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Henry Philip McCoy is just seven years old when he finds the boy in the bushes, hidden away behind his house. He’s tiny, and covered in dirt and grime and something red that makes Henry’s stomach lurch. When he forces his eyes away from the red, there’s two bright spots of blue staring at him, so wide and clear that Henry takes a step back.
Henry glances back at his house, to see if anyone is watching. But it’s late and his parents have drawn their blinds and closed the curtains, and the neighbors, even as nosy as they are, have done the same. They’re all used to the McCoy boy’s antics by now.
He turns back to the tiny thing in the bushes and it’s still there. Henry edges closer and the little boy keeps still. Henry is reminded of the baby deer he saw during one of his expeditions in the woods. The fawn had been curled up, hiding, and waiting for its mother. Henry had written the information down in the journal his parents had gotten him, but when he returned the follow day, the deer had gone. He hopes it won’t be the same with this boy. It’s not every day one finds a blood-stained boy in one’s backyard, and Henry is determined to investigate the situation thoroughly.
First he takes a brief—but thorough—catalogue of his specimen, the boy. Probably a few years younger than he is, 5 maybe, with hair that he guesses is blonde beneath the grime. The blue eyes are still watching him, wide and star-bright.
Henry realizes with a start that the boy is afraid.
He’s never seen anyone look so afraid before. Some of the girls in his class had made a scrunched-up face he’d identified as disgust when he’d tried to show them the anatomical differences between two species of beetles, and he’s seen an angry expression on the faces of the boys who kick him after he answers too many questions right in class for their liking, but nothing like this. He wonders if this is what he looks like when the boys advance on him in the playground, and decides to bring a mirror to school the next day to investigate.
The boy is still watching him.
Henry takes the chance to see how close he can get, and he moves as slowly as he can because he’s learned by watching birds and squirrels that fast movements scare small things away. And this boy is so, so small.
Finally, he takes one step too close and the boy’s eyes widen impossibly further and he scuttles away. Henry quickly throws up his hands and backs away.
“Sorry,” he whispers. “Sorry.”
The boy is watching him again.
“I’m Henry Philip McCoy,” he whispers again.
The boy is silent, but he doesn’t move away any more, and Henry takes this as a good thing.
“You’re in my backyard,” Henry says, then, because he feels like he should keep talking even though he can’t think of anything good to say. “You’re in my bushes.”
The boy is still staring at him, and Henry rambles on quietly into the night.
“You’re covered in dirt, and is that blood? You don’t look hurt so I don’t think it’s yours. Whose is it? Do they need help? Should I call for help?” The boy panics at this, scrambling away, and Henry hurries after him. “No, wait! Wait! Stop! Don’t run away!” The boy slows to a crawl, and Henry takes a deep breath. He has to figure out what’s going on before the boy reaches the escape hole in the fence. “I won’t call anyone if you don’t want me to.” He takes a chance and sits down. “I can keep a secret. I can keep you a secret. Are you on the run from somewhere? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
And then, like magic, he takes the boy’s hand and the boy doesn’t pull away, even though he looks ready to run at any second.
“We should get you clean,” Henry says firmly, and steps towards the house.
The boy’s eyes flicker up to the windows and he doesn’t move.
“My parents are asleep,” Henry says. “I always wait for them to go to sleep before I leave. They won’t notice us coming in. Or hear the shower.”
The boy lets himself be pulled along.
Getting in the house is more nerve-wracking than ever before now that Henry has this strange boy to worry about. But he’s left the back door unlocked, as per his usual nighttime expeditions, and they get inside easily enough. Henry warns about each creaky floorboard and uneven step that might give them away, even though he’s 99.7% sure his parents won’t wake up for anything less than an earthquake.
By the time they pass his parents’ bedroom door and enter the bathroom, Henry is feeling much more confident. Still, he’s slow and careful as he turns on the water and lets it run over his hand until it’s the right temperature.
“It’s good now,” he tells the boy. “You can get in. Just put your clothes on top of the hamper. I’ll take care of them.” He isn’t sure how, yet, but he has a few ideas about either using the washing machine by himself for the first time, or washing them in the stream in the woods. But in the meantime… “I’m going to go get some clothes for you. Get in the shower, okay?”
