X-Men: Beast (6/8)
Jan. 31st, 2009 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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prose_alchemistTitle: Beast (Chapter 6 of 8)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jordannamorgan
Archive Rights: Please request the author’s consent.
Rating/Warnings: Mild PG, for angst and adult situations.
Characters: Emphasis on Beast, with support from various other characters.
Setting: Mainly mid- to post-X2.
Summary: The personal journey of Henry McCoy—as a mutant, and as a man.
Disclaimer: Marvel and Fox create the characters that sell. Nora is mine, and so is Kristen, who has appeared in several of my stories.
It was just as well that Hank spent the night with a solid wall between himself and the other occupants of the house. His rest was fitful, jagged with violent nightmares about his transformation. Many times he awakened, thrashing in their grip, his throat rough from his unconscious cries. Then, as he gazed at his hands and remembered that the nightmare had really happened, fresh tears would burn in his eyes.
He was ashamed of those tears—ashamed of being ashamed. The horror and despair he felt went against everything he had ever taught and believed about mutation.
Yet Hank had counseled enough newly emerged mutants to know this reaction was an inevitable phase. The shock of such a change could be nothing other than traumatic, but he was sure he possessed the awareness and resilience to make a healthy emotional recovery. Not all mutants could accept their changes, even when they were less pronounced than his; he blessed the education and experience that gave him an informed and reasoning perspective. In time, he would learn to live with the disadvantages of his condition—and to embrace its benefits.
Even so, his own ordeal brought him new enlightenment about his work. Now he was rediscovering, from the inside out, every struggle he had guided his patients through. He vowed to himself that he would give use and meaning to that painful new understanding.
Shortly before dawn he surrendered any further effort at sleeping, and crept back into the quiet house. In the kitchen he found Nora restlessly cooking breakfast. She looked pale and worn, and he knew she must have slept as little as he had, but she greeted him with a somber smile and an affectionate squeeze of his hand—at least after her initial startled flinch at the morning’s first glimpse of him. It was a reminder that the long process of adjustment was not his burden alone.
All along, Nora had shown her readiness to touch him, to prove to him that she wasn’t afraid. He only wished he could respond to her without his own fears getting in the way.
In spite of his emotional duress and lack of sleep, his physical healing had furthered itself. The soreness in his body was fading, the sharpness of his senses beginning to feel natural instead of dizzying. He could feel his strength recovering, as well, and he made every slight movement with scrupulous care. It would take time to adjust the conscious limits he imposed on his muscles—to relearn the amount of force he could exert without breaking things. A splintered workbench in the garage, the victim of his struggles against his nightmares, gave testimony already to his power.
Hank was not alone in facing bad dreams. The children who were rescued from Alkali Lake particularly endured a night of terrors, or wandered awake through the house just as he had predicted. According to Nora, Jubilee was the only one who passed the night quietly. She was the first student to rise that morning—and Hank was moved by her apparent impulse to look after him. She had explained his change to the others, as he requested. Now as savory aromas of sausage and eggs lured her classmates out from under the covers, Jubilee settled herself close by his side, her own trusting nearness meant to soften the alarm that was still unavoidable.
When the students began trickling into the dining room, they found Hank calmly bent over the newspaper with a cup of coffee, his old reading glasses clinging precariously to a craggy face they no longer quite fitted.
From the night’s newcomers who had not witnessed his change, there were the soft gasps and hesitations and stares Hank expected, as they confronted with their own eyes what Jubilee had described to them. Then, unfalteringly, each one sat down with him at the table, unafraid and accepting.
If Hank continued to receive a few lingering, morbidly fascinated gazes throughout breakfast, he didn’t mind. His heart was full. Even knowing what these young ones had been through in their own lives, he was humbled by their tolerance for intense changes in their world—the world their teachers had tried to build as a refuge, now so shockingly exposed as a small and fragile place.
His body might have changed, but his blue fur did not obscure the memory of his years as one of the vital pillars of that world. He remained the same Doctor McCoy who nursed bruises and told stories; the same Doctor McCoy who kept secret his knowledge of teenage pranks, and gave children with frightening new powers his shoulder to cry on. Although his life and work had taken him away from Xavier’s School for some time, he was remembered and loved—no matter what he looked like.
