asks, and fishes out his cell phone, like looking at it will demonstrate one way or another whether such a phone call actually occurred.
“Yeah. About tutoring?” Alex says. He’s speaking with a pointed slowness, as if to a particularly stupid child.
“Right, of course,” Hank says. “You must’ve called the wrong number.”
“Huh,” Alex says. “You sure?”
Hank dials his voicemail and hands the phone to Alex.
“Clearly, there’s nothing there from you,” he says.
“Clearly the only person who calls you is that one chick,” Alex counters, “But she’s pretty hot, so I guess I should be congratulating you.”
Hank grabs at his phone, but Alex ducks under the counter and continues to listen.
“What the hell kind of name is Raven?” he continues. “And I imagine I’m the ass--it’s cute that you have a nickname for me, though I could come up with--”
He pauses then, and after a moment he flips the phone shut with a toothy grin.
“So, not your girlfriend, then,” Alex says. “If she’s trying to set you up with dudes.”
It’s then that Hank realizes precisely how ill-advised it was to give Alex access to his voicemail.
He snatches the phone back.
“Is this going to be a problem?” he bites out, raising an eyebrow. He doesn’t add, “because I know jujitsu,” but he hopes something along those lines is implied.
“No,” Alex replies, studying him. If Hank didn’t know better he’d say Alex’s grin was turning salacious. Alex slides a napkin and a pen across the counter. “Give me your number. I’ll call you when I’m off work.”
So Hank does.
“Latte?” Alex asks. “It’s on the house. Consider it advance payment for the tutoring.”
“Don’t worry,” Hank says. “The college will cover the hours.”
And then he leaves, without coffee, without looking back, feeling stiff and uncomfortable and uncertain about what just happened, what changed, because it feels like something shifted subtly and some of Alex’s venom seeped away.
But midterms are coming up, and Hank has other things to worry about. Mostly grading, and problem sets, and a terrible, interminable group project for one of his seminars, a project for which he’d suffered through a series of painful meetings before deciding to do the entire thing himself. Since then, he’d come up with increasingly implausible excuses not to see the other group members for any reason.
In that vein, he goes to his apartment, because right now he’s supposed to be suffering from a debilitating illness, and then he calls Raven because no one should suffer through a fake debilitating illness alone.
“Want to go clubbing?” she asks when she arrives, dropping her bag on Hank’s sagging sofa.
“That wasn’t exactly what I was thinking,” he says, but it’s obvious that that was exactly what she was thinking, because her dress is shorter and tighter than necessary or comfortable for sitting around Hank’s apartment.
“It’s Friday night,” Raven says, shimmying her hips. “We’re young and beautiful.”
“Speak for yourself,” Hank mutters, and Raven shoves him in the shoulder.
“I hope that’s because you think you’re old, and not because you’re going to give me the ugly birthmark bullshit again.”
“Tell me again about how you used to wear cover-up on your portwine all the time,” Hank says, and Raven frowns at him.
“That was a long time ago,” she says. “And it made it look even worse--”
“And then you decided it added a certain mystique,” Hank finishes for her, and Raven grins.
“Yeah,” she says. “And you would realize that, too, if you ever paid attention when we went out. You know how much ass you could get if you just made eye contact with half the guys checking you out? Enough to get you out of this cloister, that’s for sure. ”
“You’re deluded,” Hank says. “They were probably just trying to figure out who let me out of the house.”
“Yeah, no,” Raven replies. “You know, Hank there’s a point when your modesty ceases to be charming. We’re going.”
Because Raven always gets what she wants when she sets her mind to wanting it, Hank acquiesces.
Because Raven’s passive-aggressive and pissed at Hank for bringing up the cover-up, she pulls out the clothes she bought him for his last birthday and forces him to wear them.
