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When Erik returns to the Maximoff household to collect Scott he finds the front door locked and the house empty. There's a note on the kitchen table, hastily scribbled. It says only, “GONE TO HOSPITAL” in Scott's childish scrawl, so Erik knows not to immediately suspect foul play. He thinks it likely that Peter's mother suffered some kind medical emergency. Nevertheless he sweeps the house and yard for intruders, for signs of a struggle or foul play. He notes that Peter's mother's bed is stripped and the soiled linens are in a heap on the floor. There are a few cups on the kitchen counter and one of the drawers is open, revealing a stash of clean, folded dish cloths. So there is every indication that Scott and the rest of them left quickly, but not so quickly that they forgot to lock up.Erik senses the shape of a vehicle approaching, but when he looks out the front window he doesn't recognize the car pulling into the driveway. A stranger gets out, a human, middle-aged, gray haired, heavier than Erik but still strong for his age. Erik opens the front door before he can knock, and for a moment they size each other up, and it seems that the stranger is determining how much of a threat he is. Recognition dawns in the human's eyes. It's a subtle shift, as if something has clicks into place and he knows how he needs to respond. He sticks out a hand, “Frank Maximoff.”Peter's step-father, or former step-father.“Erik Lehnsherr.”They share a very firm, almost competitive handshake.“So you don't always go by 'Magneto',” Frank says.“Only when it suits me.”“Are we going to stand on the porch all day?”Erik appraises him with a long glance, and Frank stands up the the scrutiny without breaking eye contact. Erik could rip him apart in in instant but Frank isn't going to let that scare him off his ex-wife's lawn. Erik respects that. He stands aside.XXX
This next scene takes place after Peter, Lindy, and Scott return from the hospital.
Scott and Erik go to the den to make a phone call while Frank is speaking with an obviously-ill Peter. We pick up there.
XXXBefore Erik left the mansion he memorized the phone numbers of every bolt hole and safe house that Charles had. He finds a phone in the den and keeps dialing until he finds where Hank McCoy is hiding. While Hank is being fetched to pick up the line Erik hands the phone to Scott. Erik and Hank rarely see eye to eye, and Scott is in charge, after all, but Scott seems confused when Erik hands him the receiver. Apparently he hasn't been able to keep up with Erik's line of reasoning.“What do you want me to say?”“Just tell him to come,” Erik says. Then he tunes out Scott and Hank's conversation, feigning interest in the spines of the books and magazines that line the built-in shelves. The bottom rows are crowded with old issues of National Geographic and Time Magazine. Further up there is a set of encyclopedias next to four or five photo albums of different shapes and sizes. Erik looks for titles that he recognizes and sees a dusty copy of Moby Dick that has clearly never been opened. It sits alongside a thoroughly abused edition of Gone With the Wind.Erik turns around when he hears the handset settle back into the cradle. “He's on his way.”“Good,” says Erik.“He thinks he can be here by midnight or so.”“It will have to do.”Peter isn't in the living room when he and Scott emerge, but Frank is sitting on the couch, looking agitated, running his hands over the legs of his pants. “Where's Peter?”“I sent him to bed.”“And he went?”“I don't need you to tell me that's a bad sign.”Erik puts aside the pretense that Scott is in charge and says over his shoulder, “Check on him.”Scott goes.Frank stands abruptly and goes to the kitchen. The phone books are stored in a nook in the corner. He slaps the Yellow Pages onto the counter and starts to thumb through them. “I'm getting him a doctor. There has to be someone who will make a house call.”There's purposeful tension in the set of Frank's shoulder and the crisp, efficient way he pages through the book. He's a man who prefers action to patience. “If you're looking for an advertisement for a doctor who specializes in mutant physiology I don't think you'll find it,” Erik says. Frank stops flipping pages. “I know Peter's a mutant. He's sick. He needs help.”“He'll have it. We have someone coming who knows more about Peter's physiology than anyone else alive.”Frank's shoulders slump and he takes a deep breath. “He's a doctor?”“He's more scientist than doctor, but he's very good. He's been monitoring Peter's health for the past few weeks.”“Okay,” Frank blows out a breath. “He just... Peter's always been such a healthy kid. If I'd known he was having trouble I would have come sooner.”“I'm sure he'll appreciate the sentiment but I don't think it would have helped. Peter can be a very stubborn individual.”“Yeah, he can be a pain in the ass,” Frank says shakily. “But he's a good egg.”“Yes,” Erik agrees.Frank sighs heavily. Scott emerges from the basement. He says, half amazed and half relieved, “He's asleep.”“That fast?” Erik asks.“Yeah, that fast. He's out. Dead to the world.” “I suppose that's for the best then,” Erik says, “Although someone should keep an eye on him until Hank arrives, and that won't be until evening.”Scott says, “Right, well, I guess that would be me.”Frank looks from Scott to Erik, as if he is trying to understand the dynamic between the two of them. The dynamic is that there is no dynamic. Scott is a child in whom Charles places an irrational amount of trust and Erik is here because that trust does not imply confidence in Scott's fledgling leadership skills.Scott seems to notice the look on Frank's face. It is gloriously awkward when he says, “The professor told us to keep an eye on Peter.”“The Professor. Professor Xavier? Peter's employer?”“Yeah, it probably wasn't on the news but there have been mutant attacks- that is, mutants have been attacked.”“And you think Peter's in danger?”“There hasn't been any specific threat against him... specifically...”Scott looks to Erik for help but Erik is quite happy to stand placidly by and let Scott's mouth destroy him.Scott heaves a sigh. Erik steps in with, “We're here as a precaution. Peter is in a vulnerable state, and might be seen as an easy target. We believe the threat has been neutralized, but we'll be keeping an eye on things until all is certain. Do forgive the intrusion.”Frank shrugs. “This hasn't been my house since the divorce. It's Peter's decision whether or not you stay or go.”“Then until Peter is in a fit state to express his wishes, we will remain.”Remain is what they do, and while Scott grows bored and tired sitting with Peter, Lindy makes a trip to the funeral home with a dress and shoes for her late mother and takes her brother's black suit to the dry cleaners. She worries that Peter isn't awake to have it tailored but Frank says just to have them let out the waist as much as they can, which will only be at most a couple of inches. Peter can wear a belt if they're too loose. While she's gone Erik and Frank sort through stacks of bills and paperwork, earmarking things for Peter and Lindy to sign, and making phone call after phone call until the close of the business day, when they can do no more. Peter still has not woken by evening. Scott insists that he hasn't so much as twitched in his sleep, but he's still breathing. They order Chinese takeout.When Lindy returns empty-handed and haggard at about six o'clock Frank gathers her into his arms and tells her to make an early night of it. Her lip is trembling still but her father seems to have lent her some strength. She picks at a container of noodles, clumsy with her chopsticks and probably uncomfortable with Erik's presence, then she mounts the stairs to her old room.Frank finds a bottle of twelve year old scotch in a cabinet above the refrigerator. He takes down two tumblers, drops one ice cube in each and pours them both a double.“Mary preferred vodka tonics, but she kept a bottle of the good stuff for special occasions,” Frank explains. He hands the second tumbler to Erik. “To Mary.”Erik raises his glass. The scotch burns with a pleasant familiarity.Unprompted Frank says, “Peter likes to think that he's the reason Mary and I divorced. That's not true. We each had a strong personality and there wasn't room enough for both of them in a marriage.”“Hmm,” says Erik. “I made some mistakes with Peter, I don't mind admitting that. I was strict with him, and I think that just made him more rebellious. Don't think I didn't find out about that business with the Pentagon. But after all of the trouble he got into he still managed to turn his life around. He managed to become somebody I'm proud to know.” “Charles certainly sees a great deal of potential in him.” Of course, Charles saw a great deal of potential in everyone, including Erik himself. Charles is a magnanimous soul.Frank gives a slight chuckle and a shake of his head. “Look at the two of us. I would have laid odds this day would never happen, but here we are. Mary would be horrified.”“And you?” Erik says.Frank takes a sip of his whiskey. “I don't always approve of your methods, but I can't deny that you have a point. Mary never saw what I saw. I was in Poland at the end of the war. I saw one of the camps, and the people in it, what was left of them. I don't want to imagine Peter in a place like that.”“We have that in common.”“I was there when Peter's mutation manifested. I understand that's usually how it happens, suddenly, like a switch being flipped. I still remember it, clear as crystal: It was a Saturday afternoon. Peter was twelve. Mary had gone to the grocery store and taken Lindy with her. Peter and I were in the back yard. I was trying to show him how to change the belt on the lawnmower but he wasn't paying attention and I was getting angry at him. One second I'm wagging my finger in his face and the next -and I'll never forget this- there was the sound of screeching tires and Mary screaming Lindy's name and Peter just vanished. Gone. I thought I'd had a stroke or something. I ran out into the front yard, and I saw Mary next to the station wagon with her hands over her mouth, and there were skid marks on the asphalt and Peter was across the street, holding Lindy, safe and sound. Mary had been unloading the groceries from the back of the car and when she wasn't looking, Lindy wandered into the street, right in front of a VW bus. So, I don't know about all of the mutants out there, or even some of them, but without Peter, I wouldn't have a daughter anymore.”Erik can't help but reflect briefly on the day when his own powers had manifested, and how his, even then formidable, power had been. “It will take more than a single act to change the way the world sees mutants,” Erik reminds him. “As long as humanity fears mutants, there will be a need for people like me.”“I'm not afraid of you. And I'm not afraid of Peter or the kid with the glasses, what I'm afraid of it what we -and I mean humans and mutants- are going to do to each other.”“An appropriate fear to have.”Frank raises his glass. “To our darkest fears. May they prove to be totally unfounded.”They drink, and Erik kindly refrains from revealing that his darkest fears have already come true.“So, is there anything you want to know?” Frank asks.“About?”“Peter, what he was like growing up. Mary's gone, but if you want to ask, then ask.”“Why would I do that?” Erik frowns. “I'm quite certain we know enough about one another to get by.”Frank regards him for a moment, expressionless. Then he says, “Tell me again why you're here?”Erik doesn't entirely trust this man. He could kill him at any time with a hundred different objects scattered throughout the room, and yet Frank doesn't fear him.Without revealing the details of the mutant kidnappings and Peter's involvement in their rescue, Erik reiterates how he and Scott are here to keep an eye on things until Peter is better equipped to deal with a threat.Frank aims a finger at him. “Yes, but why you specifically?”Erik is growing a bit tired of Frank's questions. He says, “Charles Xavier is an old friend. I'm here as a favor to him while the rest of Peter's peers are otherwise occupied.”Frank stares at him, unblinking. He says, without breaking eye contact, “Holy shit.” Then without another word he very calmly tosses his drink back, gets up, and leaves the room. Frank is back one minute later, clutching his empty glass in one hand and a book in the other. He looks down at the the book in his hand, and Erik can see that it's a photo album he's holding, an old one, with cracks in the powder-blue vinyl cover. “This isn't my business,” Frank begins. “Peter isn't my son and Mary hasn't been my wife for a long time. I don't have a horse in this race. But if I were sitting where you're sitting right now, I would want to know.”Frank drops the album in front of Erik. Erik carefully sets his drink on a coaster. He's unsure what to make of this display, but he can't help feeling a modicum of dread as he opens the album to the first page. On it he sees three pictures of a girl and what appear to be her parents. The pictures are in black and white, so Erik supposes that these are photos from Mary's childhood.“Is there something specific that you want me to see?” Erik asks, turning the page. The girl is older now. There are more pictures of her with her parents, and a school photograph, her alongside her classmates. Another page and the girl is older and her father no longer appears beside her and her mother in any of the photos.“Towards the end you'll find pictures of Peter's father,” Frank says. “There's a good chance you'll recognize him.”Erik wonders if this is some game or distraction, but as he watches Frank pour himself another drink and take a seat on the couch, facing away from him as if to give him some privacy.Page after page Erik watches the girl become a young woman, sees her school uniform swapped out for the apron and cap of a nursing student. The pictures turn from black-and-white to color, and the girl is hardly a girl at all anymore, but a slender and attractive young woman with light brown hair and green eyes. Erik can see a bit of Peter in the height of her cheekbones and the set of her eyes. He is near the end of the book now, but has yet to recognize any of the people in these pictures and he's beginning to think that Frank is either mistaken or that this is a very unfunny joke when he reaches a set of photos two pages from the end and sees his own eyes staring back at him.The possibility that the photos have been doctored crosses his mind briefly before his eyes fall on the tiny gold cross hanging around Mary's neck in the photograph. He doesn't recognize Mary, not as she really was, but as a collection of memories: of brown hair and, soft edges, as the warm press of flesh against him, as the resonating of the tiny metal cross around her neck, ringing against he senses like the far off chime of a bell. It was real gold, delicate and precious. She had kept it on, even when she'd taken everything else off.On the couch, Frank notices that Erik stopped turning pages. He says, “Did you find it?”“Yes.”“She said you were the only one. I suppose she could have been lying, or mistaken, but Mary's never been the dramatic type.”“She wasn't lying,” Erik says. His voice is thick. There is too much to feel and Erik doesn't know how to process this revelation. He has a son. He has a son.He's had a son for a very long time, before Magda, before Nina, before he met Charles and before he took his revenge on Shaw, before he became Magneto.“She wasn't supposed to keep him,” Frank says. “In those days girls in Mary's situation usually didn't. But Peter was born small and pale with gray hair. They told Mary that no decent family would take him, that his hair color was likely an indication of serious genetic defects. They said he would probably only live a few weeks anyway, so they sent her home with Peter and told her to keep him comfortable until he passed. Honestly I think they expected her to just let him die. No one would have asked any questions. But she didn't let him die. She kept him and she raised him and as he grew up, you never saw a healthier kid. Mary loved that boy.”Erik turns the last page in the album and is greeted by a picture of Mary sitting in a rocking chair, holding a tiny bundle in her arms. Below it is a picture of Peter as a baby, with his shock of silver hair. He's sitting up and grinning toothlessly at something off-camera, probably a rattle or something shiny meant to get his attention. Someone has dressed the poor child in a short pants suit complete with a jacket and a tiny blue bow tie that cinches around his neck beneath his double chin. He looks so utterly adorable and completely ridiculous and Erik lets out a noise that is half laugh and half sob but it's all joy for this unlikely gift that Mary has given him.Erik draws in a shaky breath. Frank is still on the sofa, still turned away.“Thank you.”“You're welcome, but I don't know that I've helped anyone. Mary didn't want you to know. Peter's known for about ten years. I thought he'd have told you by now but clearly he hadn't. Maybe he was going to in his own time. I can't say. Maybe it wasn't my place to interfere, but if Peter didn't want you in his life, you wouldn't be in this house right now.”More alternate scenes to come.Thank you for reading. Feedback is welcome.
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That Peter Maximoff is Erik Lehnsherr's son is the worst kept secret at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. Peter literally has no one else to blame but himself. He's the one who opens his big mouth to Raven when they're sharing a cozy green holding cell in the Canadian Rockies, and it's not like Hank and Moira aren't pacing well within earshot when he does it. They're probably just polite enough to pretend his conversation with Raven is private.
So, Peter's able to fool himself into thinking that he's kept his little revelation to himself, and honestly, Peter's family tree is back-page news today, and the real headline is an ancient Egyptian asshole with delusions of godhood, running amok and threatening to destroy the world.So Mystique and her merry band of mutants (plus Moira) steal a jet together. Is there any better bonding experience? No, he doesn't think so.The first hour of the flight is all tense silence and white knuckles as Hank and Moira navigate their way out of the Canadian Rockies. After that the ride smooths out and the younger mutants, Peter included, relax enough to exchange a few words with each other. Kurt is nervous enough to be chatty. The other two, Jean and Scott, are pretty quiet, and Peter can't exactly blame Scott for clamming up around him. “Sorry about your brother,” he says finally. He's been trying and failing to find Scott's eyes behind his glasses. “If there was any way I could have saved him, I would have.”Scott just stares at him, or maybe past him. Peter can't tell if the kid wants to cry or punch him in the face. So... yeah. Too soon.After an awkward silence that lasts a couple of seconds for everyone else but an eternity for him Peter digs some gum out of his flight suit and offers it around, “Bubblicious?”No takers. Peter sticks a piece in his mouth and starts on the serious business of chewing and trying not to think about where they're going and what they're going to do when they get there. Peter thinks of himself as an “in the moment” kind of guy, and it seems like this might be the kind of situation that he should play by ear.Everyone on the plane is pretty gung-ho to rescue the professor, and yeah, Peter is totally on board with that, but Erik (Magneto) is the whole reason Peter is there in the first place. Raven seems to be the only other person interested in bringing Magneto (Erik) back alive. As an aside, that is kind of surprising considering that she shot him in the neck on national television ten years ago. The two of them must have some history. Anywho, he supposes he should be sticking close to her if he wants to have words with the old man.And what exactly is that going to sound like? Hey, do you remember the waitress that you used to run into when you were moonlighting as a delivery boy? Well, you ran into her often enough that she had to quit her job, move back home, and go to night school so she could get a better job to support your illegitimate son. Her career is going great, by the way. She's head of the nursing department at Georgetown University Hospital. She hates your guts. Wanna grab a beer?Peter isn't even sure he's going to live long enough to have that conversation, so he guesses that he should cross that bridge when he comes to it. Peter feels at least partially responsible for whatever part Magneto is about to play in this whole Apocalypse scenario, seeing as he's the jackass who helped bust him out of the Pentagon in the first place. Maybe they can bond over that. Right about then he realizes that Jean is looking at him, not exactly wide-eyed but not blinking either, with an expression on her face like she just walked in on someone who forgot to lock the bathroom stall.Oh, riiiiiight. Telepath. He wonders how many times in the past three hours he's thought about boobs.“I lost count,” Jean supplies.One more time won't hurt, then. After that it's no use hiding how eager he is for a chance to get on Magneto's radar, even if it means running across a river of floating debris to get to the guy, which it does.And after all that, after running into an exploding building and getting kidnapped by military goons and flying halfway around the world on an empty stomach, after all that-“I know you think you've lost everything, but you haven't. You have me, you have Charles...” Raven casts a meaningful look at Peter. “You have more family than you know. You never had a chance to save your family before, but you do now. That's what I've come here to tell you.”Then Magneto's attention is on him, like a laser, “And you?” and he looks his dad in the eye for what he realizes is the first time and feels... nothing. There's no connection, no bond, and no life left in Magneto's eyes. He looks like a man who isn't capable of caring about anyone or anything ever again. Peter tries to imagine him as a father, tries picturing him reading a book to his daughter or tossing around a baseball, but it feels like trying to force a square peg into a round hole; it's just not going to work no matter how hard he tries. And he does try.“I'm your- ” he starts, then chokes on the words, wishing that the ground would open up and swallow him whole. And, hey, he might just get his wish in a second because Magneto, his father, is literally tearing the world apart under their feet. Thanks to his mom Peter knows how Erik Lehnsherr takes his coffee (black, no sugar) but he knows next to nothing about the man responsible for supplying half his genes, and everything that he does know about him is incredibly bad. Maybe Teenage Peter would have just blurted it out but Teenage Peter isn't here right now, and Twenty-Something Peter is world-wise enough to admit to himself when he's bitten off more than he can chew.He isn't ready. What's worse, he realizes that he might not ever be ready. The best thing he can think of without resorting to a lie is, “I'm here for my family too.” He's sorry to leave Raven holding the proverbial bag like that, but he's sure she's chickened out a time or two in her life... okay, maybe not, but this is, like, not working for him. Magneto seems anything but persuaded by Raven's heartfelt speech, and neither one of them have any more cards to play, except for the one Peter won't lay down, so they leave Magneto there, and they go off to fight the good fight.Peter doesn't know karate, but he's seen a lot of Bruce Lee movies and any punch thrown at two hundred miles an hour is bound to leave a mark. He gets some good shots in at least, but Peter really only has the one trick up his sleeve and it takes about four seconds for the bald blue guy to come up with a counter. Watching the ground reach up and swallow his leg to the calf is both surreal and terrifying. Being trapped is just terrifying. Then the demigod paces toward him, purposeful, and Peter knows, for the first time in his life, that he is completely, totally, and utterly fucked. Aside from the odd wrestling match or grade school knock-down-drag-out he's never experienced violence at the hands of another person, even when he probably deserved it. No one has ever been fast enough or powerful enough to catch him, until now. Peter deeply regrets his earlier wish that the ground would open up and swallow him.Peter thinks as fast as he moves; it comes with the territory. So he has a lot of time to think about how much damage En Sabah Nur's foot is going to do to him before he lands the kick, and when he does, he mostly screams out of shock at the sound of his leg breaking. The pain doesn't come until a few seconds later.Things rapidly go downhill after that, but Peter is too busy swimming in a haze of red-black agony, trying not to throw up, to really make sense of anything until Hank: awesome, blue, furry Hank, breaks Peter's leg out of the ground with his awesome, blue, furry fists and dumps him against the side of a building to sit the rest of this clusterfuck out in the shade.Super.Then there are people floating all over the place and shit is on fire and his dad is hurling rebar and steel beams and chunks of iron-rich debris and fucking spare change or whatever at the blue guy- the bad one with the stompy foot, and there's lightning streaking down from the sky and it's all pretty badass except for Peter's broken leg and the awful wheezing cough that Raven is making as she slumps next to him on the proverbial bench.After a good amount of near-quiet, punctuated by the occasional scraping, scratching, pitter-patter of crumbling masonry and twanging snap of wires and power lines, Peter hears the crunch of footsteps on gravel. He looks up and there's Magneto, standing over them with the sun behind him so Peter can't quite see his expression. Raven lolls her head in his general direction.“It's over,” Magneto says.Peter registers that, lying there with his pulse in his ears and his leg beating out agony like a drum, looking out at a city that's more junkyard than metropolis and thinks How do you figure that? in a very disconnected way. Their stolen jet is scrap metal, they're stranded in a heap of rubble that used to be part of a thriving city, and Peter's pretty sure that the authorities, when they climb out from under their desks, are going to have a lot of questions that he, for one, is not going to know how to answer.So... Peter says nothing, unless harsh breathing counts.A little ways off Hank and Scott are struggling down from the wreckage of a building, supporting a bald stranger in a lilac sweater between them. Moira, Jean, and Kurt are trailing behind, picking their way carefully down to the ground. Lilac Sweater looks about as roughed up as Peter feels, and he thinks absently that he must be another mutant or a civilian who got caught in the middle of this mess. Peter's money is on the latter because he's not sure how popular sweaters are among the locals and man, that guy should really be wearing a hat in this climate. Magneto sees where Peter is looking and turns. He's still for a moment, watching as Hank and Moira lower the stranger down in the shadow of a tumbled building. Then very slowly Magneto turns away from Peter and Raven and advances toward the rest of their merry band of mutants, pacing slowly like he's approaching a herd of wild gazelle and he doesn't want to startle them and cause a stampede. Moira, Jean, and Kurt form up in front of Lilac Sweater like some kind of shield but Lilac Sweater sees Magneto coming and smiles a big, genuine, 'so glad to see you, old friend' smile.Well, at least someone's having a good time.Peter turns away from the show to focus on his own problems. Okay, maybe not 'focus on' so much as 'wallow in', and maybe not 'wallow in' so much as 'be swallowed by'.He's busy spacing out when Hank leans over him and says something about finding a splint but thankfully doesn't lay one furry digit on Peter's leg. Hank does get a little up close and personal with Raven, though, stroking her scaly neck with one blue thumb, making a low rumbling sound in his throat that's almost like a purr.Good for him.Peter tries to give them as much privacy as he can, and instead focuses his attention on Magneto and Lilac Sweater, who are exchanging words just out of earshot. For as long as Peter lives he will never know exactly what clued him in, but, “Holy shit, is that the professor?”Hank and Raven turn on him, frowning, and he realizes that he's probably just ruined their moment, like the whole world being ripped apart couldn't do that but the guy with the broken leg, who can't exactly excuse himself at the moment somehow found a way.The annoyance on Hank's face fades quickly though, “I guess you remember him differently.” Yeah, people change. Not Magneto, of course, but other people.“He should really be wearing a hat when the UV index is this high.” Skin cancer is no joke. One of his neighbors, Mrs Szewc, loves to garden. She used to spend all day out in her yard, and a few years ago she had a melanoma removed from her shoulder. She used to show it to Mom and ask her if she thought she should see a doctor and Mom had to tell her about a million times that yes, she should totally get it checked out, and it was tiny, like maybe the size of a pencil eraser, but when the doctor removed it he left a scar about three inches long because he had to scoop out all of the surrounding tissue to make sure he got it all. It was gnarly. So yeah, sunblock, man.“Peter?”Hank's looking at him funny. Did he space out? He seems to be having some trouble focusing.“Yeah,” he says, pulling in as deep a breath as he dares. “Sit tight, I'm going to find a splint so we can move you.”That sounds great, except for the splinting and the moving part. He manages a nod.After Hank leaves, Peter tries not to move. He's never been good at sitting still but the broken leg is a great incentive.Once Hank is out of earshot Raven croaks out, “You didn't tell him.”He looks at her stupidly.“Erik,” she elaborates, her voice squeaking on the vowels. “Why didn't-” she breaks off, coughing.Oh yeah, that. He tries to be concise for both their sakes, “Wrong time.” He can't tell if she finds his answer acceptable or not, but after a minute she levers herself to her feet, hand still clutching her throat like she needs to protect it.Peter goes back to spacing out until Hank reappears with the promised splint tucked under his arm, eyes tracking Raven as she crosses the rubble-strewn street toward the professor. He hates to see her go but he loves to watch he leave, Peter thinks inanely.“What's so funny?” Hank asks, almost defensively.Careful, Peter, don't piss off the guy with the splint.“She likes you," he says. She totally doesn't want Hank to know, but Peter bets that if Hank started dating someone else, Raven would be a total bitch to her.Hank's blushing under his fur.Over Hank's shoulder Peter can see Moira and Kurt crouched by the professor's side. Scott and Jean are missing. So is Magneto. Peter feels a distant pang of loss. It goes great with the dull, insistent thrum of agony radiating up from his leg. He can use the one to take his mind off of the other.“I'm going to take off your boot,” Hank states.Peter waits for an Option B but none is forthcoming. Okay. Peter bites his lip in anticipation. Hank is surprisingly gentle as he unlaces Peter's boot and slides it off. Then rolls down Peter's sock, exposing his extremely white foot. He talks while he works, “Erik and Jean went to find us transportation. Scott went with them. It's probably best if we get out of here as quickly and quietly as we can. Can you feel this?” he asks, pinching Peter's big toe. Peter grunts an affirmative.Hank uses a razor-sharp claw to bare Peter's broken leg to mid-thigh.“Bet you don't own a water bed,” Peter says.Hank doesn't get the joke. Oh well.Peter forces himself to look at his leg but almost immediately has to tilt his head back, dizzy, because one quick glance is enough to tell him all he needs to know. His knee is caved in and smashed toward his left leg. His femur is obviously not attached to the bones in his lower leg anymore, and the whole mess is purple and black and swollen.“Deep breaths,” he hears Hank say over the ringing in his ears.Hank's splint is a scarred table leg which he ties to Peter's mangled leg using strips torn from an old curtain or tablecloth or something. As careful as Hank is, Peter spends the entire process alternating between sucking breath in through his teeth and biting back screams. When Hank is finally done jostling his leg Peter feels incredibly light-headed and it occurs to him, very distantly, that the cold, shaking feeling radiating out from his core probably has less to do with his broken leg and more to do with the number of meals he's missed. Peter's mutation is pretty straightforward: he moves fast. He also heals fast, and he needs a lot of energy to do it, and since he isn't a plant and he can't use photosynthesis, he gets that energy from food, drink, and sleep. Peter's not diabetic. He can go eight hours without eating. Hell, he can go twenty-four hours without eating, although he does get pretty damned headachey and bitchy. What he can't do is get whammied by the military, locked in a cell, go almost a full day on nothing but bubble gum, dash around on an adrenaline high, confront his absentee father, have his leg smashed by a demigod, then take a nausea-inducing gander at his mutilated leg without it leaving a dent in his blood sugar. Peter feels a small jolt of panic when he realizes where this is going and how fast it's going to get there. Or maybe it's just good old-fashioned shock. Either way Hank seems to be more or less on the same page. The white-haired lightning chick from earlier has been loitering a little apart from the professor's group like she isn't sure she's welcome. Hank waves her over. He doesn't even ask her name, just tells her to find something with sugar: juice, candy, anything. She nods agreeably and hurries off, picking her way nimbly over the rubble. Peter watches, frustrated by how slowly she moves, really with how slowly everyone moves.Where did Magneto go to get transportation? Iceland?Whatever.Then Hank's smacking him on the cheek like he's a damsel having a fainting spell, “No, no, Peter. Keep you eyes open.” Ow. Claws.Peter swats his hand off with an irritable grunt but his head won't stay upright. It's like his neck muscles have forgotten how to do their job.“Nope, nope, not getting off that easy. Here.”Lightning Chick is back, holding two dusty glass bottles of Coca-cola. Hank thumbs the cap off of the first one and presses it to Peter's lips. The soda is warm but Peter drains the bottle in four swallows. He coughs a little afterward but Hank is already taking the empty from his hand and plying him with the second bottle. Peter downs it faster than the first. “Thanks.”“Feeling better?”“Yeah,” Peter admits. He already feels more alert. It won't last. He needs something solid in him before too long. Again, Hank is right there with him.“I figured this might be part of your mutation. I'll get you something else. For now, try not to move.”“Done,” Peter says with as much enthusiasm as he can muster, which isn't much. “Can you stay with him?” Hank asks Lightning Chick. “Just make sure he doesn't fall asleep.”She looks a little wary but nods an affirmative and Hank scoots off, leaving them staring awkwardly at one another.“Peter,” he mumbles.“I'm sorry?”“My name,” he says, trying to speak up. Talking gives him something to take his mind off his leg. “It's Peter. What's yours?”For a minute he doesn't think she's going to reply.“Ororo.”“Cool name.” He means it.“Charles Xavier tells me that he runs a school for mutants in the United States.”Peter is captivated by the way she says 'mutants', pronouncing the 'a' with an 'ah' sound.“I would like to go there, I think.”Peter smiles at her. She seems young, like, maybe sixteen or seventeen. He doesn't have the heart to tell her that the school is currently in about the same state of repair as this place. Maybe Magneto can help rebuild it, considering he'd, you know, laid waste to, like, everything as far as the eye could see. One little house should be no big deal. Peter wonders absently if are any mutants out there who can control wood and brick the way that Magneto controls metal. That would be helpful. Maybe Xavier can put an ad in the paper or something.Then Peter suddenly feels terrible again. It comes on like a flash flood: He's cold and shaky. Sweat breaks out on his forehead, and he has this sinking feeling in the pit of his empty stomach that Hank isn't going to make it back in time.“Peter?” There's that cool accent again, 'Petah' instead of 'Peter'.Peter has it in his mind to reply but the words get lost on the journey from his brain to his mouth. Ororo is shaking his shoulder and boy does that get his attention because every little movement is like a knife in his broken leg. He opens his eyes but they refuse to stay open. For a brief moment he sees, across the way, the professor sitting up, alert, with two fingers pressed to his temple. That seems to jog Peter's memory. Like, he remembers something about the professor being psychic and that being the whole reason En Sabah Nur had a crush on him in the first place and... ugh... it's so hard to think... Hank's back, ducking and shouting something over a swelling roar that's louder than the sound of blood rushing in Peter's ears, and there's dust flying everywhere because the wind is kicking up something fierce, ruffling Hank's fur and Ororo's Mohawk. A dark shape looms large overhead, blotting out the sun. It's such a relief that Peter shuts his eyes. There's too much dust in the air to keep them open anyway.Does he make it? Of course he does. He's Peter Maximoff, and nothing aside from a set of ratchet straps, a broken leg, an IV drip, and a wildly turbulent medevac helicopter ride is going to keep him down.“Your skin is like Kevlar,” Hank complains to him later, as he's adjusting Peter's IV. “I bent six needles trying to find a vein.”Peter's been semi-conscious for a while, but he's slowly approaching 'fully conscious', and that's exciting. What's not exciting is that he's lying on a cot in what looks like an army medical tent in... uh... “Tel Aviv,” Professor Xavier fills in. He's sitting in a wheelchair at Peter's bedside -cotside- whatever, and it looks like Hank didn't pass on his advice about wearing a hat.The professor scratches his bald head where the red skin is starting to peal. “It seems I'm in for a period of adjustment.”Peter has vague memories of being medevac buddies with the professor, seeing as they were the only two who couldn't walk and no, Peter hasn't missed the fact that Xavier lost the use of his legs sometime in the last decade. You don't get that kind of muscle atrophy from sitting behind a desk all day.Xavier's swapped out his lilac sweater for a set of clean army fatigues but those and his hands are the only clean things about him and Peter's guessing that running water is hard to come by at the moment and an honest-to-God shower is probably a luxury and he thinks that Xavier looks very Apocalypse Now in his fatigues and oh God, that's not funny. Magneto did this. Magneto...
He's still loopy enough to feel a stab of panic attack, thinking Where's Magneto? Where's my dad?
Even half-awake Peter's a pretty observant guy, so he catches the subtle shift that tells him that the professor has caught his drift. Wow, he really is psychic.Shit.
Don't tell him. Oh my God, DON'T TELL HIM!
