Alex doesn’t see the appeal of touching others. He never really has; the only casual touches he received before his incarceration were from his little brother, and then after were the brushes of other imprisoned young men and from prison guards. He regards touch as a thing that tethers him to the world of prison, of humans, of people he can hurt. Alex has hurt his brother Scotty as a young boy playing around, but that had been before he hurt some people in a manifestation-filled panic that got him put into jail, so now he tries not to hurt anyone else. He gets into a big enough fight the first day of prison that he is in solitary confinement for a while, and that’s fine with him. Every time he gets out he throws himself right back in because he can--because the possibility leads to the inevitability and he can’t stand the idea that he could hurt some bright-eyed kid who got mixed up with a wrong crowd. Everyone younger than him, a feeble almost-twenty, reminds him of his nerdy little brother with his dark spectacles and his fingers ghosting over Alex’s braille.
He hates it still when Erik Lehnsherr and Charles Xavier come to pick him up from his holding cell, when they stare at him with a matching set of cat’s grins, when they make the hairs on the back of his neck stand up with a tug of his handcuffs and a whisper in his mind that he is safe now which, okay, is a little bit cool. Charles surges forward to take his hand, and Erik notices Alex’s reticence, puts a hand on his chest. He appreciates it, just a little bit, but there is something about that hand on Charles’ chest, right where Alex would burn Erik’s hand clean off, that makes him angry, and confused, and scared all at once. He’s been in prison a long time. There’s a wordlessness between them that Alex suspects has more to do with that hand than it does with Alex at all.
Whatever, Alex thinks, let them be whatever that is and he doesn’t have to get involved, he just has to ward of the state it for a while or something, meet with some other freaks like him, like the three of them, and then he’ll… he’ll what, save the world? Alex doesn’t have a plan, but he doesn’t care, because a hotel room is a million times softer and lighter and sweeter than his hard squeaky bed and concrete walls. He sleeps with Erik and Charles (except not--he doesn’t--fuck off) in the hotel room for a few days and then they take him somewhere “they’re keeping the others”.
They’re in a CIA guarded base instead of a freak show, which makes Alex more than a little hesitant, because at least his stupid concrete cell with a suspicious stain in the corner didn’t have humans and mutants for him to touch. He has a lot more at stake, but somehow, Charles seems to trust him with this, even when he doesn’t at all trust himself. Alex sees the people in dark suits and sunglasses pass his room, sees the shadows under his locked door, and he wants to vomit; their guns and their training will do nothing if Alex loses it. He can obliterate them in an instant.
Alex, because he is not a “friendship” guy, doesn’t leave his room besides for meals, just for a few days. He gets to know the walls of his room and the lumpy but soft mattress. Once he does manage to leave, though, he’s pleased with what he finds in the common room of the Division X facility where the freaks like him gather during their meals and their free times.
He meets Raven first, because Raven is a ball of blue sunshine that shifts into the rainbow and back again and asks him immediately if he has any “prison tats”. He tells her, because he isn’t a stranger to offhanded comments about the prison experience, that he has one below the waist, and if he shows it to her, then he’ll have to kill her. (This pleases her to no end, really, and she constantly shifts into him to moon Alex with his own pasty ass.)
Then Sean, who is red hair and freckles and curls and so, so fucking Irish that it radiates from him almost as much as marijuana does. He asks Alex if he likes The Beatles or not, and doesn’t seem fazed at all when Alex says he actually prefers Buddy Holly because the only Beatles song he’s really heard was in the car ride to Division X and it was Love Me Do and he actually had hated it, thanks. Sean shrugs, lazily lets the smoke drift from his mouth, and says “cool, give ‘em an ear sometime, yeah?” with pursed lips.
Angel is an enigma, sort of, because she’s a firecracker. Hot, hot-tempered, hot-blooded, whatever, she’s Alex if he was a pretty girl who used to dance for a living. He doesn’t ask her about it and she doesn’t ask about prison, because they’re polite and don’t like to get into other people’s businesses. She can spit fire, apparently, and fly, and he’s jealous that she can show off her powers so harmlessly.
Hank is the nerdiest person he’s ever met. Charles scolds him mentally the first few times Alex thinks this, but he really can’t help it, because Hank mumbles and looks at his feet and cracks his long fingers and cleans his glasses on his striped button-downs tucked into his khakis. Really, Hank reminds him of Scotty, and even the simple fact that he does so makes Hank an easy target for someone like Alex, who pushes his emotions right into the bottom of his brain and steps on them a few times for good measure. And then locks them in a box.
Really, Alex does not consider himself anyone who is remotely interested in touching others, and then he meets Armando.
The first thing he notices is that Armando is handsome. He is tall, a lanky and spindly mess of arms and legs and a wry smile. His teeth are white, beautiful and straight, and his soft eyes are tired but always crinkle at the corners like he's telling an unspoken joke. They tell a story Alex wants to hear at midnight, at twilight, at secret hours where Alex is brushing against Armando long, beautiful, dark neck with his pale fingertips, pale lips, anything to sap a little warmth from Armando, because he radiates it. He is a vibrant beam of light, and he croons his nickname--Darwin!--like he sings it for a living. Absolute perfection. He realizes suddenly that Darwin is staring, staring at Alex who is staring back at him, thinking lucrative and confusingly Charles-and-Erik thoughts about him.