“Keep the glasses on,” she says when he’s straightening his tie. It’s skinny and ridiculous looking, and Hank isn’t a hipster, and the whole ensembles makes him feel even more uncomfortable than he usually is. Hank usually wears his contacts when they go out, but Raven apparently wants him to be Hank McCoy--the real McCoy--just in tighter clothes. Ergo, closer to nude. He looks at her beseechingly before they go out the door, and she gives him a pat on the shoulder.
“Remember when you made me apply for that P.R. job I thought I couldn’t get because you told me I was more than qualified, and, furthermore, the best person for the job?”
“Vaguely,” he says.
“This is me returning the favor,” she tells him, and he really can’t fight that--his meager ration of common sense tells him that everything he wants to say will be swiftly shot down, because he’s always been better at logic and lists, cover letters and resumes, and Raven’s always been about some nebulous other thing that has to do with why she was the best person for that P.R. job. Her skills are wide and varied, by contrast to Hank’s narrow scope, and in social situations she morphs slightly, from the person she is into the person she needs to be, until maybe the person she is is the person she needs to be.
Hank doesn’t entirely understand it, but it happens again when they get to the club, one that’s new to Hank, but apparently not to Raven. She shimmers slightly, despite more than because of the terrible lights, and a drink appears at her elbow, and then she’s off and dancing and Hank is sinking into his stool, desperately trying to fade into the dark wood of the bar and finishing Raven’s abandoned cosmopolitan.
“Another?” the bartender asks when he’s done, and Hank peers up at him.
“God no,” he says. “White Russian?”
“So,” the bartender starts when he delivers. “You make a habit of finishing your girlfriend’s drinks, even when you don’t like them?”
“Free drinks are the only reason to go out with her,” Hank says, looking at the new drink balefully.
“Huh,” says the bartender. “So maybe you should break up.”
“We aren’t dating,” Hank mutters, a little baleful even to his own ear. He’s looking at the dark whorls of wood on the bar, at the whorls of skin on the bartender’s elbows. “I don’t know why people keep thinking that.”
“Mmm-hmm,” the bartender hums. “That’s where I was going.”
Hank looks up. The bartender’s not bad-looking--dark, what some might call swarthy, with a crooked nose and a matching grin.
“You want me to set you up with Raven?” he asks, aghast.
“Not precisely where I was going, no,” says the other man, and his grin broadens into dimples, and he holds out a hand. “Sebastian Jones.”
“Sebastian,” Hank repeats, and he can feel himself blushing. “Right, Hank McCoy.”
“So you’re the real McCoy then,” Sebastian says, and Hank, because he is stupid, replies, “I think you have another customer.”
Sebastian blinks at him.
“They can wait,” he says, apparently resistant to Hank’s efforts to cockblock himself. “Tell me about yourself, Hank McCoy.”
So Hank does, and Sebastian disappears occasionally to serve the rest of the bar, and it’s not entirely terrible, because at the very least Hank can stay at the bar, so long as he’s flirting with the bartender.
And he might be flirting with the bartender. Maybe. Around the third White Russian, he’s definitely flirting with the bartender, and it might be because Sebastian is a bartender, cut from the same sort of sociable cloth as Raven, but their conversation flows surprisingly well, from Hank’s studies to Sebastian’s work, the music he writes on the side. Raven catches Hank’s eye at some point and gives him an outsize wink.
Hank wonders vaguely if she paid off Sebastian, if he’s some sort of hired hooker, but it seems rude to ask.
“That guy over there,” says Sebastian somewhere into the fourth White Russian. “Do you know him?”
“Who?” Hank asks, glancing out across the dance floor. He doesn’t see anyone he knows, though there’s a momentary flash of Raven’s coppery hair and electric blue dress.
“Red shirt,” Sebastian says. “Blond hair. He was watching you a minute ago.”
Red shirt, blond hair turns around. It’s Alex--of course it’s Alex. His shirt is tight, and he’s moving his hips in a way that’s simultaneously obscene and recalls hula hooping. Hank’s not entirely sure that makes sense, but there’s a tiny part of his brain that’s gone from ‘fuck, Alex is an ass,’ to ‘fuck, Alex has an ass and strangely mobile hips, and lips, and kind of golden hair.’