The professor opens his mouth, maybe to tell Peter that it's too late, maybe to put him at ease, but then he seems to think better of it and sets two fingers to his temple instead and a sense of relief and well-being and gratitude floods over Peter. Peter's breathing evens out. He can't even feel his leg in its plaster prison.He has a cast. When did that happen?"You were... uncooperative with the medical personnel," Xavier tells him. “Traditional methods of sedation were made ineffective by your mutation. I'm afraid I had to intervene.”Peter frowns, “I didn't hurt anybody, did I?” He's pretty strong. That's not a boast. It's just... people think he's all about speed but Peter knows he has to be cautious with his power because he can really hurt somebody if he's not paying attention. A quick look around tells him that he's the only patient in this tent and Hank is the only medical staff. Nothing says “dangerous patient” like a private room.Peter realizes that he has something else to feel bad about because the professor really does look beat.Xavier smiles. “I quite prefer to avoid sleep at the moment.”Across the tent, Hank looks up from the notepad that he's scribbling in. “He's awake now, Charles. I've got a sedative with your name on it.” He sounds bored, like an offer he's made before.“In a moment, Hank.”Hank goes back to doodling what looks like a very detailed picture of a jet while the professor brings Peter up to speed on everyone's whereabouts. Jean, Scott, Raven, and Kurt are resting after being questioned by representatives from the CIA and the Israeli military. Now that Peter is awake they'll likely want to interview him as well, but Moira will be sitting in and at this point it's only a formality. Magneto is...“Erik has gone to the Wailing Wall under military escort.”Oh. Peter's first thought is that he's never going to see his father again. Erik is going to jump ship and head for Antarctica or something, and it's not... he doesn't... he's conflicted, okay?The professor goes on, “He went there to pray for his family. He gave me his word that he would return.”For his family... The words are ambiguous but the professor somehow makes the meaning behind them clear. Magneto is praying for his wife and daughter. Nobody's told him about his long-lost son, lying broken on a medical cot in a military camp. Peter is safe. He feels relieved... and ashamed for feeling relieved. His face gets hot, and he can't look at the professor because he can feel something from Xavier, something that's like pity for both Peter and Magneto.“Peter... ”“I'd like to get in touch with my mom... see if she's okay," he says quietly. His throat feels tight. It's hard to talk.A pause. “Of course, Peter. I'll do my best. It might take some hours to find an open line with the current state of the infrastructure, but we'll find a way to get a message through.”He's so reassuring. It's nice.“Thanks,” Peter says.“You know, Peter...” the professor begins, and Peter knows where he's going. He wants Peter to give Magneto a chance. Peter saw the way Xavier and Magneto looked at each other out there in that decimated hell-hole that used to be Cairo. He gets it: they have history. Where the rest of the world sees a mass murderer and a psychopath, Xavier sees hope, friendship, and the potential for redemption. Xavier thinks Peter has something that his pal desperately needs, but Magneto's going to have to find it somewhere else for now.For now... Peter hears the professor's voice echo his thought his head. Once unearthed, a secret can never be completely buried.The professor follows up, out loud, with, “You are a good man, Peter Maximoff, and not just for saving the lives of my students. I owe you a debt of gratitude that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to repay. For now, rest and recover. You have boundless potential, and if you'll allow me, I'll show you a way to make the most of it. The world needs more men like you.”Peter's still under the psychic fog enough to be vaguely confused. For the past ten years Peter's seen himself as a delinquent and a thief, a liar and a loser, and as lists go he thinks that's as comprehensive as it's going to get for him. The professor's words shine a light on the parts of himself that he usually overlooks because they're not as big or obvious as being the son of a mass-murderer.
There's so much more to you than you think.
Peter feels like he's been trapped in a basement for years -not a literal basement, even though that's where he's been living- but a figurative basement. He left his literal basement, and now that he's gotten so much fresh air he's not sure he can go back there, and also there's this guy shouting down at him from the top of his figurative basement stairs, holding the door open, saying that all he has to do is walk through.“You needn't decide anything just now, but think on what I've s-” “Okay, I'm in,” Peter says, because he's Peter Maximoff, and he's never walked anywhere when he could run.End.Thank you for reading. Feedback is welcome.
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Peter wakes up all cotton-mouthed and groggy in a hospital room with an IV in the back of his hand and electrodes stuck to his chest and Magneto perched in a chair on his right like the specter of death who leans over and looks at Peter with big, wounded eyes and asks, “Why didn't you tell me?” like he's saying it to himself and doesn't expect an answer, which works out great because Peter is pretty out of it and Erik might as well be speaking Swahili for all the sense he's making and Peter just stares at him with heavy-lidded eyes and eventually falls back asleep.Peter eventually pieces together what happened to him, but it takes a while because a) he isn't super lucid the first few times he wakes up and b) everything was and continues to be really chaotic. As Hank explains later Peter was only 'technically' in a coma because human doctors don't really understand mutant physiology enough to say what constitutes a comatose state in a mutant and what is just mutant physiology doing its thing, but that's Hank talking, and Hank unfortunately wasn't there when Peter slept all afternoon and didn't come out of his basement in the morning and eleven o'clock rolled around and Frank decided to try to wake him and couldn't. Neither could Lindy. True to their word, Sergeant Dispensa and Officer Cobb were the first ones to respond to Frank's nine-one-one call. They even beat the paramedics there by about three minutes, which Peter thinks is really impressive since the fire station is only two blocks away. Anyway, the paramedics, when they arrive, put Peter at a three on the Glasgow Coma Scale, which doesn't mean anything to Peter when Hank tells him but Peter finds out later is about as close as a person can get to dead.So at that point Lindy was freaking out because she'd just lost her mother and now her brother was unresponsive and being transported to a hospital. Frank was freaking out because the paramedics were asking him a bunch of questions to which he had all the wrong answers, like had Peter been behaving strangely (yes) had he sustained any recent injuries (yeah, he has a big gash in his head) had he taken any medications (no clue, he's had access to all kinds of narcotics. There are two half-empty prescription bottles still on Peter's night stand and they might have been there for days). The neighbors are freaking out because Mrs. Maximoff just died and the next day her son is being hauled off in an ambulance, and right there is where things start to go sideways because unlike when they'd ratted him out to Raven over the car crash and the cops and Mr. Oberman's Camaro, nobody saw what happened to Peter. Lindy and Frank are unreachable because they followed the ambulance to the hospital, so Peter's neighbors get busy tying up the lines at the school, trying to get through to Raven, and they do, but none of them have much information. So Raven goes to the professor with what she knows, which isn't much, and the professor pops into Cerebro to find Peter for a quick look-see... and he can't find Peter. He's gone. Poof. Just like that, and it's enough at the time for Raven and the professor to seriously consider the possibility that Peter has gone toes-up, bought the farm, gone to the big video game arcade in the sky, and part of the reason that the professor considered it such a strong possibility was because, unbeknownst to Peter, he'd been privy to some of Peter's occasional BOC-related, Knocking on Heaven's Door thoughts by way of Cerebro, which is so not cool. Spying on somebody's private thoughts is no way to build trust, plus it was something the professor had promised not to do. Also, who wants to live with the knowledge that some guy who isn't even family (or trustworthy, apparently) knows you thought about offing yourself?A few phone calls later Raven comes back to the professor with the name of the hospital that Peter was taken to, but no information other than that he was admitted and by that time the teachers and staff have caught wind that something is going on (the professor isn't the only telepath at the school after all) Magneto of all people storms into the professor's office, totally ignoring the locked door, and demands to know what's happened to Peter and he's projecting so loudly that Xavier (who has no ethical problem reading Peter's mind, apparently, but who won't touch Magneto's with a psychic ten foot pole) immediately realizes that the cat is out of the bag and Magneto knows that Peter is his son. After that the conversation gets pretty fucking strained, and Hank, realizing that there is no earthquake, emerges from his nerd lair long enough to see what Magneto is so upset about and to ask an important follow-up question: did Peter's mom pass away? Why, yes she did, and it turns out that Peter is an inconsiderate jerk. He called Peggy and Frank and Mom's close friends the day she died, but he never called the mansion. He just... he felt like he would have been doing it for himself, and he didn't want the sympathy or the pity or whatever. So the only reason that they know that she passed is because his neighbors told Raven.So Hank saves the mansion from having its metal components crumpled like used tissues by floating the idea that something else might be going on with Peter and that nobody should jump to conclusions (Erik) until they have eyes on the ground. So Raven gets stuck babysitting the school while the professor, Hank, and Magneto take a trip down to Peter's neck of the woods to see what's going on.Peter, meanwhile is laying in a hospital in one of those stylish open-backed hospital gowns, dead to the world and being puzzled over by every physician, nurse, and med flock of med students who come to call. His toxicology report comes back clean, so they're pretty sure he didn't take anything (although Frank later admits that he went back to the house and flushed all of Mom's unused meds anyway, just to be safe) and the scans don't show any signs of brain damage or bleeding or anything that might have caused the coma. Peter's blood work makes no sense by their standards, which means by human standards, even though Lindy tearfully confessed to the entire ER staff that her brother was a mutant, which at least got him a private room.Then the professor shows up with Magneto and Hank and puts the psychic whammy on the hospital staff, not, like, freezing them or anything because this is a hospital and the staff needs to be able to get to people if they code, but he sort of massages their way into the ICU, where they find Peter all conked out with wires tubes going everywhere and he can only imagine Xavier's regret for not putting the whammy on Frank and Lindy because Frank takes one look at Magneto and socks him in the jaw with everything he's got. Everything he's got isn't enough to break Magneto's face or anything but it is enough to leave him with some pretty spectacular swelling and the impression that Peter had been a somewhat difficult child to raise and the altercation that could easily have ended with Frank having a hundred scalpels embedded in his torso instead ends with Frank taking Magneto and his ice pack to a nearby bar and buying him a scotch while the professor convinces the ICU staff that Hank is Peter's attending physician.The ER doctors hadn't really done much with Peter besides scratch their heads over him and run a bunch of tests. Hank doesn't even think he needed the IV fluids they were giving him because he'd been thinking over Peter's condition for a while and had concluded that Peter's collapse was just his body's way of recovering from a period of prolonged stress. He theorized that Peter's physiology had been trying to plan ahead for it by storing energy and keeping him in a depressed state, and while all of that sounds super neat and tidy the reality is that Hank has no way to confirm his theory until Peter wakes up, and he just doesn't know when that is going to be so the professor and Hank decide, for the sake of convenience, that it's best that Peter stays where he is, after all the hospital has all the equipment and staff in case something goes wrong, which Hank doesn't think it will but he's not a hundred percent so 'better safe than sorry,' as they say. The wait-and-see approach never worked for Peter for obvious reasons and it went over with Peter's family like a lead balloon. Lindy was a wreck and she wouldn't eat and all of her tears had been wrung out of her so she walked around the hospital like a zombie with her eyes all red-rimmed from rubbing them too much. Frank was and is a manly man and almost every conversation he and Peter ever had was an argument but even he was at a loss because once he'd taken care of his manly head-of-household duties all that was left was hand-holding and Frank is not a hand-holder. That's what Mom had been for, and Peter, to a lesser extent, so instead of hand-holding, Frank stomped around the hospital and drank bad coffee and read the newspaper and tried to get answers out of anyone that he thought might have them and threatened to have Peter moved to another hospital (which he technically didn't have the right to do because Peter had never assigned him Power of Attorney). The professor put up with them for about a day before deciding that they both needed some rest and then Lindy and Frank decided that they needed some rest and they went back to the house for the night.In the silence that remains after Lindy and Frank leave the professor tells Hank that he isn't sure about Hank's diagnosis. He still can't sense anything from Peter, which is a bad sign because there are two other coma patients in Peter's ward and the professor can sense them, but with Peter it's like he's not there at all. The professor never actually could read Peters thoughts, at least not like he was able to read others. Peter thinks too fast, but usually the professor can get the gist of what's on his mind, especially if Peter is dwelling or thinking in circles, which he tends to do, but the point is that Peter's mind, usually a buzzing hive to the professor's telepathy, was now a still, lifeless pond and the professor thinks there's a good chance that Peter will never wake up.But he does.“Peter?” Hank asks in a way that makes Peter think that he's been saying it for a while but this is the first time that Peter's brain has been able to make any sense of the word.“Yeah,” he answers.“Are you with me?”“Think so.”Then Hank asks him what year it is and who's president and how old he is and Peter's brain is starting to come back on line and he realizes that something's up because this isn't his basement and then Hank, who's satisfied that Peter doesn't have brain damage, at least not any more than usual, has to explain about the coma, which he thinks was Peter's body's way of trying to recover and Peter accepts that with an, “Oh,” because that's all he can manage and he doesn't understand at all why he's so tired if he's been sleeping for four days.“There's someone who wants to see you,” Hank says gently. “If you're not feeling up to it he'll understand.”“No, s'okay.” Peter's too weak to sit up but he's already chafing at his body's restrictions, and maybe the coma makes sense in that context, like his body finally got pissed at him and blew a breaker.Peter shuts his eyes for a second and opens them again when he hears the scrape of footsteps on the linoleum. Something jumps in Peter's chest when he sees Erik Lehnsherr standing close Hank. Their heads are ducked together in quiet conversation that Peter's not meant to overhear. Eventually they separate and Hank leaves the room, shutting the door very quietly behind him.Then it's just Peter and Erik, who's looking at Peter in a way that makes Peter want to apologize for things he didn't even do, which is impressive because Peter rarely ever feels contrite.Erik crosses the room, hikes up his slacks and takes a seat in the chair near Peter's bed. “How are you feeling?”Like he's been drinking glue. “Time's it?” he asks, because that's the most intelligent thing he can think to say at the moment.“Very late... or very early depending upon your perspective.”By the time Erik finishes his sentence Peter's awake enough to remember two things: a) Mom is dead and b) Erik knows that he's Peter's father.Then Peter's brain sort of short-circuits because he doesn't know what to do with this information. He doesn't know how to proceed. This isn't a contingency he's ever planned for and he can't resort to his usual tactic of running away until shit gets sorted out in his absence because in addition to the IV and the electrodes and the backless hospital gown he's pretty sure he's catheterized.Once Erik's accepted that Peter's not going anywhere he starts the ball rolling, “I”m very sorry about your mother.”Peter's eyes start to burn and he has to find something to keep his mind off of the empty hole inside of him where Mom used to be. He says, “Why would she tell you?” He's so confused, and a little angry because why would she make a point of warning Peter away from Erik and telling everyone how dangerous he is if she was just going to turn around at tell him herself. Peter can tell by the way that Erik's face closes up that he's taking it as rejection which- that's not really what he wants. Or is it? He doesn't know. It's like he's been wanting some stupid thing for Christmas like that kid in the movie who wants a Red Rider BB gun but everyone tells him he'll shoot his eye out and that finally sinks in only Peter's not a kid, he's a grown man and he can get his own BB gun if he wants and there's nothing stopping him but his mom's voice echoing in his ear that he'll shoot his eye out and also maybe he personally witnessed the BB gun do billions of dollars worth of damage to the global infrastructure, which, hey, maybe the BB gun was having a rough week and he fell in with the wrong crowd. It happens. And he took it back... sort of. But once that was all straightened out and Peter was like, “Yeah, I'm good with a football instead,” his mom gets him the BB gun anyway, as, like, a parting gift, and if he's being totally honest he would take Mom over the BB gun any day of the week because she was always there for him no matter how he looked or what he stole or how many pairs of Nikes he wore out, but the choice is out of his hands and he can either have the BB gun or he can tell the BB gun to fuck off, but either way it won't bring Mom back and there kind of has been a BB gun-shaped hole in Peter's chest ever since he was old enough to understand that most kids had both a mom and a BB gun and maybe things would have been normal if the BB gun had known he existed and stuck around but that didn't happen and there's nothing he can do to change that so he's going to have to just keep going forward like he always does, except he's stuck in a hospital bed and he doesn't feel like he's going anywhere, but there's a BB gun sitting in the chair next to him if he wants it even though it would have been way more awesome twenty-seven years ago and maybe the BB gun doesn't even want him for a son because he's a total loser and he's having some sort of breakdown because his body can't handle stress or something plus he's fat and he knows that older people have a thing about that, like it's shameful because they never had enough to eat growing up, so, yeah, he's not sure who should be more disappointed or who is going to reject who, but he's got a feeling that he and his BB gun aren't going to end the week toasting marshmallows over a campfire or tossing a baseball around in his mom's backyard.“Peter,” Erik says.Peter realizes that he's spaced out, staring at the ceiling like he's hoping if he doesn't move and doesn't breathe Erik will go away and he won't have to deal with this right now or ever.“Peter... look at me.”Erik clasps Peter's hand in both of his. Peter feels tears welling in his eyes and he can't look. He can't look.“Your mother had no reason to trust me. I never gave her one. After all that I've done, after all that I've taken from the both of you, she gave me the most precious thing she that she had to give, and that was you.”
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The professor makes it a priority to track down and rescue the remaining mutants, but unfortunately there just aren't that many left alive. During one of their missions the X-Men find a small abandoned hospital in Tijuana that seems to have been operating as a lab for mutant experimentation. Peter gets in first, looking for survivors, but all that's left is a basement full of dissected bodies. Some are still strapped to tables, still in restraints, left to rot where they died, others are laid out on metal tables and covered with sheets, and when Peter looks at them a peculiar kind of mania grips him because he can't stop replaying the last conversation that he had with his dad in his head and how Erik said that whatever he was up to was a very personal matter and what's more personal than being captured and tortured? Plus, Peter already knows how far his dad will go for revenge and Jesus Christ he hopes his dad didn't do anything stupid for his sake and before he can stop himself he's tearing through the place, whipping sheets off of corpses and making himself look at the face of each and every mutant who died here, overcome with dread that one of them will turn out to be his father, but none of them are.None of them are.Peter is leaving the hospital by the time that the rest of the X-Men arrive. As he crosses the threshold his knees go weak and he slides down stucco facade of the building, uniform catching on the rough surface. Ororo crouches in front of him. They all look like they know what he's going to say even before he pulls off his goggles and shakes his head, “You're not going to want to go in there.” Scott reports the lab to the appropriate authorities. The dead mutants get a proper burial and some families who were missing loved ones get closure. Peter endures the longest, quietest flight back to the mansion ever and immediately takes off when the jet lands and misses the debrief and spends the next week or so running himself ragged enough to sleep through the night and biting the heads off of anyone who asks him if he's okay, which is a lot of people. Scott puts up with Peter's bullshit for a while but it's not like finding a hospital full of mutant corpses didn't affect him too, even if he didn't get up close and personal with them like Peter did, so he finally pulls Peter aside and asks what the hell his problem is and right now Peter's problem is Scott and Peter wants to punch him right in his stupid face but he knows that if he does that he's going to put Scott's visor through the back of his skull so Peter runs outside instead and punches a tree in half, which Kid Peter will later assure him is very impressive, right before he reaches around the stump and pulls it up by its roots so that Peter can chop it up for firewood. But anyway, before all of that, before Kid Peter and the firewood, right after the tree-punching, Peter stalks back to the house with his fist all full of splinters, arms folded and shoulders hunched like expects someone to punch him and he's kind of surprised to find Jean waiting for him on the front steps. Her arms are folded too, but it looks more like she's cold or like she's protecting something. “Peter,” she says, “Can I talk to you?”Peter feels like he and Jean were pretty close when Mom was sick but they haven't spent much time around each other since the funeral. Peter just figured that she didn't want to make Scott jealous, even though Peter thinks she should be able to hang out with whoever she wants but whatever. He gets it. It's fine. The point is that they haven't really talked just one-on-one for a long time but it seems like that's exactly what Jean wants to do now and boy, she could not have picked a worse time. Peter takes a deep breath and promises himself that he will try as hard as he can not to send her to her room in tears.He stops at the bottom of the steps, leaving a good seven or eight feet between them. “What's up?” “Is your hand okay?” she asks.Peter quickly picks all of the splinters out except for a few stubborn ones that can't get to even with his tongue and teeth, then he shrugs.“You've been thinking about your dad,” she starts out. “I know that you're worried about him.” She almost never talks about what she reads from other peoples' minds. It's like it's some kind of social contract that telepaths have, like accidentally walking in on someone who's naked and having to pretend you didn't see anything. If Jean were anyone else Peter would be five miles away by now, stealing cigarettes from a gas station, but it's not just anyone, it's Jean, and Jean was there when Mom was dying. She was there for the big reveal and if anybody knows how deep the hole inside him goes, it's her, so he clenches his teeth and looks away and worries at a stubborn splinter with his thumb nail and forces himself to stay put while she says, quickly, like she's trying to catch him before he bolts, “I know why he left.”Peter feels like his feet are glued to the ground and he knows it's got nothing to do with Jean's power. “He was looking for something. He never told anyone. He tried to hide it, but he couldn't hide it from me. I haven't told anyone else. I thought that you should be the first one to know, but you never wanted to hear about your dad.”“Why are you telling me now?” he asks.“If you weren't ready to hear it you'd be gone by now.”That's fair.“And I thought he'd be back by now.” She's worried too. “He's done some horrible things, but he's a good man. He really does want what's best for you. He never thought any other way.”“Okay,” he says, not sure if he believes her, but maybe that's just the echo of Mom's words he's hearing, even though she did trust him in the end.“Only a telepath can lie to another telepath,” Jean assures him.“Have you ever lied to the professor?”She totally has.“He's been curious about Erik.”Peter's mouth is dry. He hears himself ask, “What was he looking for?”In answer Jean comes down the steps but not all the way. She's tall for a girl, and standing one step above him she's tall enough to put a hand on his shoulder just by reaching out. Two fingers of her other hand go to her temple, but slowly, inviting Peter to stop her any time. He doesn't stop her, and when the connection is made Jean, the house, Westchester, they all fall away and leave Peter standing in a field of green grass surrounded by headstones. Everything is soft-edged and dreamy, a memory of a memory, something that's faded as Jean's held onto it, like a photograph that's been left out in the sun.Do you know where you are? Jean asks him.He's standing over an open grave. There's a coffin inside, and a few handfuls of dirt on the pristine white lid.A graveyard. Mom's grave, the day she was buried.
Yes.
This is Erik's memory. Peter is as sure of that as he is of his first name. He's Erik, and he's standing over the grave, alone. In the periphery Peter can see cars that are parked along the cemetery road pull away one by one. A few small groups stand a respectful distance away, friends of Mom's, talking softly. Mostly they keep their distance from Erik, all except for one woman. She's older, in her fifties maybe, with dark hair, olive skin. She crosses herself as she looks down at the grave and she mutters a prayer in Spanish. Peter doesn't understand the words but Erik does, and when she finishes he adds his own “Amen” and she looks up at him. He asks, in Spanish, if she knew Mary well, and the woman, pleased to find someone who speaks her native language, admits that she hasn't seen Mary in years. She read about her passing in the newspaper. She says that they used to be neighbors, that Mary and her son lived in the apartment just upstairs from her and her family. She tells Erik how she used to watch Peter while his mother was working and that's when it dawns on Peter that this is Mom's Puerto Rican neighbor, the one who used to babysit him when he was little, before Frank and Lindy were in the picture. She's smaller than Peter remembers, and not as frightening. Peter remembers how she would speak to him in rapid-fire Spanish, snapping her fingers at him to get down off of the sofa or the bookshelf or the ceiling or wherever he was, but that was twenty years ago, plus this is a second-hand memory and her features are indistinct, like she's more on an idea than a person. She introduces herself as Camila Lugo and for Peter the name clicks into place like a Lego. Erik introduces himself back and Mrs. Lugo doesn't seem to place it. She asks how he knew Mary and Erik tells her that she was the mother of his son and that seems to shock her into silence. “You are Peter's father?” she asks. She turns a shade or two paler and lifts her hand to cover her heart. And “Yes,” says Erik. There's a protective undercurrent to the word, not pride exactly, or if it is pride it's like pride of possession, like Erik is proud of the fact that he has a son, not necessarily that that son is Peter.Mrs. Lugo stays silent for a moment longer, looking past him at the rows of headstones. “Births and deaths,” she says. “I look at the paper every day. I used to see so many familiar names in the birth announcements, but now I see more in the obituaries.” She sighs. “It is not right for Mary to be alone here. They should be together.”“Who?” Erik asks, puzzled.Mrs. Lugo clarifies, “Mary and her other baby.”Peter can feel Erik's confusion. “Mary had another child?”“Yes,” she says. “Twins.”And Peter is more lost than Erik because Mom never mentioned miscarrying or having twins, but then he thinks back to the Latin prayer that Mom remembered word-for-word and remembers that he'll never know everything about his mom's life. Then Mrs. Lugo says, “Peter's twin.”Peter doesn't know if that's Erik's shock and disbelief or his own that he's feeling. He had a twin? No, that's not possible. Mom would have told him, wouldn't she have?“Mary never mentioned a twin,” Erik says, echoing Peter's sentiment, but with way more intensity.Mrs. Lugo shakes her head, “I don't think Mary remembered. Things were very different for us back then. There were no scans, no checkups. We saw a doctor once to tell us we were with child and once to have the baby, and the drugs, they couldn't take away the pain but they could make us forget. I remember when I had my first son, the doctor gave me a shot, then I thought, 'I will have the baby soon' and they told me, you have already had him. Here he is, and they brought Jaime to me. He looked like his father so I thought that it must be true, but I remember nothing about his birth. It could not have been much different for Mary.“I saw her, when she moved back in with her mother, and it was clear to me right away why she had come home. We didn't talk about it. Girls like her were not so unusual. They would go stay with family, or disappear for a while, have their babies, and then go back to their lives like nothing had happened. Sometimes their families would raise the babies or the girls would give them away. I remember that she got very big very fast and I knew she would have twins. The babies came early. It happens with twins, and it's not so strange for one or both to be born sleeping, so when she came home from the hospital with only one small baby, I was not surprised. Back then my English was not as good, but when I saw Mary's mother one day I told her that I would pray for the other baby.” Camila's voice heats up. “I will never forget. She came up very close to me like this,” and she steps up to Erik to illustrate her point, “She put her finger in my face and said that I should never mention the other baby to Mary.” Erik isn't breathing.“I never did. It was not my place, and things like that, we did not talk about. Skeletons in the closet.”“Skeletons,” Erik swallows.Then Mrs. Lugo asks, “Do you believe in God, Mr. Lehnsherr?”There's a whole part of Erik that Peter can feel from inside of this memory, a deeply complex, conflicted part of himself that Mrs. Lugo's question touches, like she's running her hand down the spine of a sea monster, temping it to rise up and bite her hand off. “Yes,” he hisses the answer. “I think that God put you here so that I could tell you this. I don't know what happened to the other baby, whether he lived or died. It was so long ago. I don't know if there is any way to find out, but it would be good to know that they are together.”“Thank you for telling me, Mrs. Lugo,” Erik says. There's this hard edge of conviction building up inside of him. “I assure you, if they can be brought together, they will be.”
When we were at the reception this was all he could think about. He kept replaying it over and over in his head. Later that night he disappeared for a few hours.
