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Charles had told him that he probably didn’t want to come along. Hank had suggested in his own quiet way that Alex might want to stay home because Hank was coming along for a reason. Erik had taken him aside and told him that he had to accept whatever he saw and experienced as not being his fault.
Charles had been right and Erik’s words did nothing to soothe the guilt and rage and nausea of what they found.
He didn’t remember his family very well. He had been little when they died, only five, and all he remembered of his big brother was his eyes were like their mother’s and he gave great piggy back rides.
He didn’t remember this creature that lazed back on a couch with deceptive sensuality, eyes closed and lids painted with glittering eyes that never saw. Not this pale skinned, too thin boy who looked younger than Alex himself, obscenely young for the tiny cut off shorts and ripped mesh top that did nothing to hide bruises and track marks. Not this pink lipped, submissive thing that gasped as his leash was yanked and handed over to Erik.
“Behave.”
Erik took the leather, nodding calmly as he tipped the boy’s face up to his own and then Charles took possession of the leash, sweeping off his long coat to wrap it around the thin body.
And Erik took possession of the room.
Alex wanted to run out there, scream and rage and loose the plasma curling in his body. He wanted to see them all die, all these monsters who had turned his big brother into the frightened, gasping wreck that Charles dragged across the street, away from Erik’s destruction.
He didn’t do it though, because then the van door was opening and Charles was pushing them all inside, frowning slightly as he kept up whatever mental litany was keeping things steady.
“Scott,” he heard himself whisper. “Scott, it’s me. It’s Alex. Your little brother.” He reached out, hands shaking and touched his brother’s face, greasy with sweat and city life and makeup.
“Alex?” His voice was lilting, far away.
Alex’s fingers felt crustiness as they tried to sweep over Scott’s eyes, pushed away makeup to reveal the horror, the layers of superglue and old stitch marks that held Scott’s eyes forever closed.
He stumbled away, out of the van before he was throwing up in the bushes, listening to Erik collapse metal around him and the soft, confused calling of his addled brother.
I would have spared you this, Alex, Charles whispered in his mind.
Alex just wished they could have spared his brother this.
*~*~*
Alex had found control, briefly.
Alex had lost it again, because somewhere out there, his brother was waiting, alone, and Alex couldn’t find him.
Breaking into Hank’s lab, Alex had poured over all the data, trying to see if there was any Scott, anything that might suggest a power like his, because they were brothers and that was how it worked, right? They were brothers, so if he was a mutant, Scott was a mutant and out of control.
Except probably not. Scott was always in control. Even as an eight year old, he’d been too serious about some things. About doing things right for Alex.
And now, Alex could find nothing. He couldn’t get anything right, not his power, not finding Scott, not stopping this family from exploding apart.
Eventually, he resorted to desperate measures and asked Charles to help him. And Charles was shocked, which was how Alex knew he kept his promise and never looked in their minds without permission.
He dropped everything to help Alex find his brother. Mutant or not, he was Alex’s family and he would be welcome there, with them.
But when Charles finally called him into the office, he knew.
“Don’t tell me,” he whispered. “Just take me to him.”
Which was how he came to be standing in a graveyard, by a numbered stake that was meant to replace the memories of a real, living person. The grass was growing over the grave, the wood of the stake weathered by exposure.
Alex knelt down, though honestly it was more a collapse to his knees, his hands digging into the dirt as though to reach down and feel his brother’s hands one last time.
“What happened,” Alex finally whispered.
“His foster father killed him,” Charles said softly. “We’ll make sure he has a proper burial, Alex. Anywhere you want, even my family graveyard. You can bring him home.”
But he was never coming home.
Alex was finally, completely alone.
*~*~*
Alex saw him standing there and for a moment, he was five years old again and it was the fateful week that Scott came back from his school camp.
He didn’t think, didn’t have time to check his impulses–he never checked his impulses–he just flew, honest to God felt like he flew as he bolted across the entryway with a scream of his brother’s name, barrelling into him and grabbing him tightly.
It was good he grabbed, because Scott stumbled backwards, didn’t hold himself up right and he dropped what he was holding, hands awkwardly grabbing at Alex’s shoulders and back. “Alex? Is that, is that you?”
Alex leaned back, smile fading slightly as he looked at his brother’s face. Older, sharper, gaze hidden but sunglasses knocked askew in the crushing hug.
He paused, reaching his hand up to push the glasses further aside. Scott tried to fight him but Alex was quicker, Scott unable to see what he was doing.
Unable to see, because both his eyes were closed and had an odd recessed look about them, one that instinctively made Alex shake with anger.
He was numb enough that he let Scott take the glasses back and use them to cut off the horrific vision of his brother’s missing eyes.
“Scott,” he eventually heard himself murmur, asking, pleading.
“You were meant to be with a good family,” Scott whispered. “Having a happy life. Not... like me.”
Like him. Like he used to be, undoubtedly, before someone-
Energy crackled up before he could smother it down, dancing over his body and then onto Scott’s.
He screamed, tried to warn him.
