fic: whiplash | pietro & wanda maximoff; pg-13 for minor character death and angst
Title: Whiplash
Author: obsessionality
Fandom: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014); X-Men: First Class (2011)
Pairing: None
Relationships: Wanda & Pietro Maximoff
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Minor Character Death
Summary: It was strange how the tables turned, and how anyone could get dragged under the rip tide of life. Even quicksilver Pietro, who escaped every obstacle by simply being too fast to be caught. The problem with running was that sometimes there was nowhere to run to, and there was a big difference between running away from a thing and running towards it. Maybe Hank was right. Maybe no matter how good you were, the house always won, and in the end, life always screwed you over.
A/N: This was partially based on a one-line text post from tumblr which I can’t find now, which said “can you imagine what would happen with Peter Maximoff turned up outside Xavier Mansion after DOFP, like hey Prof, do you mind if I crash on your couch a bit?” Like I tend to, I took the prompt and beat it to death.
“What are you doing?”
“Holding your neck so you won’t get whiplash.”
“What?”
“Whiplaaash.”
The thing is, sometimes things happened too quickly, even for him. Sometimes, even Pietro got whiplash, and for someone who could move ten times faster than the speed of sound, that was a pretty big deal. Hank used to say that it was because even their extraordinary abilities had a limit, that there were fixed points in time that couldn’t be changed, and that like Oedipus, life would always screw them over eventually in a self-fulfilling prophecy. No matter how good you were, the house always won. He’d been forced to back down when Havoc said his argument sounded like faith in a higher being, like he believed in ineffability, someone setting events in motion beyond their control. Hank had backed off, because the mutants of Xavier Mansion did not have a healthy relationship with God, and frankly, no one blamed them for it.
Their mom, his and Wanda’s, had done everything she possibly could. She really had. Pietro worked hard to pretend he was an ordinary teenager, but ordinary teenagers didn’t age twice as fast as their twin siblings. Ordinary teenagers weren’t forced to learn about a harsh world in a far shorter time than everyone else. Ordinary teenagers didn’t have to help their single parents travel across the country, moving from city to town to city again, looking for a safe place to live, where their abilities wouldn’t get noticed. Ordinary parents didn’t have to raise two children whose abilities they couldn’t even begin to understand, short on money, time and support, and god knows she’d done the best she could. He knew what people thought about him, that he was nothing but a trouble-making klepto punk, who wouldn’t know familial duty and loyalty if it bit him in the ass. But if he was loyal to one person, it was to his mother, and he’d die before he let anything happen to her.
His mom had raised them single-handedly and she hadn’t complained, even when Wanda had unwittingly levitated a social worker’s car in broad daylight, and they’d had to pack their bags and leave town before she could return with her colleagues the next day, to point fingers, and tell them in no uncertain terms that they did not belong. Even though there had been way too many boxes of instant mac-and-cheese, too many jars of peanuts butter and far too many nights spent sleeping in a car while mom drove them into yet another state, she’d never abandoned them, never even considered it, and Pietro knew they were luckier than most. He’d had classmates whose parents had abandoned them for being mouthy little shits, and he suspected that raising twin mutants with dubious looking birth-certificates and no partner to confide in was far more difficult than raising ordinary snot-nosed brats whose only flaws involved eating too much, and being rude to their elders.
He thinks, if he could have wished away their powers, he would have, no matter the consequence, even though the only time he felt he could breathe freely was when he was racing ahead of everyone and everything, and it felt like he could defy gravity by stepping outside the slipstreams of time, and the ordinary atmosphere. He would have given it all up, if it had meant his mother had an easier time of it. But there was nothing he could have done, no one he could have turned to for advice or help.
So he pretended to be a mouthy little shit, and occasionally stole packets of chips from corner shops to distract the police from the fact that he was stealing (and selling) larger electrical components from car dealerships and computer shops barely seconds after. It wasn’t that he didn’t doubt the rightness of what he was doing, it was just that he didn’t have a choice. And if it helped his mum pay for milk and vegetables for Wanda, and for a new fake ID for him whenever his body decided to age a little bit more, then he really didn’t have a choice.
It wasn’t like there were people who’d help them without asking for things in return.
And as far as Pietro was concerned, courtesy was free, but charity was a luxury only the wealthy could indulge in. He didn’t make a habit of giving people food out of his sister’s mouth, and he never would. But when Charles Xavier and the two other dudes turned up at his front door, he gave them a chance and listened to their hare-brained plan. There was something in Xavier’s eyes that made Pietro feel that he understood loss, and pain, and suffering. Something that made Pietro identify with him, in the way he snatched that card away like it would burn him, like it was a hope that would never be fulfilled. Like Pietro’s hope of a normal life, close enough to touch, but always evading him. And he believed in Xavier, somehow, even though faith and trust were in short supply. He believed that it would be okay, in the end.