Where did he go? Peter asks. The graveyard vanishes and Jean shares small flashes of Erik's memories: a heavy-looking door with a double-paned window, the pull of the metal in the door like his hand is one big magnet, a loud bang, fluorescent lights, a long room lined with shelves and shelves and shelves of books, identical except of the numbers on the spines. Walking through the maze of books, and it seems like a nightmare, like a hand is going to reach through the shelves and grab him. He turns, finds the spine of a book labeled nineteen-fifty-seven, the year Peter was born. Pages flipping and then, clear as crystal: a smooth sheet of paper, just another page in a book, yellow at the edges with age. Peter's name at the top underneath the Virginia State seal and he realizes that he's looking at his birth certificate, and now that Peter thinks about it he's not sure he's ever seen his birth certificate before, not even a copy. It wasn't like he ever needed it to get a driver's license, or anything else. Erik flips back one page to another birth record, almost identical to Peter's own, with Mom's name recorded under “Birth Mother” and a single, lonely E under “Birth Father” but the time of birth is twelve forty-five a.m. whereas Peter's time of birth was twelve fifty-seven. The name at the top of the page is “Wendy.” Peter and Wendy. Jesus, that should be a joke but Erik isn't laughing in this memory so neither is Peter. Mom always wanted a Wendy, and Frank wouldn't let her. Maybe Mom did know, not, like, on the surface but deep down in her subconscious. That's what he's going to tell himself anyway.Peter is reeling but Erik's search isn't over. The images that Jean shows Peter now come quickly, almost frantically: rows and rows of books, brown, worn spines, the smell of old paper, and a volume tucked away high on a shelf, riffle of pages, another birth certificate. The date and time of birth are the same as Wendy's, but the name on the top has been changed to “Wanda” and “Wanda” has a new set of parents, a dad with a first, middle, and last name. Lucky girl. So, she's not Peter's Wendy after all.Darkness, the sound of tearing paper and a book slamming shut.Mom's basement. Peter barely recognizes himself as the bloated corpse lying under a pile of blankets in his old bed, but he recognizes Jean, standing there beside Erik. He feels the outline of Wanda's false birth certificate, folded in quarters, tucked into the breast pocket of his shirt and Peter can feel Erik's thoughts. He can feel the pull of that little sheet of paper and what it represents: potential, uncertainty, and the deep, magnetic pull of his own blood. He can also feel how he's anchored by the boy in the bed, his boy, who has lost so much already, who shouldn't have to bear another disappointment if all Erik can find of his twin is a single piece of paper, who would follow him if he knew, no matter the cost to himself. He can't risk the boy. Erik's decision is made.Peter's thoughts are so entwined with Erik's that when he hears the words, “Let him go!” he thinks they're inside his head, like Scott is somewhere in his mother's house, calling out. Then the weight of Jean's hand leaves Peter's shoulder and Peter stumbles back a step and sits down hard on the gravel, dazed and tasting blood. Scott is on the steps next to Jean, sucking in air like he ran to get here, looking back and forth between Jean and Peter like he's just snatched a baby away from an alligator but he can't decide which one of them is the baby and which is the alligator. “Peter?” Scott asks. He's crouching next to him. Peter doesn't know when that happened. He looks at Scott, sniffling blood back into his nose and feeling uncharacteristically helpless, like he just realized he's missing something very important, like his wallet or keys or a passport or, oh God, a family member and he can't even think when he lost it and his hands are trembling like he's missed dinner and his heart is pounding, but under it all there's this small measure of hope, of excitement, like that moment before the television announcer reads the lottery numbers over the air and he knows odds are he's not going to win but stranger things have happened, right? “You're bleeding,” Scott points out. Peter knows. He swipes a hand across his face and it comes away streaked reddish-orange. It all seems like a very vivid dream, but he knows that it's real, she's real, his twin.“What happened?” Scott asks. Peter's still staring at his bloody hand. “Jean?” Scott asks, looking up at her.Jean stands there with the winter sun behind her and doesn't answer.“I have a twin.” Oh shit, that's Peter's voice isn't it. “I have a twin,” he repeats.And that's the moment that the professor wheels out and finds them there: Scott leaning over Peter, who's sitting on his ass with blood on his face, and Jean looking down at them from a few steps away with her hands over her mouth and this, kids, is how rumors get started, but thankfully the professor is psychic and he knows this is no mutant love triangle.Jean wasn't lying, not even the professor knows about Peter's long-lost twin and that's something, although what he's not sure, but he doesn't miss the way that the professor gives Jean the side-eye on the elevator ride down to Cerebro and says, “I wish you would have come forward sooner,” but Peter doesn't think he's upset so much over her withholding Lehnsherr family gossip as he is frustrated that she was able to keep something like that from him all this time.Peter finds himself defending her, “It wasn't her secret.” The professor backs off a little, “Indeed not. I suppose that if Erik wanted my help locating his daughter he would have asked. Erik always did prefer to work alone.”And that explains Peter's stubborn independent streak.The inside of Cerebro sort of reminds Peter of that Circle-Vision thing at Disneyland except that it's more like Sphere-Vision with a ramp and a funny little platform in the middle. Peter's never had any desire to spend much time in the thing, especially when the doors are shut and the lights go out because there's literally nowhere for Peter to run and seriously why is there no railing? Hank is such a safety-conscious dude that you would think he'd install at least a curb that the professor's chair couldn't easily roll over and Peter's just trying to distract himself with the lack of safety features so that he doesn't have to think about the reason that he's in this room in the first place with the doors whooshing shut behind him and the professor and Jean and Scott like they're Kirk, Spock, Bones, and Uhura on the Starship Enterprise although Peter doesn't really identify with any of those characters. He's more like the random red-shirt that gets killed off ten minutes into the program for the sake of advancing the plot, and the professor is more of a Captain Pike, with the chair and everything, although Peter is pretty sure that Xavier imagines himself as more of a Kirk, because he is the captain of the ship, school, whatever, and Cerebro is like the forward view screen and they're about to contact some unknown, potentially hostile alien life form and if Peter thinks of the situation that way then his anticipation feels a little more appropriate.“Peter,” the professor says and Peter snaps out of his thoughts to find everybody looking at him.“Yeah, hi. What?”“I have very little to go on as far as your sister is concerned, so I will try to contact Erik first.”“Sure.” That makes sense.“Are you alright?”Should he be?“Right, well, here we go,” Xavier says, sliding Cerebro's metal helmet... interface... thing over his head while Peter tries and fails to think up an explanation for Erik having been out of contact for this long that doesn't involve Erik or Wanda or both of them being dead, maimed, or captured. Then he tries not to throw up when the room swirls sickeningly around the four of them and their platform. Luminescent figures flash by. Peter can hear voices: shouts and prayers and laughter and whispers, all in a confused jumble like they're standing in Grand Central Station during rush hour. It's overwhelming, and if this is what life is like for the professor all the time he can keep his telepathy, not that Peter wanted it in the first place. It seems like it goes on forever, and he can't imagine how the professor can find anyone in this but slowly, slowly a figure floats toward him out of the darkness, pushing aside all the rest, and it's the image of a man, picked out in red lights, sitting, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, worrying his chin with his thumb.Erik Lehnsherr looks up like he's just heard someone call his name. Peter doesn't actually hear the word, but he sees his dad mutter, Charles?“Hello, old friend,” Xavier says warmly, and Peter's reminded that this isn't just his dad that Xavier is talking to, and these two probably know each other better than Peter will ever know his dad. Then there's a moment and Xavier sighs like he's getting something from the exchange that the rest of them aren't. “Oh Erik... I wish you would have told me about her. I could have helped you.” Peter sees his dad's lips move but he can't hear the words. At the end his dad's shoulders are shaking, like he's laughing at a private joke, but Xavier isn't laughing along. “He says that he's found Wanda,” the professor translates, “but he can't seem to reach her.”Peter's heart climbs into his throat. She's there. She's alive. Erik's lips are moving again, asking a question.“Your son is here,” the professor answers, “You've had him very worried.” Narc. Peter wants to hide under the control console even though he knows that his dad can't see him. Erik's expression softens for an instant. He seems to ask the word, Peter? like maybe he forgot that he had a son, then he seems to dig deep and find some sort of resolve. His lips start moving fast, explaining something and Xavier listens, straight-backed and tense. “Slow down, Erik. Calm your mind.”Erik does, apparently. Xavier would know better than him.“Picture her in you mind as clearly as you can,” Xavier says, “Good. That's good. Let me see what I can do.” There's a disorienting moment where the room seems to rotate while Xavier shifts his attention and Erik's image rotates with it, and then drifts away until it's a single red pinpoint of light, just one among thousands.Xavier hones in on one figure. Peter can see by the long hair and the curve of her hips that it's a woman. She's standing, arms folded, shifting her weight from foot to foot. Her back is to the professor, and as he zeroes in on her she turns. Peter gets the tiniest glimpse of her face--and Cerebro goes dark. It's so sudden and so complete that Peter's balance is thrown off and now he's really upset at the absence of a railing.“What- ?” Scott starts to say.Before Xavier can answer sparks fly from the control panel. The professor shouts wordlessly and strips off his helmet and flings it away from himself. Peter hears it bang around as it reaches the end of its tethers and crashes against the console.So, Peter learns three things that day: a) he has a twin sister, b) his twin is a mutant too, and c) his twin mutant sister doesn't want anything to do with him. It's not personal. Apparently Wanda doesn't want anything to do with any mutant. Xavier gives Jean, Scott, and Peter (or really Scott and Peter) a synopsis of his conversation with Erik while the four of them sit around in pitch blackness inside Cerebro, waiting for Hank to reset the circuit breakers or fire up the generator or whatever it is that he has to do to get power to the doors. Hank designed them so that people in general and certain mutants in particular would have a tough time breaking in without anyone noticing but that means that Jean can't get them out without seriously damaging the door, so that didn't work out the way it was supposed to, did it, Hank? Scott could blast them out of here if they were in a rush, but they're really not and those doors are heavy and not cheap to replace and so here they are: Kirk, Scotty, Uhura, and Ensign Cabral or whatever Peter's Red Shirt name would be, sitting around in pitch-blackness until Hank can find a flashlight and jimmy the doors open. “Wanda fears her own kind,” the professor says. “It doesn't matter why, although Erik has his own ideas about the source of her prejudice. I think what she truly fears is detection. She wants to pass as human, so she's found a way to conceal herself and her powers. Erik has been close to her for some weeks, but he's been unable to speak with her directly. The experience has been quite trying for him.”“I bet,” Peter says, and yeah, he might be a little pissed at Erik for, you know, concealing the fact that Peter had a sister, a twin, and running off to God-knows-where to get in touch with her and leaving him on the sidelines. “Your anger is justifiable, however Erik believes that Wanda is dangerous, and I'm afraid I agree with him. Unless what we experienced was a very inconvenient coincidence, she disabled Cerebro with a thought from thousands of miles away, and all because she didn't feel like talking. Erik was trying to protect you.”Peter gets it, but he also hates the thought of being the weak link. “You really had no idea about her?” Scott asks. Peter's sitting at the edge of Xavier's platform, dangling his feet over the edge into space, imagining he's a kid sitting at the end of a pier next to Frank, back before Frank gave up trying to bond with him and Peter gave up trying to pretend to be anything other than a bored, ungrateful teenager.“Nope,” he says. He's imagining fish in the water below, only there's no water and no fish, but it gives his mind somewhere to go when he knows he's not going anywhere.“How does somebody not remember having two babies?”Peter knows Scott's not trying to be a dick. It's more like he's just trying to wrap his head around this new information and hey, so is Peter. Also Scott doesn't trust Erik and Peter can't really fault the guy for that. It's actually kind of touching, like, Scott's defensive on Peter's behalf, so he's not mad at him but he also doesn't want to have to explain the process of childbirth to Scott. He feels like that's something they should have covered in health class, but thankfully the professor clears his throat and steps in helpfully, “The combination of morphine and scopolamine that was in use at the time in the obstetrical field was notorious for its side effects, which included memory loss. The combination of drugs did not so much relieve pain as remove any memory of pain.”Scott makes a little 'ah' sound from somewhere in the dark. “But how did Wanda end up with another family and your mom- ?”“Got stuck with me?” Peter finishes. “I didn't mean it like that.”“S'fine,” Peter says. The answer to Scott's questions is buried in the back of his brain, an old story that his mom only shared when she'd had a few too many and it was just her and Peter and she wanted him to know how much she loved him even though he was an asshole. “She never meant to keep me. Us, I guess. It wasn't like a big secret or anything and it wasn't like she didn't want kids ever, it's just that she was twenty years old and she wasn't married and she didn't have a job or a place of her own, so what was she going to do with a kid? There weren't a ton single moms back then, not unless their husband died in the Korean War or something, and premarital sex was something everybody pretended wasn't happening, right Professor?” Xavier clears his throat and gives him a way uncomfortable, “Indeed.”Peter feels like the darkness is squeezing all the air out of him. He takes a deep breath and explains, “So there she was in the hospital, thinking that she'd get to go home soon and go back to school and pretend like nothing happened, and in comes a nurse with a baby in her arms, a wrinkly little beet-red bastard with a full head of gray hair, and the nurse shoves the kid into her arms and says, 'He's yours, you need to calm him down,' and she's looking at this little shit, who's screaming his head off, who's been screaming his head off all night, who's driving the nurses nuts, and she's scared out of her mind, and then the baby looks up at her, this kid she never meant to have in the first place, that she definitely doesn't want, and what does the kid do? He stops crying. Then he goes to sleep.”The room is dead silent. If Peter didn't know better, he'd think he was completely alone, which makes the next part easier to say. “After that Mom wouldn't give me back. The nurses tried to take me away but she wouldn't let them. A doctor came in and just looked at Mom and looked at me and said that it didn't matter because I probably had birth defects and I wouldn't live very long anyway, so she took me home to die,” He swallows because his throat is bone-dry, “but I was a persistent little bastard.”They expected us to fail, his mom told him once, right after she and Frank had gotten married. She'd had a few glasses of champagne and she was looking at him in that weird, uncomfortable, wet-eyed way she had that let him know that no matter how much she'd yelled at him earlier in the day, she still loved him. Everybody: the doctors, the nurses, your grandmother, my friends. They thought that you would die or we'd end up on the streets, but we showed them, didn't we, baby? At the time Peter had been more interested in the Hot Wheels set that Frank had bought him as a bribe so that he would behave at the wedding, which hadn't worked because Peter couldn't sit still during the ceremony and he kept kicking the pew in front of him and then he broke a plate and a glass at the reception and called Peggy's son, Trevor, a dill weed, but he got to keep the Hot Wheels anyway, and drove the little cars up and down the banister, letting them fall down the stairs, making little crashing and exploding sound effects when they hit the bottom. All that time she'd had another kid out there, a girl, her Wendy, whom she never even knew about, who'd been born healthy enough to be adopted, who some family had wanted, while she'd been stuck with Peter, and it kills him, it just kills him because she'll never know, and it also kills him, although it shouldn't, that Erik had Peter, his son, right there in front of but he chose to go chasing after Wanda instead, who seems to want nothing to do with him or with any mutant, his perfect daughter, who's probably not even perfect but hey, infinitely preferable to the comatose pile of laundry sleeping his life away in his mom's basement, and if Erik hadn't at least suspected that Wanda was the more powerful twin when he left and if it didn't play a part in his decision to go after her Peter will eat his Nikes. He bets she even looks like their dad, and how sad is it that he's jealous of a total stranger for hogging the affections of a guy that Peter can't trust not to kill a short-order cook at a diner for getting his order wrong?Then Scott, because he's the only person in the room who isn't psychic and doesn't know that Peter's thoughts have spiraled down into the black pit a the bottom of Cerebro, says, “So... you were always a noisy pain in the ass?” And for some reason that helps Peter pull his head out of his ass and he smirks and says, “Oh, absolutely.” There's silence for a little while, punctuated by the occasional tap or bang or reluctant squeeeeeeal as Hank works on the other side if the door. Peter can practically hear the professor thinking.“Where is she?” Peter asks before he can stop himself. There's a pause, not much of one, but it's there, like the professor is thinking Peter's going to squeeze out the doors as soon as they open and take off for Afghanistan or the moon or wherever Wanda is hiding out and why shouldn't he? Well, in short: his twin doesn't want to see him, doesn't want to be seen by him, whatever. Also he might run into his dad and he doesn't know how that conversation will go. Also his job is here and so are all of the people who, for one reason or another, put up with him, so there's that. “Wanda currently resides in Los Angeles. I know that she works as an actress and she seems to have enjoyed a fair amount of success. I'm afraid I can't tell you much about her life beyond that.”Huh. That's... not what he expected. He'd sort of hoped that she would be like him, another speedster, but then he imagines that they would have come across each other by now if that were the case. Then he wonders if she's been in any movies or TV shows and whether or not he's seen her without knowing who she was.Peter wants to ask the professor more about his twin but right about then when things start to get noisy in the vicinity of the door and pretty soon there's a wobbly shaft of light poking through a crack in the door, making them all squint like moles as Hank parts the doors with blue, furry paws. He's super frustrated because he can't seem to reset the breaker and everything is pitch black, which means that Jean has to help the professor by levitating his chair up the stairs to the ground floor.Peter doesn't neglect to thank Hank for freeing them but then the next words out of his mouth are, “I'm going to see my sister.”Scott glances at the professor but he's sure that Xavier and Jean have been keeping at least loose tabs on his thoughts and know that he means Lindy and not Wanda.“I should tell her, you know, something.” He doesn't add that he feels like he needs to be with his family right now, and Lindy's pretty much the only family he's got that wants to talk to him.“Very well,” the professor says. “Once Cerebro is repaired I will try to contact Wanda again.”And Peter's like, 'fine, whatever' because he doesn't really want to talk about his twin anymore. She's not a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. She's a relative that he's never met who doesn't want anything to do with him and that's fine, really. It's great. He doesn't want anything to do with her either.Then the professor's looking at Peter with this pitying expression on his face that Peter can't stand and Peter wants to shout, What?! But he's going to find out anyway if he hangs in there and sure enough Xavier says, “Trust, once broken, is a very difficult thing to mend, but it is my hope that in your time here, your teammates and I have shown you that it can be done.”Peter makes a sound that's like a cross between a 'huh' and and 'ugh' and he says, “You can't mistrust someone you never trusted in the first place.” He's not even sure who he's talking about, Erik or Wanda.The professor ignores that and says, “You've come so far, Peter. You may not think so, but it's the truth. Don't throw it away.”“Sure.” Peter has no idea what he's talking about. None. He doesn't feel any different than the day he showed up on the mansion's front lawn with a Twinkie in his hand, except that he's given up Twinkies, probably for life, and he can't decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing. He doesn't even feel any different than the day his powers manifested, like on the inside he's still a scared little kid with no clue how he's going to get through another day of everybody in the whole world frozen in time while he blows past them with his “gift”. Oh, and now he has a twin. Jeez, his life is weird. “Do be careful with yourself,” the professor says.Peter promises not to drink and gamble while he's visiting his little sister in her college dorm, then he takes off for Rhode Island as fast as his legs can carry him without even asking if Scott will cover his gym class because he knows Scott will.Because he didn't call ahead Peter ends up waiting for Lindy on the steps of her dorm, pacing and freezing his ass off because it's barely February and he's not dressed to be outdoors and standing around for long. It takes about twenty minutes for one of the girls from the dorm to get creeped out by the gray-haired guy just hanging out outside and ask him if he's looking for somebody, but in a voice that says she's pretty sure what he's really looking for is a slap in the face, but when he says Lindy's name something seems to click for her and it turns out she's an RA and she lets him chill out in the common room until Lindy gets back. Peter hasn't eaten since breakfast and he's feeling shaky because of it, but his brain is too busy trying to digest what he's learned to even consider food.Lindy notices Peter before he sees her. He's spacing out in a corner of the common room, pulling at his lip and thumping his heel against the carpet and just generally making all of the students around him uncomfortable when Lindy steps in front of him and lets her messenger bag slide off her shoulder and onto the floor. “What's wrong?” she asks. “You look like hell.”At least she's toned down her cursing. The existence of a long-lost twin isn't something you just blurt out in the common room of a dorm and it's too cold and Peter's too under-dressed for any outdoor activities that don't involve a lot of running, so they go up to Lindy's room and give her roommate the boot as politely as they can.Then he tells her about Wanda. For a long, long time Lindy just looks at him, kind of disbelieving, but kind of angry, like she's not sure if he's messing with her, like this is some kind of prank and she's not sure why he'd say something like this. “I know how it sounds,” Peter says.“Hold on,” Lindy says, holding up a finger and backing out of the room. He hears her trot down the hall and knock on somebody's door and exchange words with the other room's occupant. The conversation gets heated and finally Lindy says, “Just give me the tape, Darlene!” and a moment later Peter hears a loud clatter and somebody who must be Darlene proving that she hasn't toned down her cursing at all. Lindy doesn't seem to care about Darlene's feelings as she comes dashing back to her room with a VHS tape tucked under her arm, totally focused on her task. Lindy and her roommate have a small TV and VCR sandwiched in between their beds. Lindy pops the tape in and starts fast-forwarding through what looks like an episode of Knight Rider mumbling, “Where is it? Where is it?” and she gets to a point in the show where David Hasselhoff is in a diner and there's a waitress taking his order with her back to the camera and Lindy starts saying excitedly, “This is it, this is her!” and pointing to the screen. Peter's chest tightens. The waitress is tall and thin and has a lot of very curly brown hair like Mom and Lindy, but when she starts to turn around the VCR makes a high-pitched whirring sound and the screen goes dark, then there's the unmistakable crinkling sound of the tape being eaten. “No!” He and Lindy say at the same time. Even with Peter's super speed it takes him a minute or two to extract the tape from the machine and wind it back onto the spools. The tape itself looks awfully wrinkled but Peter and Lindy cross their fingers and feed it back into the machine. The diner scene comes up and Peter sits there on the floor, glued to the TV like a four-year-old watching Saturday morning cartoons, but when the waitress turns around, a big band of static covers her face. Then she leaves the screen and the picture is perfect and clear again. “I swear it was her,” Lindy says. “You said she was an actress right?”“You saw her?” Peter starts to get a little excited at the idea that at least Lindy had laid eyes on her, but he guesses he should have known better, because Lindy shakes her head and says, "I'm not a big Hasselhoff fan, but Darlene is. She had her roommate record the show for her. I just remember her saying that there was a girl in the episode who looked just like me and I thought it had to be her.”“Hang on, her name might be in the credits,” Peter says, and it's like his words anger the gods or something because sparks fly out of the back of Lindy's TV and the VCR catches on fire. Peter races down the hall to grab the fire extinguisher. He makes it back in time to stop the fire from spreading beyond Lindy's tiny entertainment center, but the VCR (and Darlene's tape) are toast.Sitting on the floor, staring at her smoking entertainment center, Lindy says, “I think we're cursed.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Peter finds Xavier waiting for him in the foyer when he gets back, just sitting there like he's been drumming his fingers on the armrest of his wheelchair for hours, waiting patiently to give Peter a talking-to for breaking curfew and Peter opens his big mouth but then whatever smart remark he has in mind dies on his tongue when Lindy steps out of the shadows, eyes wide and lips parted, looking at him like he's let her down. Peter actually steps back, confused, because he just left Lindy's school, and even if she hopped in her car and and drove here straight from dinner he still should have beaten her here by a good hour and a half and that's when he realizes that this girl isn't Lindy. She looks like Lindy: same bushy brown hair, same shape to her face, but she's older, taller, more like a younger version of Mom than an older version of Lindy. There's something else familiar about her too and Peter starts hearing his pulse in his ears because something's really wrong here. He feels like he just stepped sideways into an alternate dimension where he doesn't exist and instead there's this girl who looks like Mom but, especially with that disappointment on her face, looks a whole lot more like Erik Lehnsherr.“Who- ?” Peter starts out, but doesn't finish because he sees movement out of the corner of his eye and it's Jean, coming out of the library, and behind her, with his hand on her shoulder... is Peter's dad.Magneto looks a little older, a little grayer than the last time Peter saw him. He also seems a lot less put-out than not-Lindy when he lays eyes on Peter, but he seems more anxious than anything else. Jean comes toward Peter like she's going to do something and that puts Peter on edge enough to lean away from her touch when she goes for his face and she looks at the professor for help and the professor is sitting there in his chair, looking unhappy with everyone and he says, firmly, “Give it back, Jean.”“I'm sorry,” Jean says softly as she takes Peter's face in her hands and everything falls away but her.XXX
Jean restores Peter's memory of Camila Lugo's revelation of Peter's twin, which takes place in Chapter 14 of Immediate Family.
XXXPeter hears Jean's voice in his head, Erik asked me to hide this memory until he could find out what had happened to your twin. He was worried that if you knew, you would risk yourself to find out. He wanted to protect you. He wanted- Peter recoils from her. With their minds joined to his he can feel how hurt she is, how confused, and how convinced she was that she was doing the right thing at the time, but now she sees how much of a violation it was. I'm sorry, she says again, retreating from his mind. I'm sorry... Her voice is a whisper.Peter opens his eyes and wavers on his feet for a second. His chest is heaving like he's just sprinted here from Virginia and he's swallowing blood because his sinuses are bleeding down the back of his throat. “Do you know where you are?” Jean asks in a wavering voice.He's in the foyer in the mansion in Westchester. He never left. Mom's been dead and buried for nine months but her ghost is standing a few yards away, staring at him with wide green eyes, except she's not a ghost, she's real. She's always been real. His twin.Jean is backing away from him, hands covering her mouth and tears in her eyes because she can feel what Peter's feeling. Xavier's sitting stern-faced in his chair and Peter bets that he and Jean will be having a talk about this later, and not necessarily about the nosebleed. Meanwhile Erik -Magneto- is starting toward him with his hands raised like, 'calm down' but Peter doesn't let him get one single step in before he's got his fists full of Magneto's shirt and he's slammed him against the nearest wall hard enough to break one of the narrow stained glass windows on either side of the front door and let in a cold breath of wind. “You son of a bitch,” he says, giving Magneto a rough shake and the raw anger in his voice is at odds with the tears streaming down his cheeks because his dad stole something from him, and he's not just thinking about his memory.“Peter...” the professor warns him, but Peter still has control over his body. Xavier won't take away Peter's free will after what he just found out.“I did what I had to do to protect my family,” Magneto says in a harsh whisper. He's holding Peter's wrists but he hasn't done much else to protect himself. “I won't ever apologize for that. You're alive to hate me because of what Jean did. You would have let the search for your twin kill you. Don't think I don't know about your self-destructive streak. Where do you think it came from?”Quicker than the eye can see Peter slips out of Magneto's grasp, winds up his fist, and puts it through the wall next to Magneto's head.Nobody else would have been able to see Magneto flinch, but Peter is right there and he does, but it's out of surprise, not fear. Peter's hand is still buried in the wall when Magneto says, “Take your revenge if you like. I won't stop you, but know that where you are concerned, I have no regrets... my son.”Peter can hear the creak of stairs. All the noise has woken the household and kids are starting to gather at the top of the stairs and the landing.“Back to bed,” the professor says sharply. “Scott, Storm, Nightcrawler, stay. Hank, Raven, take our guest to the library, please.” To Peter he says, “Let's talk about this.” But Peter's still standing there, breathing hard. Very slowly he pulls his hand out of the wall. It's not broken. Well, the wall has a huge hole in it, but Peter's hand is bleeding and full of splinters. He closes it in a fist, takes a step back from Magneto but doesn't break eye contact. “I need a minute.” The fabric of Magneto's shirt is still molded in the shape of Peter's fingers when he lets go. Peter turns and takes in the room. Some of the kids have turned, like they're headed back upstairs, but they're glancing over their shoulders. Storm and Scott are backed up against the wall, letting them past. Jean has backed herself into in a corner. Her face is chalk white and her shoulders hunched, like she's trying to make herself as small as possible. Hank and Raven are making their way in from the informal living room, and they're looking at her, Peter's twin.Peter steps closer to her, feeling weird because his twin reminds him so much of Mom, which is painful and wonderful at the same time because it's like discovering another little piece of Mom that's survived, like finding a photo album after a house fire, or like Xavier finding some old cigar case in the ruins of the mansion after they all returned from Cairo to stare at the gaping hole in the ground (and, boy, there had been a lot of people doing a lot of standing around, gaping at holes in the ground back then) but anyway, she's not Mom. She never knew Mom. She's a total stranger, a total stranger looks like a perfect cross between Mom and Erik Lehnsherr, not like Peter, who looks like a perfect cross between a Bulldog and a Weimaraner, but she doesn't have super speed, or if she does, she's doing a great job of hiding it. Maybe she isn't a mutant at all, and how pathetic is it that he feels hopeful that he might have one thing in common with his dad that she doesn't. And holy shit he has a twin. He has a twin. Holy shit. This should be good news, so why is he so jealous of his long-lost twin? Well, because he can tell just by looking at her that she's everything he's not: well-dressed, hair neat and styled even at this crazy hour, tailored wool suit, fancy handbag, like she has an important job somewhere. She's put together in a way that Peter's never been in his life, not even at his mom's funeral. She's everything that anybody could want in a daughter, and he wants to know more, so he steals her purse.Peter's stolen plenty of stuff in his life but he's never really been a handbag thief. Wallets, sure. Picking pockets always felt a little less wrong than purse snatching, but, hey, there's a first time for everything he thinks as he slides his twin's Gucci off of her shoulder. Inside Wanda's pocketbook he finds a California driver's license with her adopted last name on it, so it doesn't look like she's married. No engagement ring. Her driver's license photo is impossibly fantastic he thinks as he looks at the card long enough to memorize her address. He thumbs through her checkbook and notices that her account is healthy according to her balance sheet. She has a credit card with her adoptive father's name on it, probably for emergencies because it doesn't look like it's seen a ton of use. No paycheck stubs or bank receipts that Peter can find, but maybe she just cleaned out her wallet. She's getting regular deposits from somewhere, different amounts at irregular intervals, which points to freelance work, and when Peter comes across her SAG-AFTRA card that part of the mystery is solved. His twin is an actress. Huh. That's not what he was expecting but good for her. There aren't any drugs or cigarettes in her purse, just makeup and a few girly things and he stops rifling through her purse when his tidal wave of curiosity recedes, leaving his mucky, seaweed-covered morals exposed. He slips her purse back onto her shoulder. Her eyes are still fixed on Magneto, or maybe the space where Peter was a second ago, then he's on his way up the stairs to go lay on the roof for a while and think.'Think' turns into 'mope and pick splinters out of his chewed-up hand' once he gets up there. It's dark and it's started snowing and he has to brush off a place to sit down and even then the cold just comes right up through the stone. Peter's kind of glad for the cold and kind of not because on the one hand it makes his extremities go numb so he can't feel the cuts or the splinters in his right hand, but between the cold and the dark he's having a really tough time seeing and feeling the splinters well enough to pick them out, so it's taking forever. He's kind of glad and not glad that Wanda didn't have any cigarettes in her purse. He would have taken the pack and smoked them all up here while freezing his ass off even though he knows it wouldn't have done anything but make him smell bad. He knows Xavier's probably got mental tabs on him up here, and while he sort of resents that and sort of wants his privacy he knows this is something he can't run from, or maybe just doesn't want to run from it, and he's feeling a big jumbled mess of things right now, like when he found out that Magneto was his father or when Magneto found out Peter was his son, and he knows there's music to face and adult crap to deal with but he just doesn't want to do all of that right this second. He has a twin. It's like lightning strike every time he thinks about it. It's great, on the surface, like, they should be falling into each others arms and hugging it out and maybe Wanda will do that with Lindy and holy shit, Lindy. How is that conversation going to go? Peter guesses he can just run Wanda by Rhode Island, if she's into that, if she has any interest at all in meeting the rest of her blood relations, if she's not totally put off by her mass-murdering dad or unstable twin, and he guesses that at the very least she's okay with Magneto, to have let him bring her all this way, but it would be a shame if she left without meeting her only normal relative.Even after going through her purse Peter knows, like, almost nothing about his twin and he's still curious and he wants to talk to her if she'll let him, if she doesn't think he is a total psycho. He wants to talk to her, but he also doesn't, because that means going downstairs and facing Magneto again and facing Jean over her part in erasing his memory. He doesn't blame her as much as he blames Magento, but he kind of still hates them both, and confrontation, despite all the evidence to the contrary, is really not his thing, and the longer he waits the less he wants to go inside, even though he's freezing his balls off, trying to pick his splinters out now by using his tongue to find them and his teeth to pull them out because he can't see for shit. He knows he's being stupid but he'd rather lose some toes to frostbite than go downstairs and face the fact that Magneto dropped Peter like a hot potato to chase down Wanda, maybe because she's the child he wanted, not Peter. God, he hopes Wanda's not a telepath. He doesn't want her to know what a fucking high-speed train wreck he is on the inside.Peter lays down on the roof. It's so dark that the snowflakes look like they're appearing out of the sky, inches from his face, falling on his eyelashes so that he has to keep blinking and rubbing his eyes. The crust of ice underneath his head hasn't even had a chance to melt when a small voice behind him asks, “Um, are you going to go in soon?”Peter yelps and jumps about four feet in the air. He turns, still clutching his injured hand, and there's Calvin, looking repentant, standing right behind him. It's freezing and the kid's nose is running so Calvin does the logical thing and wipes it with his sleeve. “Sorry,” he says. “I didn't mean to scare you.”“It's okay, you're not in trouble,” Peter tells the kid. “What are you doing up here?” Students aren't allowed on the roof, especially at dark-as-fuck-o'clock in the morning. It's common knowledge. If it weren't, where would the teenagers go to make out? Now Calvin looks guilty. “Oh, uh... nothing.”“B.S. Somebody sent you.”“No!”“Dude.”There's a big 'ol pause where Calvin tries so hard and fails to come up with a convincing lie and just can't make it happen. “Mystique asked me to check on you.”“Yeah?” Peter says with interest. It never hurts to know who's reporting to who around here.“She's training me to be a spy,” he says proudly.Makes sense. Calvin and Raven are two different kinds of chameleons. The teachers try hard not to play favorites but they sometimes end up taking kids with similar powers under their wing, the professor did that with Jean, and Peter cringes when he remembers that Magneto was tutoring Jean for a while too. He shrugs it off. Cat's out of the bag now. “Are you going to get in trouble for talking to me instead of, you know, spying or whatever?”“No.” Calvin sniffs and wipes his nose on his sleeve again. “It's cold up here. I know you get really cold if you're not moving.”“Yeah,” Peter says, flexing his injured hand. His fingers are white and numb with cold. “We should go inside.”“Okay,” says Calvin brightly.“Does she have you keep an eye on me a lot?” Peter asks, trying to remember all of the embarrassing shit he's done when he thought no one was watching.“Sometimes. I keep an eye on a bunch of people, mostly for practice. Mystique calls me Wallflower. I think I like it, you know, for my mutant name.”Peter shrugs. As long as he likes it. “How's your French?”“Comme ci, comme ça. We spend more time on Russian. Mystique thinks I'll get more use out of it.”Peter's not really sure what languages Calvin's going to get the most use out of. Peter's gotten by on English just fine but he's a different animal. No one's ever going to find him under table at a United Nations summit... probably.Calvin asks, “Hey, so... your dad is back?”Peter sighs. “Looks that way. Hey, do you ever spy for the professor?”“He doesn't ask. He usually knows when I'm around but he doesn't always stop me. He seemed nice... your dad... while he was here last time.”“Yeah, he makes a killer sandwich.”“Are you mad at him because he left?”Peter thinks about it. “Not really. I'm mad at him for other reasons, though, sure.” “My dad left me in a shopping mall a couple of months after I got my powers.”Dude. “That sucks, man.”“Yeah, I found my way back to our apartment, but it was empty. He never came back. Somebody else moved in and I had to leave. I think Dad was scared of me.”It's a sad story but it's got a really familiar ring to it, especially in this house. “People are always scared of what they don't understand.”“Yeah, the professor says the same thing. Maybe one day the humans won't be scared of us anymore. Maybe I'll see my dad again.”“You know it wasn't you, right? It was him.”“Yeah, I know. But if he came back I'd still want to see him. Raven says nobody has perfect parents.”“Yeah, well, Amen to that,” Peter says, slapping Calvin on the shoulder. The poor kid's teeth are chattering.“It gets a lot colder here than it does in Virginia,” Calvin says.“You're telling me,” he says as he ushers the kid back inside.Peter walks Calvin back to his dorm, although he can't really keep the kid from sneaking out again and he's pretty sure that's exactly what's going to happen once his back is turned but hey, he tried. Once that's done he heads downstairs and finds the foyer empty except for Hank, who's duct-taping a garbage bag over the broken window. “I'll fix it tomorrow,” Peter says. He's not really sure where he's going to get the stained glass, and he's probably going to have to replace the one on the other side of the door too so that they match. The wall should be easy, though. He's done framework, drywall, plaster, wood paneling, all of it before. Hank sets the roll of duct tape on an end table and looks at him, all pissed off. “Jesus, Peter. Forget about the window.” He comes over and takes a look at Peter's hand, and Peter knows better than to pull away.“I got most of the splinters,” he says defensively.“It looks like you stuck your hand in a garbage disposal.”There's a first aid kit in the coat closet near the entrance. Hank retrieves it and has Peter sit a the bottom of the stairs while he gives Peter's hand a wordless and efficient going-over with a set of tweezers. Then he gives the open cuts a rubbing alcohol bath and wraps Peter's burning hand in gauze. “Thanks.”Hank is shaking his head. “I'm so sorry, Peter. Erik did everything right under my nose. He hunted down your birth records and talked to all of your mother's neighbors and friends. He made all of his travel arrangements, and I never caught on.”Peter looks down at his bandaged hand. “Yeah, well, it's not your fault. This is who he is.”“You're right. I remember you telling me that when he left. Dammit. Dammit.” Hank slams shut the lid on the first aid kit and shoves it back into the closet hard enough to put a dent in something, either the wall or the kit. “Easy, big guy,” Peter says. “Between the two of us we're going to take this place down to the studs.”That's when Xavier rolls in, shutting the library door quietly behind him. “Please don't,” he says, “I'll never be able to afford the insurance premiums. Hank, would you excuse us for a moment?”“I'll be in my lab,” Hank says shortly, and Peter wonders if there's going to be anything left of his lab by the time breakfast rolls around.Once he's gone and it's just Peter and the professor, Xavier looks at him and then looks away, and seeing him this agitated is a rare treat. “I was a fool, Peter. You were under my protection and I failed you. I'm sorry.”Peter shrugs. Twenty minutes or so in the freezing cold picking splinters out of his hand has given him enough time to transition from outrage to shame. “Hey, it's not like I didn't know who I was letting into my life. I had plenty of warning.” This is what it is to be Magneto's son. The professor looks up at him with sad, watery eyes. “What Erik did to you was inexcusable. Logically he knows that it was wrong. He isn't, in fact, a psychopath, but he has always been ruthless in the pursuit of his goals. I don't condone Jean's actions either, but you mustn't judge her too harshly for her part in this. At the time she thought she was doing the right thing, but after some counseling she understood that her actions were unethical. The fault lies not with Erik but with me. Many years ago I did the same thing to Moira that Jean did to you. Like her, I was convinced at the time that it was the right choice. It wasn't. It took me twenty years to learn that, and it spared neither of us any pain.”