When he comes back with a t-shirt and shorts and an old pair of underwear—all a little too small for him now but hopefully the right size for this tiny boy—the shower curtain is closed and Henry can’t see through it clearly. Red-brown water is sluicing down the sides, and Henry’s glad the toilet is next to the door because he feels like he might throw up.
Instead he takes a deep breath and takes the dirty clothes from on top of the hamper—and they really are dirty, so, so dirty, with mud and muck and things he doesn’t want to think about—to stow away under his bed in an old shoebox until he can deal with them later. He hopes they won’t smell too much.
When he comes back a second time, the boy is on the floor, trying to squirm into the pair of shorts. Henry hurries to assist, holding them up and away so the boy can shimmy into them. The shirt goes on a lot easier, but Henry is still the one to pull it down over the boy’s raised arms.
He really is tiny. Henry’s old clothes still look much too big on him.
“Are you hungry?” he asks, instead of asking for a name or age or home address.
The boy nods, and Henry leads him back down to kitchen, where he makes them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and neither of them says anything. It’s hard for Henry, being so quiet and not asking questions (he wants to know, wants to understand everything about this stranger, wants to learn learn learn), but he wants the boy to stay even more than he wants to know why he wants to leave.
He serves dessert after they finish the sandwiches, and the boy stares at his bowl like he’s never seen chocolate ice cream before.
And Henry wants to know
But he washes the bowls and puts them back instead, and after a moment’s consideration leads the boy out, and away, to the woods and the tree house he’d built with his dad so long ago. It’s well-made—the McCoys have always been good with tools, as his dad likes to say—and even if it rains the boy won’t get wet. He unfurls a sleeping bag and hands the boy a plastic cup of water and an apple and tells him that he’ll come to check on him in the morning.
Henry can’t sleep for the rest of the night. He’s worried that the boy will have gone, forever, and he’ll never know why, or who, or what. He’ll never know anything about the boy.
In the morning, he pretends to leave early for school but slips into the woods instead and climbs up into the tree house.
The boy is still there, curled up in the old sleeping bag.
****
Two days of visiting the boy and he learns his name is Alex.
****
Five days and he learns that Alex’s last name is Summers.
****
Ten days and he learns that Alex Summers, and the rest of his family, died in an explosion in their home the morning before they met. Alex doesn’t have to tell him this—it’s all over the news.
****
Eventually it’s not just Henry holding up their conversations, and they talk together instead of Henry prattling on by himself. Alex is a quiet boy, still, but he’s also stubborn (bananas are “gross!”, no matter how many times Henry tries to convince him otherwise), inquisitive (“Why do birds have diff’ernt sounds?”), and brave (“When I get big I’ll stop them. I won’t let ‘em hurt you.”).
Henry has never had a friend like Alex.
If he’s being honest, he’s never had a friend before at all.
Still, he can’t help but think that Alex is something special.
****
He gets confirmation of this when Alex tells him his big, big secret, a whole month and a half after they first met.
“I blowed it up,” Alex says quietly one night, when they’re eating their sandwiches. “I blowed it all up.”
Henry doesn’t ask what Alex is referring to. He’s pretty sure he knows.
And then Alex is crying, and the only reasonable thing to do is hold him, and Henry does.
****
Four days later and Henry runs out of patience and asks how?
Alex frowns, and Henry’s afraid he won’t answer, but after a while Alex speaks. “I was scared. And then it got hot. And everything blowed up.”
“Why were you scared?”
This time, Alex really doesn’t answer.
****
With time, Henry teaches Alex how to bathe in the stream in the woods, and how to watch deer without them watching back, and how to copy birds’ songs. Whistling takes Alex a long time, but he gets that in the end, too. Alex is good at learning.
Soon, Henry realizes Alex can’t go to school, won’t learn math or English or art, and starts teaching Alex things from school, things that Alex should be learning there.
And, soon after that, Henry realizes he’s smarter than everyone. That that’s why the other kids pick on him on the playground when he answers too many questions in class.
He skips one grade. Then two.
He gets picked on more than before, but the admiring look in Alex’s eyes when he tells the younger boy about what the third grade is like makes his bruises ache less.
