Chapter Text
Charles makes one thing clear almost immediately.
“You cannot take Wanda to buy lottery tickets.”
“What?! You can’t be serious!”
Goddamn telepaths.
“I’m perfectly serious, Peter. It’s an abuse of power and your sister is a minor.”
“It’s a shit ton of money! Come on, we could use it for the school! Wanda could wait in the car!”
“Absolutely not, and I doubt very seriously that you would donate all of your winnings to the school.”
“Well, I would take a cut, obviously. But it would be tiny. Like, thirty percent.”
“No. And if I catch you sneaking out, Peter, God help you.”
So Charles killed that dream. But whatever. Wanda will be of legal lottery-buying age in six years. Peter can wait.
But, really, genius break through and all, things don’t get any easier. Wanda’s powers have always been erratic and crazy – now there’s just an official explanation for it. So how do you train a mutant when no one can predict the outcome of her powers?
Carefully. Duh. Everyone here has witnessed enough destruction from her powers as it is (Peter’s beloved pinball machine bearing literal scars).
It starts out small. Erik hauls an old black and white T.V. out of the attic and hooks it up in one of the classrooms. Wanda stays in that room for over an hour trying to do . . .something. Charles is vague on the details. Eventually she blows the screen out by some freak electrical accident and starts a fire, which makes Charles happy and literally nobody else.
He takes her out to the garden and she kills his hydrangeas, which makes him considerably less happy.
Peter has her hit baseballs until she shatters the window to Erik’s study behind her (the ball bounced off a fucking tree, can you believe it?) and then they both decide to go on a spur-of-the-moment milkshake run into town. For several hours.
Maybe Charles thought she needed something more challenging. Or maybe he’s as vain as an old Hollywood movie star. Whatever the reason, Charles stepped it up after a few days and takes Wanda down to the bunker, which doesn’t surprise Alex in the least. Apparently, Charles used himself and Hank as live targets during Alex’s training and he continues this trend with Wanda.
When they emerge for dinner, they both look none worse for wear, though Erik keeps a steady eye on Charles just in case the guy’s brain explodes or his bones turn to jelly or whatever ungodly body horror that could occur.
The next morning Charles doesn’t show up at breakfast or any of his morning classes. Peter cruises the house until he finds Charles hiding in his bathroom.
“Holy shit!” Peter shouts, jerking back and hitting his arm against the doorframe.
Charles’ scalp gleams in the glare of the vanity lights. He’s bald as a plucked chicken and just as pissed off.
“Peter!” He whips his head around. “Can’t a bloke have a little privacy in his own bathroom! For God’s sake!”
“What the hell happened?”
Peter rubs a hand over the man’s scalp. It feels smooth as a cue ball – no stubble whatsoever, like someone lasered off all the hair.
“It was an accident,” Charles explains, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You know, my hairline has been receding a bit and I thought – Well your sister, she tried to -- I wasn’t supposed to lose all my hair!”
The professor sounds dangerously close to tears, and Peter can feel his panic building. Even as a sort of maybe mature adult, he doesn’t deal well with crying, especially from other grown-ups.
“Maybe I should get Erik –“
“No! Don’t you dare! He cannot see me like this!”
“Uh . .. you do know you share the same bedroom, right? I mean, eventually, he’s got to . . .”
“I’ll sleep somewhere else.” Charles brings his hand up as if to run it through his hair before stopping and dropping down at his side. He takes in a shaky breath. “I’ve already told Erik I’m sick, and we’ll wait for it to grow back.”
“Charles, that’s literally the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say. Erik loves you. He’s not gonna care if you have hair or not.”
Judging by how unnaturally smooth Charles’ head is, Peter suspects that the hair is never going to grow back. But he doesn’t voice this concern.
“But – my hair.” Charles’s voice cracks and Peter places an awkward arm around the man’s shoulder.
“Look on the bright side,” he says, “you look even fucking younger than usual bald. You keep this up and people are going to suspect your secondary mutation is immortality.”
The corners of Charles’ mouth lift up the tiniest bit. Peter counts that as a victory.
And that’s when the bathroom door opens and Erik steps through.
“Charles, I set some soup on your nightst –“ He stops cold at the sight of Charles’ gleaming head.
Charles does some weird, jerky thing with his hand where he tries to unconsciously cover up his head but realizes at the last second how stupid and impossible that is. He drops his hand with a heavy sigh.