“You guys got past it,” Peter says. There's no sense in pretending he doesn't know about the professor and Moira's history and the Cuban missile crisis. The school is a book of open secrets.“We have moved on, but trust, once broken, is a difficult thing to mend.” “That's if you had trust in the first place,” Peter says, and looking back, there's been absolutely no reason for him to trust his father. So at least he knows where he stands.The professor sighs. “Yours is a difficult lot, Peter, but I hope that in the time you've been here your teammates and I have shown you that trust can be built.”“Sure,” Peter says, hoping he's talking about Jean or Wanda because he doesn't hate his dad, he just thinks he's too well-informed about the guy to ever be surprised when, not if, but when his dad breaks his trust again. “I've asked Erik to give you some space,” the professor says, and Peter has to fight down a surge of panic that Xavier might have asked his dad to leave.Something occurs to Peter. “I could have killed him.” “Indeed you could have,” the professor says. “It's easy to forget that there's more to you than speed.”“Why didn't you try to stop me?”“Because I didn't think I would need to, and I was right. You're a good man, Peter Maximoff, a better man by far than I.”Peter huffs out a breath. “Okay.” It's not true at all, but it's easier not to argue.“Trust, Peter,” the professor reminds him. Then, “You're not your father. There isn't a single mutant at this school who could confuse the two of you, not even your twin.”His twin. His mutant twin. She's like him. Not just like him, obviously, but like him enough to shake him down to his roots. Peter shivers and it's a visceral reaction to hearing the word, a physical manifestation of his anxiety and excitement and also because he just spent a good twenty minutes laying on a roof in freezing weather like a dumbass and he hasn't warmed up yet. The professor knows he has Peter now. “Her powers are very different from yours. Like many mutants who grow up among humans, she's lived in fear of using her gifts for many years. I've offered to help her while she's here. She's traveled a very long way and left behind everything she's known to put her fate in the hands of complete strangers, not for the chance to learn more about her powers, but to meet you. She's in the library now, surrounded by other mutants for the first time in her life, and she is terrified. How long are you going to keep her waiting?”Well, that depends. Peter's terrified too, and he searches around inside of himself, looking for any reason, any reason not to walk through those double doors and meet Wanda and he realizes that it's the same reaction he had when he was face-to-face with Magneto and he couldn't tell the man that he was his son and he wonders what's wrong with him and the answer is that there's a lot wrong with him.“Perhaps I can put your mind at ease,” the professor ventures. “Would you like to know about her before you meet?”Peter gives Xavier a sheepish look. “Is there anything you can tell me that I couldn't have already learned by looking through her purse?”Xavier's expression doesn't change.“You already knew I looked through her purse.”“I said you were a good man, Peter, not a perfect one. I like to think I'm familiar with your predilections by now.”He takes a deep breath, tries to play it cool, but he can't even put his hands in his pockets because one of them is wrapped up in bandages and he would look stupid with only one hand in his pocket. “What are her powers?”“Ask her yourself,” the professor suggests, indicating the closed library doors. Peter thinks about slinking in like a naughty dog but there's no point. He's not sneaking into an exam late, and he doesn't even think he's capable of being subtle, either because of his power or his hair or whatever. He's just not a guy that blends in, and everybody's probably waiting for him and he thinks to himself that he might as well make an entrance and he grabs the library door handles and yanks them both open, which stops all conversation. The X-Men are scattered around the room. Storm and Jubilee are sitting on either side of Wanda. Scott is leaning against a wall, looking into the fire. Kurt's found a comfortable table to crouch on. Mystique is quietly observing the room, back to the wall, yellow cat eyes glowing in the dim light. Jean's there too. She's the closest to the door, like she's been eavesdropping on Peter and the professor. “Sorry,” Peter says. It's not directed at Raven specifically. It's more of a general, all-encompassing kind of 'sorry' because he's got a lot of people to apologize to and a lot to apologize for. “Are you okay?” Raven asks. She's not even pretending to look at his hand.“No,” Peter says plainly. He has the attention of the room but he really doesn't want it. He looks across the room at his twin, who's coming to her feet. “Can we talk?” he asks.“Yes.”He sees the moment where she slides into her groove, and he imagines that she's telling herself that it's just another audition, then she's walking toward him, flashing a smile that can't cover up how scared she is. If there was anything he thought he could do to make her less afraid he would do it, but at this point he feels like he's done enough and he should just let her come, so he does. She stops just out of reach, like she's asking permission, and there's this kind of hopeful look on her face like she knows she's not going to get the part, but she came all this way and she doesn't want to leave without being able to say that she tried and that's when Peter understands that it's not his temper making her scared, so he does the only thing he can think of to make her feel better, and he closes the distance between them. When they meet in the middle it's less like two long-lost family members embracing and more like a toddler trying to feed itself. Peter smacks the top of her head with his jaw and his teeth click together and gets a face full of her fluffy hair and has to kind of tame it with his chin so that it doesn't go up his nose, but it does anyway. Then she tries to put her arms over his arms and kind of ends up pinning his arms to his sides for a second and he has to pull his arms out and gets his bandaged hand caught in her jacket and then she laughs and it's easy and light and weird because she's a total stranger who is also his sister, his twin, and in a way it feels like they're two actors in a play trying to pretend they're relatives and neither of them want anything except for this moment to work out and it's not, but then it is. They figure it out and when they do they fit together like two Lego bricks that came from different sets and they're two different shapes and colors and sizes but that doesn't matter because they were made by the same people out of the same stuff, and the two of them together work.While Peter and Wanda are wrapped up in each other, totally oblivious to everything around them somebody says something or maybe the professor does something and the X-Men clear the room respectfully.Eventually Peter and Wanda part, and they sit, and they talk to each other, and their conversation gets started as awkwardly as their hug, but it takes them no time at all to fall into sync, and he gets her story.Peter and his twin have, like, nothing in common. Wanda was adopted by a rich couple from Norfolk and that's where she spent her early childhood. Her adoptive parents already had three teenage sons, but they always wanted a girl. Her adoptive father's job moved them to Chicago when she was seven years old. Her brothers were grown and out of the house by then. She went to an elite private school and took tennis and ballet lessons and vacationed in places like Aspen and Fiji and learned French and thought she'd go to college and be a journalist or a teacher or travel the world, but then her powers manifested, and that was pretty much it for a normal life. Peter asks her what her powers do and she says, “I'm bad luck.”“Uh, okay.” Peter says. It's not the most unusual mutant power Peter's ever heard of. That award still goes to Naughty Nancy Nagahori, but still, it isn't what he was expecting. “Are you sure you're a mutant? Maybe you're just unlucky.”“I'm not unlucky. Everyone around me is unlucky.”Wanda doesn't really have a name for what she does. “Some of the kids at my school used to call me a witch.” When she uses her powers she thinks about it like she's casting a spell or putting a hex on somebody. Then she explains that she never really knows what form her curses or spells or hexes or whatever are going to take. “I just... wish for something, and it always comes true... always,” she repeats, like her tone wasn't ominous enough so she has to repeat a word. “I have to be careful what I wish for.”“Ever wish for something you thought was impossible?” Peter asks.“All the time.”“And?”“Some things are more possible than I would have thought,” she says, and she's looking at him and he knows she wished a wish that had to do with him. Then she adds, “When I was younger I wished that I could fly.”“Yeah? What happened?”“Tornado. My parents and I were driving back to Chicago from Indianapolis. We had to get out of the car and take shelter at a truck stop. The wind almost blew me away. I got stuck on the awning. My dad had to pull me down.” Depeche Mode was right, there is a God and he's got a sick sense of humor. “I tried a few times to wish that my powers were different, but I don't think it works that way.”“Everybody wishes their powers were different,” Peter says.“Even you?”Peter thinks about Mom, and how he watched her slip away from him in slow motion. “Sometimes.” Then he asks. “Can you make things go, you know... right?”She shakes her head. “I've tried. Ever since I manifested I've been wondering what kind of a person would have this kind of power. I wondered who my birth parents were, whether they were mutants like me, but then I decided that I'd rather not know, because I was afraid that the answer would be bad news. I just wanted to pretend to be someone else, so I dropped out of high school and went off to Hollywood to be an actress.” Finally! They have something in common. Not the actress part but the high school dropout part. “I promised my parents when I moved to California that I wasn't going to use my powers for selfish reasons. I was going to do it on my own but, uh... waiting tables sucks, and it's a lot easier to get parts when the other actresses forget their lines or get sick right before their auditions. I never told anyone what I was because I was sure they'd hate it as much as I did. Eventually I started to doubt that I was living the life I was supposed to be living, and that's when Magneto found me.”Magneto had been looking for Wanda for months, and he knew exactly where to find her, but since Wanda didn't want to be found, he was having the worst luck actually getting to her. “He said the closest he could get to me for months was seeing my face in a print ad for dental floss.” Wanda does have fantastic teeth. Either her adoptive parents shelled out for braces or good teeth run in the family. Come to think of it Magneto does have a pretty decent set of teeth too, but good lord is it terrifying when he uses them in a smile.It's funny as hell, hearing how his twin Greta Garboed Magneto by thinking “I want to be alone” but he imagines it was a lot less funny to Magneto. “I think that when I started doubting myself I broke the spell. He was waiting outside of my apartment building when I went out for a jog. I recognized him right away and I just knew right away why he was looking for me. I felt like I'd always known and I just didn't want to admit it to myself, and I understood why I was born this way, with these gifts.” Her voice is cracking and there are tears in her eyes but she pushes through, “The only way he could get me to stop crying was by telling me about you,” Wanda says, and she lists off a few of Peter's prouder moments, things it's physically painful for Peter to hear because he doesn't feel like whoever that guy is. He's not a hero. “He told me I could choose, that he knew a place I could go where I might be able to figure out how to do something better with my powers than cheat my way onto the set of Days of Our Lives. Best of all, you'd finally get to meet your evil twin.” She's really crying now, eyes puffy and cheeks red, and Peter wraps an arm around her shoulders and pulls her against his chest. “Shut up. You're not evil.” Peter doesn't even think that Magneto is evil, not really, no matter how much deplorable shit the guy gets up to. “I used to steal everything that wasn't nailed down,” he says. Then he tells her about the Pentagon breakout and how he only got scared straight after he saw Erik on television, making that speech on the White House lawn. “It's pretty crazy that he turned out to be your dad.”Yeah, maybe not so crazy. He thinks that asshole, Logan, knew who he was. Logan said he was from the future and the two of them were old drinking buddies or some shit and at the time Peter had nodded and smacked his gum and wondered what kind of drugs that guy was taking but looking back Peter's like ninety-nine percent sure that Logan knew Magneto was Peter's dad. Why else would he rope a sixteen-year-old kid into breaking a mass murderer out of the freaking Pentagon? Maybe future-Peter owed him money or something. Whatever. He actually misses the big, hairy guy with the disgusting bone claws, though, and wonders if the two of them are ever going to meet and also wonders if he ever knew about Wanda. Wanda yawns. “Sorry, jet lag.” “S'okay,” Peter says. He's worn out too. He needs a lot of sleep anyway but he's had a busy day and the fire feels great after his self-imposed roof exile. He's shivering that cold, right-before-he-falls-asleep shiver, even with the full heat from the fire hitting him. God, they have so much to talk about...Peter finds out later that Magneto never went to bed that night. He and Xavier stayed up, talking to each, probably about stuff only two old friends or enemies or whatever they are would understand, and just before dawn Magneto asks the professor how his twins are doing and Xavier thinks for a second and then smiles and tells Magneto to come and see and when they poke their heads into the library and find Peter and Wanda exactly where they left them except that Peter has passed out with his head flopped over the arm of the sofa and Wanda has curled up into a ball against his side like she's trying to stay warm because the fire is burning low and Magneto stacks a new log on the embers of the dying fire and writes a heartwarming note and places it carefully in an envelop in the center of the otherwise bare coffee table. Then he asks Xavier for the use of one of his cars and puts on his coat walks away (again, Goddammit) with his hands in his pockets or at least that's how Peter imagines that it all went down when he wakes up to that plain white envelop in his direct line of sight and the professor reading The Brothers Karamazov in his chair by the fire. Peter looks at the professor with a question in his eyes and the professor says, “If you hurry, you might catch him.”Peter finds the Mustang warming up in the driveway, opens the passenger side door, slides in, shuts the door behind him, sees Magneto trying to warm his hands because he doesn't have to pretend not to be freezing his ass off when he's alone, and Peter thinks that he should grab the keys to the Mustang out of the ignition and lob them into the pond, which isn't going to do a lot of good because the pond is frozen and the keys are just going to land on the ice and slide into the reeds and it wouldn't matter anyway because even if the pond wasn't frozen and the keys sank all the way to the bottom, this is Magneto and the keys are made of metal, Peter, you dumbass, except for the little leather fob attached to the key ring that's engraved with an 'X' because why wouldn't it be? So instead of grabbing the keys, Peter crumples up Magneto's heartwarming note and throws it in his face, and says, “What the hell, man?” After a half second of genuine surprise Magneto collects his dignity (and the wrinkled envelop) and says calmly, “I'm doing Charles a favor.” “No.”XXX
First ending
XXX“No,” Magneto repeats, not like it's a question, just like he's searching for the meaning of the word. “You don't get to dump your kids in the professor's lap and drive away. What you did was totally shitty and I'm still mad at you and you might think you're doing me a favor by taking off again but you're not. If anything that should give you more of a reason to stick around. You see, I don't think for a second that you're leaving because you think it's what's best for us. I think you're leaving because it's easier for you.” Peter's voice is getting awfully loud, climbing in intensity as he goes, but he can't help it. “It was hard for Mom to raise a kid on her own, and I bet it was hard for Wanda's parents to raise a mutant daughter, but they didn't quit. Wanda needs to know that her powers don't make her a bad person, and the professor can tell her that until he's blue in the face but nothing he says is gonna matter because it's not coming from you! You can't just give her the syllabus, asshole, you have to stay and teach the class! I know how she's going to feel if you walk out on her because I know how I felt when you walked out on me!” Magneto looks at him is straight-faced and unwavering, and Peter knows that his mind is made up and nothing he's said has convinced him to stay, so Peter flings himself back into the passenger seat, spent, and rests his head against his bandaged hand. The heater isn't on yet and he can see his breath clouding up in front of him.There's a sound coming from the seat next to Peter, paper being unfolded. Then Magneto's voice saying slowly, “Did you read this?”“No.”“Would you care to?”Magneto's holding out the letter, unfolded, still slightly wrinkled. It's a lot shorter than Peter thought it would be.
Dear Peter, I've gone on a brief errand but I should be back within an hour or two. I hope to speak with you when I return.
-E
“The school is out of coffee,” Erik says, “Charles and the rest of the faculty are going to have a particularly difficult morning. I felt it was the least I could do.”Peter stares at him, and keeps staring, and can't think of anything to say except, “You bastard,” which is funny because Peter is the real bastard here. “You know, it's probably just as well that I caught you when I did because the roads are all black ice right now and you'd probably wind up in a ditch or find a way to get kidnapped or arrested or something again because you have like, the worst track record in that regard of anyone I've ever met so why don't you just hang out here for like, two minutes and I'll go get the coffee?” There's a twenty-four-hour convenience store a few miles down the road, and it's well-stocked because Xavier's Gifted Youngsters are always running out of something between grocery deliveries and the kids like to sneak off for candy bars and chewing gum and porno mags and the occasional junk food binge (Peter) but anyway, he's pretty sure they'll have a canister or two of Folgers sitting around somewhere and if he buzzes over there super quick and drops a twenty on the counter he knows the clerk will have his change for the next mutant kid who walks through the door because he is the mansion's resident gofer, which only makes sense and Peter's not kidding about the black ice. Conditions were wet enough last night that he got plenty of traction coming back from the city but everything froze overnight and road rash at two hundred miles per hour is no joke. “We could just drive together,” Erik suggests. “With our combined powers perhaps we can manage a trip to the grocery store without leaving a trail of devastation in our wake.”Peter thinks about it. “Are you sure about that?”“I'm almost certain.”XXX
Second ending
XXXMagneto's gripping the steering wheel like the Shelby is flying down the road at a hundred and twenty miles per hour, not idling in a driveway. “Wanda was horrified when I told her that I was her father. I don't believe my influence will be healthy for either of you. Your mother asked me to protect you, and I've done the best I can in that regard. I've brought the two of you together, in a place that's as safe as any I can think of. If I stay, I endanger you and your sister and every mutant at this school. There are still people out there in the world who see me as the enemy.”Peter takes it in, nodding. “That's a bunch of bullshit.”Oh, Magneto looks pissed, but fuck him, it's true.“You're our dad. You don't get to subcontract. I get that you have hangups because of your past and everything, and yeah, you're not perfect and maybe you're not the best person for the job, but you're it, and that means something, and also, if you think you're the only reason that humans and mutants can't quite seem to get along, you haven't been watching the news.”Peter can already see the edges of the argument taking shape in Magneto's brain and it's the same one that he had tried to make nine months ago in Mom's basement when Peter didn't have a choice except to lie there like a beached whale and listen to Magneto ramble about how he was a walking, talking curse and just being near him was poison and he's pretty sure Magneto wasn't swayed by Peter's counterargument and only stuck around afterward because Peter was a boneless, defenseless lump of goo who couldn't have defended himself against a Girl Scout troop let alone a bunch of armed mutant-hunters. Now things are different and Peter doesn't need someone to change his pajamas and roll him over so he doesn't get bed sores, let alone watch his back. He has people who watch his back, whose entire job some days is to watch his back and he theirs and so on and... he'll be damned if he hasn't had this same argument with himself before only at the time he was on the other side of it, trying to convince himself that he didn't need his dad and he still doesn't, not in a practical, 'teach me to tie my shoelaces' kind of way, but he's so tired of walking around with a big empty hole inside of him, trying to pretend that it isn't there.“I want you to stay.”Peter looks up and finds his dad just... staring at him, like he's never seen Peter before, or like Peter just said something in Farsi, which is, like, one of the five or six languages that Magneto never learned, and Peter could elaborate, sure. He could tell Magneto that it wouldn't be forever, maybe just until Wanda finds her feet and goes back to her life in Hollywood if that's what she wants or until Magneto and Peter get sick of each other and start throwing things: keys and punches and stuff because the two of them are cut from very different cloth. None of them are getting any younger and the world is a dangerous place but the three of them are here right now and the truth is that if Magneto really wants to leave, he's going to do it, and there's nothing that Peter can say or do to change his mind and Peter knows that because that's the part of himself he gave to Peter, that stupid stubbornness that drove Mom crazy, but Peter's said the thing that mattered and if that's not enough to get his dad to stick around then nothing is ever going to be enough and Peter can either live with that and let him go or Peter can grab the keys to the Mustang and run them out to Hudson River or swallow them or something. Peter groans, burying his face in his hands. “I want you to stay,” he repeats, enunciating carefully, just in case he was talking in tongues earlier. “Are you happy? So just do it.” Then he bolts. He leaves the keys in the ignition and the car in the driveway and Magneto at the wheel and takes himself on a brisk thirty mile jog through snowy woods before heading back inside to thaw out. Wanda's still asleep in the library, curled up on her side, and Xavier is still reading only now he's got a blanket over his legs like an old, old man. Peter feels like he's going to cry or have a heart attack when he looks at his sister, like, his chest just aches and it's so weird and Xavier looks up and says, “The children are starting to wake up. I've had a guest room prepared for her in the East Wing. It's the third door down on the left. She might sleep more peacefully there,” he suggests.Wanda is tall, almost Peter's height, but there's not much muscle or much of anything else on her frame. As skinny as Peter is right now he's probably still got thirty pounds on her. He lifts her gently and easily and speeds her to her room. She doesn't wake up when he pulls her boots off and lays a down comforter over her legs. When he goes back downstairs the professor is still there, with his book and his blanket and when Peter walks into the library rubbing his face tiredly the professor says, “The two of you have much more in common than you think.”“Oh yeah?” Peter says.“I agree,” says Magneto. He's sitting in Wanda's spot on the sofa. Peter bets that the cushions are still warm.Peter stands very still, like he's Wallflower and he's going to make Magneto forget that he's there. After a moment his dad stands and says, “I wasn't going to come back,” and Peter thinks he's talking about right now, today, but then he goes on, “The day Mary told me who you were. I wasn't going to return. I felt that I'd failed, that I'd missed my chance to be a father again, that I didn't deserve to have a family. Once I'd said them out loud to Charles, here in this very room, he asked me if I could hear how idiotic I sounded.” Magneto glances to the side, at the professor, who returns his stare innocently. “I told him he had a choice to make,” the professor says. “He could let you push him away and admit defeat or he could stay and fight for the privilege of having a family again.” “He shamed me, because he knew what you needed better than I did. And now you've shamed me, because after all I've done to bring my family together, I was ready to abandon you again. I'm sorry.”Peter can't really blame his dad for thinking he hated his guts. He knows he can be... mercurial.Magneto goes on, “When I discovered that you had a twin, I knew that I would stop at nothing to find her, not for her sake, but for yours. I couldn't risk you, Peter. You were the most important thing that your mother had to give, and she entrusted you to me. She gave me the impossible task of protecting you. It's my blessing and my curse. I've never been sure about the former but I know that I deserve the latter.” Magneto's stood up. He's been walking toward him while he speaks, but Peter's grown roots and he's stuck where he is and his dad is reaching out to him and Peter still can't move and then it's too late and he's in the circle of his dad's arms and pinned against his dad's chest. Peter feels his own hands slide up his dad's back, returning the embrace and he can't let go because he can't let his dad see that he's crying. Since he's right up against his dad's chest he feels the intake of air, and the slow rumble of the exhale as his dad turns it into the words, “My boy.”Peter is warmed all the way through when his dad pulls back from him and holds him at arm's length. His hands travel up and down Peter's upper arms, squeezing like he expected there to be more of Peter under his clothes than there is and Peter can kind of understand how he might think that because winter time in New York is cold and Peter's cold to begin with, so he's always wearing at least four layers and never dips below three unless he's indoors under a down comforter or in the shower, but the point is that there just isn't much actual Peter under all the layers and Peter's like, “I know, man. Don't say it. You have no idea,” and Erik sneaks a look over at Xavier, and he hasn't been around Peter in a while so Peter guesses he can forgive him or thinking that he's getting away with it without Peter noticing. Erik steps forward and wraps an arm around Peter's shoulders and it's not the worst feeling in the world.“Come with me,” Erik says. Then he doesn't say anything more or explain anything as he walks Peter out of the library, across the foyer, and into the kitchen and steers Peter towards one of the bar stools at the kitchen island. “Have a seat.” Peter sits. Magneto opens the pantry and starts rooting around. “Do you want some help?” Peter asks.“No. I think I still know my way around.”Peter watches his dad take out flour, sugar, milk, eggs, butter, oil, all the usual ingredients to make a batter, so Peter doesn't ask. Eventually Erik says, “I used to make these for Nina.” There's the slightest pause before he says her name, just a little catch, like an old injury, a bad one, that his body is never going to let him forget no matter how much time goes by. “Magda handled most of the cooking, but I've never needed much sleep, and I enjoy seeing the sun rise far more than I enjoy watching it set. Most mornings I would have breakfast waiting for my family before they came downstairs, but as Nina grew older she liked to get up early and come downstairs and watch me cook. It was our special time together, and these were her favorite.”“Oh.”Erik knows the recipe by heart, and either Polish people don't use measuring cups or Erik has just done it so many times that he can eyeball each ingredient and know whether or not it's enough. Whatever the case, when the batter hits the pan and starts to cook, it smells amazing. “My parents taught me that the preparation of food, the act of sharing a meal, is a sacred act, a celebration of life and the people we share it with.”“What were they like?” Peter asks before he can stop himself, because he does want to know.“Honest, hardworking. I was young when they died, and it's been so long. It all fades, and what I remember the most are the things I forced myself to repeat. Mostly I remember them through songs and rituals and prayers.”Mostly. Peter hasn't forgotten how Edie Lehnsherr died and he's pretty sure that Erik hasn't either. “I've missed far too much of your life, Peter. Please, tell me how you've been.”It's a simple request, plainly and politely spoken, but Peter feels like if he throws back the figurative dust cloth covering the furniture of the last nine months of his life he's going to reveal that there is no furniture, just a bunch of termites holding hands over pile of dust and breadcrumbs. He's spent all that time trying to figure out how to live without the most important person in his life, and live with the glaring absence of the person who should have been the second-most important person in his life, and he's probably making a good show of it, most days, but that's with the dust cover on.“I, uh, had some rough days,” he says. He sniffs. He's not crying, but he sniffs. His eyes sting. “Not, like, 'Nazi death camp' rough, but not great. When Mom was sick I couldn't sleep. Now... I hate food. I hate eating. I wish I didn't have to but, you know, I kind of do.” And he tells Erik about the problems he had when he came back, how it took months for his weight to stabilize and how draining it was: physically, emotionally, the works.Erik says, “I understand.” That's good, because Peter doesn't. Or he does. He just wishes none of it had happened.“I thought that Auschwitz had destroyed everything that I was, erased all the good that had come before, and for many years it was painful for me to recall anything that had happened to me before I was imprisoned. But something of my old life survived, and in time I saw that it was worth passing on. I have been a fortunate man, to have shared my life, my memories, and my table with so many loved ones, and I will continue to be grateful for as long as I share a table with you, my son.”“Yeah,” Peter whispers. “Me too.”Dad's got a lumberjack-sized stack of blintzes on a plate and he's letting Peter help make the fillings when Wanda appears in the doorway. She's still in her jacket, arms folded over her middle like she's cold, looking back and forth between the two of them like she has no idea what to expect but she knows it's going to be a disaster. Magneto is looking back at her, doing that thing where he closes himself off and stands very still so that he becomes part of the scenery, because he knows he's the least popular person in the room. Peter decides that this isn't going to go well unless he does something and he doesn't think he can handle another emotional conversation right now so he zips over and takes Wanda by the hand and says, “Come on, we're making blintzes. You can spread the filling.”“I'm a terrible cook.”“So am I. I mostly do dishes.”So Wanda washes her hands and joins the production line. She smears too much cheese filling on the first few blintzes and Peter does a terrible job rolling them so that they either split or the filling comes oozing out the ends. Eventually they fall into a rhythm, and the blintzes start looking like something that Denney's wouldn't be too ashamed to photograph for their menu.Peter gets the coffee brewing and sets the table and asks Wanda what she wants to drink and she says just coffee, black, which is how Erik takes his, too. Wanda sits next to him at the table and looks doubtfully at the plate that Erik sets in front of her and Peter realizes that the look she's giving her food isn't because of the person serving her, it's because of the food itself. Wanda's thinner than Mom ever was, well, when she was healthy, and she didn't get that way by eating eggs and bacon for breakfast. “I can make you something else if you prefer,” Erik offers.Wanda glances at Peter, and whatever it is that she sees in his face, it decides her. “This is fine. Thank you.”Peter and Wanda both clean their plates like they've been starving for years.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
XXX
Wanda is a Disaster
XXXThe honeymoon doesn't last long. Wanda, once she starts exploring her power, is a walking, talking disaster area with all the bells and whistles or, more accurately, the flashing lights and sirens and some guy in a flame-retardant suit running around doing the Star Wars scream as he jumps, flailing, off a balcony. Peter wakes up one morning to the hallways filled with smoke because of a dryer fire, there's a man-shaped hole in the front door because Kid Peter forgot it was there and walked through it, and there's a raccoon loose in the mansion. It would be kind of funny if Wanda didn't take it so hard. “I was made to be a villain,” she says over breakfast while she's spooning up milk and soggy Cheerios and letting it dribble off the spoon back into the bowl.“There aren't any villains,” Peter says. “We can be whatever we want.”“You know, it's fascinating how different your powers are,” Hank tells them around a mouthful of toast that he can't swallow fast enough. “Even among mutant families, powers are unlikely to manifest in exactly the same way. Take Scott and Alex for example. Both possessed the ability to manipulate beams of energy, and if Scott hadn't suffered a brain injury as a child, I think it's likely he would have been able to voluntarily control his ability as well.”“Wait, so we have proof that Scott was dropped on his head as a baby?” Peter asks, smirking at Scott across the table.Scott gets all serious, “I survived a plane crash as a toddler.”Really? “No...”“Yeah, it was this little plane on wheels that I could ride in and I rolled it down some stairs.”Peter gapes because Scott just told a joke but Wanda seems to have missed it. She's staring her cereal, glum and inconsolable, dribble, dribble, dribble. So the X-Men gather around to relate their tales of woe and ineptitude and there's a lot to say on the subject, more even than Peter thought. Ororo recounts how she was recruited by En Sabah Nur and only changed allegiances when her big blue lug of a demi-god threatened to crush her idol's throat, and Peter still has a little bit of a tough time with that because the fact that he was literally having Erik tear the earth up from under her feet wasn't a red flag at all? But he can't talk because he'd been about the same age as her when three weirdos trudged down into his mom's basement and convinced him inside of three minutes that breaking into the Pentagon to release a presidential assassin would be a real hoot and he reflects that teenagers, as a rule, have zero consideration for the consequences of their actions.Wanda never broke anybody out of prison and she sure didn't moonlight as one of the four horsemen (horsepersons?) of the apocalypse but even so she's convinced that her powers are a blight on humanity and a danger to the world at large and no one can really talk her down from her ledge, so Jean tells her how bad the X-Men did when they started training and how disastrous their Danger Room sessions were and how hard they had to work to get anything accomplished as a team. “Really?” Wanda asks. “You're not just saying that to make me feel better?”“We were awful,” Ororo admits. “Scott set me on fire,” Kurt says.Jean says, “I once made everyone think they were shrinking.”“I don't remember that,” Peter says, and there's a tiny awkward moment where he kind of wonders if she messed with his head again and he can tell she's worried that's what he's thinking and she says, hurriedly, “It was after you left... or before you came back,” and he's like, “Oh.”“I missed that one too,” Jubilee chimes in, because Jube's the best social lubricant since alcohol. “Ooh, but I was there when Raven infiltrated the team and gave everyone conflicting orders.”“Oh my God,” Scott groans, “That wasn't a training exercise that was a practical joke.”“All of Raven's training exercises are practical jokes,” Jean says. They go on like that, with Wanda pushing Cheerios around in her bowl, still looking down, but starting to smile...XXX
Peggy
XXXPeter knows there are going to be a lot of awkward conversations in the days ahead, so he puts them off as long as he can stand, which is about five minutes after he finishes breakfast. He should call Lindy first, but there's someone else he thinks he needs to speak to.Peter lets the phone ring nine times before Peggy's husband picks up. He sounds groggy and annoyed, but he hands the phone over when Peter says who's calling. Peggy sounds like she just woke up too, but that's probably for the best. Peter's more likely to get an honest answer this way. Peter says to her, “I'm going to say a name and I want you to tell me if it means anything to you,” and then he says, “Wendy.”There's an uncomfortably long silence. Finally, Peter can hear small noises on the other end of the line and Peggy's husband asking what's the matter. Then Peggy asks, in a voice that's gone up an octave, “Did you find her?”“She found me. Did you always know?” Peggy was Mom's closest friend in nursing school. She was around when Mom started seeing Erik, and she was around when Peter was born. When Peter used to hate Peggy because she would come around and give him his vaccines and do his TB tests and bring him medicine whenever he got really sick, which honestly wasn't as often as most kids. Peter only found out later that she did it because Mom and Grandma couldn't afford to take him to a doctor. Peggy did all kinds of nice things over the years that Peter took for granted, and he never thought to ask why, but he thinks about it now. “What Mary did... it just wasn't done at the time,” Peggy tells him. “I never saw her. I never saw Wendy. She'd already been taken away by the time I came to visit Mary in the hospital. That's how it was back in those days. Most of the girls who had babies out of wedlock never even saw their children. The nurses just took them away and that was that. It was a hard labor and the drugs they gave your mother made her forget everything, and the nurses were so awful. They wouldn't bring Mary anything to eat, so I went to the cafeteria to get her a sandwich. When I walked by the nursery I saw tiny baby through the window, completely red and screaming its head off. It was you. The nurses said you'd been screaming since they took your sister away, and that you wouldn't take a bottle. Finally the nurses got tired of hearing you scream and they brought you to Mary to try to nurse, and once Mary had you, she didn't want to give you back. I think she was scared that the nurses would do something to you. Your grandmother and I tried to talk her out of keeping you, but she refused and the doctor said it was probably for the best because he thought you wouldn't live very long anyway. I never even thought of telling Mary about her daughter, not once. It... what she went through... it was something to be buried and forgotten, like it never happened in the first place. Girls like Mary used to be disowned by their family and friends. That's the way these things were handled.”Peter takes that all in and says, “Thank you,” and means it, because he asked her a question and she answered him honestly, even if hearing it makes his chest hurt.“Are you angry with me?” she asks.Mom had lots of friends before Peter was born, girls she went to school with, girls she worked with. He's seen all of their faces in Mom's old albums, but of all the girls in those pictures, there's only one that he recognizes, only one person who stuck by Mom's side when everyone else abandoned her. So, no, he's not angry with Peggy.“Have you seen her?” Peggy asks. “Wendy? What does she look like?”“She looks like Mom,” Peter tells her. “She goes by 'Wanda'. Her birth parents changed her name.”“The nurses said she was perfect. Healthy and perfect.”She's still perfect, Peter thinks.“Will you send me a picture?” Peggy asks. “I want to see her. Do you need the address?”He doesn't. Peter's had Peggy's address memorized for years, and he recites it for her when she asks if he's sure. “Somebody's bound to have a Polaroid camera around here.”They talk for a little while longer, just catching up, and for the first time Peter's sorry to say goodbye to her when he hangs up. XXX
Friends and Neighbors
XXXAfter breakfast Saturday morning Peter, Wanda, and Lindy pile into their borrowed Pontiac and finish the drive to Richmond. Lindy wants to swing by the house for old times sake, so they park across the street, in front of the Obermans'. The new owners don't have as much finesse at gardening as Peter did, but at least the plants are alive and the lawn is mowed. Mrs. Oberman comes out to visit when she spots Peter's silver hair from her kitchen window. Peter asks where Mr. Oberman is, even though he already knows the answer. “He's out with his mistress,” she says.“She means the Camaro,” Lindy explains.Peter introduces Wanda and tells her who she is and Mrs. Oberman puts a hand over mouth and her eyes tear up and she says, “You're going to think I'm crazy but I knew as soon as I saw her. Come here, darling,” and Wanda gets a big hug and compliments about her mother and a few stories about Peter's adolescence, most of which feature police involvement.Mrs. Oberman also gives them the scoop on the new neighbors, who have two teenage boys. “I think they're forming a band. They definitely own a drum kit, but they usually limit their practice to daylight hours. I took for granted how quiet it's been for the last ten years.”Peter gives her a flat smile without teeth.While they're talking Peter sees old Mrs. Szewc in her quilted house coat coming around the side of her house from her back yard. She's got an arm load of calendulas and winter jasmine from her garden and she crosses the street without looking for cars, making a beeline right for them. She puts the flowers in Wanda's hands, and plants kisses her on both of her cheeks. In heavily-accented English she says, “These are for your mother. Your papa told me he would find you. It was so nice to speak Polish to him. Mόwi Pani po polsku?”Wanda looks at Peter. Mrs. Szewc seems to understand, “Ah, it was too much to hope for. You tell your papa to come and visit me. He is such a nice man.”Peter thinks that's probably the only time in this half of the century that someone has thought of their dad that way.Wanda holds that flowers on her lap the whole way to the cemetery, and lays them on Mom's grave.Peter had a lot of things he wants to say to Mom, but his whittles them down until nothing is left because Mom isn't really here anyway. Lindy can't bring herself to speak because she's too choked up. Wanda stands on her grave for a long time, looking down at the head stone. She says, “I'm sorry I couldn't be your Wendy.”On their way to meet Frank for lunch Wanda tells them, “I feel like I'm playing a part. I have parents. I have three brothers. None of this seems real. I'm sorry.” Lindy looks a little crushed. Peter says, “You don't have to be sorry.”They meet Frank at Lindy's favorite Italian place in the Museum District. Frank has a table reserved and he's already there, nursing a Tom Collins and reading a trade magazine that he brought with him from the office. When he sees Peter, Lindy, and Wanda he sets his drink down and comes around the table and hugs Lindy and shakes Peter's hand and Peter steps aside and introduces Wanda, who smiles with all of her beautiful teeth and Peter sees Frank lose and quickly recover his control even though his face is still red. He says, very seriously, “Peter, are you going to introduce us?” and then it's up to Peter and Wanda to lay the story out while Frank struggles not to blow his lid because he hates being caught off guard. Frank's eyes bounce back and forth between the two of them like he's watching a tennis match, occasionally stopping one of them to clarify something. Then he orders another Tom Collins. Wanda has a glass of red so that Frank doesn't have to drink alone.Frank, who has never been an overly sentimental kind of guy, and who might be a little loose from the drinks says, “I don't know about you, but I'm starving. Peter, don't try to take it easy on my wallet. It looks like they don't feed you at that school. And don't think of trying to snatch the check. They already have my Diner's Club Card.”After they put their orders and Lindy and Wanda go off to the bathroom to do whatever it is that girls do in pairs in the bathroom Peter says, “I hope you're not having second thoughts about visiting the school. And if you're not I hope that you are having second thoughts about poisoning Erik's drink.”Frank is a stone wall, but a stone wall with a sense of humor. “I won't leave the kids hanging. We'll see about the poison. How are you and your dad getting along?”It's so weird to hear the word coming out of Frank's mouth, when Frank was a father to Peter for so many years, and Peter regrets that he never appreciated him for it, regrets it far more than he regrets the years he spent in Mom's basement, waiting for his 'real' dad to turn up. “It's a work in progress,” Peter says.“Twins,” Frank muses, glancing toward the back of the restaurant, where Lindy and Wanda have gone. “If Mary knew, she never said a word.” “I hear that the drugs back then were pretty serious.”“They were. Delivery rooms used morphine and scopolamine back then, which caused amnesia in the mother and breathing problems for the newborns.” “Hard to believe we're related, isn't it?” He means Wanda, but he quickly realizes that he could be talking about Erik too.Frank looks at him carefully and says, “Not at all. You just can't see the forest for the trees,” and then he raises his glass and drinks.
