keeping secrets
Summary: That's the problem with being the size of the universe, isn't it?
Prompt: milliways_bar DE Challenge
Recipient: Bjornwilde
Summary: Hank & Jean; keeping secrets
Disclaimer: Jean Grey is from current comicsverse and Hank is from the middle of X-Men: First Class. This takes place in the wonderful, beautiful
milliways_bar.
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It's a eureka moment like several thousands she over heard - during practice, class, relaxing, fighting - her whole childhood. When the last variable in his great equation suddenly falls into place like it was made of grace, divinely wrought. Throwing himself back into his chair with a pride brighter than certain suns.
His awe and his relief and his great surness.
(She hears the echo of his fear, regret and repeated failures after.)
It's no wonder it falls out, as he has gotten it, before she realizes. "Henry, you-"
But the word 'shouldn't' gets trapped in her throat, like a bird in a chimney. Struggling and beating. But The Phoenix speaks only truth, even when the boy - one of The First Five, one of Her Boys, even if he doesn't know her here, this one - turns to look at her, surprised confusion offsetting his, if only mentally begun, started celebration.
Shouldn't. But many great things come from the smallest actions. Accidents.
Repurcussions of vanity, that lead to such wisdom at the cost of struggle.
"Do I know you?" He asked, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his now in a way that was only his. Had ever and all of her life been only his.
She cannot say no. Even when she wars with herself. There are not two of them in here, but there are grave differences in the mortal and the immortality, and what each thinks of the world, of the other. Truths that convolute other truths.
She cannot say no to this one in either. Instead, something that is not a lie, though she can quibble about whether evasion and omission. "I over heard the girl who left say your name."
"Raven," Hank said, inserting the name, and missing how it makes his mouth crinkle into a pleasure, shy, smile. Before he clears his throat. "Was there something I could help you with?"
No. No, she'd wanted to help him. She never could resist any of their family, but Her Boys? She was shameless before the inability, the stunning want, to right the whole of the world for them if she could. Childhood bonds, forged in classrooms and war zones.
This, too. This, too, never happened for him. It still doesn't matter.
At his base he's still Henry McCoy, and she's still Jean Grey. Scott said so.
She simply curls a smile, gentle and absent, pointing out. "You dropped your paper."
Henry'd looked momentarily confused before he spotted it. The scrap sheet of equations that had gone sailing through the air, to land in the walkway as he'd turned quickly when she said his name.
"Thanks," he'd said, hasty, with the breath of a laugh as he saved as though, the flat thin piece of paper, with it's curled corner and high school lines, were more precious than a newborn baby.
He thinks it will make him less alone. More normal. Real.
That's the problem with being the size of the universe, isn't it?
Even when one thought could burn that paper, could remove his epiphany. You have to keep the secrets of the universe. To watch the first domino fall, while no one else sees it, and only your heart breaks for it in the silence of the endless void of space.