“You tried to get Wanda to fix your hairline, didn’t you?” says Erik, a smirk tugging on his mouth. He leans against the door frame.
“It’s not funny, Erik,” Charles spits back, acid in his tone. “I don’t -- I don’t think it’s going to grow back.”
There goes his eyes, wide and watery and fluttering like a sad princess. Erik crumbles like a house of cards in the rain. He strides over to Charles, bends down, and kisses the life out of him.
“Oh. Wow. Okay.” Peter hastily throws his gaze at a nail in the wall beside him while his dads make out beside him. When they don’t stop after a while, Peter clears his throat. “You know I’m still here, right?”
They finally break for air and Erik rests his head against Charles. “You’ve never looked more beautiful,” he whispers.
Charles gives Erik watery smile, and Peter throws up in his mouth a little.
“That’s my cue to leave,” he says before turning on his heel and walking out.
Those two don’t come down until almost dinner and Peter warns Raven away from the upstairs before she traumatizes herself for life.
By the time Wanda sees the damage she’s accidentally wrought, Charles has made his relative peace with his new shorn-lamb look. He pulls bald off with surprising dignity, and it lends an air of credibility that his fluffy hair couldn’t give him.
Wanda makes no peace about it. She leaves the room in tears, unmoved by everyone’s attempts to reassure her. Erik stops Peter when he tries to go after her.
“Let her parse out her feelings on her own. You can’t do all her thinking for her.”
He allows himself Erik to tug him back to the breakfast table.
Wanda skips classes that day and Charles says nothing. Peter spends his free period tracking her down in the library a few hours later, lunch in hand on a plate. She is lounging by the window, a book of poetry in hand.
“You missed lunch,” Peter says, setting the plate down on a nearby desk.
Wanda shrugs. No tears shine on her face, her face pale instead of blotchy.
“Well, it’s here if you want it.”
Nothing. Wanda ignores him in favor of her book, even though she isn’t turning any pages. The silence is so goddamn awkward, and Peter does not like feeling as if he’s been dismissed.
“Look, what happened with Charles, it’s not your fault.”
Wanda turns a page. “Yes it is,” she says, matter of fact. “It’s my power. I did it. Ergo, my fault.”
“It’s not like you hurt him. Everything turned out fine.”
“He hates it. He’s devastated. Everything is not fine.”
Her tone and her words do not match up. He can’t tell if she’s actually upset or not. There is a deadness, a hollow acceptance in her voice that scares him infinitely more than hysteria and tears.
“Wanda . . .are you okay?” He has no idea what else to say, even though it’s a stupid question.
His sister sighs, sounding more world weary than a twelve-year-old ought to.
“I used to dream about having power like yours. To be one of you and go to this school. And now I got it and it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Her words, and the dead tone she paints them in, pierce him like a volley of arrows. He blinks tears from his stinging eyes.
“How can you say that?” he says, voice barely a whisper.
“Don’t you dare, Peter.” A hint of anger sparks in her, the first sign of life he’s seen so far. “You get to run really fast. You get to pull pranks and travel and save people. It’s great for you. I ruin everything I touch! I’m uncontrollable. Untrainable. I’m a gun that’s broken and you never know when it’ll go off and what it will destroy. It sucks, Peter. It sucks in a way that you will never be able to understand. So don’t bother.”
She returns to her book, a very clear sign of dismissal that fills Peter with equal parts fury and despair.
He turns on his heel and leaves, not knowing what else to do.
They avoid each other for a while. Wanda loses interest in training, trying only halfheartedly, and then not trying at all. To Peter’s surprise, Charles seems upset about this.
“We went through something similar with Scott,” Charles says as he and Peter play a round of chess that evening while Erik and Wanda meditate. “He had difficulty accepting the destructive nature of his power.”
“Well what fixed it?”
“He still struggles, at times.”
“Great,” says Peter, sighing as Charles captures his queen. “Wanda’s gonna hate herself forever.”
Charles graces him with a soft smile. It’s still so weird to see him without his ridiculously boyish head of hair. “Don’t give up hope, Peter. Acceptance doesn’t happen overnight. Wanda just needs to see her powers doing something helpful rather than harmful.”
“That’s never going to happen if she stops trying.”
“She’s twelve years old. Have patience, friend.”