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Peter and Wanda probably have more bad days together than good, at least in the beginning, but they get better. Peter gets better. He puts on ten pounds by Easter and the professor finally lifts Peter's suspension and he's back on the team, fit and healthy and fast. Wanda slowly comes to terms with her power. She learns how to use chaos to her advantage. Peter never does win a fight with her, and he's fine with that. He takes her to meet Lindy, and when he falls out of speed and sets Wanda on her feet in front of Lindy's dorm, Wanda tries to stand on her own and falls on her ass because she can't stop laughing. They visit Mom's grave. Wanda says she feels a little weird about it, and she feels even weirder when she's the first one to start crying.In late May Frank surprises Peter by calling the mansion and saying that he'd like to come for a visit. He says his wife saw Peter on the news and she talked him into doing some pro-bono dental work at the school and Peter tells him he'd better bring his scaler because there are some kids at the school with serious tarter buildup. He's sort of afraid that Frank with have a heart attack when he sees Wanda but Lindy's warned him already how closely she resembles Mom. Frank doesn't have a heart attack. He also doesn't follow through on his promise to poison Erik over drinks, but after a couple glasses of Scotch with the professor he does give Wanda a hug and tell her that she's beautiful and Wanda blushes like that's the first time she's ever heard it. Then Frank embarrasses them both telling Wanda to look after her brother and Peter's like “Hey,” and Frank tells him to shut up and points at him and says, “You need it.”By July Wanda's human family has accepted her new circumstances enough that they expect regular updates and they call the school to check on her whenever they see a frightening headline in the news about mutants. Peter speaks to them a handful of times because he's pretty quick to answer phones just in general. Her folks seem nice, but in a nervous, overprotective kind of way, so Peter makes it a point to tell them about some of the boring-ass, hum-drum, day-to-day shit that goes on at the mansion, like finals and spring cleaning and driving lessons and how the professor had to get after the kids to stop feeding the geese because they were crapping all over everything. He thinks maybe that will help them not to worry and not to treat every phone call as if Wanda's joined the military and she's stationed overseas in a war zone and they're talking to her on a hand-crank radio in a fox hole and every conversation that they have with her might be their last. “They're retired and they have way too much time on their hands,” Wanda says. Peter can relate. Still, he's a little surprised when he's eavesdropping, not very subtly, on Wanda's conversation with her folks and they invite her to visit and bring Peter along. They even offer to fork over for the plane tickets and Peter's like, “We don't need plane tickets,” because he can just run them both to Arizona but her parents want them to stay for a long weekend and that means a couple changes of clothes and Wanda tells him that she does not travel light. Peter's really not sure about this and he notices that Erik didn't get an invitation and he thinks he should probably stay put just out of solidarity but Erik and the professor both tell him to go and “foster positive relations between mutants and humankind” and Peter would rather foster positive relations between himself and Lindy's (now former) physics professor but he's like “Ugh, fine,” and he goes. Summer is still in full swing and it's hot as balls in Arizona but it's not so bad because Wanda's folks live in a big, fancy house with air conditioning in Scottsdale. It's no X-mansion, but there's a pool and a guest house and it's big enough that they can have their whole family, including all four of their kids and their families over at once and not run out of beds and that's good because it turns out that they've invited their whole family, which includes all of Wanda's brothers and their wives and kids and that's, like, twelve guests including Peter and Wanda. There's no better ice-breaker than kids. Wanda's mom and dad have just gotten through introducing Peter around and Peter's barely had a chance to forget half of the names he just learned when some nine-year-old with ginger hair down to her butt elbows her way through the mob of adults and plants herself right in front of Peter and demands, “Do something fast!” before the adults have a chance to intervene and Peter sort of glances around for permission but everybody's gotten shy all of a sudden because they probably secretly want to see his power too and so he asks, “Like what?” and she says “Braid my hair!” and she is so lucky that Peter grew up with a younger sister. One enormous fishtail later Peter's reputation as the cool mutant uncle is established. He spends the rest of the weekend cementing it by doing quadruple back flips off of the diving board into the Eisenhardts' pool.Peter was worried that meeting Wanda's family would mean answering a lot of awkward questions about Mom's death and Erik's checkered past but it seems like the Eisendardt clan has less interest in dredging up the past than they do just assuring Wanda that she's still part of the family and getting to know Wanda's twin, which means barbecuing by the pool and playing board games with the kids and falling asleep in front of the television and doing normal end-of-summer family reunion-type things... also skydiving. Peter ferrets out that Wanda's second-oldest brother is the pilot inside of ten seconds of meeting him and begs him to take him skydiving within twenty seconds and he's as excited about taking Peter skydiving as Peter is to go. They spend the rest of the weekend trying to convince Wanda to join them but she's like, “No, I'll probably make it so that your chute won't open!” and Peter's like, “That's fine, I think I can survive a thirteen thousand foot fall,” which he's not, really, but he knows he's got a better shot than anyone else in the room. Wanda's more horrified than convinced but Peter keeps at her. “You can keep your powers in check when it matters,” he tells her. “Otherwise you would have given me a brain hemorrhage weeks ago,” and she admits that's probably true.Peter doesn't totally escape a weekend with the Eisenhardts without touching on some heavy topics. Wanda's oldest brother is a geneticist with the University of Chicago and after dinner one night, when the kids are all tucked into bed and everybody but Peter has had at least one drink he wants to talk about the genetic implications of Mom's cancer as far as Peter and Wanda are concerned and Peter wants to curl up into a ball and stick his fingers in his ears. Instead he sits with his feet propped on the ottoman in the family room, clutching a beer he'll never finish, and listens to Wanda's oldest brother tell him that after mutants emerged into mainstream society genetics took center stage in the science community and the resulting interest led to several advances in medicine that had nothing to do with mutants. “I don't want to scare you,” is how Wanda's brother prefaces his next statement, which Peter thinks is about the dumbest thing anybody can say when they don't want to scare someone, but he says that Peter and Wanda should both get tested for BRCA gene mutations because they're associated with an increased risk of developing some types of cancer and Peter raises his beer and says, “On it,” because Hank's tested him for everything under the sun at this point and he's actually heard this speech, or part of it, before. He tells the Eisenhardts how he tested positive and Lindy tested negative, although Peter had to bring some of her spit back to the mansion for Hank because it turns out that genetic testing isn't something that they handle at the student health center. “Hank tested you, too, right?” Peter asks Wanda. Peter would be shocked if he hadn't. He and Wanda are Hank's two favorite lab rats, and Erik would be too if Hank could get him to sit still for more blood draws. Wanda says, “Hank didn't tell me you tested positive.” Oh. Well. It's not like there was a ton Hank could do with that information, except maybe screen him more often, and he does, so Peter waves her off, “It's like a five percent greater chance of getting cancer or something,” and he hopes he's doing a good job hiding how terrified he is of going out the way that Mom did. He must exude some kind of vibe, though because Wanda's mom hooks a hand around his bicep and pats his knee reassuringly. It gives him the chills.Peter and Wanda save their skydiving adventure for the last day of their trip. There's a school about an hour outside of town and Wanda's brother knows a couple of the instructors there, so he gets them in no problem. Peter really wants to jump tandem with Wanda but since it's his first time he has to settle for jumping with an instructor while Wanda jumps with her brother. Peter thought he was pale but Wanda is white as a ghost during takeoff and she keeps a grip on Peter with one hand and her brother with the other until it's time to jump. Falling through the air at a hundred and twenty miles per hour is (for Peter) a lot like going for a light jog but being surrounded on all sides by open sky and it is freaking amazing. Peter lands safely and he's grinning ear-to-ear when he runs up to Wanda, who's been unhooked from her harness and is sitting on her heels in the dirt and Peter pulls her to her feet even though her knees are shaking and her body is shaking because she's sort of laughing and crying all at once like she's so overwhelmed she can't decide between emotions but then his smile infects her and she pulls him down into a hug. Peter thinks that's when it happens, that's when she lets a little thread of her power escape and he feels, well, not much, maybe a little jolt, like the world just rotated five degrees to the left but it's gone as quick as it comes and nothing seems different so he forgets about it right away. Wanda's parents make her promise to come back for Thanksgiving and to bring Lindy this time. It's on the tip of Peter's tongue to make a joke about Erik coming too but he doesn't want to push things. Wanda's brothers sucked him right into their circle, no problem but Wanda's folks seemed reserved, like they weren't just trying to get to know Peter, they were trying to get to know Wanda too.“My parents and I never talked much about my 'gifts'. They were more comfortable when I didn't bring them up at all, but now that I'm where I am, doing what I'm doing, they can't ignore it anymore. They love me. They're trying, but it's hard for them. You help.”“By eating them out of house and home?” They hosted twelve guests this weekend, including Peter, who basically constituted another five guests on his own. The Eisenhardts' pantry didn't stand a chance.“They were warned,” she tells him. Her exact warning had been, 'He eats a lot and he's a little off,' but Peter forgives her because she's didn't say anything that wasn't true. “You are a hero, even if you don't think so. They knew who you were before they knew you were my twin. I knew too. It just took me a while to see it.”Erik is there to pick them up from JFK in the professor's Shelby. He's parked casually in the white zone, leaning on the passenger-side door while two airport cops stand a couple of car-lengths away, each trying to convince the other to approach Erik and remind him that “the white zone is for loading and unloading of passengers only – NO PARKING,” but it doesn't look like that's going to happen because Erik's flat-front khakis, casually rolled-up sleeves and sunglasses don't do anything to hide the fact that he's Magneto and Magneto is as subtle as an air horn in the face at four in the morning on a Sunday. Erik is pretending to be oblivious to the cops when Peter knows he's anything but until he sees Wanda and Peter and he smiles a genuinely happy smile and forgets all about the cops and hugs his kids like any normal person waiting brazenly in the no-parking zone for a relative at the airport and Peter waves to the cops like, “Thanks, guys!” and they wave back like they were totally doing Erik a favor this whole time.Erik hugs them, but not too hard because, “It looks like the two of you got some sun.” After a summer in Westchester and a few days baking by the pool in Scottsdale Wanda's all brown skin and blond highlights while Peter is all pink and peeling because he burns no matter how much sunscreen he uses, which is fine because summer will be at an end soon enough and he can go back to hiding indoors like a naked mole-rat.Peter begs Erik to let him drive the Shelby back to the mansion because the professor has only ever let Peter drive the van and there's been absolutely no talk of teaching Peter to fly the jet. None, and Peter can't exactly blame the guy after Frank told him what Peter did to Frank's Pontiac back in seventy-two. It's a no-go. Erik just smiles at him and Peter rolls his eyes and lets Wanda take shotgun while he sprawls across the back seat and falls asleep before they even leave the airport.Wanda doesn't just comes back from Arizona with a tan. She comes back validated, like she has a renewed sense of purpose and confidence that she never had before. She even starts to enjoy using her powers. The professor tries to hold her back, but sometimes she comes knocking on Peter's door in the middle of the night so that he can watch her practice small things like making coins land wrong-side up. Peter's pretty sure that the professor knows about these little practice sessions but as long as nothing goes wrong he doesn't interfere.Nothing goes wrong, but something goes right, it just takes a while for anyone to notice. Hank likes to put the X-Men through full physicals at least every six months. In Peter's case, every three months, which Peter's gotten used to by now. What he isn't used to is Hank calling him back in to repeat blood work, and at first Peter's a little nervous but Hank says it's nothing to worry about even though his expression says that Hank couldn't be more concerned if someone had replaced Peter's blood with Kool-Aid so Peter tries to go about his day while he waits an interminably long time for Hank to run his blood work again only to have Hank insist upon a third draw and Peter's like, “Jesus, Hank!” and refuses to get stuck again unless Hank tells him what's up and Hank sighs and calls the professor down to the lab because he Has News and he doesn't know what to make of it and Peter's like, “Shit, it's cancer, isn't it?” and Hank's like, “No, the opposite.” And, huh?“I've been looking at samples of your blood for over a year. I'd like to think I know what's normal for you and that I didn't just make a mistake six or seven times. Peter, your BRCA gene mutation seems to have spontaneously repaired itself, which should, theoretically, lower your chances of developing cancer later in life. I'd like another blood draw to confirm the results because I've never known this to happen and the implications could be far-reaching,” and Peter wants to know: far-reaching as in new developments for cancer research and treatments or far-reaching as in he might wake up human one day, and Hank just says, “I don't know.”Hank's gotten his third (and final!) draw by the time the professor rolls in and he reiterates what Hank just said about the implications and how they just don't know yet but he also adds, “For now this is good news,” and he pats Peter's knee and says, “We'll get to the bottom of this,” and that's when everything falls into place and Peter realizes that he's a total dumbass.“Wanda,” he says, and that's all it takes for the professor to connect the dots. Hank needs a little more clarification, so Peter explains how he told Wanda about his test results while they were in Arizona. “I thought I felt her do something. I just didn't know what it was.”Then Hank is even more interested in the implications of Peter's test results, not because of Peter but because of Wanda. “This is a very precise use of her power.” He has trouble believing that Wanda is at the root of all this because, “I've never seen her exhibit this level of control before.”“Perhaps because she lacked the right motivation,” the professor suggests, and Peter's pulled right back to that bright desert morning when he helped Wanda up and she'd looked at him like it was Christmas morning and he'd given her something spectacular and maybe she gave him a gift in return. She healed something inside him, something he'd thought would always be broken, something he'd thought would kill him one day. It's a breakthrough, not just for Wanda but for Peter too. Wanda's powers aren't good or bad. It's just... chaos. She possesses the ability to make the very unlikely likely and the impossible possible. Once she sees that for herself, the world starts to open up for her, but sometimes it takes Peter or the professor or Erik or Scott or Ororo or one of the other X-Men to help her walk through.“It's good that she fears her powers,” Erik says one day. They're out in the garage, wasting a perfectly good late summer day checking fluids, rotating tires and doing other routine maintenance on a dozen or so of the professors' cars. Peter could have done it himself but he tends to get bored by the routine and the professor still hasn't forgiven him for forgetting to refill the oil in the Stingray after changing it. But anyway, cars are made of metal and Erik likes working around them so he's sort of the brains of the operation while Peter does most of the work, although Peter's speed is somewhat limited by the available power tools. Still, he'd make a hell of a pit mechanic.Wait, what did Erik just say? “She's not afraid,” Peter points out, and it's true, she's not. Peter doesn't think she ever was. Other people, sure, but not Wanda. She just didn't like her powers. Now that she sees that there's more to them than mayhem she's opening up, she's just just doing it cautiously. Wanda's no Jean. Jean now, she's afraid of her powers.“No, she isn't. Not anymore,” Erik says, laying that one at Peter's feet. Peter has no idea what to do with it. “She respects her powers, I should say.”“I told Scott she'd be an X-Man someday,” Peter admits.Erik looks up at him from under the hood of the Professor's Sunbeam Alpine and smiles the most serene, sad smile Peter's ever seen on the man's face. It's grief and acceptance and disappointment and satisfaction and Peter feels like the blood in his face is draining into his Nikes. “She'll be wonderful.”“You're not going to stick around,” Peter says.Erik takes way, way, way too long to answer. Peter could have changed, like, eighteen tires in the time it takes him to say, “There is much to be done for our kind out in the world.”“I know. That's what we're doing, as X-Men.”“I'm no X-Man, Peter. Charles and I knew when we made this arrangement that it could never last. We disagree on too many levels. I feel it's better to walk away and remain friends than to stay and jeopardize what we've built.”Peter frowns and nods like, sure, of course, makes perfect sense, while he chokes on the lump in his throat. And it does make perfect sense. He knew this was coming, just like he'd known for a while that Mom was dying but now that it's happening he can't help but wish that he had more time.“Of course... you could come with me,” Erik suggests. “You and Wanda.”Peter feels like time is standing still, and to be fair, for him it is... almost. He's looking at his dad, studying his face, and he sees hope and apprehension masked by his calm, cool, everything-is-going-as-I-intended expression. He can't hide what he's thinking from Peter: He can't stay here forever and he wants his kids with him when he goes. He wants his family.Peter wants his family too.“You don't need to answer right away- ”“When do we leave?”There's a pause while Erik reorganizes his thoughts, shifts into a different gear to catch up with Peter.“I'm in no hurry. I thought I would stay until after the holidays, give Charles a chance to recruit a new teacher. I haven't made a firm date. I thought perhaps you and your sister might take some convincing.”“What's your plan?” Peter asks, trying not to let on how afraid he is of the answer.Erik's face grows very still, very focused, and very dangerous. He says, in a controlled voice, “The people responsible for the actual mutant kidnappings may have been captured or killed, but the roots of that evil go far deeper. Individuals, organizations, even entire countries stand to benefit from the murder and dissection of our people.” Peter can't pretend he hasn't caught the tail end of an argument or two between Erik and the professor about just this subject. “Charles knows that these people exist, but they're too important, too rich, and command too much influence and respect for Charles to risk his school and his students trying to bring them down. This would be better handled by the CIA, but the United States government is run by cowards, fearful of jeopardizing their political interests.“Charles and I have one very important thing in common: we both want to make a difference in the lives of mutants, however I prefer to strike out into the world to do it rather than sit behind a desk and wait for the perfect conditions while the world decides our fate.”In the professor's defense Peter doesn't think he has much choice about 'sitting behind a desk' but somehow he doesn't think Erik will appreciate the observation.“Do you agree?”Peter thinks about it, but not for very long, because he remembers Bobby and Tilda and Kid Peter curled up in the back of a truck in their dirty pajamas, because he can still feel the darts in his own skin, because he still remembers the fingerprints around his dad's neck, because of Calvin, and because he can close his eyes and still see the piles and piles of corpses in that basement in Mexico. “I was made to move,” he says, then adds, “Not to mention, you could use someone to watch your back so you don't get captured again because if you don't mind me saying so, you have a lousy track record.”Erik doesn't disagree.Wanda takes a little more convincing. She's only just getting comfortable in her mutant skin and Scott's been making overtures to the professor about adding her to the team at some point. Peter feels like he's pulling the rug out from under her when he brings up Erik's plan.“You don't call him 'Dad',” she observes.They're sitting together on the rug in Peter's room and she's peeling the cellophane off of the Rubber Soul LP that she picked up in town.“Neither do you.”“Yeah, but you've known him longer than I have, and I still have a dad. My parents are my parents. They raised me.”“Am I your brother then? Or just some weird guy you like to punch sometimes?”She punches him, not very hard. “You're not my brother, you're my twin. And you're weird, yes, but it's a good weird. What about Frank? Did you ever call him 'Dad'?”“Nope, just Frank,” and other things, none of them 'Dad'.“What does Lindy think?”“I haven't talked to her about it. I don't imagine that it matters too much. It's not like anyplace is far away for me.”“Do you think he's alright? Our dad? You don't think he'd do anything like he did before?”She's looking for a certain answer but Peter just doesn't have it, not for sure but, “I think he needs us. I think he's a lot more likely to do something stupid if we're not there, and I think it has to be us.” Wanda doesn't say anything right away. She crumples the cellophane from the LP into a ball and tosses it toward the trash, misses, and leaves it there while she puts the record on. She skips past I've Just Seen A Face and sets the needle down on Norwegian Wood and they listen to John Lennon and Paul McCartney sing about drinking wine with a girl and then burning her room down when she has to work early the next day; psychos, but the tune is nice. They listen for a while longer, and Peter flips the record so quickly that it's like there's only one side. In My Life hits him harder than he wants.Wanda slides an arm around him and he pulls her head onto his shoulder. “We stay together,” she says.“We stay together,” he agrees.The mutants at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters have mixed reactions to the news that the Lehnsherr clan will be leaving. The professor is very stoic, very professional, and that figures because nobody else is able to really understand the situation on all levels like he does. The only one who comes close is Raven, and she and Xavier agree that Erik's departure is for the best, and Peter and Wanda are the only ones who can keep him out of trouble, although the two of them seem pretty cautious in their optimism.“You can always come back,” the professor assures them. “Always. Remember that.”The rest of the X-Men follow the professor's lead, all except Hank and Scott. Hank echoes Scott's earlier sentiment, “I don't trust him and I don't think you should go.” He's been pacing and agitated since he heard the news. “Frankly I'm worried that if you leave with him, we'll never see you again.”“Pffft, as if. I'm totally going to come back every once in a while just to hide your lesson plan and put all of your microscope slides in the wrong order.”Scott's a little more direct. “Don't leave,” is what he says. “There's so much more good you can do here.”Scott's not wrong. Peter could keep this up forever, or until he hits forty and blows out a knee and has to hobble everywhere at a sluggish eighty miles an hour, but he's also pretty sure that he can do great things out in the field with his dad. He's going to miss the kids, no question, but Scott's all poised to take over as their gym teacher and Peter's never had the patience it takes to stick with one job for very long. He knows he's going to miss the team, and it's a weird kind of feeling, like he'll be leaving behind something he's struggled with, and that's a relief, but he also knows on some level that that struggle was good for him.“Hey, if it doesn't work out I'll come back,” he tells Scott, and although Scott is usually tough for him to read, Peter can tell he's got the same fears as Hank. “It'll be fine.” That doesn't do the trick.“Promise me something,” Scott says, serious as a heart attack.“What?”“Promise me that if things go wrong, you'll run away.”“I'm taking off to find mutant killers with my long-lost twin and my dad, who may have been on America's most wanted list for more years than I've been alive. What could go wrong?”Peter's not trying to put anyone at ease. Later, much later, he'll look back at this moment, and at the least few months and realize that everyone could see where this would inevitably lead, but right now, it feels right.Once the word is out that the Lehnsherr clan will be leaving the school time seems to speed up, even for Peter. He and Wanda celebrate their twenty-eighth birthday at the beginning of September with a barbecue and a picnic and lawn games and two similar but not identical cakes. Peter even invites Lindy up for the weekend and uses the opportunity to tell her his plans, and she looks at him the same way she looked at him when he told her the doctors had taken Mom off of chemo, but she doesn't say anything right away. About a week later Frank calls the mansion and asks for Peter and Peter picks up in the hallway outside of the second level bedrooms and listens to Frank tell him without hesitation that Peter should think carefully about his life choices. That's when Peter explodes, “What am I doing here that's so important?! Teaching basketball to teenagers? Babysitting political rallies? Diffusing bombs that might kill twenty mutants while people who bought and sold mutants like furniture and butchered them like animals and sold their body parts for medical research walk around like nothing happened?! What do you know about anything? You think because you had a mutant stepson that you know what it's like to be one of us? What it's like to be hunted? What it's like to know that there are people in power who can come for the kids, for Wanda, for some mutant postman on his route or a mutant legal aid on the way to work at any time and that all of the good will and shows of faith in the world aren't going to stop them if they can profit from mutants dying?! If someone doesn't stand up and make them pay, it will never change. If we want it to change we have to do something about it and I'm tired of standing still and doing nothing and knowing that these things happened and will keep happening if someone doesn't fight back!” The hallway is dead silent when he finishes, but not because he's alone. A couple of kids are hanging out a the end of the hall, faces tilted down like they're looking a the books in their arms but they're not looking at anything at all. A couple of doors are cracked and Peter can hear soft noises coming from their rooms, and he knows he's crossed a line, but he can't say that he's sorry. He can't make himself want to take it back, because this is what's going on inside of him. This is something he's wrestled with for a long time. He might not be able to make any difference at all he has to know. He has to find out for himself. It's as strong a need in him as thirst, and admitting it out loud only makes it easier for him to leave. There's a long stretch of silence on the other end of the line, Frank composing himself so that he doesn't react on Peter's level, just like he did when Peter was a kid, and he says, “Your father must feel very strongly about this,” and damned if Frank isn't right on the money because Peter was listening to himself and it's Erik's words coming out of his mouth, but that doesn't mean they're not his too.Peter hangs up, and the next few days at the mansion are strained because probably a dozen people overheard his meltdown and word travels fast and apparently the school is more divided on the subject of how best to protect mutantkind than Peter thought because Xavier has to break up two fights and end a civics class early because it deteriorates into a shouting match that makes a few of the younger kids cry. In the weeks leading up to Christmas Peter, Erik, and Wanda are approached by five or six teens who want to go with them when they leave, and one of them is Calvin, but even Erik won't poach minors from a school, which leaves Xavier with a handful of teenagers that are even more angsty and disgruntled than usual and he does a great job of handling them but still, Peter can tell that the professor is both annoyed with him for rocking the boat and weirdly okay with it, like it was something he expected from Peter eventually. Peter's sorry for causing trouble but at the same time he's angry at no one in particular because why can't this be easy? “Your feelings are valid, Peter,” the professor assures him, out of the blue one day, “You have a right to express them, and it serves you not at all to keep them locked away. Besides,” he adds, “You're not the first rabble-rouser to darken my door, and you won't be the last.”Peter's relieved enough to say, “Sorry anyway,” even though he had no intention of ever apologizing before the professor decided to let him off the hook. “What are you going to do with the kids?”“We'll move forward, as we've done all along. Some of the children will rejoin the world once they've graduated from this school. Some will remain. Others will choose their own path, as you've done.”There's something in the inflection of Xavier's voice that tells Peter that the professor doesn't think he's chosen his own path at all, and maybe that's a fair read of the situation. Maybe Peter's not cut out to forge his own way. Maybe that's why he stayed in Mom's basement all those years, adrift in his own life, maybe he's been looking for someone to follow. He's never been much of a leader.It's not very surprising that Frank doesn't invite Peter to spend Christmas at his place that year. Peter thinks he would have sat it out anyway. “He still loves you,” Lindy tells him when he visits her at school. He's lying on the floor or her dorm room, staring a the boxes and dust bunnies under her bed. He's not supposed to be there, strictly speaking, but it's not like the RA is ever going to catch him. “He's just disappointed with your choices.”Peter gets that, but there's no one choice he can make that's going to satisfy everybody, so he's going to have to get out there and do the best he can, even if it's nowhere near good enough.Lindy comes back from North Carolina in time to spend the New Year's Eve with Peter and Wanda, and Peter takes them to Times Square to watch the ball drop. They've worked their way into the thickest part of the crowd and people press in on all sides, waving flags and banners and holding bottles of Heineken, his sisters on either side of him like bookends and even though it's close to freezing outside it's the warmest memory he has of the three of them together.Peter, Wanda, and Erik leave the mansion on a snowy morning in mid January while most of the school is still asleep. The kids all shed their tears over their pork chops and mashed potatoes last night. Some of the smaller rug rats give them little going away presents: drawings of Erik and Peter and Wanda, little cutout paper magnets, sheets of paper that have been folded in half to read like farewell cards, rocks because kids love rocks. Erik makes a big deal about every gift and praises the kids for their efforts. Peter's said his goodbyes and stripped the sheets off of his bed, folded the blankets and placed them in the closet. Peter doesn't own much to begin with. Erik has said that they should travel light, and Peter doesn't know if he'll ever need his records or his books again, so he lets the kids take their pick. Once he's foisted off or donated most of his earthly possessions he's left with not much aside from his clothes and shoes and Walkman and a few photographs and personal documents. He doesn't trust himself with the last two things so he sandwiches the papers between the pages of Peter and Wendy and runs them over to Lindy for safe keeping. She doesn't want him to go. She doesn't say it out loud but she hugs him a lot and punches him more. Then she tells him she loves him and tells him not to do anything stupid but she's decades too late for that advice to do any good.The professor and all of the X-Men are there to see them off in the morning, with the notable absence of Scott and Hank. Peter said his goodbyes to Scott last night over a forbidden six pack of beer while they listened to Songs From the Big Chair and talked about video games and TV and girls and nonsense until Scott hit his fifth beer and got all quiet for a while until he worked up the courage to say, “You let me down, you know? I thought we were friends,” and Peter kind of looks at him for a second because he's not used to being called anybody's friend. Sure, he has people he knows and teammates and other kinds of people that he hangs out with, like Wanda and Lindy and Hank and the rest of the X-Men. He's never really thought of himself as somebody's friend.Xavier has gifted Erik with his choice of vehicle, although Peter thinks they both view it as a kind of extended loan, unless Erik has some car trouble and by car trouble Peter means unless they get into a sticky situation and Erik feels the need to crumple up the car like a wad of paper and hurl it at something, then it's a gift. It's not like Erik even needs a car to get around when he's got Peter, but Peter appreciates how some people might not want to travel at two hundred plus miles per hour in a snowstorm, so the car is a nice gesture. Anyway, he hopes Erik picked one with a working heater. Canada is fucking cold this time of year.“Perhaps one day I'll be able to persuade you to stay,” Xavier says, shaking Erik's hand.“That will be the day that I don't need persuading,” Erik replies. There's a pause, just barely there, and his eyes flick over to Peter, then, “Thank you,” he says sincerely. There's a lot of feeling behind the words, so much that the professor's eyes start to water, but Peter tries not to dwell on that as they pull away from the mansion with Erik behind the wheel, Wanda riding shotgun, and Peter drowsing in the back seat.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