Perhaps now more than ever, when his appearance was certain to further remove him from the acceptance of ordinary society… and bring him closer than ever to them.
Slowly but surely, his regret of that singular fact had begun to die. His well-cultivated, carefully strategic social life among the intellectual and political elite had been useful but hollow, a thin mask designed to benefit the cause he served; but his heart had never been with those people. He knew his change would turn many of them away from him, but those who possessed compassion and understanding would witness in him the struggle of all mutants.
Now that he wore his nature on the surface, he would learn who his true friends were—and in a world so brutally shaken by the events of those last twenty-four hours, that knowledge seemed suddenly very important.
One day faded into seven days, and one week became two. As the cleanup and repair of Xavier’s School progressed, the students at the safe house began to drift back to the mansion, a few at a time. Hank and Nora continued to look after those who remained—but as the house grew steadily quieter and more empty, Hank felt ever more awareness of the duties and decisions that still lay ahead of him.
He was, at least, in a better condition to face those responsibilities, for his physical recovery was complete. Strained muscles healed, and were no longer sore. The initial riot of hormones in his system gradually settled at lower (if still permanently elevated) levels—and as his nerves grew calmer, so did his emotional state. Partially instinct-driven anxiety gave way to thoughtfulness and curiosity: his own familiar traits, which he once more proceeded to put to use. The suburban residence was hardly equipped for a clinical analysis, but he did his scientific best, filling a notebook with his detailed observations of himself.
Perforce of his claws, his handwriting became slightly altered.
On some nights he ventured into the wooded lot behind the house, there to explore his new strength and agility and acute senses. He marveled at each new discovery of his abilities—and he realized just how deeply his entire physicality had changed. Experimentally attempting a few of his old fighting moves, he found them hopelessly clumsy and slow, incompatible with his new ways of moving and reacting. When he let go of his years of past danger room training, and instead trusted his nascent instincts, what emerged was a raw primal force: elegant, powerful, with the savage grace of an animal. It was one of the most exhilarating things he had ever experienced… and more than a little frightening.
By contrast, other occurrences during those two weeks helped him feel a little more human. When Nora went out to buy groceries one day, she was gone much longer than Hank expected—and he was brought close to tears when she returned with half a closet’s worth of new clothes for him. He was sure they must have run to a massive expense; they were the largest sizes she could buy off the rack, and almost everything fitted him at least passably. Perhaps the plain shirts and trousers were not the immaculate designer suits of his old life, but it still made him feel a great deal better to be presentably dressed again.
He would not have admitted it to himself… but there were some moments when those days felt strangely peaceful. The pressures of research and politics were a world away from the safe house, which had come to feel almost homelike even after all that had happened there. His ongoing emotional conflict aside, he had nothing more important to do than play with the younger children, and help Nora in the kitchen, and carry out an assortment of household chores. In a distant-seeming past, he might have found such a commonplace routine to be dull and even somewhat unbecoming, but now it held a reassuring comfort. He had lived his life immersed in the deepest complexities of man and nature, and thought he knew nearly as much of both as anyone could; but an existence stripped to such perfect simplicity was a revelation to him.
Yet the broken world outside could not be dismissed forever—and there came a bright Sunday morning when he was forced to face that fact.
“The rest of the children will have to go back to the school today,” Nora said quietly at breakfast.
Hank’s heart skipped a beat as he looked up from the morning paper, tipping his glasses down his nose to regard Nora somberly across the table.
They were alone in the dining room. It was barely past sunrise, and the five youngest students of Xavier’s who still remained in the house were not yet awake. For the past three mornings it had been this way, with both adults speaking little in those quiet hours; he was afraid to break the spell of those days of rest, and she was too considerate to rush him. He was all too aware of how much remained to be said and done, but he still couldn’t imagine where to begin.
Now, however, there was no avoiding it. On the phone the night before, Ororo had told them regular classes would resume on Monday. It was time for the last of the students to leave the safe house—and that meant there would be no more reason for their temporary guardians to remain there. Hank could no longer put off the question of what came next.
But it was a question he felt he couldn’t answer on his own.
With a deep sigh, he folded the newspaper and set it aside. “I know. They’ll be alright now… I think they’re ready to face the memories of what happened there on the night of Stryker’s attack.”