Peter tries. He keeps his distance from her, giving her space to think without his interference. A couple of days later he spies Wanda standing in front of the lightning struck tree, running her fingers over its blackened trunk. The leaves have started to turn brown and fall off at the top. He resists the temptation to go out there and talk to her, but someone else does not.
Scott approaches her, slowly enough to give her time to walk away. But she doesn’t. And to Peter’s shock, he watches Scott stand an easy distance from her and study the tree with his arms crossed, like it’s one of those algebra problems he hates.
He turns and says something to her, gesturing at the tree and oh God Peter wants to eavesdrop so goddamn bad, but Charles is in the kitchen helping prepare dinner and he sends a weak wave of Don’t-You-Dare to Peter’s head.
Any minute now an argument is gonna erupt and a branch will probably fall right on top of Scott’s head and kill him, and then Wanda will probably jump off the roof.
Instead she and Scott talk for several minutes, until Charles rings out the mental call for dinner. Wanda jumps, still not used to the intrusion even after a month. Scott hesitates a moment before putting his hand on her shoulder and says something that makes Wanda smile ever so slightly.
Peter has to pick his jaw up off the floor.
Later that evening, Wanda makes her peace with him. He and Erik are chilling in the library (and its thanks to him and Wanda that Peter even sets foot in the fucking place now) when she approaches the couch hesitantly, a slim book clutched in both hands.
“Read to me?” she asks.
He has heard and seen this exact pose and that exact phrase more times than he could count, though back then she used to hold Little Golden Books instead of what looks like the volume of poetry Charles foisted on her during Literature class. They stare at each other a moment, an unspoken exchange of apology and forgiveness.
“Sure, Squirt.” He pats the space beside him and she climbs up on the couch. “You sure you want to read this flowery bullshit?”
“Yes,” says Wanda, flashing him a glare. “And it’s not flowery – bullshit.”
She says that last word in a hushed whisper, eyes darting over to Erik sorting through paper work across the room. Peter has to suppress a laugh. Mom is right; he is a horrible influence.
“Alright, alright. Don’t get your panties in a twist. Do you want me to start from the beginning or just flip open to a random page?”
“Any page is fine,” yawns Wanda. She curls up next to him, fluffy head resting on his chest.
So Peter flips to the middle of the book because why the hell not and starts reading. The poems are okay, they’re just words that gloss over in Peter’s mind as he reads them, their individual meaning clear to him but together creating empty syllables.
After a few pages, the peanut gallery decides to speak up.
“You’re a horrible reader,” says Erik. His eyes don’t leave the table but Peter flips him off anyway.
“Fuck off, Dad. I know what all these words mean.”
“Just because you have a college degree doesn’t mean you can mouth off to your father,” Erik warns, without any heat.
“Try and stop me, old timer.”
It’s a slight variation of an exchange they’ve repeated a lot in the last five years. The buttons on Peter’s worn jean jacket vibrate warningly before settling back down. Wanda watches them with wary eyes – she didn’t handle conflict very well, especially when Peter and Mom used to fight constantly – but then relaxed when she saw Erik’s shark smile.
“You have no emotion in your voice. It’s like listening to a robot.”
Peter huffs. “I can do emotion.”
He reads the next poem as over dramatically as possible until Wanda smacks him with a pillow and Erik is snickering.
“Be serious,” Wanda tells him. “For once.”
“You do know who you’re talking to, right?” retorts Peter, but he flips a page to a new poem, scans it for a moment, and then clears his throat. He can be serious and deep. You don’t have to like poetry to be a deep person.
“You do not have to be good,” Peter reads. “You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.”
He stops because holy fuck that’s the sort of line that takes your breath away. Something in the air shifts, the attention on him sharpens. Peter licks his lips and continues, intrigued..
“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
“Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
“Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”
Peter finishes on a whisper, mostly for dramatic effect, but also because it feels right. It’s a poem that deserves gravitas. He looks up to catch Erik staring a hole though him.
“Let me see that,” says Wanda. She grabs the book from Peter’s hand before he can answer and scrutinizes the page. Then she closes the book and gives him a swift kiss on the cheek. “Thank you for reading. Good night.” She waves to Erik. “Good night, Mr. Lehnsherr.”
And then she pads out of the library, book hugged close to her chest like it was made of gold.
Wanda keeps staring at the tree. Every now and then over the course of the next couple of days he finds running her fingers over the bark as if she were soothing the flank of a wounded animal (it’s habit now to watch her to make sure nothing explodes or implodes or dies). She always gives it one last, long look before leaving, as if steeling herself for something that never happens.