In early, early spring Frank calls the school and tells Peter that he's decided to take him up on his invitation to come visit.“My wife talked me into it,” Frank explains. Dawn saw Peter on the evening news playing jump rope with some kids in Brooklyn after the X-Men diffused a hostage situation. After that she wouldn't get off Frank's case until he agreed to go upstate for a little pro bono dental work.“Well, bring your scaler because there are some kids here with serious tartar buildup,” Peter tells him. He gets permission from the professor (who is delighted) and together they decide on the dates for Frank's arrival and departure and just like that it's a done deal. Peter calls Lindy and invites her up to visit on the same weekend so that Frank doesn't have to be the only human at a school full of mutants. Frank drives in on a Friday evening and Peter's already got Lindy stashed somewhere as a surprise. The real surprise (for Peter) is how patient Frank is with the kids. Frank isn't a childrens' dentist and he never struck Peter as the type of person who would be comfortable around kids, especially mutant kids but he doesn't even flinch when Bobby sneezes ice crystals all over his food at dinner. In fact he seems genuinely interested in the students and the school and when Peter takes a step back and sees the place through Frank's eyes, yeah, he can see how it's pretty interesting. Since Frank and Hank already know each other and since Hank is basically the school nurse it's no surprise that he gets roped into being Frank's dental assistant for the weekend. Hank's spent the entire week enthusiastically setting up a temporary dental office in a small ground floor room overlooking the gardens, which are just beginning to bloom.Frank spends most of Saturday cleaning teeth and fangs and the occasional tusk and schedules a few fillings and a root canal for Sunday. When Frank isn't polishing or drilling he stays busy talking cars with Xavier or medicine with Hank. That leaves Peter and Lindy plenty of time to catch up. He shows her the grounds and takes her on a run through the surrounding area and to New Salem and back. She tolerates his speed better than anyone Peter's ever met, maybe because she grew up with him. It reminds him that she handles roller-coasters like a champ and he suggests a little trip to Coney Island while the kids are getting their fillings. Lindy is incredibly popular with the youngsters at Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. The mutant kids don't exactly see many fresh faces and when just about everybody with whom you regularly socialize is a fellow mutant, humans are something of a novelty, so he's not surprised when Kurt and Jubilee ask to tag along. Peter can speed with two people, max, without hurting somebody, so this means that they'll need a car and the professor grudgingly agrees to let them borrow one on the condition that Lindy or Jubilee or really anybody but Peter does the driving. “It's not that I don't trust you...” he says.“Frank told you about driver's ed,” Peter surmises. “Dude, that was soooo long ago.”“I would never have given you the keys to the rental car if I had known what you did to to Frank's Pontiac.” “Fair enough.”Jubilee drives. Kurt rides shotgun. Lindy and Peter stretch out in the back seat. Jubilee is as chatty as ever and she and Lindy gossip back and forth over the seat backs while Peter keeps his eyes on the road. Kurt is strangely silent during the ride and it doesn't take a genius to figure out he's got a crush on Lindy. Half the boys at the school have a crush on Lindy and Peter thought it was funny at first but since it's Kurt he's torn between an awkward kind of pride in the little blue devil and the instinct to grab him by the tail and fling him into the ocean for looking at his baby sister that way. Instead of exploring either of those options he just decides to sit back and let Lindy enjoy herself.It becomes clear pretty early on in the day that Jubilee has cottoned on to what's happening and designated herself as Kurt's wing man. She makes sure that Lindy and Kurt get paired up to ride the Cyclone and the Enterprise, after which Kurt starts to look a little less blue and a little more turquoise, so they spend some time wandering, visiting shops and playing carnival games and occasionally being gawked at by humans.Peter doesn't usually have a tough time blending in with the humans when he's out and about, at least at first glance, but since Kurt is part of their group it doesn't take much of a leap for most humans to figure out that Peter's a mutant too. Not that he cares. Most of the humans don't really care that much themselves; it's just that mutants aren't all that common, and even less so mutants that look as different as Kurt, so yeah, they get some stares while they're out. No big deal. Lindy's the only one who seems to be having less and less fun as the day goes on. A group of six dumbass teenagers has been following them at a not-so-discreet distance since their third trip on the Cyclone. Peter knows that both Kurt and Jubilee have noticed them from the way they form up protectively around Lindy. Ordinarily he would relish the chance to mess with the teenagers but he's also mindful of the effort that professor's put into projecting a positive image of mutantkind and Peter's not about to casually destroy it by harassing some punk kids and ruining Lindy's weekend so, “What do you say we hit up Times Square on the way back, get some food that's not cotton candy or ice cream?”Kurt is pretty eager to take him up on his offer, probably because he's been trying to keep pace with Lindy and her enthusiasm for roller coasters, even though Peter has sat out the last two rides with Jubilee so that she wouldn't be alone while she tried to recover her balance.“Yeah, let's go,” Lindy says, and Peter's bummed because he knows if she were by herself or just with Peter or with some of her college pals she would ride the Cyclone until the park closed for the night. They angle for the exit. Peter's walking point, keeping an eye out for security guards, who always seem to lay into the mutants first if there's trouble, so when one of the kids launches a half-full cherry slushie between Lindy's shoulder blades and bright red sugar-water explodes against the back of her pink denim jacket, he reacts too late. Peter turns and looks from Lindy, who's just registering the attack, her curly hair swinging forward and her lips parting in shock, to the punk kids, one of whom still has his arm outstretched and a shit-eating grin on his face. The kid next to him is also grinning ear-to-ear. He's got a slushie too, an orange one, but he doesn't look like he's gotten any bright ideas about tossing it. The other four are hanging back, like they were smart enough to realize their pals might be going too far. So, Peter wanders over and plucks the drink from Orange Slushie's hand, smells it, then finds a half-full flask of vodka in Cherry Slushie's back pocket. Peter roots through their jackets until he finds a couple of learner's permits, which tell him that Cherry Slushie's real name is Dave Bliss and Orange Slushie's name is Chad McMasters. Then Peter drapes his right arm casually over Dave's shoulders and his left arm over Chad's and waits for time to catch up to him.“Here's what's going to happen,” Peter tells Dave when he knows he's got his attention.“Oh, shit,” Peter hears from somewhere behind him, followed by the sounds of four teenagers hustling for cover.“You see that girl, Dave?” Peter points at Lindy.Dave and Chad try to struggle free but Peter can do the iron cross all day. These dipshits are going nowhere. He gives Dave an encouraging little shake. “You see her. You threw your drink at her, so I know you saw her.”Now Lindy and Kurt and Jubilee have turned around. Lindy's shaking red drops from her cuffs and when she looks for Peter and finds him she does her own 'oh shit' face and forgets about her cuffs. Kurt's fangs are bared and there are sparks between Jubilee's fingers but Peter holds up a hand. He's got this. He tells Dave, “You're going to go over there and you're going to apologize to her. You're going to say it like you mean it. Then you're going to give her your jacket, because you ruined hers, and if you don't- ” he snaps his right hand open like a magician doing a card trick, revealing the two learners' permits he stole from their wallets, “-I know where you live.”Peter gives Dave a little nudge and off he goes, already shucking his members only jacket while Peter hangs onto Chad for insurance. Kurt growls at Dave when he gets close and Dave gives him a wide berth while he offers Lindy his jacket with a trembling hand and a mumbled apology.Once the exchange is complete Peter lets go of Chad and rejoins Lindy and Kurt and Jubilee. As he passes Dave he tosses the kid's flask into the air, leaving him fumbling to catch it. He keeps the learner's permits.“Are you okay?” Kurt asks Lindy as she shrugs into her new jacket. She nods but Peter knows her better and knows that she hates conflict and that's the reason Peter didn't give Dave a wedgie that he would remember for the rest of his life. To Peter, she says, “You sounded just like your dad back there.”It's been easy to forget, because Peter was unconscious for most of it, that Lindy spent a couple of weeks sharing a roof with Erik Lehnsherr. He has no idea what they talked about, and he hasn't asked, but he knows they talked.“Maybe the apple didn't fall that far from the tree after all,” he admits, because if there's anything in the world that could drive him to kill, it's the thought of harm coming to his baby sister. He kisses her on the head. “This jacket smells like B.O.” Lindy says, wrinkling her nose.Dave's jacket goes in a garbage can in the parking lot and Lindy is already wearing Kurt's jacket before Peter can offer his own. Having Jubilee around is great because she's like WD-40 for awkward social situations. Over pizza she ropes Peter into an animated discussion about popular music in general and the current music scene in New York and gets him excited about visiting a few underground clubs and seeing some shows in the city. While the two of them are talking way too loud and too fast Kurt and Lindy alternate between quietly chewing their food and looking worriedly at the owner like they're afraid they're all going to get the boot. Nobody gets the boot and on their way back to the car Jubilee grabs Peter by the elbow and points excitedly to a poster for Sunday Punk matinee at CBGB and asks if Peter's on board and he's like “Hell yeah” and she's like, “We should bring Ororo too. Kurt, Lindy? Are you in?” and it's going to be a party from the sound of it and Peter gets kind of wrapped up in the feeling of being out in the city with the lights and noise and Jubilee, who's still clinging to his arm because her bright yellow jacket might be rad, but it's not weather appropriate for New York in March and her teeth are chattering. When they pile into the car Kurt takes the front seat next to Lindy and Jubilee curls up against Peter and falls asleep halfway into the drive.Nobody's mentioned Magneto since they left Coney Island, but Peter can't stop thinking about what Lindy said, and while he's staring out the window he has a lot of time, like, a lot of time to think. He thinks how Magneto has always been a part of him, even though he was wasn't there when he was growing up, even though he might not want him to be, even though he's been trying for a long time to figure out how to squeeze him in or how to shut him out it's just, like, a scar that's always going to be there, like the gash on his forehead that healed into a white seam and turns purple when he's really cold. That part of himself that is Magneto isn't going anywhere.Lindy glances over the front seat at him and then at Jubilee, who's using his arm as a pillow. “She totally likes you,” she mouths. Peter knows. It's sweet, but it's never going to work, and Jubilee's smart enough to know that, but it feels good and it's nice. He doesn't even mind that this moment seems to last forever.It's a school night, so they're back at the mansion before eleven. Peter finds Frank in the professor's study, cognac in hand, and when he sees Lindy's back safe and sound Frank thanks the professor for the night cap and for his hospitality but says that it's time he turned in. He and Lindy are leaving first thing in the morning so that Lindy won't miss her early classes.“We're in your debt, Frank. If there is anything that you need, please don't hesitate to call,” the professor says. Frank shakes Peter's hand, just in case he doesn't see him in the morning and tells Peter to keep in touch. “I will. Thanks for coming up. Really,” Peter tells him, and Frank is mellow enough from the cognac that he smiles and squeezes Peter's shoulder, which is the closest Peter's ever come to getting a hug from the man.Peter lingers in the doorway after Frank leaves, hands in his pockets.“How'd it go?” Peter asks“Very well. Sadie is still a bit woozy from the anesthetic but she'll be fine,” Xavier says. “Hank was very impressed with his technique.”“Yeah, he's top notch. I've never had a cavity, but if I did, I'd want him to fix it.”“He's very proud of you,” the professor continues.“Yeah, okay,” Peter says, face heating up like he's the one who's been drinking. “Thanks for making this awkward. Hey, uh, I'm sure you'll find out anyway, but... ” He tosses the learners permits he stole from Red and Orange Slushie onto the professor's desk and explains the incident in as few words as possible. The professor frowns and sighs. He doesn't like the X-Men using their powers to threaten or intimidate the humans unless it's necessary but whether or not it's necessary is a big ol' gray area, isn't it? Except not this time because Red Slushie, sorry, Dave, threw a drink at Lindy. That's assault. Peter knows what he's doing. And if he'd wanted to pull Dave's underwear up over his head nothing could have stopped him. The only thing stopping Peter is Peter.“Is there something on your mind?” the professor asks.“Yeah,” Peter says, but the words are stuck inside him and they won't come out. After a few beats he laughs because this is so much harder than it should be. Where's my dad? That's all he wants to ask but the words won't come, and he's about to give up when Xavier lets him off the hook with, “Would you like to speak with your father?”Peter shakes his head, “No, no, that's okay. I just... wondered if you knew where he was is all.”“He's been in your thoughts.”“Okay, coming from a telepath, that's actually pretty funny.” “You've been worried.”“No.” Yes.“I've been in contact with him. I can call him for you now, if you like.” The professor is watching Peter carefully, gauging his reaction.He's okay, then, Peter thinks with relief that he's too proud to show. “No. I was just curious.”“He would welcome a chance to speak to you.”Peter's trying as hard as he can to look anywhere but at the professor.“Peter,” Xavier says. “He would welcome it.”The professor sets his glass down, picks up a pen, and jots some numbers onto a piece of paper, which he leaves at the desk.“I'm off to bed,” he says. “My office and my telephone are at your disposal. It is morning in Erik's corner of the world, so he should be up and about. Don't fear that you'll wake him. The door is open, Peter. Whether or not you choose to walk through it is entirely up to you.” And with that said, Xavier glides past him and out into the hall.For a while Peter stands there, listening to the whirring sound of the professor's chair growing fainter and fainter as he moves off down the hall.For obvious reasons there's no chair behind the professor's desk, and that's okay because Peter doesn't want to sit.There are too many numbers on the sheet of paper for Erik to be stateside, and for the professor to have it memorized means Erik's been there for a while. Peter stares at it for way too long. The professor's half-finished cognac is still on the desk. Peter drains the glass in one swallow. His body will burn through it like it's water, but the strong drink sure is a punch in the sinuses.He dials the number and waits a million years for the call to connect to whatever the hell country he's dialing and listens to it ring for a million more until a faint voice on the other end of the line says, “Eisenhardt, guten tag.”Peter's not sure what to do with that. “Hello?” he asks.There's a silence, then, “Peter?” It's him.“Hey,” Peter says, and then his throat closes up because he's talking to his dad, which is something he thought he'd never do again. “It's good to hear your voice. How are you?” Erik asks, and it's not a polite 'how are you?' like he expects the answer to be 'fine', it's the invested kind of 'how are you?' that Peter used to get from Peggy and Mrs. Baird and the school counselor when they knew that Mom and Frank were getting a divorce, minus the intense eye-contact. “Good,” Peter says, finding his voice. “You?”“I'm well.”“That's good. I thought maybe you, uh... weren't.” And he thinks about the room full of mutant corpses that he found in Tijuana, and the heart-pounding dread as he'd pulled the sheets off and made himself look at all of their faces, fearing all the time that one of them would be his dad. Other dark possibilities had crossed his mind long before that, a bunch of dreadful what-ifs that he chose to ignore in favor of the more comfortably familiar notion that his dad had abandoned him, things he never let himself consider until he found himself ripping sheets off of bodies and swallowing bile. “I've kept in touch with Charles, or rather Charles has kept in touch with me. I'm afraid I was never very good at communicating. I would have reached out to you, but- ”“I burned your letter,” Peter confesses. “It was stupid. I was mad and I couldn't take it out on you so I did the next best thing.”“You weren't punishing me. You were punishing yourself,” Erik says, “I've been a terrible disappointment to you, and I'm sorry. I wish that things had happened differently between us.”Peter's heart sinks. He hasn't been on the phone with his father two minutes and already Erik is pushing him away. “So why did you leave?” Peter asks flatly.“I want to tell you everything, but first, there is someone that you should see. Her name is Camila Lugo. She lives in Richmond. Your mother knew her quite well when you were young. When you find her, ask her to tell you what she told me, then you'll understand why I left.”“Camila Lugo,” Peter repeats. Camila Lugo. The name sounds familiar but he'll be damned if he can place it. “Where are you?”“Europe, a small town in the mountains.” Erik tells him, “It is good to hear your voice, my son, so very good. It has always been my intention to come back, even when I thought you didn't need me, even when I thought that you wanted nothing to do with me. I will never abandon you.”“God, you sound old.”Erik laughs. “And you sound well. Charles told me how difficult things were for you after you returned to the mansion. I'm proud of you for persevering. I know that it couldn't have been easy.”“Now you sound like you're dying. Are you dying?”“Not that I'm aware of, but thank you for your concern.”“Yeah, well... you're welcome.”“There were many times that I wanted to reach out to you, but Charles thought that you needed time. He told me that if I pushed things I would only drive you away.”He's hoping that Peter will spare him his regrets. “He's not wrong. Don't tell him that. He already thinks he knows everything.”“And here I was under the impression that Charles had become less self-congratulatory with time.”“He's good at hiding it, not good enough to fool me, but still, pretty good.”They talk a while longer, mostly about the school and the mutants that they both know, and Lindy. Peter tells him about Coney Island and the Slushie incident. If he's lucky Frank won't ask about Lindy's jacket and even if he does Lindy's always been good about keeping Peter's secrets.Erik admires Peter's restraint, “You're much better at controlling your temper than I am.”“Nah, it just looks that way because I have a long time to think things over.”“A useful gift.”“Sometimes. I also have a lot of time to second guess myself, like Cairo. I was going to tell you, but then... ”“It does neither of us any good to dwell on it, Peter.”“I know,” he says, but it doesn't stop him. It's waaaay past midnight by the time Peter gets off the phone with his dad, and he wishes he had a way to play back their conversation in his head so that he could mine it for information because now that he knows Erik is out there, all he wants is to find out where, and why and-“Professor, hey, professor.” Peter's upstairs, in the professor's bedroom, leaning over his bed before he can stop himself.“Hmm... Peter, what time is it?”“Like, two o'clock or something. I talked to him.”The professor hauls himself upright in bed, flicks on the lamp and flinches at the sudden brightness. “You spoke to Erik.”“Yeah,” Peter says, then he parks himself at the foot of the bed and stares off into space, because there's just so much to process. He'd felt good while he was talking to Erik, but now that he's off the line his warm fuzzies have fled and his doubts and fears have come creeping back in, well, creeping by his standards, rushing by anyone else's. He's starved for answers about where Erik has been and what he's been doing for, like, months, man, so much so that he wants to call his dad back right now, even though a) normal people don't do that and b) they ended on a pretty good note (he thinks) but he's also not sure because his dad didn't give him any information to go by except for some lady's name and she's in Richmond and it's two in the morning there too and he can't wake up some poor lady in the middle of the night and he's already racked up an insane amount of long-distance charges tonight so he tries to comb back over his conversation with Erik in his head and figure out where he is and just maybe, you know, stop by for a visit. He said Europe but he answered the phone in German, which probably means Germany or maybe Austria unless Erik was expecting a phone call from Germany or Austria and that's why he answered the phone the way he did and he's actually somewhere in India or Czechoslovakia or South Africa for all Peter knows and there's got to be a way for him to find out and really he's in the professor's room right now to keep himself from doing something he's going to regret and maybe, just maybe, getting some answers and the professor is wearing a look like most people get when they have a headache coming on only that headache's name is Peter and the headache won't move from the foot of his bed. “Peter, you will have your answers, but you'll face them better on a good night's sleep, and so will I.”Peter's never been subjected to the full force of the professor's mental powers before, but then again he's never purposefully woken Xavier up in the middle of the night for no good reason either, so he's not totally offended when he wakes up warm and cozy and rested in his bed at six o'clock, just in time to see his sister and Frank off. Peter hugs his sister and exchanges manly handshakes with Frank and says, “Uncool,” to the professor once Frank's taillights disappear beyond the gate. The professor doesn't rise to the bait. Instead he asks, “Did Erik explain to you why he left?”“Not really,” Peer says doubtfully. “He didn't really tell me anything, he just gave me the name of a lady that my mom used to know and said to ask her.” Wow, he even sounds sulky to his own ears.“What name?” the professor asks. “Camila Lugo.” There it is again, that feeling that he knows this woman, and it's right there on the edge of his memory and he just can't access the information. He passes most of the morning in a distracted haze before he realizes that there is a copy of the Richmond White Pages stacked with the rest of the phone books under the phone in the ground floor hallway and he tries really hard not to consider the implications of that. The name doesn't click until he slides his finger down the page to her name and sees the address next to it and recognizes the street and number of his mom's old apartment building. That's when it hits him: Mrs. Lugo, Mom's Puerto Riccan neighbor, the one who used to watch him when he was a kid, the one who had, like, eight hundred kids in a two bedroom apartment and only spoke rapid-fire Spanish and snapped her fingers a lot. And what the hell? Why had Erik Lehnsherr been talking to Peter's old babysitter?“Why was Erik talking to my old babysitter?”The professor slaps his hands around in the air, trying to collect the papers that Peter has just blown off his desk with his sudden arrival. Peter catches the ones that are fluttering to the floor and sets them in a neat stack near the professor's right hand.“So you do remember her?” Xavier asks.Peter makes the tilty-hand 'more or less' gesture. It's been twenty-plus years. He probably wouldn't recognize her if he saw her.“She was at your mother's funeral. That's where she met Erik. You looked her up?” Peter nods. “Did you speak to her?”Peter shakes his head.“Are you going to speak to her?”Of course he is but “Why do you want me to talk to her so bad?”“Because I believe that it is better to hear information from the source rather than second hand.”Ughhhh. “Fine.” He's being handled. It's annoying, but he trusts the professor enough to go along with it for now.Then Xavier casually lobs a grenade into the conversation: “Erik has expressed interest in returning to the school.”Xavier's watching Peter, looking for a reaction. Peter's trying not to give him one but at the same time he knows that's pointless.Peter clears his throat. “When?” “Soon. We spoke this morning. Erik shares your lack of respect for my sleeping schedule.” Oh my God, he's telling jokes now, the self-satisfied bastard. “It was your phone call that decided him.”Peter feels anxious enough to be vaguely nauseated.With no concern for Peter's discomfort Xavier says, “I'm quite looking forward to dumping some of my class load in Erik's lap when he arrives. Hopefully he'll be a good sport.”“Wait, he's staying?”Xavier evades the question by saying, “Erik has asked permission to bring me a new student, an older mutant who never properly learned to control her powers. I would appreciate your help in getting her settled, but be aware that she has spent very little time among other mutants, and it may be difficult to earn her trust. Do you think you're up to the challenge?”“Sure,” Peter says uncertainly, because there's a deeper level to this and Peter doesn't think he's going to like the look of the basement. Then again it might just be busy-work, something to keep him from making a scene when Erik gets here. Peter does like projects, especially when he's trying not to dwell, and his father sharing a roof with him will give him plenty to dwell on. “No problem.” “You'll find that the two of you have much in common.”Peter frowns, “Are you trying to set us up?”The professor looks pained. “Hardly,” he says, “Peter, speak to Mrs. Lugo, and if you decide not to, please find time to speak to me, preferably before Erik arrives.”Peter rolls his eyes. He's not going to call Mrs. Lugo. Yes, he totally is.There's a phone in the teachers' hallway but Jubilee has the line tied up talking to someone in Mandarin, probably her grandmother. No problem. He can wait...A second later he's standing in the door to Hank's lab asking, “Can I use your phone?” Aside from the phone in Xavier's office Hank has the only other separate line, and it's mostly for emergency purposes like 'Call nine-one-one, I squirted acid in my eyes!' That kind of thing.Hank looks up from a set of slides he'd been organizing and accidentally spills them across the table. He swears, but before he's got the whole curse word out (and it's a good one) Peter has cleaned up the slides and put them back in their container (probably in the wrong order) and ushered Hank out into the hall with a “Thanks!” and shuts the door behind him.Peter calls Camila Lugo, all set to grab Domingo if he needs to, by the ankle if necessary, assuming he's stuck to the ceiling again. Sure, the kid only knows Portuguese, not Spanish, but even so it's probably head and shoulders over the twenty-five or so Spanish words that Peter remembers from high school. It turns out not to matter though, because a young-sounding girl answers and Peter thinks he has the wrong Camila or the wrong number but nope, Camila is her grandmother and who is this? There's some awkward back-and-forth while Mrs. Lugo's granddaughter tries to relay Peter's identity and his reason for calling. He's sort of nervous to talk with Mrs. Lugo, and glad that her granddaughter is there as a buffer. He's afraid that she's going to say that his mom wasn't really his mom and that he's secretly her long lost mutant Puerto Riccan son, which he guesses would explain his super dark brown eyes and her disappointment that he never managed to pick more than a dozen words of Spanish while he was practically living at her house. Eventually the granddaughter comes back on the line she says, “She wants to know when you can come.” Today, he thinks, but then he glances at his watch and realizes that unless he bails on his obligations here, even at top speed he's going to get there pretty late, “Tomorrow, if that's okay,” is what comes out. He's pretty sure the professor will give him the time off if he asks. They decide on afternoon since that's the time that works best for the Lugos and Peter says “Perfect,” even though he'd be there first thing if he could.Hank is still in the hallway holding his box of slides when Peter emerges. “Is something wrong?” Hank asks.“Nope,” Peter says. Everything is great. He's about to set out on a wild goose chase to find out the reason that his dad abandoned him, but no, everything is fine. Thanks for asking.Peter goes to find the professor to ask for the day off and finds him holding office hours with a couple of students who are failing everything but gym. Not everybody is cut out to be an academic and Peter is case in point but that doesn't keep the professor from trying, so, you know, good for him. Xavier doesn't have to ask where he's going because the answer is written all over his face but he does ask Peter to take someone along. Peter politely refuses the last stipulation out of sheer practicality. He can get himself there and back more quickly if he goes alone. Xavier doesn't look happy with Peter's totally logical assessment but he reluctantly agrees and shakes Peter's hand and tells him to travel safely.Will do.Peter gets his second shock of the day when he visits the kitchen to grab something to drink, becomes overwhelmed by the available variety of juices, sodas, and the odd imported sparkling water, shuts the fridge and finds Scott standing behind the door.“Gah! Why?” Peter asks because Scott was one Halloween mask away from giving Peter a heart attack.“You're hard to sneak up on, and you always run away when I try to talk to you.”No he doesn- Yeah he does. Not during mission briefings or on missions or during the debrief but preeeetty much every other time. “Sorry,” he says.“Are you going to Richmond?”Richmond? Where's that? “Who said anything about Richmond?” “Come on. Wallflower told me about the phone call.”Peter frowns.Scott explains, “'Wallflower'. It's Calvin's mutant name- ”“I know. I'm in the loop now. Does he spy for you too?” “Sometimes.”Maybe Peter should start offering Calvin Snickers bars to spy on Scott, then Calvin could learn the meaning of 'double agent' if Raven hasn't taught him that already. “So, are you going or not? The professor asked me to sub your class today, so I know you're up to something.”“I'm not up to anything. I'm going to visit an old lady that used to live downstairs from me and my mom when I was growing up.”“I'm coming with you. We're a team.”“This isn't a mission. I'm going to my hometown to visit an old neighbor, not break into a highly secured facility.”“You're going to speak to the last person that Magneto spoke to before leaving you high and dry. I know he's your dad, but he's only known that for a few weeks longer than he's been gone. I don't trust him not to get you involved in something twisted. I think you need someone to watch your back.”“I know more about him than you do,” Peter says, suddenly defensive. “I broke him out of the Pentagon when you were still learning to tie your shoelaces. I spent the next ten years learning everything I could about him,” and Peter cleverly refrains from mentioning that most of what he learned came from microfiche newspaper articles denouncing him as a murderer and sociopath. He also cleverly refrains from telling Scott that Xavier had suggested taking someone along.“Yeah, and you know who knew him even better? Your mom. She asked us, me and Hank, to look out for you, not to let him manipulate you.”“If he's manipulating me then he's doing it with the professor's permission.”Scott drops his voice and looks away, embarrassed, “Yeah, well, the professor kind of has a blind spot where your dad is concerned. Even Raven thinks so.“Look, I know Xavier trusts him and Raven trusts him and even your mom decided to trust him at the end, but she was dying and she was desperate. Before then she was terrified that he would try to suck you into something. Hey, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you mom was wrong and he's a changed man. Maybe he has the best intentions in the world, but until I know that for sure, I'm going to watch your back, because she asked me to and because you need it and because I'm your family too. Now when do we leave?”Peter looks at Scott like he's seeing him for the first time, and doesn't see a teenage wonder-boy, voted most likely to lead a paramilitary group of super-powered mutants, but the spark of something, not so much what he is, but what he could be. Peter doesn't need the kid. He doesn't need anybody. That's what he tells himself. He's tried so hard not to be like his dad but his dad never needed anyone either. Mom had a point, still has a point. She's never led him astray but she's not here anymore. She sent Scott fucking Summers.“We should leave before nine, at the latest,” Peter says.