The energy crackled up along Scott’s hands where he was touching Alex and he moved it in his fingers, with an easy control that made Alex, made everyone stare.
“It’s like holding firelight,” Scott murmured. And then closed his hands around it, almost seeming to vanquish the energy.
Alex knew better. Alex felt it sink into Scott’s skin, like it was going home.
“Dude...” Sean breathed out from somewhere behind him.
“Exceptional,” Hank added. “Quite exceptional.”
Alex closed his hands over Scott’s, holding them. “Are you staying?”
“Do you want me to?”
“Of course,” he replied. This stranger with hollow eyesockets who stood over him, only just. His brother who carried him fearlessly back from camping trips and who was a perfect unknown, except that someone had done something awful to him, more awful than Alex could really comprehend right now.
“Of course I do, bro.” And he hugged him around the neck.
He thought that maybe Scott would’ve cried if he could’ve anymore.
*~*~*
Alex dove out of the way as a ball of bubbling acid splattered the pavement where he had stood. “Banshee! Get her out of the goddamn air and off my ass!”
He took off running as he heard the echoing howl of Sean taking to the air. To the side, Hank was launching himself through the air, bounding from wall to wall, closing in on Angel’s other two teammates.
Then the red tore through the air.
It wasn’t Alex’s concentrated blast of energy, but Alex only knew that because he hadn’t shot.
It looked the same, crackling red in a concentrated blast that tore through everything in its path.
“Stand down! Our quarrel isn’t with you, brothers.”
His voice was strong and commanding, oddly compelling through no mutation but natural charisma honed by training.
He walked forwards, clad in black armour and a strange visor wrapped around his eyes. “This is needless. We don’t want to hurt you.”
“Just you try,” Alex yelled back. He concentrated and unleashed a blast back at them.
The young man ducked out of the way. His companion wasn’t so lucky, being thrown backwards, desperately trying to put herself out.
The guy retaliated, blasting Alex. He shifted targets, willing to take the hit to get one of his own in.
Power blasted around him, sinking through his skin like warm sunlight. Opposite him, he was the other boy, his lips parted and almost basking in Alex’s power.
They both stopped at the same moment, standing there amongst the carnage they had wreaked, untouched and upright.
“Alex!”
“Alex?!”
Alex’s head whipped back to Sean and then back to the other boy.
“Alex? Alex Summers?”
“What the fuck does it matter to you,” he yelled back.
The boy started forwards, almost jerky like he was being controlled. “It’s me. Alex. It’s me, Scott.”
Alex felt like the world stopped around him, his heart ceasing to beat and lurching into his throat. “Scott?”
And then Scott was suddenly running forwards, at Alex. Alex, who couldn’t see his brother in this man, boy, being with hidden eyes and hard jaw.
They stopped inches apart, staring at one another through the strange red lens of Scott’s visor. He could see the glow of his brother’s eyes, somewhere past that the shape, large, boyish eyes.
“Cyclops! We got it, let's go!”
“Come with me,” Scott whispered. “I can’t lose you, not when you’re so close, when you’re here.”
“No,” Alex whispered. “He tried to kill thousands of people. He paralysed Charles and then walked away from him.”
“Cyclops!”
“Please,” Scott pleaded.
“Stay with me,” Alex countered. “Come back with us.”
“Goddammit, Cyke, move your ass!”
“I can’t. Magneto saved me. He saved my life. He saved my dignity, my mind, everything. I owe him everything.”
“I’m your brother,” Alex screamed. “You’re meant to put me first!”
“I’m your brother, why do I have to be the one to give up the only family I’ve had since the crash?”
They stood there and Alex understood Scott wasn’t going to come with him.
And he wasn’t going to join Erik. Not even for Scott.
“Cyke!”
Scott turned away and walked to rejoin his team.
Alex let them go.
*~*~*
Charles thrashed in Cerebro, eyes wide and unseeing and gasping slightly as he tried to focus, to hunt and search.
Alex stood nearby, watching the details rattling out of Hank’s computer. Hank’s fingers flew over the keyboard, agile despite their size, translating numbers into English, into words and descriptions.
“There,” Charles breathed out. “I can see him.”
The next number that came out meant nothing to Alex, but he knew what it meant. It meant that that was where his brother was, alive and hopefully well.
The second number that followed it made him frown. “What’s that?”
“Company,” Hank murmured. “Another mutant.”
“A mutant I’ve met,” Charles said, pulling the helmet from his head. “We’ll go together and hope he doesn’t hold grudges.”
Alex vaguely wished he did hold grudges, because right now, held against a wall by long metal knives protruding from the guy’s hand either side of his throat, a grudge would mean some familiarity.
“Please, my young companion doesn’t mean anyone any harm. You’re alarming him,” Charles said quietly.
“I’m alarmin’ him?” The man growled and pushed closer, a third knife starting to slide from between his knuckles, towards Alex’s neck.
“Logan!”
“Stay back, kid,” Logan growled, but Alex’s gaze slid to behind his attacker to the young man who stood there, face distorted with red crystal embedded into his face over his eyes, old scarring holding it in place, casting an ugly red glow over his face.