It’s uncomfortable, in more ways than one.
Hank turns back to Sebastian.
“He’s in a class I T.A. for,” he says. “He’s probably suddenly realized his T.A. has a social life.”
“It looked more like suddenly realizing his T.A. is hot,” Sebastian says, his voice low and his breath warm across Hank’s ear.
“I seriously doubt that,” Hank replies, but Sebastian’s attention has shifted to something behind him.
“So, Beast, you going to introduce us?” comes a voice, and there’s a hand on Hank’s shoulder, and there’s really only one person it could be.
“Alex,” he says flatly. “Sebastian. Sebastian, Alex.”
Sebastian offers a hand, and Alex takes it, and then stands there for a moment longer.
“I think you have a customer,” he says to Sebastian, and Sebastian looks between Alex and Hank before moving down the bar, still watching.
“I thought this wasn’t going to be a problem?” Hank asks, twisting around to look at Alex.
“You being queer?” Alex asks. “Yeah, that’s not a problem. You standing around and making eyes at that asshole, though, that I’m going to have a problem with.”
“So, what, I can be gay in theory but not in practice?” Hank asks. He knows his voice is getting louder, but he doesn’t have it in him to care.
“Shut up,” Alex says. “You’re drunk, and that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that guy is an asshole, so you should go find someone else to practice being gay with.”
“Fuck you,” Hank mutters. “Just--I don’t even--why should I listen to you?”
“Whatever,” Alex shrugs. “It’s your life. Just hope for your sake I don’t see you two together again.”
“Or what?” Hank shouts after Alex as disappears into the crowd, and then Raven comes to collect him, and Hank goes home with Sebastian’s number freshly ensconced in his cell phone, the encounter with Alex the only dark mark on an otherwise good night.
“See?” Raven says smugly, and Hank tries and fails to look contrite.
“It was nice,” he offers.
“It was nice,” she mimics. “And it took like two seconds, and I’m sure if it weren’t for him there would’ve been other guys. You’re hot, Hank McCoy.”
“Maybe he’s a creep,” Hank says. “Maybe he was a birthmark kink. Alex tried to warn me off him.”
“Alex,” she snorts. “I’m sure his thoughts are extremely valid.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not like he gives a shit about me one way or the other,” Hank says. “So maybe they are.”
“If the bartender was a creep, there are other bars,” Raven replies. “And other guys.”
They walk the rest of the way in a pleasantly buzzed silence, and Hank bobs his head and watches the streetlights bob in turn, steps from crack to crack along the sidewalk.
“You’re breaking your mother’s back,” Raven says, and Hank laughs more and more loudly than the comment merits, thinking back to hopscotch and skipping rope, hazy pieces of a happy childhood, before he was constantly aware of his face being marked.
Marred, maybe, though Raven wouldn’t like him to say so. She would tell him not to even think it, but Hank’s mind has always roamed outside any bounds one might try to place on it, anyway.
Alex calls in the morning, and neither of them mention the night prior. Hank’s not sure why Alex doesn’t; for his part he’s vaguely hungover and wants nothing so much as a cup of coffee, and so it’s in his best interest to keep the call as short as possible.
Besides, when he’s sober Hank doesn’t really do confrontation.
They arrange to meet for a few hours on Monday evenings until Alex feels like he’s sufficiently tutored, and after they disconnect Hank collapses onto the couch and sleeps for an hour, eventually waking up for lunch, problem sets, and that ridiculous group project.
Monday comes too quickly by half, and Hank finds himself in a study room in the library with the class’s most recent test, the textbook, and a sheet of paper covered in nonsensical scribbles. Alex is late. Hank feels an unreasonable surge of dislike for him, and runs through equations in his head as a salve for his anger.
When Alex arrives, it’s thirty-seven minutes past when they were supposed to meet, and Hank’s already shifted to his own work. He glances up, and Alex looks uncharacteristically flustered.