“I think so too.” Nora shrugged and gazed into her coffee cup. “I’ll take them after they’ve had breakfast. There’s no sense waiting any longer, and the house could use a good cleaning before…”
Before we leave. The unfinished thought hung in the air between them, worried and uncertain.
Hank was silent for a moment. Then he smiled solemnly and set his glasses aside, shaking his head.
“No… I’ll take the children myself.”
Nora flinched. “Hank, are you sure you’re…?” She faltered and trailed off—perhaps finding no graceful words for what was in her mind.
“It’s alright, Nora. I’ve got to start again somewhere, and a Sunday drive is as good a first step as any. Besides, the roads in this area should be almost deserted today.” He gave her a thin smile that quickly faded. “It’s time I saw Charles… for a lot of reasons.”
“Oh,” Nora said softly, and the discussion was closed.
While the children ate breakfast an hour later, Nora packed the clothes and toys Ororo had previously brought for them, and Hank made himself as ready as he could to be seen in public. He chose to wear black, with a vague thought that the color might make his otherwise casual shirt and slacks seem more professional. Any deeper meaning in it did not occur to him; but if it had, he might only have felt more sure that black was an appropriate hue.
He dressed slowly, stealing time to gather his nerve. Then he made his way to the phone and called the school, dialing a private extension that was known to no more than half a dozen people in the world.
“Charles, it’s Henry. I’m bringing back the last of the students… and I’ll be coming to see you shortly.”
The forewarning delivered, he pushed his own thoughts and feelings away for the moment, and led the children out to his Mercedes. He placed their bags in the trunk, then squeezed himself behind the steering wheel—becoming immediately conscious that the seat position and various other settings were in need of drastic readjustment.
Amidst a background of quiet giggles, Hank rearranged the car’s interior with grumbling chagrin. Nora had followed them out to the driveway, and busied herself fastening the children’s seatbelts; but he noticed that even she quickly stifled a smile, and somehow it made him feel better. It had been far too long since he had seen her smile that way.
When he was at last comfortably situated in the driver’s seat, he reached out through the open window to grip her hand lightly. “I’ll be back in a while.”
“Take your time,” Nora answered gently, and watched as he drove away.
© 2009 Jordanna Morgan
Author:
jordannamorganArchive Rights: Please request the author’s consent.
Rating/Warnings: Mild PG, for angst and adult situations.
Characters: Emphasis on Beast, with support from various other characters.
Setting: Mainly mid- to post-X2.
Summary: The personal journey of Henry McCoy—as a mutant, and as a man.
Disclaimer: Marvel and Fox create the characters that sell. Nora is mine, and so is Kristen, who has appeared in several of my stories.
It was just as well that Hank spent the night with a solid wall between himself and the other occupants of the house. His rest was fitful, jagged with violent nightmares about his transformation. Many times he awakened, thrashing in their grip, his throat rough from his unconscious cries. Then, as he gazed at his hands and remembered that the nightmare had really happened, fresh tears would burn in his eyes.
He was ashamed of those tears—ashamed of being ashamed. The horror and despair he felt went against everything he had ever taught and believed about mutation.
Yet Hank had counseled enough newly emerged mutants to know this reaction was an inevitable phase. The shock of such a change could be nothing other than traumatic, but he was sure he possessed the awareness and resilience to make a healthy emotional recovery. Not all mutants could accept their changes, even when they were less pronounced than his; he blessed the education and experience that gave him an informed and reasoning perspective. In time, he would learn to live with the disadvantages of his condition—and to embrace its benefits.
Even so, his own ordeal brought him new enlightenment about his work. Now he was rediscovering, from the inside out, every struggle he had guided his patients through. He vowed to himself that he would give use and meaning to that painful new understanding.
Shortly before dawn he surrendered any further effort at sleeping, and crept back into the quiet house. In the kitchen he found Nora restlessly cooking breakfast. She looked pale and worn, and he knew she must have slept as little as he had, but she greeted him with a somber smile and an affectionate squeeze of his hand—at least after her initial startled flinch at the morning’s first glimpse of him. It was a reminder that the long process of adjustment was not his burden alone.
All along, Nora had shown her readiness to touch him, to prove to him that she wasn’t afraid. He only wished he could respond to her without his own fears getting in the way.