****
They can’t properly celebrate Alex’s birthday, but Henry makes the fanciest mud pie he knows how and sticks candle in that in place of an actual cake. They play tag for hours and, two months later, Henry brings Alex a giant piece of cake leftover from his own birthday party and they call it even.
****
The years pass, and Henry moves rapidly through the educational system. By the time they’re twelve, he’s graduating high school, and when he finally gets back home at the end of the day, Alex is there with a smile and a hug to congratulate him. He’s even made Henry a little card out of collected leaves. Henry’s grin as he turns through the green pages lights up the tree house.
Henry keeps it with him even when he goes to college in the fall—at a local community college, because he can’t leave Alex for an Ivy League school, no matter what his parents say.
****
Then, puberty happens.
Before Henry knows it, he’s being stretched up and across and his voice is changing and he’s got hair and it’s not Henry anymore, it’s Hank, wise-cracking classmates in college clapping him on the back and saying his new name over and over again until he’s convinced it’s the truth.
It’s difficult to go see Alex now, because the tree house, which has been getting too small for a while, is now an impossibly tight fit for his gangly arms and legs, never mind the fact that he can’t seem to maneuver them into any reasonable position. Alex is very understanding of this, and just smiles at him like everything is perfectly normal, like Henry isn’t turning into some long-legged, big-footed freak named Hank.
He shows Alex his new feet, and Alex tells him they’re cool, wearing the same admiring smile as he always has.
Hank wonders if Alex has always been this small.
****
He starts to notice girls soon after the growth spurts end.
Things about older girls that never seemed worth his attention before—lips, hair, chest, waist, backside, legs—are now all he can think about. He gets caught more than once staring at a college girl’s chest, and their laughs and pitying looks make his stomach flip and heat rise to his face. And to—other locations.
Hank isn’t sure what to do the first time, when he wakes in tangled sweat-soaked sheets with a stain in his pajama pants. He frantically does the laundry and does more research online, learning until he knows what’s happening to him, until he can’t be surprised like this anymore.
It gets harder to face Alex after that. He doesn’t know what to say anymore. He trips over his own tongue and is sent into a verbal sprawl. His utter inelegance in movement has apparently spread to affect his speech as well, and Hank desperately wishes to go back to being young and small and the right size for the tree house, for the hole in the fence. For Alex.
His visits to Alex become short and perfunctory. Alex slowly starts to smile less, becomes more withdrawn. Quiet. Serious. He resents the dumbed-down lessons Hank has to give him. They’re painful for both of them—Hank because it’s so old for him, so elementary and basic and boring, and Alex because no he does not understand that formula, and why is this supposed to be common knowledge again?
They grow apart.
****
Alex hits puberty a year and a half later, when Hank is knee-deep in his master’s degree.
He doesn’t sprout up like Hank, but takes his time with the growth, building up muscle alongside bone. He takes to running in his spare time—which he has a lot of, without Hank—and climbing trees, and going into town. Seeing other people. Getting a job.
When Hank emerges from his study with a master’s degree in hand, Alex is no longer someone he knows. The teenage boy who leans against the bottom of the ladder to the tree house, arms crossed over a t-shirt Hank doesn’t recognize, wearing new jeans and shoes, hair newly cut by someone other than Hank, is not Alex. This young man with toned arms and a sharp smile is not the little boy who gave Hank the leaf-card that still sits in his room.
The stranger that Hank hasn’t seen in two months tells him to go fuck off.
Hank does him one better and goes to Yale for his doctorate studies, leaving Alex and his new job and new clothes and new smile thousands of miles away.
****
Yale is miserable and rainy, and while there Hank witnesses his freaky feet get freakier and freakier, until it hurts every time he puts on shoes.
More than once, as it rains and water drips through the ceiling, he wishes for a dry tree house and a sleeping bag with Alex in it. Alex, who was always so warm, even on cold nights.
****
Hank goes back to visit his family over the holidays, and Alex isn’t in the tree house when he goes to look. He leaves a note and retreats to his room to leaf through the crinkly pages of Alex’s old gift to him.
Alex never responds.
****
Hank finishes his doctorate degree earlier than planned, and at the age of eighteen is officially Dr. Henry Philip McCoy.
Hearing his full name out loud makes him remember seeing two wide blue eyes among bushes.
****
He looks for Alex.