Finally one evening about a week later, she closes her eyes and presses purple covered hands against the trunk. The whole tree glows for a split second before returning to its natural state. Both Peter and Wanda freeze, staring at it and waiting for something horrible. Peter stands on the balls of his feet, ready to whisk her out of there if another lightning strike hits.
Nothing.
The tree just sits there, as it always does, ugly as hell and split nearly in two.
Wanda tilts her head back, the way she does when she tries to hold back tears, before walking back to the house with a rather defeated slump in her shoulders.
For two days the tree does nothing.
On the third day Scott practically beats Wanda’s door down before breakfast (Peter can hear him all the way in the kitchen).
“Get out of bed and go look at your stupid tree,” he hollers.
Wanda emerges from the dorm hallway still in her bathrobe, bushy hair barely restrained in a messy braid, and follows Scott into the yard completely barefoot.
Peter tags along out of curiosity and kneejerk caution for Scott’s safety.
There are tiny sprouts growing out of the blackened branches.
“You see,” says Scott softly. “It doesn’t suck all the time.”
Wanda’s grin threatens to split her face in two.
“Just most of the time.”
“Shut up, Scott,” Wanda says fondly.
She lays her head on his shoulder for a moment, and Peter looks at the sky for the sun to implode or Mars to come crashing down out of orbit because her and Scott are having a Friendship Moment and what the fuck?! If there was any proof at all that Wanda’s powers shifted probability, it would be the sight of her and Scott not trying to verbally rip each other’s throats out.
Wanda kisses the tip of her finger and gently presses it against one of the green buds. She glares at Scott and Peter, daring them to say anything.
They (wisely) do not.
Wanda makes it her mission to cure dying plants, starting with the few survivors of Charles’ poor hydrangeas. Some of them wither and die on the spot, but other perk back up to their former glory in only a couple of days. Peter takes her into town and searches for the most pathetic, droopy-looking, dried-out potted plants to take home and rescue. Scott and Jean often tag along with them, and sometimes Peter takes them out for doughnuts afterward.
The gardens out back flourish with a veritable jungle of flowers and ferns and shit. Wanda could damn near open her own nursery at this point. In fact, Peter starts spending gym time with all students digging new flower beds to accommodate all the fucking flowers she adopts. The ones that develop under her care grow at least twice as big as they’re supposed to. Charles starts taking his morning coffee on the terrace so he could better admire the gardens.
Peter thinks, on one particularly cool morning, about maybe giving Wanda some pumpkin seeds and seeing how big they would grow and if Charles would consider it cheating if Wanda won Biggest Goddamn Pumpkin at a country fair. Maybe they could even break a world record. . . .
Peter.
Charles’ voice sounds in his mind, tense and urgent.
Busted. Why the fuck does Charles have to ruin everything fun?
Peter you need to take Wanda and leave. Immediately.
Wait . . what?
The man’s fear and stress echo and mingle with Peter’s sudden unease. What happened? What could have caused this?
Carl is here.
Shit fucking shit.
Peter’s eyes slide over to his sister, who pats in a fat fern beside a gangly rose bush, in ignorant bliss that will shatter any second now.
He finds himself getting furious. After all the tears and destruction and fights they’ve finally finally found a measure of peace that, quite frankly, Peter worked his goddamn ass for. That Wanda worked her goddamn ass for, and this bastard is just going to show up and ruin it the second everything calms down.
What right does that bastard have to come here after everything he put Wanda through?
Wanda gives him a searching look.
“Something’s wrong. What is it?”
“Nothing.” Peter forces a smile. “Hey, who’s up for ice cream?”
Wanda points her spade at him. “Stop lying to me, Peter. What’s going on?”
He doesn’t know her perception is a side effect of her powers, with her ability to always be right when she guesses, or if she just inherited Mom’s I-Always-Know-When-You’re-Fucking-Up sense early. But before Peter can answer her, a voice shatters everything.
“Where is she?”
Wanda’s head snaps up at the unmistakable sound of her father’s voice.
“Daddy?” She whispers. Her face has gone white.
Before Peter can react she’s dropped the spade and dashes off to the back door.
“Wanda!”
He runs after her, but doesn’t try to stop her. She deserves to face whatever she thinks she can handle. But he does snag her before she can walk in on the warzone that currently occupies the foyer. He tucks them both away near the stairs, and they watch in silence.