“Okay,” Scott says, after a surprised pause. “Don't try to go without me.”Peter had kind of been leaning in that direction but, “Wouldn't dream of it.”Scott gives him the 'you expect me to believe that?' head tilt and a pat on the shoulder as he leaves. Peter immediately pops his head around the corner into the hallway and says to Scott's back, “If you don't bring my Steppenwolf tape I'm dropping you by the side of the road.”Scott turns and gives him a two-finger salute.The professor has, predictably, no problem letting Scott go with Peter. He even offers Peter and Scott the use of the Continental, provided Scott does most of the driving. It's, like, a seven hour drive, so Peter brings a stack of tapes for their road trip but the joke's on him because the Continental doesn't have a tape deck. Peter cranks the radio up as they drive away because he'll have to talk to Scott eventually but he's going to avoid it for as long as humanly possible, and that turns out to be about twenty minutes because he and Scott get into a slap-fight over which radio station each of them wants to listen to and then Peter's song ends and there's nothing but commercials and Scott starts in with the questions: “Who's Mrs. Lugo?” “Why are we going to see her?” And Peter knows who she is, and he tries to remember her to Scott but it's been so long and he was pretty young when he moved away and he has no idea why Magneto would have been talking to her or why she wants to see him in person. None. He would love to know, but he's going to have to wait, just like Peter, so can we drop it and turn the radio back on?Scott lets him pick the station and Peter leans his forehead against the cool window and lets the soothing hum of the tires on the road and sound of Boston's Peace of Mind lull him to sleep. He wakes up three hours later because he's noticed that the car stopped moving and the heat is off. Scott has pulled into a Denny's parking lot and he's outside the car, stretching. It's a clear day and his breath is a white against the winter sky.Peter pops the door open and stumbles out, all stiff and cold. A few dozen laps around the lot warms him up and he's ready to switch to the driver's seat when Scott suggests -or rather, insists on- lunch. Peter mentally adds forty-five minutes to their trip because it's his trip, not Scott's, and that's all he's going to allow. Period. He doesn't care how slow the service is.They're a little ahead of the lunch rush and most of the tables are empty. The hostess seats them in a corner booth and Scott orders a couple of appetizers before she's even handed them their menus. When the potato skins and onion rings arrive Scott pushes them both at Peter. “Hank told me he's going to ground you if you lose any more weight,” Scott informs him. “You're pretty important to the team so I'd like to avoid that if I can.”Peter knows. It's just that after so much work to get his weight (and his life in general) under control, eating isn't his favorite activity anymore; it's more like a necessary evil, but he'd rather not be grounded so Peter dutifully dips an onion ring in ketchup and eats it slowly, like a human. His turkey club and Scott's BLT aren't going to be out for a while anyway and it gives him an excuse to brood about Erik and not talk to Scott, but since Peter's full mouth won't keep Scott from talking to him he pushes the potato skins back toward the center of the table. “Share. I'll order dessert, I swear. I won't get you in trouble with Hank.” He's sure Scott hasn't forgotten his last furry blue scolding. “How are you holding up?” Scott ventures.“Fine,” Peter responds immediately. He wishes he weren't in a situation where everybody felt like they had to ask him that all the time.Scott takes Peter's reply exactly how he meant it. “You know, I wish I knew what to say. Raven, Hank, the Professor, they all know exactly what it is you need to hear. I'm doing my best but I'm clueless here, man.”“You do alright. Back at the house, that was a pretty good speech.”“Thanks,” Scott says, like he's not sure if Peter means his compliment or if he's being sarcastic.Peter surprises himself by saying, “You know, if I could snap my fingers and erase this whole past year, I'd do it.” It feels like something he's been trying to say but it's never been the right time or the right place. He's not sure what's so special about now, but it's a huge relief to finally say out loud. “Then your dad wouldn't know he was your dad.”Peter's surprised at how regretful he feels hearing that out loud.“You know, I hate this,” Scott says, pointing to his sunglasses. “I hate it every day. I hate that everything I see is just shades of red. I can't even tell if my outfits match. I miss blue. I miss my old school and I miss my friends, but without it I wouldn't have met the professor or Jean. I wouldn't be flying around in a jet rescuing people or taking road trips with the weirdest guy I know. I would have missed out on a lot. Besides, it's not like either of us have a choice.”Scott's admiration is showing so Peter lets the conversation die rather than embarrass the kid, and spends the next few minutes silently humming the melody of You Can't Always Get What You Want. Their sandwiches arrive, grilled golden, the layers and layers of meat and cheese and bread held together by frilly toothpicks, and Peter has a flash of his dad and the sandwich in the basement that he never ate. Scott's taken the first bite out of his BLT but Peter's still staring at his turkey club like it called his sister a whore. “Is everything okay?”“Yes,” he says determinedly, and eats the thing at speed just to show it who's boss. It sits in his stomach like a hunk of radioactive lead but afterward he plows through two slices of apple pie anyway, because he promised.Peter doesn't wait for the bill. “I'm driving,” he says, tossing a ten and a twenty on the table. Then he's out the door, with the keys that he took from Scott's pocket, leaving Scott to decide whether to leave the money or walk it to the register like he's supposed to. Scott either decided to follow etiquette or maybe he just had to use the restroom, because Peter's been warming the car up for a few minutes when Scott comes out. He's blasting Lynyrd Skynyrd and getting sour looks from the eighty-year-old couple that just got out of their car next to him. He waits patiently for the click that tells him Scott's belted in, and then it's burning rubber and squealing tires, flying down the road at seventy-five miles per hour with the window rolled down and the freezing wind in his hair while Scott white-knuckles the dashboard and tries not to lose his lunch. After a few miles Peter takes pity on Scott and slows down to sixty-five and starts to take it easy on the curves. Scott shows his appreciation by not vomiting everywhere.“What made you want to lead the X-Men?” Peter asks. He's always wanted to know. Scott looks between him and the road for a little while, like he's trying to decide if Peter's asking a serious question or just pulling his leg. “I don't know, I just... I felt like somebody needed to step up and I realized that I could stand there and feel that way or I could just do it.”That's a great answer, actually.“Why didn't you?” Scott asks.“That's not really my scene,” Peter says. “Could you imagine me giving orders? I wouldn't have the patience. Everyone would quit the team inside of a week. No, man, better you than me.”Scott's takes his eyes off the road to look at Peter. “You mean that? You don't mind taking orders from me?”“Nope.”“I thought I bugged the hell out of you.”“Oh, no, you totally do but, like, it's fine. That's just who we are. We'll probably grow out of it, like when you stop being a punk kid and I grow the fuck up too.”“I honestly thought you hated my guts. You're always tearing into me in front of the professor.”“Yeah, you have some terrible ideas, for sure. I have terrible ideas too, but I have a lot of time to realize that they're terrible and that I should keep them to myself. Do you know how much I have to slow down my speech just to have a conversation? It's like I'm walking around in a world where everybody else is standing still, all the time.”“I never thought about it that way, but I totally get it. With my power... I can't shut it off. It's always there, waiting just behind the visor or my glasses. Even when I close my eyes I can still feel it, like it's trying to get out.”“Dude, that must have been scary as crap the first time it happened.”“Yeah, there was this guy who thought I was after his girl. He chased me into the boys' restroom at school and that's where it happened, in the stall, on the toilet.”“Holy shit, man,” Peter laughs.“Yeah,” Scott gets serious. “I totally thought I killed the kid.”Peter sobers up a little. “But you didn't.” “No. He was kind of banged up, but he lived, and for the record, I wasn't looking at his girl.”“I believe you.”“Before the paramedics and the firetrucks could even arrive I already knew what it was -what I was- because of my brother. I didn't think Alex and I had anything in common. I never wanted to be anything like him, but things didn't turn out the way I wanted. He was never anything but nice to me, and I was such a dick to him.”Peter knows part of this, like, he's heard it somewhere before, maybe from Jean. The mansion is it's own little world and it's tough to keep secrets, unless you're Calvin, jeez, that kid's slick. He's going to be a kick-ass spy someday. “You were his little brother. I'm pretty sure that you were supposed to be a dick to him. There's nine years difference between Lindy and me and the number of times she used up all the hot water in the house -out of spite- is just inexcusable. People are dicks to each other, even when they love each other, sometimes especially when they love each other. You loved your brother, right?”“Yeah, I just didn't like him all that much.”“Well, I'm sure he knew both of those things.”Scott stays silent, probably because he knows Peter's right, and probably because the professor has told him that about a billion times since Alex died.“I think you're alright,” Peter says. “Like, you're good. You're gonna do great things. You're gonna be somebody.”There's a pause. “You're alright too.”“You're still an asshole.”“Right back at you.”“Hang on.” Peter floors it.They don't fight over the radio (much) for the rest of the drive, but Scott's legs are shaking when he gets out of the car in front of Peter's old apartment building. They made good time but Scott has threatened to fight him if he tries to get behind the wheel on the way north and Peter just nods, like, uh-huh. He's got other things on his mind now. He feels like someone has reached inside his chest and is squeezing his heart and he's so glad he didn't bring a telepath.“Wait up,” Peter tells Scott. He dashes away to the local flower shop for a minute and rushes back with a bouquet of colorful flowers. Scott looks confused. Peter says, “Dude, what? I'm not going to show up empty handed.”It's weird, he thinks, as he stares up a the brick facade of his old apartment building. He remembers it, but he remembers it differently, also it's been twenty years and two coats of paint since he lived there, and everything seems smaller and shabbier and older but when Mrs. Lugo's granddaughter buzzes him and Scott in and he steps past the heavy glass doors into the lobby and he smells that undefinable smell that's a mixture of urban decay and cleaning products and home cooking twenty years fall away and Peter's seven again, racing over to pick up the mail before Mom can get her key out of the front door. Scott's gone all quiet beside him, and Peter can imagine seeing this place through Scott's eyes for the first time. He can't imagine that the kid is impressed but he's putting up a polite front.Mrs. Lugo's door is open when Peter and Scott get there, but Peter knocks anyway. Mrs. Lugo shouts at him from the kitchen to come in. That's familiar too. He can't actually remember a time when her door hadn't been open during the day. There's loud, brassy music coming from the old radio on the dining room table, loud enough to cut through the noise of ten thousand screaming rug rats, except that all of the children are gone now and the apartment is quiet except for the music and the sound of dishes clacking together as Mrs. Lugo empties the dishwasher. He always thought of Mrs. Lugo as being much older than Mom, but now that he sees her again he thinks that there couldn't have been more than ten years' difference in their ages. There's gray in her curly hair, but not more than a few streaks and she moves like a woman who's never off her feet while she's awake. A young girl, maybe thirteen years old with thick black hair comes out of the back bedroom. Peter introduces himself and Scott and she collects the flowers from him with a shy, “Thank you,” and goes to give them to her grandmother. Mrs. Lugo turns and looks from the flowers to Peter and puts a hand on her heart. Then she takes the flowers and crosses the room to wrap Peter up in a hug. She pulls back and holds him by the upper arms and looks him up and down. He gets another hug before she moves on to Scott and clasps his hand warmly. “Come, come,” she says, and sits them down in the living room. The couch that she had when Peter was a kid was a big fuzzy maroon thing and Peter's not surprised that it's been replaced given how rough he and the other kids were with it.“Are you hungry?”“We're okay,” Peter says before Scott can answer.“I'll bring tea,” she says, patting him on the knee. She also brings out a plate of cinnamon cookies despite the fact that Peter refused her offer of food. “I am so sorry about your mother, Peter,” she says. “She was so young. Such a pretty girl.”Peter can't disagree. He's seen the pictures of his mom from her glory days and it's not a surprise that she managed to find a husband even with a silver-haired ankle-biter following her around.“I saw in the paper when she died. I went to her funeral. I spoke to that man, your father. I could not believe it was him!” she seems to stumble and waves her granddaughter over. “This is Ana, my granddaughter. You remember Jaime? This is his daughter. I know, he started so early, like his mother. Ana, I want to tell Peter...” and she rambles off a string of Spanish, finishing with, “I don't know how to explain. Your father, he speaks Spanish. He heard me pray, came to talk to me, after the...” she turns to Ana, “el entierro.”“The burial,” Ana fills in. Peter's frowning, trying to reconcile what he remembers of the funeral and everything that had happened afterward but it feels like he spent the whole day in a fog bank. “He told me he was your father. I thought he meant... ” more Spanish, directed at Ana.“... step-father,” Ana says. “She says it seemed like he did not want to leave, so grandma stayed and talked to him and after a while she realized who he was and that he was your real father. Then she told him she was sorry because- ”Mrs. Lugo waves her hands for her granddaughter to stop. She takes a moment to compose herself. Ana tells them, “She says she has to start at the beginning.”Mrs. Lugo tells him, with Ana's help, that Peter's grandmother had been living in the building when the Lugo family, which, at the time, consisted of Mrs. Lugo, Mr. Lugo and three kids under the age of five, moved in. Three years (and two more little Lugos later) Peter's mom moved back home from nursing school.Ana explains, “Grandma says that when she first saw your mother, she knew right away that she was in trouble, even though she wasn't showing. Lots of girls her age were getting into trouble then, and no one said very much about it. Sometimes the girls would go away for a while, to a home or someplace, but your grandmother did not want to send her away. She says your mother got very big very early.” Peter smiles a little half-smile because he remembers his mom complaining about that. He'd thought she was exaggerating. “She says she remembers seeing your mother one day in the hall and thinking, 'oh, it is twins',” and Peter's smile falters. Mrs. Lugo goes on to say how Peter's mom went into labor early, how she knew because she could hear Mom and Grandma upstairs getting ready in the middle of the night. “A few days later they came back, but with one baby, not two. Grandma was sad because she thought the other baby must have died. It happens with twins when they come too early, and you were very small.” “You had a twin?” Scott asks.Peter shakes his head. “No, I didn't. Mom was totally open with me about everything.” It would have been unusual at that time for an unwed mother in Mom's position to keep her baby. She'd told him flat out that she had plans to give him up. She even admitted to signing the papers and everything, but then he was born small and pathetic and between that and his weird silver hair the doctors predicted that he wouldn't last a week and Mom felt so bad that Peter was going to die alone and so she took him home to die instead. Mom only ever talked about the day Peter was born if she'd had a few because it was pretty obviously a traumatic experience and she would always hug him long and hard afterward and say how glad she'd been that he'd been born the way he had. Nowhere in there had she ever mentioned a twin. “No, she wouldn't have kept something like that from me.”Mrs. Lugo frowns into her teacup like she's remembering. She raises one finger and says, through Ana, “Your Grandmother was a good woman. She cared for her daughter very much, but she she had very little money, and that is why I think she did what she did.“When your mother brought you home from the hospital, they had nothing for you. No crib, no clothes, no diapers. I loaned them a few things to help them get by. Your grandmother said that you would not live long anyway. She seemed very sad already. I said how sorry I was about the other baby, because I thought it had died, and your grandmother became very white, like a ghost. She said please, not to mention the other baby to Mary, that losing one baby would be hard enough.”Peter realizes that he's stopped breathing. He had a twin? No, that was crazy. “Mom never talked about another baby. Not once. I think she would have told me.” He's repeating himself, like he can make what she's saying a lie. He can't. Hey, it might be a lie, or it might not be right, but Mrs. Lugo believes every word of what she's saying. Peter can tell.Mrs. Lugo goes on. Ana says, “Things were different when you were born. Fathers did not go into the delivery room. There were no scans. Women would see the doctor once to tell them they were pregnant and once to have the baby. She says men don't know anything. When Grandma had her first baby she remembers that the doctor came and gave her a shot for the pain. Then she says remembers thinking, 'I will have the baby soon,' and the nurse tells her, you have already had the baby. Here he is. And they put my dad in her arms. At first she thought they were lying because she didn't remember anything, but it must have been true because he looked like grandpa. It was the same with her second baby and her third. The rest came too quickly for drugs.”Peter remembers Mom, slurring her speech and crying into his shoulder while she talked about how hard it had been to have her baby in that place. “So,” Mrs. Lugo continues, “I looked after you so your mother could go back to school. She got a good job. Your grandmother passed away. I did not mention the other baby. I didn't think it would help. Your mother got married and she moved away. Upstairs was very quiet without you running around. I missed you. Sometimes I thought about the other baby. I was sure that the other baby had died and that was why your grandmother did not want your mother to know. This was what I told your father. I told him that it would be good to know where her other baby is buried, so that they could be together. At first he was quiet. Then he said not to worry, he would find the other baby.”Peter feels the skin around his eyes burning. None of this seems real. It feels like a weird dream, but he's not waking up. He feels a hand land on his shoulder and it belongs to Scott. He's too stunned to brush it away.Mrs. Lugo breaks the spell with a wave of her hand, “I thought your father was just being nice to a crazy old lady and I went home. Then your father called, a few days after the funeral. He said, 'Camila, you were right,' and I thought my heart would stop. I asked if he found where the baby was buried and he said 'no, not yet', and I wondered out loud to him if the other baby had lived, and he said he didn't know, but he came to my door one morning, looking very tired and he gave me an envelop. He asked me to keep it safe, and said that one day he would send someone to collect it. I think he meant it for you.”Mrs. Lugo goes to the kitchen. She gets a stool, opens a cupboard, and takes down a small plastic box. The process takes an excruciatingly long time but dread keeps Peter glued to his seat while anticipation makes his heart pound in his throat. When Mrs. Lugo brings the box back to the sofa Peter sees that its full of recipe cards. She thumbs through them, then reaches between two cards and pulls out a tiny envelop with a snap closure and the words Keep ONE key in this envelop printed on the top, along with a warning that losing one or both keys will incur considerable expense. Hand written near the bottom of the envelop is a safe deposit box number. There's one key in the envelop. Erik is terrible at communicating but at least he knows how to follow instructions.“Thank you,” Peter says. “Um, I don't suppose he mentioned the name of the bank?”Erik's terrible at communicating but he's not that terrible. Mrs. Lugo tells him where the box is, and he thanks her and makes himself sit and finish his tea and ask about her grandkids. Scott tells her about the school and she doesn't look surprised when he tells her what kind of school it is. Ana, though, won't stop staring until Peter gives her a demonstration. “What do you want me to do?”“Braid my hair!”She is so lucky Peter grew up with a younger sister.The bank closes at five. Scott checks his watch as they leave the apartment building, and it's a quarter 'til. “Go,” he tells Peter. “I'll meet you there.” Peter tosses the car keys over his shoulder and makes it to the bank with plenty of time to spare. He wonders he's going to have to use his powers to get into the safe deposit box even if he does have a key because how does the bank know he's not just some burglar who found a safe deposit box key? But he gives Erik the benefit of the doubt and tries the straightforward approach first: he asks the teller. She asks for his ID, pulls out a file, looks at him, looks at a sheet of paper, and says, “Right this way, Mr. Maximoff.” He can't help it. As soon as she's let him behind the counter and her back is turned he zips over to the file that she just replaced. Sure enough, his name is on a list of people authorized to access the box, right under the alias that Erik used to lease the box and right above Charles Xavier.Peter's nervous, humming with anticipation as the teller searches for the correct number box then slides her key into the front of it and turns. She asks him to do the same with his key, then she pulls the box from it's slot. It's long, like a tiny coffin, Peter thinks, and Erik wouldn't have left the desiccated corpse of Peter's twin in there, would he have? No, even Erik isn't that morbid. Whatever it is, the teller's carrying it like it doesn't weigh much, so bars of Nazi gold are also out of the question.The teller leads Peter to a booth that's empty except for a table and two chairs. She sets the box in the center of the table and draws the curtain shut as she leaves. Peter hesitates, then calls himself an idiot, then lifts the lid on the box. He expects a bomb or something metal at the very least but it's just a small stack of paper, folded lengthwise to fit in the box. The top few sheets are old and discolored, fragile-feeling. A sense of dread unfolds in Peter's chest as he unfolds the paper in his hands. The top sheet has Peter's name on it, along with the Virginia state seal, the date and time of his birth. Mom's first initial and maiden name are printed under ' Mother of child'. The line labeled 'Father of child' is blank except for a single E. This is Peter's birth certificate, his real birth certificate, like, not one of the copies you get from a registrar's office. It was torn from a book. Peter's never seen it before. He's never needed it. He broke into the DMV and made his own driver's license when he was sixteen.The second page is very similar to the first. The seal is the same, and the date, the names of the parents, or lack thereof. The time is different. Peter was born and twelve fifty-seven in the morning, but this one says twelve forty-five. The name at the top, under 'Certificate of Live Birth' is the name 'Wendy'.Peter and Wendy. It's funny, but he isn't laughing. When he sees the two names, stacked one on top of the other, he gets a chill.Maybe Mrs. Lugo was right and Mom didn't remember giving birth to two babies, but on some level Peter thinks she knew.There's a third sheet of paper, folded in with the other two even though the paper looks different, just as old, but a slightly different shade, a slightly different size. It's an adoption certificate, and Peter sees the names of her adoptive parents next to the new name that they gave her: Wanda Eisenhardt.
Eisenhardt, guten tag
Peter's hands start to shake. The next page is sturdier. It's a transcript with the name Wanda Eisenhardt from Landisville Middle School in Pennsylvania. She pulled good grades, for the most part, better grades than Peter ever had, that's for sure, until her last semester when the A's become C's and the B's become F's and it becomes pretty clear that Wanda never made it very far in high school and the sudden drop in her grades lines up too well with the average age that mutant powers manifest for it to be a coincidence. The next page is a police report. Wanda was arrested for criminal mischief and property damage when she was fifteen, something about exploding trash cans. The page after is more of the same, only this time it has to do with exploded tires. The next one is for vandalizing some guy's car. A boyfriend? All of these are dated before she turned eighteen, but Peter doesn't imagine that sealed juvenile records mean a lot to a guy who can rip doors off of their hinges. It looks like the cops were never able to pin anything on her but it also looks like she couldn't keep them from hauling her in, so Peter's going to go out on a limb and say that her power isn't super speed. He's not sure what her power is, except inconvenient for the good people of Landisville. It looks like Wanda came to the same conclusion somewhere between the ages of eighteen and nineteen because the next police report is from Florida, and it's arson, and the next one is arson, and the next one is arson and manslaughter and Peter's starting to feel a little ill now, because it just keeps going like that until the last page, which is a missing persons' report. It's from nineteen eighty, and Wanda's name is at the top and under it two black-and-white photos of a very pretty young woman with Peter in the slant of her eyebrows and Mom in the height of her cheekbones and Erik Lehnsherr in just about everything else. Her hair is a mass of curls like Lindy's and Mom's, and Peter bets that she hated it as much as they did, and not just because her smile looks forced in one of the pictures and she's not smiling at all in the other. The report describes her as having brown hair and green eyes. Peter can't tell from a black and white photo, but he bets her eyes are the same shade that Mom's were. Peter jumps when he hears the teller from the other side of the curtain, telling him that the bank is closing.Peter folds the papers and stuffs them in his inside jacket pocket against his heart. Then he pulls the curtain back and tamps down the urge to run away long enough to apologize to the teller and see that the box makes it back in the slot and the key makes it back in the Keep ONE key in this envelop envelop and into his pocket. Peter walks out of the bank and stands in the middle of the sidewalk like a dumbass, blocking pedestrian traffic, and thinking. Peter hadn't been in the best frame of mind the last time he'd spoken to Erik Lehnsherr, but still, he'd thought they had been shuffling towards some kind of understanding, but then Erik just up and left and Peter had been filled with doubt and questions and mistrust... and anger. It had hurt in a way that he'd never admit out loud. All that crap that Erik spouted about family and how it was so important and what had he done? Leave the only family he had at the drop of a hat, except Peter wasn't the only family he had, not if she was out there somewhere.And here's where Peter's gift of speed is actually his curse because something like this never crossed his mind but hindsight is twenty-twenty and the pieces are all falling into place and Peter's frustrated with himself for not asking the right questions and he wants to be mad at the professor for not telling him right away because this is a secret he's obviously been sitting on for a while but try as he might he just can't summon righteous anger the way that dear old dad can.Peter snaps out of his funk to find Scott Summers shaking his shoulder and saying “Peter? Peter? Pete?” at his elbow and he thinks, Oh good, Scott found parking.Peter says, “Yeah?” because he feels like he landed in a different dimension where up is down and right is left and Peter has an evil twin running amok somewhere out there in the world unless of course he's the evil twin because if Peter had been booked and sentenced for every crime he's actually committed he would be in prison for the next one hundred and fifty years or so.“Well?” Scott prompts him. “What was in the box?”Peter turns to look at Scott, who isn't really a kid anymore, who makes a lot of good decisions, who has some shortcomings, but who's trying hard and learning from his mistakes, who has good intentions and nothing to hide. Peter pulls the papers out of his pocket and holds them for a second, feeling a strange reluctance to hand them over, like his twin will vanish in a puff of smoke if he lets go of them.“Holy shit,” says Scott as he leafs through the pages. “Holy shit,” he repeats. A young woman dragging two small children by the hands scowls at Scott as she rushes by but Scott doesn't notice.“Holy shit,” Peter agrees. He swallows, “I need to talk to someone.”“Okay,” Scott nods understandingly, “Yeah, sure. I saw a payphone- ”Peter's gone before he can get the rest out because the person he needs to talk to isn't very likely to answer.To be continued...
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
It's chilly outside, not as cold as New York this time of year but still, cold enough. It gets dark early, so the cemetery is pretty much deserted, well, deserted as far as visitors go.Mom's buried six rows back from the winding road that traces a lazy arc around a low, grassy hill, so it takes Peter a while to find her headstone in the light from the lamp posts. When he does he places a bouquet of tulips just under her name. He got the flowers at the same shop where he picked up the bouquet for Mrs. Lugo, and the lady behind the counter thinks that he's either a really busy guy or he really screwed up. Once he works up the courage to say something out loud there are tears in his eyes and he sounds congested. “Hey Mom,” he starts. “So I know you're not really here or anything, or maybe you are. I don't know. But, I just felt like I needed to talk and you were always a good listener, and there's a lot I think I need to say out loud just, you know, to clear my head and I probably could have spoken to Scott and, yeah, I feel shitty leaving him by the side of the road, but he has a car and a map and money for gas and he shoots lasers out of his eyes, so I think he'll be fine. Pissed, but fine, and this seems like a private conversation, like a family-only kind of thing I'd rather practice on you before I have to tell Lindy... wow, uh, here it goes: I have a twin. You had twins. Did you know? I guess they had some pretty crazy drugs back in the day, so maybe you didn't. You remember Mrs. Lugo from downstairs? She always thought you had twins. She thinks Grandma kept it a secret because, I don't know, I'm just spit-balling here, maybe she thought you'd be super bummed when I died and you'd want the other baby back but since you didn't know you had two kids you couldn't ask and it would be better in the long run because you and grandma didn't have the money to raise a kid, but you did anyway and I get how hard that is. Like, I really get it because I live at a school that's full of kids whose parents couldn't hack it, so I know it wasn't that you and Grandma didn't want her, because if you didn't you wouldn't have named her Wendy. Looks like you won that argument by the way. I haven't met her yet, Wendy, or Wanda, or whatever she goes by, so I don't really know anything about her except that she seems like she's as big of a trouble-maker as I was, so maybe it's a good thing that you didn't have to raise both of us. Man, but it would have been so good to grow up together, or maybe not. Maybe she's awful. I don't know, but I'm going to find out. Erik tracked her down and I think he's bringing her to the school. You'd think he would have said something, right? Maybe this is just his revenge on me for not telling him who I was. Maybe... ” Maybe he felt like Peter didn't want him around. Maybe he wrote off his son to find his daughter. Maybe Peter's twin is more powerful than him and that's what he's after, just someone to exploit. Peter shakes his head, “It doesn't matter. Hey, I saw her picture. She looks like you, well, a lot more like you than I do.” The thought of actually meeting his twin face-to-face makes him all nervous and shaky because what if she hates his guts? What if she's mad at Mom for keeping her brother but giving her away? What if she's a mass murderer like dear old dad? Or just plain old batshit crazy? But if she were batshit crazy or wanted nothing to do with her brother, she wouldn't have agreed to come to the mansion, that's if it really was her that Xavier had been cryptically describing. Dude. I think you two will find you have a lot in common, and oh, Peter remembers him thumbing through Mom's copy of Peter and Wendy, the smug bastard. “Peter and Wendy. Jeez. I still haven't finished that book and it's been forever. It would take me two seconds and I haven't done it, but I guess you know by now how lazy I can be, not that I haven't been busy. Oh my God, there's always something: classes and terrorists and new students, not that that's any excuse because you make time for things, right? Like raising a lousy mutant son and establishing your own career. I wish you were here. I think this would have made you happy, even if she turns out to be nuts.” Peter feels himself winding down as he empties himself of words. He feels lighter, calmer. “I miss you, Mom. Lindy misses you. She can't talk about you without crying.” Neither can Peter, apparently. This is where he'd give Mom a hug or a kiss if she were alive, but since that door is shut forever he kneels on her grave and presses his fingers to his lips, then to the grass below her grave marker.After a moment or two he turns his head to the side, acknowledging the presence of Charles Xavier, who's been standing at the edge of Peter's consciousness, too polite to interrupt.
I'm sorry, Peter. Nothing about breaking this news to you was going to be gentle. Erik and I both knew that when we came to our decision.
“Yeah, I get it.” He hates that he gets it, but he gets it. He was a total mess after Mom died and it sucks and he's ashamed and he knows his dad saw him as a liability and he can't change that and there's no one to blame but himself. He's not going to take it out on her. “What's she like?”There's a little pause, the professor deciding how much he should tell Peter or maybe how best to phrase it.
Frightened, mistrustful, and wary. As destructive as her powers can be, she has never truly wanted to hurt anyone. For many years she was convinced that her powers were a curse, and spent most of her adult life attempting to suppress them. As a result she has never learned how to fully control her powers. If she remains untrained she will continue to pose a threat to herself and to those around her. That, among other reasons, is why she will be coming to Westchester. Your sister has spent very little time among other mutants, and those that she did meet wanted only to use her for her powers. Erik is an accomplished tracker, and even with my help it took him months to locate her. It took even longer to convince her to accept his help.
Peter's head is spinning with a billion questions, but there's only one that matters, and if he gets that answered then the rest can wait.“Is she okay?”
No. But I believe that with our help, one day she will be.