Alex apologizes, clasps their hands together (so warm and big and shut the fuck up Alex!) and asks him with a neutral expression what it is he can ‘do’. Armando laughs and dunks his head in the fish tank and grows gills. When he emerges again, he says “I adapt to survive, and I can withstand just about everything,” but to Alex it may as well be an opera because the second thing he notices is that Darwin is literally perfect. Alex isn't weak but if he was even just a little bit there would be church bells.
However, there aren't and he isn't, because this is real life, and even if he feels a fatherly presence loafing around his mind he doesn't take notice of it at all, even when it peeks around the stream of DarwinDarwinDarwinDarwin with curiosity intense enough to make him blush. Instead, he claps Darwin on a shoulder and grins at him like he's fire and Alex is a neanderthal and that's that.
(Alex shows his power off later and Darwin takes the blast to his chest just because he can, and Alex wants to get down on one knee and marry him.)
They don't talk a lot, not at first, because despite Darwin easy attitude and soft smiles and calming demeanor, Alex remains resolute in solving this weird mass of feelings he has before he embarrasses himself in front of Darwin. Instead, he plays pinball, casually flicks his hand over the ball release and listens to the murmur of mixed voices in the common room mingle with the pinging of the artificial pinball sounds. Before he was arrested he used to take Scotty to the arcade and play pinball while Scotty listened to the sounds, soothed by all the people chattering all at once. Alex likes the cacophonous sounds now more than ever. He’s just starting to think about whether he's ever thought about a guy like he's thought about Darwin before when a warmth presses in close, against his side.
It's him, it's Darwin, coming to watch him play, both hands leaned against the glass, splayed across the frosted transparency with fingers extended. “Hey,” he says coolly.
Alex feels his face heat up a little. “Hey yourself, Dar,” he says, pleasantly surprised by the steadiness in his voice. He releases the ball again with a springing noise and watches it bounce around the boxy arcade machine halfheartedly, distracted by Darwin and himself reflected in the glass. They look nice beside each other, like friends. “What's up?”
“Just came to see if I could have a turn in the saddle, cowboy,” and fuck if Darwin doesn't wink. Alex feels his stomach churn excitedly, ears betraying him with a steady pink. “Think you can show me the ropes?”
Darwin is flirting.
Alex lets his ball fall into the chamber for a game over and allows Darwin to take his place. He smiles, just a little, and Darwin presses the start button on the side of the machine, which chirps and whirrs to life.
Despite Alex’s best protesting and assistance, Darwin remains absolutely shit at pinball. Alex takes the machine back from him later and begins again, and he realizes that Darwin can't get hurt because of him. Darwin is practically indestructible, and they've tried everything from holding him in chlorinated pool water (he'd created a trunk like an elephant to breathe through) to lighting him on fire (he’d just turned to obsidian), and Darwin had made it out alive. He'd taken one of Alex’s plasma rings to the chest and lived.
Before Alex notices, his ball is in the hole. Still two more tries, he thinks, and then Darwin laughs when he sees the high score. “Jesus, man,” he mock-whines, and while he does so Alex takes the opportunity to run his thumb along Darwin’s calloused knuckles. “You are killin’ me!”
Darwin’s face gets a little pensive and Alex looks pointedly at the game, at the flashing lights. “Don't beat yourself up about it. I’ve had a lot of practice.” Darwin’s fingertips brush his own, but suddenly there is a rumbling in Division X and they look at each other, at the ground, at the others. Everyone's expression rattles with confusion, and Darwin places a hand on his chest, right in the center, where his beams appear. It's a simple gesture, a stay here with no words, but Alex still gasps. It's a hand to his dangerous bits, to the raw parts of himself he hates, to the place Erik had touched Charles.
And just as soon as he turns, the world comes crashing down on them.
None of them know what’s even happening, really, but the first body hits the ground with a thump. It’s the man in the black suit with the ugly spectacles that Alex always sees Charles speaking to in hushed tones and meaningful glances. Instead of the usual concern stamped on his face and the rigid formality to his body that the CIA trained into him, there is nothing but wide-eyed shock and a crumpled mass of limbs. Angel gasps, can’t tear her eyes away, and Raven screams. Sean and Hank clutch at each other’s forearms in fear, and Darwin seems at a loss for words. What any of it means, he doesn’t have time to figure out, because a CIA operative he’s never seen tells them that they’re to stay put. A man with blood red skin and a whipping tail continues on, disappearing and reappearing in clouds of smoke and taking the operatives with him.