“I’m sorry,” he says, dropping his bag to the ground and sinking into a chair. “There was this--some things just took longer than I thought.”
“It’s alright,” Hank says, almost against his will. “I was just finishing some things up.”
As they’re working through the problems, Hank finds himself wondering why, precisely, Alex requested tutoring, because his grasp of the material seems fairly solid, and his scores on the lab reports aren’t terrible, just mediocre, apparently the result of reduced effort rather than a lack of knowledge or ability.
He asks, when they’re packing up their bags to go, and Alex shrugs.
“I don’t do well on the tests,” he says, after a moment.
“We could work on that,” Hank tells him, though he’s not entirely sure how.
“Yeah, whatever,” Alex mutters, then shoulders his bag and departs. Hank emphatically does not watch him go.
There is a period after that where Hank doesn’t see much of Alex outside class and tutoring, when every time he goes to Marvel someone else is working. It’s generally peaceful, and Hank makes an effort, albeit minor, to research learning disabilities and focusing techniques that might help Alex do better on tests.
Alex generally scoffs at whatever information Hank produces, particularly when meditation comes up.
“Yoga,” Hank is saying. “The statistics don’t reflect well, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it might be effective.”
“Yoga,” Alex repeats, skeptical. “Unscientific yoga. I thought you were in the physics department.”
“Engineering,” Hank says, and doesn’t add that he’s actually an inventor, ergo--something. Ergo, he’s fond of experiments, as long as they don’t involve himself and tight jeans, even if he’s been back to that bar a few times, gotten free White Russian and an expedited blow job in the bathroom, both courtesy of Sebastian.
“I’ll go if you go,” Alex says, and Hank, for reasons he doesn’t entirely understand, shows an admirable dedication to his tutee and agrees.
Which puts them both in the beginners’ yoga class at the campus fitness center on Thursday morning, Hank carrying a mat he borrowed from Raven and Alex with one produced from--somewhere. Hank has no idea who Alex is friends with; he doesn’t talk much with the girl he usually partners with in lab, and Hank is on campus too infrequently to follow the social lives of undergraduates in minute detail.
Either way, they both have yoga mats, and Alex is wearing skimpy running shorts despite the chill outside, and they’re joined by a motley crew of other students and faculty.
Alex turns out to be freakishly flexible. Hank turns out to be less so, though he has the dubious pleasure of watching Alex’s ass wave in the air during downward dog.
“Not doing that again,” Hank says when they’re out of the locker room. “Possibly ever.”
“You’re not going to support your protegee, teach?” Alex asks, and Hank snorts.
“Unlikely. I think I’ll continue running.”
Alex shrugs.
“I liked it,” he says. “I think it’ll help with my dancing.”
He swirls his hips experimentally, and between the ass and the shimmy some suppressed memory from that night at the club is being reawakened; Alex dancing, smooth and languid, all the parts of his body in sync.
Hank doesn’t really want to deal with it. He should probably root out that memory wholesale, take any attraction he has for Alex and toss it out like a weed. But things like that, Hank knows, are more easily said than done.
He doesn’t say it, though, because there’s no one to tell, and he doesn’t do anything about it, either. It actually doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. Hank has developed a weird sort of rapport with Alex over the course of his tutoring, and Hank finds that most of the time it doesn’t matter whether Alex’s hair rises into soft peaks or Hank has a birthmark on his face, because their words are what matter. It matters that the yoga has been bizarrely effective, and Alex uses meditation techniques before every test. It matters that Alex is intimidated by Jean Grey in the same way Hank is, and it matters that Alex loves old Clint Eastwood movies, and that he and Hank have a long-running disagreement over the appeal of colored cereal. The occasional moments when Hank realizes he might have a crush on Alex, or at least be attracted to him, are only an incidental part of the landscape of their relationship, made up as it is of Alex’s unbarbed jabs and his shocking ability to retain the information Hank tells him about his thesis.