And Alex knew. He reached out a hand, trying to call the energy forth and hating that he was too damn scared that he was about to die on those claws. “Scott. It’s me.”
“Logan, stop,” Scott gasped. “Say your name. Tell me.”
He inhaled. “Alex. Alex Summers.”
The claws vanished immediately, the man, Logan, stepping back and looking back at Scott with a frown. Scott came forwards, not too close, hands on Logan’s hip and shoulder, familiar and intimate and holding him back.
Alex felt nauseous and he couldn’t quite pin what was worse, the scarring or the unspoken relationship between the two of them, this old, grizzled savage and his fragile looking brother.
Alex. We fight bigotry in all forms.
He tried not to growl at Charles' reminder and instead stood straight. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said calmly. “Looking everywhere. Charles helped me to find you.”
Scott stepped forwards, brushing off the hand that tried to hold him back. “You’re... like us? A freak?”
“We’re not freaks!”
Scott’s hand slammed against Logan’s chest. “No. Don’t. He’s my brother.”
“We’re not freaks,” Alex pushed. “We’re mutants. Charles reads minds. I can make plasma from sunlight. Charles has a place, where we can live and train safely. Without people coming for us.”
“Bit late for that,” Logan growled. “You think those plates of crystal found their own way into his face?”
“Logan, don’t.” He caught Logan’s hand and held onto it, fingers stroking between his knuckles. “It’s not their fault. They didn’t do this to us.” He looked back at them. “And you’re offering to take us both in?”
Alex heard the condition. If they were inviting Scott, they were inviting Logan. Both or neither.
“Yes,” Charles said. “We’d be honoured to have you both living with us, helping to teach and learn.”
Scott’s face turned and Alex could see where he looked by the shift of the glowing points behind the glass like substance. Logan looked back at him, murmuring something in French.
Scott nodded and turned back to them. “Give us ten minutes to pack.”
Charles touched Alex’s elbow, maneuvering himself outside.
Alex followed him, sitting down on the woodpile outside the door. He’s... never going to be my brother first, is he?
We don’t know that, Charles replied. Which was all the lack of denial that Alex needed.
*~*~*
The truth was, Alex had never looked for his big brother because he had been told he was dead.
He had grieved as a child, cried and sobbed until his new family told him that he wasn’t to do that anymore and they called him ‘Tom’ and gave him foods he didn’t like and calmly insisted he was the little boy that went to hospital for a car crash and came back a bit different.
Alex had grown up understanding that his family were dead, his parents in the plane crash, his brother trying to save Alex from hitting the ground first. His mother had smiled the last time he saw her. Scott had just laid there, bleeding from the head and mouth as Alex screamed for him to wake up.
And over the years, he had never forgotten his family, but they had faded into the background as other things happened. As he found himself hating his new family. He found solace in misbehaving, in forcing them to recognise him as Alex, not the dead and rotting Tom who would never be naughty like Alex was, who would never steal, never vandalise, never be so angry and refuse to explain where the giant gouges and flames came from when he was found sitting safely in the middle, stunned and quiet.
He had other things to remember, like watching people he knew being murdered trying to protect him. Like his friend being murdered in front of him, his body dissolving under the strain of something horrific and alien like forced into his body.
Of seeing someone he respected walk away, a monster and leaving the closest thing he had to a father paralysed.
Nothing could have prepared for it. And Charles’ quiet promise to be back the next day with a new mutant had given no sign of what was about to walk into their lives.
“Alex, I have someone for you to meet,” was all he had said.
Alex had been in the kitchen, making coffee, casual and relaxed and confused about why Charles had come straight to him rather than the usual gathering of people. He had turned around, mug in hand and his gaze had moved up long legs, a body held tightly by pock marked arms and then to a slender face wearing heavy red glasses.
And for a long moment, his brain made no connections. “Um... hi?”
“Alex,” the boy asked softly. “I don’t... suppose you remember me.”
Alex frowned. He didn’t remember him. Maybe they shared cells some time? Or did they go to the same crappy boot camp for troubled boys?
“It was a long time ago. Fifteen years.”
And that was when the memories came flooding back and when he looked, he could see the faded scar on his hairline where he had been bleeding from, so much blood, but head wounds always bleed a lot, don’t they? “Scott?”
The boy–Scott–nodded, lips twitching slightly, like he was too scared, too nervous to let a smile out. “Scott. I’m your big brother.”
The mug smashed on the ground, but Alex didn’t care. “You’re alive.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “So are you.”
It was fucking awkward and tense, two perfect strangers meeting for the first time but this was Scott–holding him tightly as they fell, arms around his head to shelter him–and Alex felt the same grief that he had bitten down on for years surging up, that they had lied to him, had split them up and lied and let him think he was alone.
Impossibly warm arms wrapped around him and he wanted to fight, he didn’t need cuddling like a little boy.
He clung back and let himself cry. Let Scott hold onto him and do the same.