Carl and Charles face off in the foyer. Charles has parked his chair directly in the man’s way to keep Carl from setting foot further in.
“I’m sorry, but I cannot permit you to see her,” Charles was saying, holding his hands up in a placating gesture that Peter knows will only piss off Carl more.
“You can’t tell me that!” Carl jabs his finger at Charles. “She’s my daughter. I’m her father. I have every right to see her! And no crippled freak in a wheelchair is going to stop me.”
Crippled. Freak.
Peter’s entire body vibrates with the urge to drive his fist into that fucking bastard’s head.
Peter. Don’t. Not in front of her.
But it’s not Peter Charles should worry about.
The wall sconces start shaking and twisting until they rip away from the wood, dragging electrical wires behind them. They flatten into a wide band that shoots out and clotheslines Carl in the fucking throat, shoving him back into the wall.
Erik stalks in front of the man, hand held out like some kind of Darth Vader Force Choke while Carl wiggles like a worm on a hook.
“Erik!” Charles barks, but Erik ignores him and Charles doesn’t try very hard to stop him.
“You don’t deserve the title of father,” Erik hisses, sounding positively lethal. “You stopped being her father when you rejected her gift and called her a monster.”
“She . . has . . .no . . .other,” Carl rasps out.
“She has me. She has Charles. She has Peter and her mother. She doesn’t need you. And you will never bother her again.”
Erik clenches his fingers and the metal bites into Carl so tightly that blood beads along its edge and Peter realizes that Erik fully intends to decapitate Carl right here in the foyer. Wanda trembles in his arms like a leaf in a storm.
“Erik!” Charles yells. His fingers reach for his temple but Wanda’s scream startles everyone.
“Daddy!”
She tears out of his arms and races into the foyer, tackling into the back of Erik’s legs like an NFL linebacker. This doesn’t accomplish much because Wanda is shorter than five feet and can’t weight more than a hundred pounds soaking wet. But it knocks Erik’s concentration enough for the metal band to drop to the floor.
Carl sags to the carpet gasping for hair and wiping blood away from his neck. Peter dashes in, stopping in between Erik and Carl, not entirely sure what the fuck to do. On one hand, Carl is a piece of human garbage and Peter wants to hurl him from the roof. But on the other hand, he doesn’t actually want Carl to die, and he sure as fuck doesn’t want Wanda seeing her father get his head popped off, no matter how horrible he is.
But Peter doesn’t need to do anything because Wanda crouches down next to Carl.
“Daddy? Are you okay?”
“Don’t you see what they are?” Carl rasps. “They’re monsters, freaks, all of them. I don’t want you to stay long enough to become one.”
Wanda gives him a long, searching look and her heart breaks in her eyes at the conclusion she reaches.
“I’ve always been one of them,” she tells him with more gentleness than he deserves. “And we’re not monsters, even if we do terrible things sometimes.”
She stands and glares witheringly at Erik, who flinches as if Wanda had physically slapped him. Then she holds out her hand to Carl. He recoils away from her and stands shakily to his own feet.
“Daddy,” Wanda’s voice cracks a bit, and she takes a deep breath to carry on. “If you can’t accept all of me . . .then I can’t accept any of you. I want you to leave. And I – and I don’t want you to talk to me any more.”
Tears slip down her cheeks, but she refuses to acknowledge them. She turns to Erik.
“Don’t you touch him again or I will make you worse than bald,” she hisses and then with the dignity of a princess, sweeps out of the room.
Peter can only watch her leave in silent awe.
Carl walks out the front door without another word, and Erik stands resolutely in the doorway, like the Queens’ Guard, until Carl’s car disappears out the gates.
For an entire week, Peter, Erik, and Charles rank the top three on Wanda’s shit list. She doesn’t speak to any of them, not a single word. She’s positively furious at Erik for trying to kill Carl and equally pissed at Peter and Charles for not trying very hard to stop him. She’s so livid she would have skipped the classes they taught if summer vacation wasn’t in full swing already.
So instead she hangs out with Scott and then Jean on the weekends and watches T.V. with Raven and Hank and pointedly ignores everyone else.
As far as fights with Wanda goes, this is not Peter’s first rodeo. It sucks, and she’s more pissed at him than she has been her entire stay here, but experience gives him the patience to wait her out and the confidence that she doesn’t actually hate his guts. And Charles has dealt with a thousand moody teenage silent treatments, so he’s fine.