It gets to be November, and Raven and Hank are at Marvel Coffee when Hank meets Erik Lehnsherr for the first time.
It’s not a big thing, not really, except for the part where Raven and Professor X apparently know Erik well and Hank’s never even heard of him. Erik’s good-looking in a peculiar, sharp way, and when he introduces himself he says he’s the owner of Marvel, but those are maybe not the two most interesting things about him.
When he comes through the door and sees Raven, he stops short for just a moment, and then he beelines towards their table.
“Mystique,” he says, very slowly, and Raven starts slightly and glances at Hank.
After the introductions, Hank leaves them alone, because Raven had kicked him twice under the table and that’s a sort of sign between them. Alex is behind the counter, watching.
“That’s the owner?” Hank asks. “I thought you said he was pissed I stopped coming. I’ve never seen him before in my life.”
“Yeah, that was a lie,” Alex says mildly, without offering further explanation. He’s watching Raven and Erik, too, and soon they’re both leaning on the counter with their elbows in a sort of companionable eavesdropping, only there’s nothing to hear.
“Think they fucked?” Alex asks after a moment. Erik’s head is close to Raven’s, and they’re both talking quickly and quietly.
“He’s too old for her.” Hank feels weirdly protective of Raven, even though she’s probably better equipped to take care of herself than he is to take care of himself, or her, or anyone, really. Hank is soft about all his edges, which is maybe why grade school mockery still stings, and Raven is tough.
“You got a problem with May-October romances?”
“No,” Hank replies. “But I know who he fucked.”
Alex looks at him, then. Probably partly because of the awkward way Hank stumbled over ‘fucked’, but probably also because he’s wondering if Hank’s lying.
He isn’t. Hank clamps his mouth shut, and a grin to plays across his lips.
“Spill,” Alex says, leaning over until their shoulders press together.
“No.”
“Spill,” Alex whispers, and then he turns his head so his breath is brushing across Hank’s cheek, hot. Hank allows himself a smirk, then, because there’s a heat in Alex’s the nearness, something bold and bright that is spilling over into Hank himself and making him forget the things he should be worried about.
And then Erik is there, looking between the pair of them, and Hank goes back to Raven, whose face is edging white.
“We should go,” she says, and so they do.
“You know, don’t you?” she continues once they’re on the street, walking quickly nowhere in particular, or anywhere void of crowds.
“I can guess,” Hank says, and Raven nods.
“It’s not always the case,” she says. “But in most disagreements you have to side with your brother, especially when he ends up in a wheelchair.”
“We didn’t realize he was still in town,” Raven adds after a moment.
They end up on the porch of Professor X’s old Victorian, waiting on the swing for him to get back from lecture. It should be too cold to sit on the porch swing, but they both have hats and gloves on, and between pressing together and pushing themselves along with their feet they keep warm enough, through to sunset and then, moments into twilight, Professor X wheeling up the icy walk.
“Erik’s back in town,” Raven says, when they’re hardly through the door. “He owns Marvel Coffee.”
“I know,” Charles says. “I saw him already.”
And then they don’t talk about it. It’s the most anticlimactic thing--they go inside and Charles fixes them hot chocolate and talks about his day, and Raven and Hank exchange glances that Hank finds impossible to interpret.
“Erik,” Charles says when they’re leaving. “He’ll be coming to my winter party.”
Raven and Hank look at one another on the sidewalk, at loss for words.
“I did not--I didn’t expect them ever to talk to one another again,” she says after a moment, the words coming out all in a rush. Hank wants to ask her for the story but somehow knows better.
Hank goes home in the dark, and wedges himself under his blankets, and wonders if every form of heat eventually results in an explosion.
He has a voicemail from Sebastian that he doesn’t return.
They get their first snow in the middle of a tutoring session that has mostly devolved into Hank and Alex discussing superhero movies.