Headlights cut across the cemetery, catching Peter in their blinding glare and sweeping over him as Scott rounds a corner. By the time the Continental is parked Xavier has withdrawn from Peter's mind.Scott approaches and Peter lets him. “Sorry for ditching you,” Peter says, keeping his eyes on his Mom's grave.“Shut up and get in the car before your eyebrows freeze off,” says Scott, and Peter does what he's told. Once Peter's snug in the passenger seat with his hands on the heater Scott tells him, “I called the professor.”“I know.”“I'm talking,” Scott says. “You're listening. Extenuating circumstances aside, let me know when you're about to take off.”“Got it, boss.”“The professor says there's a storm coming in. Traffic is already backed up. He thinks we should get a hotel or we're going to be on the road until dawn, and if you're thinking of running all the way, don't.”Peter wasn't. Well, he was, but he was only thinking that it wasn't a smart idea. Darkness and inclement weather are Peter's mortal enemy. He manages well enough unless he has to stop suddenly.“We don't need a hotel. I know somebody who'll put us up. I just need to find a payphone.”Sam Gregorian isn't what Peter would call a close friend. He and Peter don't exactly move in the same social circles. He's a fifty-year-old lawyer who lives in a big house at the top of a hill, twice married and twice divorced, no kids, rich as hell in spite of the alimony payments and perpetually ready to roll out the welcome mat, especially for a fellow mutant. Peter met Sam back in seventy-two when the cops had Peter down at the station, harassing him over whatever it was that he definitely did and Peter had been riding it out because he didn't have anywhere better to be that afternoon and it totally gave him the opportunity to fuck with Dispensa whenever his back was turned by rearranging the files on his desk or scribbling with his pens until they ran out of ink and all the while this old Armenian dude in a suit who was sitting there waiting for his client to be released from the drunk tank had been laughing his ass off because he was in on the joke whether or not Peter wanted him to be. So Peter had kind of established a rapport with the dude before they ever spoke face-to-face. When the cops finally cut Peter loose Sam had offered up his card and told Peter if there was anything he needed, he should call. Peter didn't really need anything, but he called anyway, out of curiosity, and stopped by to bug Sam on occasion and spin around in his fancy wooden lawyer chair and help his secretary with all of the B.S. paperwork in which she was constantly drowning. He never tried to mess with Sam or steal anything from him, mostly because he'd known from the minute he met Sam that a) he was a good guy, like, not in the sense that everything he ever did was above board, but that he was a guy who would have your back no matter what kind of shit you got up to and b) Peter could tell, either through observation or just by some mutant sixth sense that Sam knew what was up, always. The latter part of that was because of his mutation. He can literally smell if someone is lying (and he can smell everything else about them too. Blegh.)Peter hasn't spoken to Sam in probably five or six years, but when Sam picks up the phone it's like none of that time has passed and he and Peter are old Navy buddies or whatever and when Peter says that he and Scott are stuck in town for the night he's like, “Of course! Come! Bring your friend!” and he's grilling chicken for kebabs by the time they get there but the second Peter crosses his threshold Sam grabs Peter by the shoulders, which Peter allows, but only because it's Sam, and looks him up and down and without saying anything else pours Peter a generous brandy and leaves the bottle on the coffee table.About a dozen kebabs and a bottle and a half of brandy later Sam is leafing through Wendy's (or Wanda's, he guesses) paperwork with a critical eye while Scott tries to hold very still and pretend that he's had alcohol before and Peter makes a mental note to duct tape Scott's visor to his head tonight.Sam's a pretty well-informed guy, so he knew about Mom's passing. He sent flowers, but he didn't go to the funeral. He's not the kind of guy whose shoulder you cry on, but he is good at making problems disappear, or not seem bad, so Peter's not too surprised when Sam rolls up one of the police reports and smacks Peter on the back of the head on the way to the kitchen. That catches Scott's attention and Sam explains, “You can't let him see you, otherwise he moves,” which Peter's pretty sure Scott knows by now. To Peter Sam says, “This is good news. It doesn't matter how it came about. She is your family. You don't have a problem. She has a problem if the police want to extradite her, but I think your psychic friend can do something about that.”After dinner Sam wants to see Scott's power, so they drag him into the back yard and have him zap the empty brandy bottles off of a garden wall. Even drunk Scott is a damn fine shot, because he has to be. Once Peter's cleaned the glass up Sam loans them some swim trunks and they take a dip in the jacuzzi. It's started to rain by then, and that's refreshing. Peter's consumed so much of Sam's brandy that he's actually managed to get a buzz going, and he's relaxed enough to let his head tip back against the edge of the jacuzzi and watch the rain zooming toward him like shooting stars.Peter and Scott crash out at one in the morning after Scott has sobered up juuuust enough to remember that he packed his sleeping goggles. Peter can't sleep more than a few hours but Sam won't let his guests go without breakfast, so they get a late start anyway, which is fine by Scott, who, in spite of feeling less than one hundred percent, still refuses to let Peter drive.Sam places all of Wanda's papers in an accordion folder and tells Peter to give him a call if she ends up needing legal council. Peter thinks that as long as Wanda is under Xavier's wing the police won't come knocking. He also wonders how much Sam's offer has to do with the fact that he's been looking for wife number three for a few years now. “Bring her by for dinner if you're in town. I'll make lamb and dolma.” Sam's been looking for wife number three for a few years now, and while Sam's dolma is outstanding, from what Peter knows about his sister he thinks there's as a good a chance that she'll burn Sam's house down to the foundation as agree to dinner and drinks with the man.“At least we know she's not boring,” Sam says with a hopeful shrug.Scott and Peter leave Richmond at eight fifteen. Peter is too distracted to argue over the radio station and Scott is too hung over to turn it on, so they listen to the sound of the road and Peter falls asleep before they even reach the interstate. He wakes up to Scott shaking his shoulder and telling him that it's lunch time and Scott seems about as enthusiastic about the thought of putting food in his stomach as Peter does. Scott's pulled them into an A&W and ordered them a couple of hot dogs and root beers, which they eat standing outside of the car under the big drive-up awning and watching the rain. Peter wasn't particularly hungry when he started eating but he grabs another couple of hot dogs while Scott dashes out to use the payphone on the nearest corner. Peter knows he's calling the professor, checking in, but he's less prepared that he thought he was when Scott comes walking back, bleeding tension all over the place and mercifully gets it over with: “Magneto is at the school. He brought Wanda with him.”Damn.“He didn't waste any time, did he?” Peter mumbles. Suddenly those extra hot dogs aren't sitting so well. “If you want to run ahead... ” Scott suggests. It's still raining but it's just a drizzle, and it's broad daylight now so it's not too likely he's going to skid off the road or clothesline himself on a tree limb.“No,” he says, “That's okay,” and they pile back into the Continental and head off. For a while it is a fucking quiet ride up the east coast until Scott asks, “What are you thinking?”“I think... ” Peter begins. He thinks his twin is more powerful than he is, and definitely more dangerous, and if that isn't at least part of the reason that Magneto dropped Peter like a hot potato to chase down his errant daughter then Peter will eat his shoes. He thinks that he's never going to measure up to his dad's standards, and that his dad knows that. He's seen Peter at his worst, after all. He thinks that Wanda has about a hundred reasons to hate him, good ones. Peter has about as many reasons to hate himself, and he does, like, soooo much. He says, “What I think doesn't matter.”“Okay,” Scott says. “That's bullshit, but okay.”Peter folds his arms over his aching stomach and doesn't say anything. The storm gets stronger the further north they get, and Scott's forced to slow down because the windshield wipers can't handle the downpour. The delay is so nerve-wracking that Peter cracks and flips the radio on but the reception is totally shitty. They pull up to the mansion about an hour late and the rain is coming down in buckets. Peter tucks Wanda's folder into his jacket but just the short jog from the garage to the house is enough to soak Peter and Scott to the skin, so before Peter follows Scott inside he stops under the awning and shakes like a dog (if a dog could shake at a hundred and fifty miles per hour). It makes his hair stand on end, but it gets most of the water off. Peter goes to push on the front door but it swings open all on its own and there Peter is, halfway dry, hair standing up like he's a dandelion, and staring at his dad. Peter doesn't need to ask how Magneto knew he was here. The plates in Peter's leg are like a homing beacon. Peter takes in his dad before Erik can do the same to him. It looks like Erik shaved his head at some point in the recent past and it's grown back in fuzzy at the top and gray at the temples. He has a few more lines around his eyes, and dark circles under them like he's lost sleep somewhere and can't seem to find it, but other than that he looks how Peter would expect him to look, except for his expression, because the moment that his dad lays eyes on him stretches on into an eternity for Peter, just like every moment, and he notices the way that the fine lines around his dad's eyes become less defined. He sees his dad's shoulders drop slightly. He sees the blood vessels around his eyes begin to dilate and flood the area with pink, and Peter wishes something that he hasn't wished since Mom died, and almost never wished before, and that's that he had more time, because this is first time that he's looked at Erik Lehnsherr and seen his dad. Erik steps out onto the porch warily, like he's worried Peter will bolt or bite him or something, and Peter is aware that his hair looks crazy but he'll be damned if he's going to fix it now. He knows he's ridiculous, and weird, and a dumbass, and a bunch of other really uncomplimentary things, but his dad seems okay with all of it because he closes the distance between them and reaches for Peter and Peter surrenders control of the situation. Then Peter is in the warm circle of his dad's arms with Wanda's folder pressed awkwardly between them. The rain is coming down hard, shushing everything but the words, “My boy.”They part, after a while, and Dad -Erik- Dad puts a hand on either side of Peter's face and says, “It's good to see you again.”“Yeah, you too,” Peter sniffs. He has some questions on his mind but he doesn't feel steady enough to ask them.“How are you?” Erik asks, dropping his hands to Peter's shoulders, taking all of him in and Peter straightens up automatically, and pulls his shoulders back and his stomach in. Maybe he doesn't look better than the last time his dad saw him but he at least looks different, definitely thinner.“Good,” Peter shrugs. “You?”Erik nods like he doesn't believe Peter and there's no reason he should if Xavier's been keeping him informed. “I'm better now.”Peter pulls his damp accordion folder out of his jacket and says, “I got your message.”Erik's face is awash in guilt. “I'm so sorry, Peter.”Peter shrugs, looks down at the fancy bricks of the entryway and Erik seems to remember that they're standing outside in the cold and he ushers Peter in. While his back is turned Peter uses the opportunity to fix his hair.It's four o'clock in the afternoon and the mansion should be bursting with activity but it's pretty quiet. Even Scott seems to have melted away and Peter's actually kind of bummed about that because that means Peter has to face whatever is coming his way on his own. “Hank and Raven are keeping the children occupied for the moment. Charles and I felt that it was best to keep things quiet while Wanda is getting settled. She should be down soon.” Erik puts up a good front, but there's uncertainty there. He's trying to make it sound like it's no big deal, but he's either not sure if she'll be down at all or he's not sure if she's going to hug Peter or tear his head off. “Do you need a moment to rest or change?” he asks, but Peter's already run upstairs and changed. He also took a little look-see around the teachers' wing and he thinks he found the rooms he thinks Erik and Wanda will be occupying, just because he knows the rooms and that's where he would put them. He didn't burst in or anything, but he did pause a moment outside of her door just, hoping that she'd pick that instant to open the door. She didn't, and he zipped back downstairs, dressed in a dry Led Zeppelin T-shirt and his nice pair of black jeans. “Right, of course,” Erik says, looking Peter up and down. Erik leads Peter into the library. Someone's been through ahead of them and built up a roaring fire in the fireplace, for which Peter is grateful. He gets chilled easily and he's been sitting in a car too long and wet winter days suck for him. There's a pot of coffee and a bottle of brandy on the side board and Peter thinks about Scott and how he could have used a little hair of the dog earlier but by now he's probably upstairs drying off and wishing he'd never heard of brandy. Erik pours a cup of coffee and tips some brandy into it. He offers it to Peter and Peter takes it so that he won't have to decide what to do with his hands. Erik pours the same for himself.“Does anyone else know?” Peter asks, then decides to specify, “Who she is, I mean?”“Charles informed Hank and Raven this morning, shortly before our arrival. Now that you and Scott have arrived, Charles is holding a meeting with the rest of the X-Men. He thought you might appreciate some privacy.”“Yeah, sure. I guess,” Peter says. It's pretty apparent that Wanda's in no hurry, so Peter picks one of the big leather chairs near the fire and settles into it, or tries to, but finds himself scooting restlessly forward, elbows on knees. “So... tell me.”“What would you like to know?”“Everything,” Peter says, like duh. “Where've you been? What have you been up to? Where did you find her?” “Europe,” Erik says. He settles himself across from Peter. “Wanda has been running for a very long time. You've read the police reports.” It's not a question, but Peter nods. “I want you to know how sorry I am not to have told you.”“It's fine.”“It isn't, but I wanted you to know the reason why I did it. I don't expect your forgiveness. I haven't earned it, but I hope to, in time.”“I've already shouted you down once, I feel like you should get a pass today.”“Well, thank you for that.”“So, what was the reason?” “Your sister is dangerous,” Erik says, and although Peter had guessed, he feels a chill that a warm fire and all the brandy in the world can't drive away. “I didn't want to risk you. I promised your mother that I would protect you. If she had known that your sister existed, she would have extended that promise to her as well. So I asked Charles to look after you, to keep you safe in my absence. I suppose you could say that I didn't want to put all my eggs in one basket,” It's a small joke, and neither of them laugh. “I always planned on coming back for you, with or without Wanda.”He's telling the truth. He always meant to come back. “I, uh, I'm glad you're not dead in a ditch somewhere.”“When Charles said you'd been worried I didn't believe him.”“Yeah. Telepaths. What do they know?” Guess there's no point in denying it now. “I was worried about you as well.” Peter dives right in, “Is she like me? I mean, are her powers like mine? I mean sure, they're not exactly like mine, otherwise the cops never would have gotten her, but we're twins so they can't be that different, can they?” Scott and Alex were brothers and they had the same power, even though Alex's energy beam... blast... thing... came from his torso (or so he's heard) while Scott's beams shoot inconveniently from his eyes.“No, her powers appear to be very different from yours.” Erik looks very worn out all of a sudden. “Your sister spent most of her life trying to hide from who she was, never embracing her gifts. As a result, she never learned to control them, nor does she know their full extent. What we do know is that she seems able to manipulate the outcome of certain events, making the improbable probable. She can't fly or read minds. She isn't telekinetic, but if she is upset enough, or wants something badly enough, the world seems to find a way to give it to her. She had been using her gifts for a very long time before she even realized that it was a mutation. All that she knew was that strange coincidences seemed to dog her. She thought she would fail a test at school, so the teacher's car caught fire and all of the tests burned. Some girls bullied her at school, and Wanda wanted them to stop. A series of unfortunate accidents removed them each from school one by one. One of the girls suddenly became very ill. Another girl's father died in an accident and her mother decided to move away. The last girl was struck by a car on the way home from school.”“Oh my God,” Peter says, because oh my God. Peter feels awful for the girls and their families, but awful for Wanda too because what kind of a kid wants that on their conscience?“She didn't want to hurt anyone, but she also didn't know how to stop these things from happening. She was an outcast in her own home. Her family shunned her. Everyone at school avoided her. People whispered that she had cursed those girls, and Wanda couldn't deny it. So she ran away from her family's farm, and she's been running ever since. Tracking her was very difficult because she did not want to be found. She was unknowingly using her power to hide from us. I was only able to catch up with her because she had eventually run afoul of the police in Amsterdam, and, knowing what she was, they decided to remand her to a hospital and keep her drugged. That was where I found her.”Peter sits quietly and absorbs that and thinks he should say something. “That sounds awful.”“It was.”Erik is lost in a memory somewhere, staring the thousand-yard stare at the coffee cup in Peter's hand. The brandy is starting to give him some color. Erik snaps out of it and says, “That is why Charles has decided to take precautions.”Precautions? “What kind of precautions?” Peter asks. He expects him to be all mysterious and say, necessary ones, or something, but he gets the straight answer he was looking for: “Hank has refurbished one of the dampening collars for her to wear while she's getting acclimated to the school.”Peter just about drops his coffee. “You gotta be kidding me.”“I had the same reaction when Charles suggested it, and I had him adjust it so that Wanda can remove it if she likes. For now I am choosing to see it as a tool that we've turned to our advantage rather than a reminder of enslavement and torture.”Yeah, those last words are Erik's but the 'tool' part, that's Hank or the professor talking, and neither of them had somebody snap one of those gizmos around their unwilling necks.“And she's okay with that?” Peter “She prefers it.”“I do. So you can stop feeling sorry for me.” Peter's sitting with his back to the door, so he didn't see it open. He comes to his feet and turns, but he doesn't know what to do after that, because there she is in the doorway: Wendy, or Wanda, his twin. She's a brunette, bushy-haired and green-eyed, dressed in an over-sized plaid shirt, sleeves rolled up past her elbows, black acid-wash jeans underneath, the kind that zip at the ankles, and low black boots. She looks so much like a younger version of Mom that Peter's chest hurts. She's scowling at him, arms folded, chin raised like she's showing off the collar, which might be ugly as crap, but the girl -sorry, woman, because she's the same age as Peter- she's... something else: broad-shouldered and straight-backed, strong and athletic, like Lindy is now, and she's almost as tall as Peter. Even with the collar she looks terrifying. Peter's mouth is dry. “Hey,” he says.“Hey,” she says back. Wanda steps into the room, and in the space between her right foot leaving the ground and landing, Peter's seen everything that she wants him to see, and everything she doesn't. She wants him to think she's tough and cynical, and he's sure she is, but underneath that she's skittish, and vulnerable, and lonely, and all she wants to do is run away, because that's all she knows how to do. He looks at her and he sees himself.She's glaring at him like she hates him, but she doesn't hate him. She's just scared, and that's okay because so is he. He's worried that if he approaches her now she's going to bolt, so he walks over to her, nice and slow, and stands right in front or her. Wanda's eyes are wide, like she's wise to him, and she's probably been warned how fast he is and she kind of shuffles back a step, and he follows. Then he's standing right in front of her and she's standing her ground, muscles tensed, looking up at him like she's poised for a fight and Peter wonders who would win, and hopes that he never finds out.He looks into her eyes and holds out a hand, just the smallest invitation. Peter's aware that Erik is on his feet behind him somewhere. After a tense few seconds Wanda closes the gap between them and slides a strong arm around his waist, under his jacket. He cups the back of her head with his hand and pulls her head down onto his shoulder, then buries his face in her hair and whispers. “You're not alone,” he tells her. “I've got your back.”For a little while she just holds her breath, and when she exhales against his neck, it's a sob.It's not perfect, not even close, and one hug doesn't make up for all of the crap that Wanda's been through, but it's a promise that things will get better.They talk, Peter and Wanda and Erik: the reunited Lehnsherr clan, where everybody has a different family name. Wanda takes a cup of brandied coffee, and Peter learns that she is a lightweight who goes all rosy just from smelling alcohol. Peter tells Wanda about the school, answers the very few questions that she has, because Peter can tell that she doesn't even know what questions to ask, then he tells her about Lindy, and before he knows it, the sun is up, and all three of them are punchy and two of them are drunk and Peter more or less carries Wanda and Erik upstairs to sleep it off. Peter doesn't see either of them at all that day because at first his wheels are spinning too fast to sleep and then by the time Erik and Wanda crawl out of bed Peter has not so much gone to sleep as lost consciousness on a sofa in a quiet corner of the mansion. Peter doesn't get Wanda's story right away or all at once, and he doubts that he'll ever get the whole thing. She's so guarded at first that she won't talk to anyone about her life, but she feeds him little bits over meals or during their downtime when they sneak off to the roof to smoke cigarettes together. Sometimes, if he asks nicely, or even if he doesn't ask nicely, Erik or the professor help him fill in the gaps.Wanda was raised on a farm in rural Pennsylvania and grew up speaking Pennsylvania Dutch, milking cows, sewing quilts, and going to church every Sunday. She didn't even have a television in her house and radio was for listening to the morning and evening news and Peter feels so sorry for her, but she feels just as sorry for him, growing up in a noisy city with no other children to play with and no big fields to run around in. And it's pointless to feel bad now anyway because the world is Peter's field and Wanda can listen to whatever she wants.Wanda's powers manifested when she hit puberty. Like, the day of, so... yikes. Double whammy. Peter was the only when home when Lindy got her first period and it was Goddamned traumatic because although she'd learned about this stuff in school apparently her health teacher never explained that there would be actual blood involved. So anyway, Peter ran to the store and bought pads for her, paid for and everything, which is probably the single most heroic thing he's ever done, but anyway, Wanda's middle school didn't have a health teacher and Wanda didn't have a friend or an awesome brother to hand her tampons underneath a bathroom stall, let alone explain to her that the reason that all of the lights in the school burnt out at the same time was because she didn't want anyone to see the stain on her dress. After that weird coincidences followed Wanda wherever she went. Whatever she wished for, she'd get, in a weird, roundabout, usually awful way. When she didn't like what her adoptive mother was making for dinner, her adoptive mother cut herself with a kitchen knife so badly that she had to go into town to get stitched up. Wanda's adoptive parents grew corn on their farm, and when Wanda felt sick and didn't want to go out into the field, all of the stalks wilted. Her adoptive parents thought that she was possessed or cursed or something. They even brought in a priest to exorcise her demons, but that didn't work for obvious reasons, so Wanda tried really really hard just to reign in her thoughts and she did... okay. By the time Magneto made his speech on national television Wanda was already a semi-reclusive local legend because of a few trash can fires and four exploded tires on the school bus. Wanda and her adoptive parents heard Magneto's speech on the radio and maybe that's when it clicked for them but the pieces didn't fall into place for Wanda until she came to school the next day and found the word “mutant” spray-painted across her locker in red and she didn't feel like going to class after that and who can blame her? Long story short, the school district had to replace every window and mirror in the school, forty-seven students and faculty had to be taken to the hospital for stitches, and the school's poor lone janitor spent the next two weeks shoveling broken glass into a dumpster. But Wanda also didn't have to go to class. Wanda never went back to school but it wasn't like things were any better at home. Her parents barely spoke to her and let her spend all day locked in her room. Her school didn't make any kind of a fuss about her being gone and no one said anything about her going back. Wanda spent her time drawing and reading, but she once got very frustrated trying to draw a character from one of her books. That night it rained hard, and while she was sleeping the roof leaked onto her bookshelf and ruined every book she owned. Her adoptive parents loaded the shelf and the ruined books into their truck and drove it to the dump, and when they got back Wanda was sitting on the front porch wearing her school backpack, which was stuffed with a few granola bars and a couple of changes of clothes. She got up, told them that she was leaving, and walked right past them, and they didn't lift a finger to stop her. To hear Wanda tell it, the next few years were pretty rough. “I didn't have any kind of plan. I'd never even been outside of Pennsylvania. I didn't know anything,” she tells Peter. “I thought it would be nice to go somewhere warm.”Wanda took a bus to Florida. And since she didn't have a place to stay she lived on the streets of Miami for a while. She tried not to use her powers but they would always come out. Always. Every once in a while someone would try to take her in or help her out, but that usually ended badly. She got hauled in by the cops a lot, mostly for being in the wrong place at the wrong time when something bad happened, but they never had enough evidence to charge her with anything. So she walked. After a while she drew the attention of some other mutants: some of whom were real criminals, some of whom were just lonely outcasts like her. She even fell in love... and got pregnant... and miscarried after six months.“Twin boys,” she says. She and Peter are sitting on the roof, passing a cigarette back and forth. “It almost killed me,” she says. She means physically, but Peter thinks that it killed her emotionally too. She says she hasn't told anybody else; not Erik, not Xavier, nobody, although the professor might know because that's kind of his thing and that makes Peter feel sick because it was really hard on her if the way that her voice shakes is any indication. Peter's not sure, and he doesn't say anything, but Wanda's miscarriage lined up uncannily with the killer flu that Peter caught when he was nineteen that laid him out for a week and knocked twenty pounds off of him and he wonders if twin sense is real and kind of doesn't want to say anything about it to Hank for fear that he'll decide to stab Peter in the hand with a fork to see if Wanda feels it.After her miscarriage a hospital social worker found Wanda a group home and a job as a wash-and-fold girl at a laundromat. All the while she's telling Peter this he's tracking his own life alongside hers, trying to match their peaks and valleys, trying to remember if he was twenty or twenty-one when he took the pizza delivery job. Overall he thinks they sync up pretty well, but whether that's because they're twins separated at birth or just because they're the same age and hit a lot of their milestones at roughly the same time he's not sure.Wanda eventually moved on from the group home and the laundromat and took a job as a waitress, and reconnected with the father of her unborn children, which turned out to be a huge mistake because he'd started taking a lot of drugs and here's where the manslaughter charge comes in, because he tried to rape her behind the diner where she worked when she was out for a smoke break. She doesn't know what she did, but she did something and he slipped. He landed on a broken glass that had fallen out of the dumpster and he landed on it in such a way that it pierced his jugular. Wanda was covered in blood and hyperventilating when the cops showed up. They initially believed her story but they told her not to leave town.“I remember thinking that I never wanted to go back to work there again. The next day a gas line burst underground and the diner burnt to the ground. The owner was the only one who didn't make it out.”Wanda left town before the cops could come knocking again, and she did it by letting her powers do the talking. She showed up at the airport and walked right through security like she was meeting a plane, then she wandered until she found a flight to Frankfurt that was in the boarding process, and strolled right up the the gate. The agent looked away at just the right moment, and Wanda walked on the plane and took an empty seat near the back. When she landed in Germany she was back to living on the streets and trying very hard not to use her powers because it didn't take long for her to figure out what happened to mutants in this new corner of the world. Since she spoke a little German she was eventually able to find work waiting tables and tending bar, and it was something. She made a few friends, but never spent too much time in one place, because no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't keep coincidences around her from mounting. She'd earn massive tips night after night when rent was close to due. Patrons who'd had too much to drink suddenly decided that they were done for the night and headed home. Wanda's favorite football team always won. Worse, troublesome bar-goers would suffer gruesome accidents shortly after leaving or while they were still in the bar, and the longer Wanda was able to suppress her powers, the worse it was when they finally erupted. A few times she fled with nothing but the clothes on her back and the tips in her apron. She estimates that since she turned eighteen she's probably slept outside just as often as she's had a roof over her head. “Miami in the winter and Hamburg in the summer, if I had a choice,” she says. She didn't have a choice, and she lost part of a pinkie toe to frostbite, and that's where Peter stops keeping score, because while Wanda was sleeping on park benches or in doorways he was safe and warm in Mom's basement playing Ms. Pacman or strumming away on his guitar, which he was never patient enough to get good at. Wanda admits that she could have used her powers to make things easier, and when she got really desperate, she did, but, “It always ends badly. I can't use my powers without hurting someone. I hate using them. I wish I didn't have them. My parents were right. I'm evil.”“You're not evil,” Peter tells her, and he adds, “They weren't your parents,” cleverly leaving out that their biological father committed a whole lot of atrocities and definitely none of them were on accident.Wanda looks at him like he's such an ignoramus. “They took care of me when I was a baby. They fed me, they clothed me, and they loved me. They were my parents... and they told me that using my powers was an evil thing to do. I don't want to be evil.”Wanda solved her problems the way that Peter solved his: she ran. Sometimes she crossed paths with other mutants, but never on purpose, and she never went out looking for them. Mutants across Europe without money or power or privilege knew to keep their heads down, because if anyone was going to be made an example of, they knew it would be them. “I knew what was happening, but I did nothing. As long as I wasn't the one being beaten on the news, I was okay. If anyone guessed my secret, I moved on.” Eventually she wasn't quick enough. “I moved to Amsterdam last year, and I worked at a coffeeshop in the red light district.”“And 'coffee shop' is code for... ?”“I wasn't a hooker. Coffeeshops in Amsterdam sell marijuana.”“What happened?”“The same thing that always happens.”Around the time that Peter was getting the news that Mom's chemo wasn't working Wanda started dating the son of one of the coffeeshops' owners. Peter, for the record, couldn't care less about the Mary Jane, mostly because he's smoked a joint or two and the only thing it did for him was make him smell like an old sock. “It was the best time of my life,” she says. “Amsterdam is so free and open, and that was something I'd never experienced. For once I felt like I didn't have to be afraid. I even told him what I was, and for a while it was okay, and,” she laughs, “business at the shop was really good.” Her smile vanishes, “But... once I told him my secret, it wasn't a secret anymore.”Customers started to ask Wanda for favors and a few harassed her, followed her home, banged on her door until her boyfriend drove them away. Her shop acquired a reputation overnight, and suddenly they were the place to go for mutants, and Wanda wanted nothing to do with that. She decided to leave but her boyfriend convinced her to stay.“He was good to me, but I should have left him. If I had, he'd still be alive.”The late summer heat fanned the flames of anti-mutant sentiment in Europe, and all of the known mutant hangouts were dry tinder. “I wasn't even there when the riots broke out. For the first time in my life I had nothing to do with the chaos. I worked the early shift and I was home in bed when it happened.”The anti-mutant protesters dragged the owners and Wanda's boyfriend out into the street and beat them with clubs. The owners were badly bruised, but Wanda's boyfriend, Klaus, hit his head against the pavement and had to be taken to the hospital. “Did you know that Interpol keeps a list of all known mutants and their powers?” Peter did not know that, but unless the professor has intervened already (which he totally might have) Peter's pretty sure he's in their files somewhere. Erik probably has a whole filing cabinet to himself. “It didn't matter that there wasn't any evidence directly linking me to the crime. They had enough reasonable suspicion to hold me, and they did. I still could have run, but Klaus was in the hospital, and I didn't want to leave without knowing if he would be okay.”The authorities didn't know what to do with Wanda, or, really, they had too many ideas about what to do with her. The Americans and the Germans wanted her extradited. The Netherlands listed her as a person of interest but a flight risk. Nobody wanted her to get away, but Amsterdam also didn't have any specialized holding facilities for someone like her, so they did the only semi-humane thing that they could think of and put her in isolation in a mental ward.“It was very boring, but it could have been worse. The doctors and and nurses let me watch television. They played cards with me sometimes, and checkers, but I had to take pills that made me sleep all day.” She gives Peter a crooked smile just like his own. “I was so high that I thought our father was a dream the first time he came.”Wanda won't call Erik Lehnsherr “Dad”. That title belongs to her adoptive father. Erik, meanwhile, is just grateful that she calls him anything that isn't an insult because their relationship got off to a rocky start.To hear Erik tell it, it was like Wanda had cast some kind of spell that made her impossible to track. “Every time I got a lead, something would get in the way. The car I was driving would break down. I would catch sight of someone who looked like her. I would find a more promising lead that ended in disappointment but pulled me in the opposite direction. Once I simply became too ill to travel.”Xavier was similarly plagued when he tried to use Magneto to locate Wanda. At first he searched and couldn't find her, then searched again and had the feeling that he was overlooking something. “The harder I pressed, the more was repelled,” Xavier tells him. “Strange things began to happen, things that would require my immediate attention. Something would distract me. I would catch sight of a mutant in dire need. One of the children would suddenly get hurt and the harder I pressed, the worse it became. It was like she and I were two positive sides of a magnet. Reluctantly, I had to withdraw from the search for a time.” “I didn't know that I was doing anything,” Wanda says. “All I knew was that I didn't want to be found.”Under different circumstances Peter thinks it would have been funny: two of the world's most powerful mutants befuddled by a mutant who didn't know she was doing anything, like Wanda was playing a giant game of “Hey, what's that over there?” and then running in the other direction.Once Wanda was locked up and drugged, her defenses came down enough for Xavier to find her, and by early December, Erik had arrived at the hospital where Wanda was being held. He was doing everything he could legally do to get in and see her and Peter thinks wow, that had to be frustrating for a guy who could just as easily tear the roof off and float in, but anywho, both Erik and Xavier were wary enough of Wanda's powers to prefer a softer approach. With a little intervention in the minds of the hospital administration Erik managed to schedule a visit with Wanda and it did not go well. At all.“I recognized him from the news,” Wanda confesses to Peter. He can tell she feels guilty, but not that guilty. “I was scared.”“She dropped a light fixture on my head,” Erik tells him. “Seventeen stitches later I tried to see her again and somehow managed to get lost on my way from the emergency department to the psychiatric ward. I wandered the hospital for two hours until she fell asleep.” Well, now Peter knows why Erik's head was shaved. Erik has a gnarly scar snaking across his crown.Erik tried several more times to get in to visit Wanda but she flatly refused to see him. It took Erik two weeks, twenty visits, multiple interventions from the professor, who was able to get through to Wanda when she wasn't quite awake, to get Wanda to listen to hear him out, but eventually she agreed to a DNA test to find out if they were related.“And?” Not that there's much doubt in Peter's mind but still, it would be nice to just, like, know. For sure.“There's only a point zero one percent chance that Wanda and Erik aren't very closely related,” Xavier explains.And for Peter that really... well, he can't figure out if having that knowledge has opened a door or shut one, but there's a finality to it. It's one of those things that he'd rather know than not know. He decides he's not going to ask to have his blood tested against Erik's. He's sure enough. But Xavier looks at him like he senses Peter doubting himself and says, “Please don't be angry with Hank for his curiosity, but Hank tested your DNA against Erik's months ago. The results were the same as Wanda's.”Oh, well, of course they were.But where Peter felt relief, Wanda had cried, because finding out that Erik was her father was confirmation of all the horrible things that she thought about herself and no, she hadn't said that out loud to him so don't you dare repeat it! She'd sniffled and let him hold her hand and sat very still while he told her how he'd found out about her and about Mom and about her long lost twin and Wanda had sat there thinking that she really had gone insane and if she had then at least she was in the right place and maybe she should just stay there but Erik wouldn't have it.“I told him that if I left, people would get hurt,” Wanda says.“I told her that people would get hurt if she didn't leave,” Erik says.Peter frowns when he hears that. “Dude, did you really say it like that?”Eric frowns right back like What's wrong with the way I say things? But what Erik meant was that as long as Wanda couldn't control her powers she would never be able to stop herself from leaving chaos in her wake everywhere she went, and it was a good argument, but Wanda didn't think that she could be fixed. Her mind was made up that she was who she was and no amount of training would make her less dangerous and she deserved to spend the rest of her life drugged and in isolation and that's where Wanda and Erik had their big bonding moment because he'd been where she was, only instead of hiding from his destructive side he had fully embraced it, but then turned from all of that at the last second, and helped save the world, and his friends... and even his son. After that Wanda seemed to warm up to Erik, and by warm up Erik means that she would only give him bumps and bruises instead of lacerations when he visited. She even slammed the door on Xavier a few times by cursing him with a migraine. Eventually Wanda agreed to leave the hospital, but only if Erik would let her stay in the Netherlands for a while, somewhere isolated, but close enough that she could visit Klaus, who still hadn't regained consciousness after his head injury. “His doctor said that he had brain damage, and that he would never wake up, but he seemed to get stronger when I was around. It was torture for his family. It took me a while to realize what I was doing.”“You were keeping him alive.”She nods. “I asked the professor to help me. I thought I could use my power to make him wake up, but when the professor tried to find him, “She shakes her head, “He wasn't there. I wanted to do one good thing with my powers. I wanted to save him but all I could do was let him go.”After the funeral Erik brought Wanda out into the German countryside for a while to decompress. He planned to take her hiking and let her spend time outside, but it rained the entire time, and Wanda spent most of it curled up in bed, like she was still in the hospital, still drugged to the gills, and Erik was at a total loss, so he started telling Wanda about Peter.“It felt like a violation of sorts,” Erik confesses. “I didn't want to betray your trust or color her perception of you. I wanted her to make up her own mind, but she liked hearing about you, about the ordinary things: about how you lived, what you liked to wear and what you liked to eat, about your sense of humor, and how you were with your little sister... and your mother. I think she was looking for the missing part of herself.”“I wanted to know what my life would have been like if our mother hadn't given me away,” Wanda tells him. It's like a punch, not just the words but the way that she says it, like an attack on Mom. Peter flinches, but too fast for Wanda to see. “I hated you. So much.”Pffft. “No you didn't.”Wanda looks like he's just pulled the rug out from under her and then she scowls, and oh, shit, that's Erik's scowl she's using, and Peter knows he'd better watch himself or she'll take the collar off and curse him with an infected hangnail or something. “I wanted to,” she says. “I still want to hate you but you're making it really hard.”Peter grins.Maybe Peter is Wanda's missing part, or parts, like he's all the things she left behind and maybe that's why he was born second. Peter is everything that Wanda isn't. In spite of that, or maybe because of that, they get along great.Wanda's first few weeks at the mansion are a little rocky. She's insecure and withdrawn and she frightens the children. She's got a temper like dear old dad but where his is quick and cold and decisive, Wanda is like a thunder cloud rolling through the halls of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, casually blowing out light bulbs and televisions every time she takes off her collar like she has to prove to everyone that she doesn't have control of her powers. She and Erik get into a few screaming arguments in German. Two or three of those and Peter tracks down Kurt, who's hiding in the attic, hanging upside down like a bat, and makes Kurt tutor him German so that he can interrupt their fights and tell Wanda to pull her head out of her ass, which surprisingly gains something in the translation.Erik thanks him after Wanda stalks off. “I'm afraid we're too like one another of either of our own good.”The professor has a different take, “Your sister has so much potential, Peter. She is capable of remarkable love and goodwill. I think there is much good she can do in the world... but she is her own worst enemy. What she thinks about herself and her powers influences what those around her think. She is creating her own reality as she goes, much like we all do, I suppose.”But unlike the rest of the world, Wanda can shape reality to reflect her fears and desires. It's a double-edged sword, though, because a lot of the time, she has no idea she's even doing anything. She thinks people should be afraid of her, so they are. Everybody but Peter, that is. Like, when Peter met her, that first day in the library, she was like an ice sculpture because she expected him to be afraid, And he was, sort of, but Wanda's powers aren't perfect, and they're not exactly well-honed, and the professor thinks that, combined with Peter's own powers, helped him shake off her spell. “So I don't have some kind of secret twin immunity?” Peter asks.“I doubt it, but many things are possible,” the professor says, which is really his way of saying 'no, but I have neither the evidence to support my conclusion nor the time to look for it.'Hank is happy to give Peter and Wanda a genetics lecture, and Hank is ecstatic not only to have a live pair of mutant twins to study but also to have their father on hand because now he has access to a multi-generational family of mutants and Peter's like, “I will hide all of your needles, Hank. I swear,” but he can't say 'no' to Hank, not when he's this excited and especially not after he's put up with so much from Peter over the past year, so in the end Peter reluctantly but dutifully rolls up his sleeve and fills a half dozen vials of blood for Hank to test or spin or microwave or drink or whatever he's got in mind and before he leaves the lab Hank says, “Wait.” Peter waits. “Actually... ” Hank says, biting his lip. “Oh my God, what, Hank? Spit it out.”Hank looks up at him and raises on hand. The other stays son his hip. “Wanda's powers... they appear to be unstable.”No kidding. “Yes.”“They appear to be unstable unless she's around you.”Before he can dive too deeply into the implications of that little nugget Hank waves a hand dismissively. “You know, it might be nothing. Forget I said anything,” and Peter does until way later when he's sitting on the floor of his room, listening to The Velvet Underground sing Sunday Morning and sitting shoulder to shoulder with Wanda while she solves algebra equations for her GED and covers him in eraser dust. That's when he notices how their breathing has synced up and how relaxed she seems, how comfortable, and he knows that Hank is onto something. He admits as much to Hank the next time he sees him, and Hank doesn't even look smug, hearing he was right.“I feel... better when she's around,” Peter says. “Calmer.”Hank nods like he'd been expecting Peter to say something like that, then he ventures, “There's so much that we don't understand about mutant physiology. It could just be the social contact making you feel that way, but it wouldn't surprise me to find that you and Wanda have a naturally symbiotic relationship.”“Oh.”“It means that your interactions are mutually beneficial.”“Sure,” Peter says, still not getting it.“I can't wait to see what happens when you try to use your powers together.”Neither can Peter, but because Wanda is the most reluctant mutant who ever lived and she wears her control collar like it's this spring's hottest accessory, only taking it off for brief lessons outside or in the danger room with as few people in attendance as possible, it takes a while for Peter to find an opening. He lives to regret his persistence.It's his own fault for getting up close and personal before she's ready. He catches Wanda at what seems like an opportune moment outside after his gym class ends. The kids are filing reluctantly back inside, jostling each other playfully, energized by a little fresh air and sunshine after a day cooped up in classrooms, and Peter's watching, making sure their behavior doesn't cross the line into roughhousing territory when he sees his twin sitting on the stone railing that runs along the terrace. Her legs don't reach the ground and she's swinging them back and forth, staring off into the middle distance and holding her collar loosely in her right hand, like she's testing the waters or tempting fate or whatever.That's when Peter gets a wild hair up his ass and buzzes right up to her and takes a seat on her left.“Sorry,” he says when she starts.“I thought I was alone,” she says, immediately fumbling to put her collar back on. He stops her, takes the collar right out of her hands.“Give it back,” she warns.“No,” Peter says, holding the collar out of her reach.He sees the retaliatory threat brewing in her eyes and it occurs to him that this would be a great time to skedaddle but there's also a school full of kids to consider and since he's the cause of Wanda's irritation he's not going to risk anybody else getting hurt. Sure, he might be choosing to live dangerously at the moment but he's made his bed and he's going to lie in it and- Cramp! Oh my God it feels like there's a knife in his back- and he screams a silent, open-mouthed scream of horrible suffering and slides gracelessly off of the railing, smacking the back of his head against the cement on his way to the ground.So, Wanda gets her collar back and Peter gets the impression that she's not quite ready to trust herself with her powers. Peter also gets a concussion and spends the rest of the day being shadowed by Erik or Scott or Kurt to make sure he doesn't go to sleep."Sorry," Wanda mumbles at him while she's picking at her dinner later on.Peter assures her that it's no big deal and he sort of had it coming but she just looks so dejected and that's when Peter gets his second wild hair in less than twenty-four hours and has to spend the rest of the day keeping his body and mind occupied so that the telepaths don't glean from him that he's up to no good.