Erik, on the other hand, is devastated.
He drags Peter to the bookstore in town looking for apology presents, and he spends at least half an hour flipping through poetry books before settling on a volume of English Romantics.
They leave the books with a note in front of her bedroom door.
Two days later the books still sit there.
He doesn’t try to talk to Wanda, but his gaze tracks her every time they occupy the same room in hopes that today she might actually look at him.
“Dude, you gotta chill out,” Peter tells him one evening in Erik’s study. “You’re taking this way too hard.”
“She’s Magda’s child,” says Erik softly. “I know she’s not mine in any way, but sometimes . . . sometimes it feels like it. I can’t explain it.”
Man, if Wanda could hear this she would fucking pass out, pissed off or not. Peter grins and claps Erik on the shoulder.
“Well, she could use a good dad like you.”
“She’s not going to want one. Not from me.”
Peter rolls his eyes. It’s not that Erik isn’t in genuine pain, but Jesus he’s more fucking dramatic than an old Hollywood starlet. “She does this shit all the time to me. She always snaps out of it.”
“She cares for you,” says Erik. “I was a stranger to her, and now I’m a monster.” He grimaces and downs the finger of whiskey still in his glass. “I thought those instincts in me had died, but they were just waiting for the right moment.”
“Carl is a piece of shit. It doesn’t take a monster to want to put that fucker out of his misery, especially after he threatened Charles.” Peter clenches his fingers. “Hell, if you weren’t going to I probably would have.”
Erik keeps his gaze on his empty glass, a thousand yard stare.
“If she hadn’t stopped me I would have killed him. Right in front of her.”
“No you wouldn’t have.” Peter tells him and thank God Erik isn’t a telepath because not even Peter can bring himself to completely swallow that statement.
“I guess we’ll never know.”
Four days later at dinner Wanda looks across the table and says, “Can you pass the broccoli, please, Mr. Lehnsherr?”
“Of course.” The coolness of his reply is ruined by how he nearly drops his fork in his haste to pass her the ceramic dish in question.
“Thank you. Peter, you have mashed potatoes on your nose.”
And just like that, they are released from the doghouse and everything is cool.
(Everything is not cool because Wanda calls Mom, and Erik and Peter decide to organize the attic since Charles won’t shut up about it needing to get done and it’s totally not a coincidence that it just happens to be when Mom pulls in the driveway.)
(It doesn’t work for very long and they both receive a vicious tongue lashing that can be summed up as Why The Fuck Can’t You Kick My Pre-Teen Child Out Of The Room Before You Rough Up My Ex-Husband How Fucking Stupid and Insensitive Are You?)
A couple of weeks later, the divorce is well on its way to getting finalized, and Mom takes a weekend off to celebrate at the school. Charles broke out a bottle of wine after the kids were sent to bed and everyone stayed up until nearly three in the morning. (Okay so it was more like eight bottles of wine. And some beer. And a few shots of bourbon). If the school hadn’t been on summer break, Charles would have cancelled class the next day.
Both she and Erik are obnoxiously early morning people and too experienced with alcohol to have much of a hangover the next morning. Even through a blinding headache, Peter forces himself up at the ass crack of dawn so he can have coffee with her and Erik in the kitchen.
The world is quietly limitless in the sunrise. and Peter finds himself more at peace in these moments with his family—percolator gurgling in the background and soft, fragile sunlight spilling across the table by the window—than in five years of meditation. It’s the kind of moment you reach for when everything goes to shit, and it’s the kind of moment that braces you when you're on the brink of losing hope.
This morning Peter stumbles into the kitchen and finds his Mom already nursing a cup of coffee and peering out the window.
“How long has this been going on?” She asks.
He gazes over her shoulder at Erik and Wanda meditating under the Lightning Tree (as Wanda calls it).
“A few weeks,” he replies. “It’s supposed to help calm her emotional state or whatever so she doesn’t keep breaking things with her powers. Scott Summers can only take so many concussions.”
“Is it working?”
“Yeah. I think so. She really likes doing it, but I can’t tell if that’s because of the meditation or because of Dad.”
“. . . they spend a lot of time together?” Mom cracks an eyebrow.
“Are you kidding me? She’s got her head so far up his ass I’m surprised her voice doesn’t come out of his mouth when he speaks.” Peter studies her. “That doesn’t bother you, does it?”
