soricel//team brotherhood//2 drabbles

[soricel]

Title: Brain Drain
Team: Brotherhood
Challenge: Amusement
Fandom: X-Men (Comicverse)
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Hank McCoy/Jean Grey
Rating: T
Notes: Set after the battle with the Horsemen of Apocalypse which led to Hank's loss of intelligence

 

It felt like that amusement park game: words were the rings he was trying to toss onto concepts, and they just kept bouncing off or falling short: ill-fitting, wrongly-weighted. And then, he started reaching down for more rings to throw, only to find that there was nothing there: the words he wanted were missing.

 

Soon, he'd be too dumb to be angry or sad about it, but until then, he raged against his brain, sulked in the shame of his stupidity. He could feel the berth the others gave him widening as his growls and moans replaced nouns and adjectives.

 

***

 

But Jean drew closer.

 

She listened patiently, never offered him the words she thought he was flailing for, never chuckled at his blunders. Sometimes they didn't talk at all. He liked those times best.

 

He was beyond being able to understand how much of it had to do with Scott pushing her away, how much was pity, how much was empathy borne of her loss of telepathy. Maybe she knew that feeling of straining her mind toward something it couldn't reach, like...no, he couldn't do similes or metaphors anymore.

 

But she came to him. She was nice. She felt good.

 

Comments

[shroomystar]

this is so lovely! I love how quiet this feels and how you wrote Hank's perspective.

[soricel]

Thank you! I just read that little arc with him getting "dumber," and I really felt for him!

[flareonfury]

I haven't read this particular part of the comics, but I remember it happened - I think you did amazing writing from Hank's perspective and just like shroomystar said, I have to agree that this is lovely! ♥


BTW Thank you for writing for the Hank/Jean prompt!! I thought it would be a longshot anyone would ♥

[soricel]

Thank you! It was a fun challenge. :)