****
The CIA picks him up for his engineering skills when he is twenty.
****
He is twenty-two and a fresh-faced young man with an English accent is revealing his secret.
His eyes catch on blonde hair.
****
Her face is soft, and the same shade as another he’d known. It’s the echoes of his childhood, paired with the curves of a woman, that draws him in.
She smiles at him and he wants to build a tree house just for the two of them.
****
He doesn’t believe his eyes when they bring him in. A hard-faced, too-familiar young man that Hank remembers.
Questions like where have you been? and did you miss me? die in his throat when cold blue eyes glance right over him.
He pretends not to know this Alex. It hurts less.
****
It’s unreal, sitting on the couch with both of them.
When Alex, the Alex who was the first to tell him his feet were cool, calls him a clown, he feels like throwing up.
So he looks away and ignores, ignores, and takes comfort in the solid presence of Raven, who hasn’t deserted him so far.
“Bigfoot,” not-Alex not-says, and it’s all Hank can do to keep from weeping.
****
Hank hates himself for it, but he dreams of not-Alex at night, when he lets his guard down. He dreams of warmer smiles and laughter-crinkled blue eyes. He dreams of smooth tanned skin and sun-kissed hair. He dreams of the two of them, in tree houses, doing things that ought not to be done in childhood spaces.
****
“You’re beautiful now,” he says, because he doesn’t think he can handle losing the face that looks so much like the one he wants to see. The one that smiles at him and doesn’t call him bozo.
But this is the wrong thing to say. And then he’s lost them both.
****
He stares at his new hands, new face, new body.
That’s it. There’s nothing left of him, of the past, of what he remembers. He’s a monster.
He rips apart wires and smashes glass beakers and pretends they’re the fibers of a sleeping bag and the planks of an old tree house.
****
“I think I’ve finally got a name for you,” Alex says, and Hank is disappointed despite himself when Alex says: “Beast.”
****
They’re in the middle of a war, facing almost-certain death, and Hank only knows he has to fight to save blue eyes and a warm smile.
****
They return to the mansion in shreds, and neither Hank nor Alex say a word as Hank drags Alex to the bathroom and comes back in with a change of clothes for his—for his teammate.
He doesn’t go back in a second time.
****
The day after they return from the beach, everything moves in slow motion.
Charles is at a special hospital owned by the CIA receiving what Hank can only hope is the best care available—he thinks it must be, because Moira had gone with him, unwilling to leave his side. Sean is stuck in bed with broken ribs and a cold, and Alex is…
Alex is in the woods near the mansion, Hank discovers. Sitting on the forest floor and staring up at the canopy and the sky beyond.
Hank sits beside him, and for a moment he can almost believe it’s the woods near his childhood home, can almost hear the sounds of familiar birdcall. He whistles out a tune off the top of his head, and receives the responsive tune from Alex.
They sit quietly, then, and Hank feels a low weight settling into place.
“You left,” Hank says, whispering.
“So did you.”
“You told me to.”
“Of course I did, bozo. You left me alone. For months.”
“I was busy.”
“Yeah. Well.” He hears Alex shift, but refuses to look at him. “You weren’t there. I needed you. And you weren’t there.”
Hank has nothing to say to this. He’s just so, so tired. He longs for simple times of mud pie birthday cakes and no secrets between two best friends.
“When the Professor brought you in, you treated me like dirt.”
“You left me.”
“And you left me.” He looks at Alex, then, and the blonde man is staring up at the sky. “I just…I wish—”
“Don’t,” Alex says, and Hank freezes. “We can’t go back in time. No matter how much we want to.”
“I miss you,” Hank breathes, the words escaping on a melancholy sigh.
Alex doesn’t say anything for a while. Then, “I miss you too, Henry Philip McCoy.”
Everything rushes in, condensing and crystallizing within Hank. It's the feeling of knowing.
He knows now what he wants.
“Can we…”
“What?”
“…Can I kiss you?” And he wants to take the words back, take them back and apologize a hundred thousand times over, because what had he been thinking, but Alex is looking at him with blue blue eyes and he can’t look away.
And that slow, warm smile spreads across Alex’s face like a sunrise, and Hank leans in to the light until it’s shared between them, casting shadows of two boys who used to play in tree houses.