In spite of his emotional duress and lack of sleep, his physical healing had furthered itself. The soreness in his body was fading, the sharpness of his senses beginning to feel natural instead of dizzying. He could feel his strength recovering, as well, and he made every slight movement with scrupulous care. It would take time to adjust the conscious limits he imposed on his muscles—to relearn the amount of force he could exert without breaking things. A splintered workbench in the garage, the victim of his struggles against his nightmares, gave testimony already to his power.
Hank was not alone in facing bad dreams. The children who were rescued from Alkali Lake particularly endured a night of terrors, or wandered awake through the house just as he had predicted. According to Nora, Jubilee was the only one who passed the night quietly. She was the first student to rise that morning—and Hank was moved by her apparent impulse to look after him. She had explained his change to the others, as he requested. Now as savory aromas of sausage and eggs lured her classmates out from under the covers, Jubilee settled herself close by his side, her own trusting nearness meant to soften the alarm that was still unavoidable.
When the students began trickling into the dining room, they found Hank calmly bent over the newspaper with a cup of coffee, his old reading glasses clinging precariously to a craggy face they no longer quite fitted.
From the night’s newcomers who had not witnessed his change, there were the soft gasps and hesitations and stares Hank expected, as they confronted with their own eyes what Jubilee had described to them. Then, unfalteringly, each one sat down with him at the table, unafraid and accepting.
If Hank continued to receive a few lingering, morbidly fascinated gazes throughout breakfast, he didn’t mind. His heart was full. Even knowing what these young ones had been through in their own lives, he was humbled by their tolerance for intense changes in their world—the world their teachers had tried to build as a refuge, now so shockingly exposed as a small and fragile place.
His body might have changed, but his blue fur did not obscure the memory of his years as one of the vital pillars of that world. He remained the same Doctor McCoy who nursed bruises and told stories; the same Doctor McCoy who kept secret his knowledge of teenage pranks, and gave children with frightening new powers his shoulder to cry on. Although his life and work had taken him away from Xavier’s School for some time, he was remembered and loved—no matter what he looked like.
Perhaps now more than ever, when his appearance was certain to further remove him from the acceptance of ordinary society… and bring him closer than ever to them.
Slowly but surely, his regret of that singular fact had begun to die. His well-cultivated, carefully strategic social life among the intellectual and political elite had been useful but hollow, a thin mask designed to benefit the cause he served; but his heart had never been with those people. He knew his change would turn many of them away from him, but those who possessed compassion and understanding would witness in him the struggle of all mutants.
Now that he wore his nature on the surface, he would learn who his true friends were—and in a world so brutally shaken by the events of those last twenty-four hours, that knowledge seemed suddenly very important.
One day faded into seven days, and one week became two. As the cleanup and repair of Xavier’s School progressed, the students at the safe house began to drift back to the mansion, a few at a time. Hank and Nora continued to look after those who remained—but as the house grew steadily quieter and more empty, Hank felt ever more awareness of the duties and decisions that still lay ahead of him.
He was, at least, in a better condition to face those responsibilities, for his physical recovery was complete. Strained muscles healed, and were no longer sore. The initial riot of hormones in his system gradually settled at lower (if still permanently elevated) levels—and as his nerves grew calmer, so did his emotional state. Partially instinct-driven anxiety gave way to thoughtfulness and curiosity: his own familiar traits, which he once more proceeded to put to use. The suburban residence was hardly equipped for a clinical analysis, but he did his scientific best, filling a notebook with his detailed observations of himself.
Perforce of his claws, his handwriting became slightly altered.
On some nights he ventured into the wooded lot behind the house, there to explore his new strength and agility and acute senses. He marveled at each new discovery of his abilities—and he realized just how deeply his entire physicality had changed. Experimentally attempting a few of his old fighting moves, he found them hopelessly clumsy and slow, incompatible with his new ways of moving and reacting. When he let go of his years of past danger room training, and instead trusted his nascent instincts, what emerged was a raw primal force: elegant, powerful, with the savage grace of an animal. It was one of the most exhilarating things he had ever experienced… and more than a little frightening.