Hank hates them. Alex accuses him of being a predictable nerd who refuses to acknowledge that just because something's the original version doesn't mean it's the best version. But Alex has also seen a shocking number of superhero movies for someone who claims to have never so much as touched a comic book.
Then it’s snowing outside, and Alex lets out something like a whoop, grabs Hank’s hat off the table and pulls it down over his own ears before inexplicably throwing his own hat at Hank’s face.
“Come on,” he says, jumping up. “Come on, come on.”
Hank wonders is this is seriously a man who was once in prison, but he’s never gotten around to asking whether or not that particular rumor is true, and he figures if Alex wanted to tell him he would. He shrugs on his jacket, and Alex is already halfway out the door, leaving their books open the on the table.
The thing about first snowfall is that it’s not like you can have a proper snowball fight, and there’s nothing really to do but look up at the sky, the street lamps and the whirls of white flakes. Alex is wearing Hank’s hat and no jacket, and Hank has Alex’s hat stuffed into his pocket. It’s dark and light and lovely, the sky the deep blue, people walking past in small groups, their voices muffled.
It’s beautiful, Hank thinks but doesn’t say.
“It’s beautiful,” Alex says, for him, and Hank murmurs agreement, and then Alex’s fingers are twining through his, Alex’s nails are digging into his palm.
When Hank looks up, Alex is looking at him with large eyes, like he expects something.
“Hey, Beast,” he says, and moves closer, radiating warmth and wearing Hank’s hat. It feels like something lovely, for a flash, and then it feels like a trick or a trap or a problem Hank doesn’t know how to solve.
“I’m your T.A.,” Hank says in a rush of words and misting breath, and he’s pulling his hand free and going inside before the words are completely birthed into the air. Alex doesn’t follow him, and Hank packs up his things and leaves the library through the back door so he doesn’t see him.
When he goes home, he doesn’t have another voicemail from Sebastian, but he goes across town to the bar anyway, slips in behind the crowd of dancers and scans the bar. Sebastian is chatting up some guy, which is about what Hank expected.
He goes back home, and goes to bed.
“It wasn’t a thing,” Alex says when Hank comes to Marvel Coffee two days later. He meets Hank’s eyes like a challenge. “Did you think that was me trying something? Because it wasn’t.”
“Okay,” Hank says, because it’s easier this way. Grading and making out, grading and fucking (because he’s thought about it; yes, he’s thought about it), are a conflict of interests. Alex thinks Hank is ugly and ridiculous and a terrible T.A. It was a trick, a trick Hank doesn’t quite understand. Soon there will be pig’s blood raining from the ceiling.
“You would know, you know,” Alex adds, looking at a point on the table. “If I were putting the moves on you.”
“Okay,” Hank repeats to himself, when he’s installed himself at his table with his coffee. He looks at the window, and not at Alex’s reflection therein. He sees his own reflection, and the birthmark on his cheek, the side of his nose, his chin, and he wonders if he would know if Alex were putting the moves on him if it weren’t for that. He tries not to worry about it, because he doesn’t entirely believe Alex, but it’s easier to believe him than not to. Alex as anything other than a student had always been more of an idea for Hank than a possibility--something to think about, in a bleary way, late at night or early in the morning but not in the light of day.
Later Hank tells Raven about it the whole thing, and she sighs.
“So, what, this is the thing where little boys pull the pigtails of the girls they like?”
“So I’m the little girl in this scenario?” Hank asks, and Raven snorts.
“You’re the one with pigtails,” she says.
“So?” he says. They’re having dinner--in the winter Hank makes beef bourguinon at regular intervals, and Raven fails spectacularly at cooking (it might be hereditary, because Charles is the same), so here they are, at the rickety table in Hank’s kitchen.
“So what?” She has food in her mouth, so it comes out a mumble, but her intent is clear.
“So Sebastian might be an ass, and Alex might be secretly decent--” Hank starts, and Raven sighs.
“Don’t analyze it,” she says. “You’ll figure things out.”