In their respective defenses, they do stay put, and they do right up until the bodies start falling one by one from the sky and the sound of bullets ricochets off the walls of the courtyard. “Stay put my ass!” Darwin says, and he’s urging their friends one by one out the door. Alex is beginning to worry, beginning to feel that tight coil of panic in his chest that usually sends his plasma rings flying off every which way, but Darwin puts a warm hand on his shoulder as they are, unbelievably, corralled back into their common room like cattle. No, like sitting ducks, really, because as suddenly as the operatives urging them back inside appear, they disappear in the same black cloud of smoke, and off in the distance Alex hears a steady stream of thumping and cracking bones.
“Where’s the telepath?” asks a man in a grey and silver helmet, pausing as he enters the room through the parade of discarded bullet casings and broken glass. Alex feels a pang in his gut and knows that this guy must be the infamous Sebastian Shaw, the very same one that Charles and Erik are dispatched in Russia in order to find. He’s standing right here before them, and when the red man replies that Charles is nowhere to be found, he laughs. “Well, at least I can take this silly thing off,” he says.
Alex doesn’t buy his speech for a minute, not with that sinister grin and those hard, cold, clinical eyes that roam them like they’re mice and he’s a hungry housecat. He looks them over one by one, eyeing up his meals, and not once does that ugly smile fade, but Alex feels like he can’t quite look away from it. “Each of us will face a choice,” he says, and he sees Angel’s hand twitch from the corner of his eye. “Be enslaved,” and he looks at Darwin as he says this, “or rise up to rule. Choose freely, but know that if you are not with us, then by definition, you are against us. So, you can stay and fight for the people who hate and fear you. Or you can join me, and live like kings.” Shaw seems to notice the same twitch in Angel’s hand that Alex did, and he turns on her, raising an eyebrow. “And queens,” he adds, afterthought.
Unbelievably, Angel takes his hand. Raven calls out to her, horror dripping from her voice just as much as sadness is, and Angel shrugs. Alex wants to be as surprised as her, but ever since the CIA agents started calling her butterfly and asking her to fly around for them, she’s had her mind set on leaving. What she says is true, they don’t belong here, and that is nothing to be ashamed of, but Alex thinks about humans in a way that is much different than Angel. He thinks about his brother, Scott, with his big blind doe-eyes and his easy braced smile. He thinks about his parents and their matching smiles, and of his favorite history teacher even though he hates history, and he thinks about how people like him only get this chance to prove themselves to humans once in a lifetime.
If Angel wants to throw that away, Alex doesn’t have a shred of sympathy for her, because they both know that with Charles and Erik the push for mutant awareness could get the ball rolling for good. Darwin, however, that absolute saint, doesn’t agree with this. He gives Alex a look, long and desperate, before turning to take a step forward. Alex grabs him, right on the shoulder, shocked. Darwin pushes his arm off, opens his eyes a little wider. Alex gets it.
“Wait,” he says, “I’m coming with you.” And that’s almost the last thing he says to them all, except for calling Alex’s name as he lets loose his mutation on Shaw and his consorts. They really hadn’t been counting on such a powerful mutant to be in their presence, let alone one who could take the red rings from Alex’s chest and condense them right into a little ball that he presses into Darwin’s mouth as though it were a piece of food.
Darwin, the only person who Alex can't hurt, swallows his plasma as Shaw feeds it. For a moment, he seems fine; he turns to stone, to metal, to molten rock, to plasma. And then he is turning gray, sickly and dusty, and Shaw disappears with a sickening grin to Alex that he returns with a snarl. Darwin touches his chest once, gently, eyebrows furrowed. Then, as though Alex was not the cause for the pain he's caused, Darwin reaches for him--but no, Armando, this is Armando now, suffering, unable to adapt, mercilessly human. Alex’s worst nightmare opens his mouth as though to speak, but all that he manages is a crackling wheeze. And then he explodes, dissipates, blows away in the wind and into nothingness.
Armando with his long sleeved shirts and his rolled up slacks and his unpolished shoes, Armando who liked crunchy peanut butter over creamy, Armando who cheated at sharks and minnows in the pool by staying underwater, vibrant Armando gone without a single reminder save the miserable expressions on the lawn of Division X, littered with bodies and rubble. Alex feels he deserves the death penalty a thousand times for killing that handsome smile and that gorgeous neck and that beautiful, beautiful sunshine sitting contentedly in their little world for a while.
The next day, Charles and Erik fuss at one another in the rubble of Division X. Hank, Sean, Alex, and Raven sit on the concrete benches of the fountain feature and brood, mostly. Alex can’t help but be mad about how Charles burrows his hands in Erik’s jacket, straightening it and preening him. Charles and Erik want to send them all back home, back where they were before, and for Alex that means prison, means not hurting anyone like he hurt Armando, means safety in solitude. But Sean disagrees, and says they’re not going to let him go that easily. Apparently he has made a bigger impact that he intended to.
“They killed Darwin,” Alex says, and Charles winces, because Alex means to say I killed Armando, and he must have said it--thought it--loud enough for Charles to hear.
“All the more reason for you to leave,” Charles says coldly, but his eyes are soft, and Alex can’t even disagree. This is his fault. “This is over.”
Yeah, Alex thinks, it is.