By contrast, other occurrences during those two weeks helped him feel a little more human. When Nora went out to buy groceries one day, she was gone much longer than Hank expected—and he was brought close to tears when she returned with half a closet’s worth of new clothes for him. He was sure they must have run to a massive expense; they were the largest sizes she could buy off the rack, and almost everything fitted him at least passably. Perhaps the plain shirts and trousers were not the immaculate designer suits of his old life, but it still made him feel a great deal better to be presentably dressed again.
He would not have admitted it to himself… but there were some moments when those days felt strangely peaceful. The pressures of research and politics were a world away from the safe house, which had come to feel almost homelike even after all that had happened there. His ongoing emotional conflict aside, he had nothing more important to do than play with the younger children, and help Nora in the kitchen, and carry out an assortment of household chores. In a distant-seeming past, he might have found such a commonplace routine to be dull and even somewhat unbecoming, but now it held a reassuring comfort. He had lived his life immersed in the deepest complexities of man and nature, and thought he knew nearly as much of both as anyone could; but an existence stripped to such perfect simplicity was a revelation to him.
Yet the broken world outside could not be dismissed forever—and there came a bright Sunday morning when he was forced to face that fact.
“The rest of the children will have to go back to the school today,” Nora said quietly at breakfast.
Hank’s heart skipped a beat as he looked up from the morning paper, tipping his glasses down his nose to regard Nora somberly across the table.
They were alone in the dining room. It was barely past sunrise, and the five youngest students of Xavier’s who still remained in the house were not yet awake. For the past three mornings it had been this way, with both adults speaking little in those quiet hours; he was afraid to break the spell of those days of rest, and she was too considerate to rush him. He was all too aware of how much remained to be said and done, but he still couldn’t imagine where to begin.
Now, however, there was no avoiding it. On the phone the night before, Ororo had told them regular classes would resume on Monday. It was time for the last of the students to leave the safe house—and that meant there would be no more reason for their temporary guardians to remain there. Hank could no longer put off the question of what came next.
But it was a question he felt he couldn’t answer on his own.
With a deep sigh, he folded the newspaper and set it aside. “I know. They’ll be alright now… I think they’re ready to face the memories of what happened there on the night of Stryker’s attack.”
“I think so too.” Nora shrugged and gazed into her coffee cup. “I’ll take them after they’ve had breakfast. There’s no sense waiting any longer, and the house could use a good cleaning before…”
Before we leave. The unfinished thought hung in the air between them, worried and uncertain.
Hank was silent for a moment. Then he smiled solemnly and set his glasses aside, shaking his head.
“No… I’ll take the children myself.”
Nora flinched. “Hank, are you sure you’re…?” She faltered and trailed off—perhaps finding no graceful words for what was in her mind.
“It’s alright, Nora. I’ve got to start again somewhere, and a Sunday drive is as good a first step as any. Besides, the roads in this area should be almost deserted today.” He gave her a thin smile that quickly faded. “It’s time I saw Charles… for a lot of reasons.”
“Oh,” Nora said softly, and the discussion was closed.
While the children ate breakfast an hour later, Nora packed the clothes and toys Ororo had previously brought for them, and Hank made himself as ready as he could to be seen in public. He chose to wear black, with a vague thought that the color might make his otherwise casual shirt and slacks seem more professional. Any deeper meaning in it did not occur to him; but if it had, he might only have felt more sure that black was an appropriate hue.
He dressed slowly, stealing time to gather his nerve. Then he made his way to the phone and called the school, dialing a private extension that was known to no more than half a dozen people in the world.
“Charles, it’s Henry. I’m bringing back the last of the students… and I’ll be coming to see you shortly.”
The forewarning delivered, he pushed his own thoughts and feelings away for the moment, and led the children out to his Mercedes. He placed their bags in the trunk, then squeezed himself behind the steering wheel—becoming immediately conscious that the seat position and various other settings were in need of drastic readjustment.
Amidst a background of quiet giggles, Hank rearranged the car’s interior with grumbling chagrin. Nora had followed them out to the driveway, and busied herself fastening the children’s seatbelts; but he noticed that even she quickly stifled a smile, and somehow it made him feel better. It had been far too long since he had seen her smile that way.
When he was at last comfortably situated in the driver’s seat, he reached out through the open window to grip her hand lightly. “I’ll be back in a while.”
“Take your time,” Nora answered gently, and watched as he drove away.
© 2009 Jordanna Morgan