“No. Just surprised. Maybe I shouldn’t be.” She takes a sip from her cup. “He loves you so much and she’s your sister, so . . .”
“She’s also your daughter. He’s kind of unofficially adopted her.”
Mom smiles into her cup.
“So I have a surprise for you,” she says.
Peter instantly feels wary.
“Is this a ‘surprise! Here’s fifty bucks!’ kind of surprise or a ‘Surprise! Wanda blew up car and I’m getting a divorce!’ kind of surprise?”
“It’s more of a ‘Surprise, I’m going to stay here and be Charles’ live-in nurse’ kind of surprise.”
Peter nearly chokes on his coffee. “What? Seriously?”
“Yeah. That’s, like, not going to kill your buzz here is it?”
“No! It’s awesome! But . . . how does that even happen?”
Mom shrugs. “He’s always asking me medical advice about his condition, especially when it comes to travel. He’s still relearning everything, you know? Finally I asked him a few months ago why he just doesn’t break down and get his own live-in nurse to help not only with him but with kids at school. I’m not sure that Hank’s actually qualified, bless his blue little heart. And he asked why not me?”
Peter’s eyebrows raise. “That was several months ago?”
“Yeah. I turned him down. I wasn’t in any position to leave D.C. and live here. But then . . .”
“Wanda blew up the car,” Peter says.
“Wanda blew up the car.”
Peter worries at his lip, a habit he’s picked up from Wanda, as he mulls over a certain question. The Question, really. The one he’s always wanted to ask and never quite dared. But now he thinks it might be safe.
“Why . . .why did it take so long? Why did it even happen in the first place?” He keeps his voice neutral, schools away the petulant whine that threatens to come out.
Mom sighs in her coffee cup and doesn’t answer for a long moment.
“I needed him,” she says. “When I left your father I left with nothing. Or I thought I did. I left Europe with the determination of becoming a new person and erasing everything that made me stand out, that reminded me of. . .” She swallows and takes a drink of her coffee. “I changed my accent. I got a job. But then I found out that I was pregnant with you and I couldn’t . . . I knew I couldn’t do that alone. Even America doesn’t look too kindly at that sort of thing. I needed someone to help support me, as much as I hated that. I also needed someone to help me blend in. I found Carl.”
She smiles, softly. “To his credit, he didn’t care that I was already pregnant. He didn’t care about all the teasing his friends gave him, or the looks they gave me. I don’t know what happened to him, Peter, but he didn’t start off an asshole. Something has just made him bitter and twisted over time, and I could never find out why. I don’t even think he knows. But after Wanda, enough is enough. I don’t need him anymore, especially if he’s going to act like that. “
A deep sigh. “Maybe someday he will straighten himself out enough for Wanda. I still have hope for him.”
Peter knows there’s a lot more to this story than she is telling. He’s pieced it together based on things that Erik has said and stuff he’s learned in class. He knows the reason why he’s never had any extended family on either side, why Mom wears plain clothing and agrees with all their neighbors at cookouts and why sometimes the stories of her “past” never exactly match up. Why she’s so protective of Wanda. Why she distanced herself from Peter the moment he started acting out.
He doesn’t ask for confirmation. He knows Mom might not ever be okay enough to talk about it. She and Erik have more in common than he first thought. Perhaps that’s why they can’t stray from each other’s orbits.
It’s one thing to empathize.
It’s another thing to know.
“Maybe he will,” says Peter.
Who is he to judge? It worked for Erik.
“Good morning, my dears.”
Charles wheels into the kitchen, his face still creased from sleep. If he still had hair, it would be sticking straight up at this point. Mom fixes him a cup of coffee and they descend into quiet discussion about what they don’t remember about last night. Peter smirk and sips his coffee, turning his gaze back out the window to the tree and its occupants.
He never imagined the possibility of having a family that wasn’t splintered into pieces. Honestly, he never imagined having his family period, even splintered. But the joy that comes from this new reality isn’t ecstatic, it doesn’t drive him to whoop and holler from the rooftops. It seeps into his bones like warm honey and makes him still.
It makes him wonderstruck, really. And when he thinks back into the last five years of his life, he wonders how the fuck it’s all possible. The odds that Charles would find him, the odds that the man he broke out of prison is his father, the odds of them coming together, healing.
The odds. The odds. The odds.
(How early can mutants manifest?)
Or, Charles whispers in his mind, perhaps it's just Fate.