That is a lie. Hank is certain that is a lie. The only things he’s ever been able to figure out on his own have to do with school; everything else is a blur of nonsense and worry, and he wants to point that out to Raven, and ask her what the hell magic thing Erik Lehnsherr did to make her get over her birthmark, if he then turned out to be such a monumental asshole that he did--whatever it was he did, to Professor X.
Hank lets it slide for no good reason at all, because maybe expecting Raven to solve his problems was his first incorrect assumption, when she has so many problems of her own. Maybe she was never really as tough as she seemed; maybe Hank isn’t quite as soft as he feels.
Hank doesn’t break up with Sebastian because he’s pretty sure they were never really dating. He waits until after the finals are done and graded to call Alex.
“Yo,” someone else answers the phone, too loud.
“Is Alex there?” Hank asks. “It’s Hank.”
“Yeah, no,” says the voice, louder. Hank holds the speaker away from his ear. “This is his roommate, Sean? And he’d really rather not to talk to you.”
Which is--which is--Hank doesn’t know what that is. He wants to ask Raven, or maybe Sean, since he’s on the phone: if you don’t almost kiss someone, and they misinterpret it, shouldn’t they, the kissee, be the one doing the avoiding?
“Tell him I called,” Hank offers, and the voice on the end of the line says, “Oh, he knows.”
So obviously Alex is sitting there will his roommate talks to Hank, which is something Hank doesn’t even know what to do with.
“Tell him he got the highest score in class on the final,” Hank adds.
“Don’t worry about it, dude,” says the voice, Sean.
Hank hangs up, and calls Raven to ask her what he should wear to Professor X’s party, because there are some things you can’t expect him to figure out on his own.
The winter party is a tradition--a costume party to celebrate the end of the semester, faculty and grad students and whoever Professor X wants to invite. Hank went last year, dressed, because Raven insisted he was pale enough to pull it off, as a vampire.
“You’re going as the Beast,” she says, this year. “I’ve got everything set up.”
“What?” Hank asks, and Raven sighs.
“Beast,” she repeats. “As in Beauty and the.”
“Seriously?” he asks.
“I’ve got a mask. Otherwise you can wear whatever you like with it, maybe a suit? With a waistcoat--”
Hank doesn’t know why, but he lets her. He winds up in a deep blue suit, the one he wore to his cousin’s wedding last winter, and the mask itself is black, with his glasses over top, and Raven brushes his hair back so everything flows together.
“We’re reclaiming your nickname,” she says, and Hank neglects to point out that the mask covers his birthmark, because he’s not sure it matters. Is a nose and whiskers going to be worse? Better? Who even cares?
Strangely enough, Hank doesn’t.
It snows the night of the party, and for the first time all winter, the snow holds, accumulating on the ground in a steadily thickening layer. Hank walks to Professor X’s house, carrying his mask in one hand and periodically shaking the snow out of it.
Raven’s already there, and Hank can’t place her costume until Professor X wheels up beside her, curling horns mounted on his head, a red scarf wound around his neck, and furred blanket on his lap.
“She’s my Lucy,” he says, grinning.
“You’re shirtless,” Hank says, realizing that Charles is not only shirtless, but unexpectedly cut.
“Just to show Erik what he’s missing,” Charles says, and Hank and Raven exchange a glance, Hank raising a brow, Raven shrugging.
Alex comes with Scott. Hank’s not sure if he’s surprised--he’s pretty sure Scott is Jean Grey’s plus one, so it makes no sense for him to have a plus one, and he doesn’t need Alex to walk him to Professor X’s house--but there he is, dressed in red and gold, his costume even more cryptic than Raven’s.
Until it isn’t; he’s fire Hank realizes, around the same time he realizes he’s been watching too long and closely.
He hopes you can’t see where his eyes are looking, with the mask, but Alex is looking back at him, his eyes making a slow, admiring trawl up Hank’s body.
And then Erik is there, too, a lone knight errant in the open doorway, and his eyes are doing the same thing to Professor X, and Raven is abandoning her brother, or maybe releasing him, and sidling up to Hank. They’re both watching Professor X and Erik, who are moving towards the kitchen, where the crowds are thinner.
“You know,” Raven says. “Erik didn’t help me with the birthmark so much as he talked about it, in a way Charles never did.”
Hank glances at her.
“Just so you know,” she says. “You can’t expect other people to fix things for you.”
“I know,” Hank says, and then he catches the door from another guest coming in and goes out to sit on the porch swing. His costume isn’t warm enough for him to last long, but there was a fire in the grate at Professor X’s, and there was Alex in the foyer, and it was too hot, there.
“So were you Jean Grey’s plus two?” Hank asks when Alex comes out. He’s still in costume, but there’s a hat pulled down over his ears and his broad forehead.
“Professor X invited me,” Alex says. “He thought I deserved a chance to thank my tutor for getting the highest score on the final.”
“Oh,” Hank says, at a loss.
“Yeah,” Alex says, sitting down next to him, and in the light of the window behind them it’s apparent he’s wearing Hank’s hat, the clumsy knit one his sister made for him.
“That’s my hat,” Hank says.
“Yeah,” Alex repeats. “I guess it is.”
And then Alex is looking at him. And then Alex says “Take off your mask.”
Hank knows Raven’s right--no one else can fix any of this for him. There was a time when he thought that if he covered up his birthmark, he’d be able to be normal. He’d made Raven use her cover-up on him, and she’d done a good job, and he’d looked like he didn’t have a birthmark.
But it had still been there--not visible, but everything that had happened had still happened. It was the same way he could pretend to be straight, if he were so inclined, or pretend not to be a nerd, if he wanted. It was just a bit of trickery, not worth the trouble, because everything that was inside was still the same, still present, and eventually the cover-up would rub off, if it was ever anything real at all.
So Hank doesn’t believe in easy solutions, and he doesn’t really believe in one person fixing another.
But when Alex tells him to take off his mask, it fixes something. Not everything, but something--some small piece falls into place, and then Hank takes off his mask and puts his glasses back on, and Alex is right there, watching.
“So you came as the Beast, huh?” he asks, and before Hank can respond Alex’s mouth is on his, and his torso is flat up against Hank’s, and the porch swing is rocking furiously.
Alex can do something with his mouth, with his tongue, that Hank is fairly certain can’t be matched by anything, and there is so much heat in him--Hank’s glasses fog up when Alex is sucking on his bottom lip, and when they pull apart Alex reaches up and pushes them up the bridge of Hank’s nose with a finger.
“You know, how long?” Alex says. Then: “I like big feet.” But it sounds like so much nonsense, noises that don't coalesce into words.
Hank drops the mask to the ground and brings his hands up to catch the back of Alex’s head, tugging the short hairs at the nape of his neck between his fingers, and then Alex bites down hard on his jaw, and there is so much that is going unsaid here, but Alex has already demonstrated that words don’t work.
Because Hank doesn’t have it in him to say anything he moans something and hopes it translates. Alex’s tongue flicks out to lick his ear, so maybe it does, and then Alex moves from Hank’s ear to the birthmark, the patch of dark skin whose lines Hank has traced far too many times with his fingers.
He kisses it, the same way he kissed Hank’s ear and his jaw, like it’s not different at all. It makes Hank achingly hard, makes Hank slip his hands into Alex’s pants. Hank knew how to play the piano once, and it’s like that, except not at all. Alex makes a little groan of disappointment when Hank pulls his hands out, but Hank swings the tangle of their legs upward so they’re lying horizontally on the swing, Alex weighing heavy on his chest, Hank’s hands cupping around Alex’s ass.
Alex rolls his hips into Hank’s, slow and smooth and utterly perfect, and Hank looks up at him and then past him at the fat snowflakes, and they’re lying on the porch swing, just below the window, and inside there’s some sort of a party and a fire in the grate but outside it’s snowing and so, so warm.