When he sat there and watched Magneto threaten the president in front of the whole world, he knew he’d made a mistake. He should have known that a man who’d killed one president wouldn’t hesitate to kill another one, and that trusting strangers only ever worked out in fairy tales and tv shows. Not in real life.
He’d held his sister and hoped, for three days. He’d hoped very hard that the backlash wouldn’t affect them, because he wasn’t stupid enough to think there would be no backlash. But he wasn’t stupid enough to think they’d be unaffected by it either, and still he hoped anyway. He didn’t sleep and he didn’t eat, and he watched the front door through the night, because any minute, any second, he was expecting it to be kicked down. His mother had protected him from many things, from many people who hadn’t been very happy with the neighbourhood’s resident teenage klepto punk. But she wouldn’t be able to protect him from the secret service, and they both knew it.
When the birds fell silent, and the kids playing outside were ushered indoors by parents listening to a non-verbal gut instinct, he knew trouble had come a-knocking, and it was time for them to get going. They didn’t have the time or the ability to take much with them, so they didn’t bother with anything beyond the clothes on their backs. He kissed his mother’s cheek, hugged her tight, then picked up his sister and ran. He didn’t look back.
He didn’t stand in the backyard of a house two doors away, and he didn’t wait to hear his mother scream. They’d discussed this a hundred times in the past six years; a hundred thousand times, developing the plan further each time, with backups galore. It didn’t make it any easier to take Wanda and leave his mom behind. Even for an ordinary teenager the concept of never seeing his only parent again would have been mind boggling, and Pietro was no ordinary teenager; forever was a long time. But for the first time in his life, he didn’t have enough time. They had to run with barely a chance for whispered farewells and ‘I love you’s’, and he tried to memorise the endearments, both for his and Wanda’s sake, because there was no one left to tell Wanda and Pietro that they loved them, ever again.
He’d have taken her, he’d have given anything to have her with him, so they could run away together, and he wouldn’t have had to be alone, but then they’d have been chased. This way, she could give them a fighting chance, a head start, if the Government stooges believed her story about a delinquent punk who ran away, leaving his deadbeat mom behind. If they believed she didn’t know where he was, or where he was going. And Pietro knew that she genuinely didn’t know, because Pietro himself didn’t know where they were going, but they didn’t know that, and Pietro knew people did terrible things in the pursuit of power and information. He could only hope that they believed her.
And oh, people would kick up a fuss, but they couldn’t criminalise neglectful parents, or half the country would be in prison. It was hardly unbelievable that a kid would run away from home, but a small part of him knew there was little hope. He still hoped that maybe there would be no screams to hear, even if he had waited. Maybe they’d search the house and leave his mother alone, leave her unharmed and unmolested. But he knew in his gut, the same way the birds knew to keep quiet, and parents knew to keep their kids indoors, he knew he’d never see his mother again. So he kept his mouth shut, and he ran.
The problem with running, though, was that sometimes there was nowhere to run to, and as a runner he knew there was a big difference between running away from a thing and running towards it. He wanted to be running towards a better future for Wanda, and for himself, but he was just a scared teenager, and he was running away from his worst nightmares.
It didn’t hit him until much later that night, when they’d taken shelter in a quiet corner of a warehouse on the outskirts of the city, and he’d draped his jacket around his sleeping sister in an attempt to ward off the chill. For someone who’d laughed at everyone else being really slow, it took him a really long time to process how dramatically his own situation had changed. They’d gone from being a loving, if dysfunctional family, to being orphans without a place to call their own, or even a roof over their heads, in the span of a few hours. He couldn’t even afford to cry because his calm was the only thing keeping Wanda panicking. No matter how he pretended for her, though, nothing would ever be okay again. And somehow, he’d have to take Wanda through it, on his own.
And he didn’t know where to run.
He blames his own lag time on the fact that he was in shock, and the fact that he didn’t sleep for the next two days, watching over his sister, because he’d heard of what happened to little girls who were picked up off the streets. When he woke up from his unintended nap to find his sister beaming at him in a way that made it clear she had no idea what was going on, it finally hit him that he did know where to go.
Xavier owed him a favour, and it was time to collect.
It was a good thing his mind worked a lot faster than normal minds too, so he could remember the address on the little card: 407 Graymalkin Lane, Salem Centre, Westchester County, New York. And still, it was one thing knowing an address, and it was another thing entirely getting there. It took weeks on foot, not because it was far away, but because he had to stop so Wanda could sleep, and eat. He could probably have gone without it, and made it there in a matter of hours if not less. But it wasn’t an option. Wanda would have suffered whiplash, and he was suffering a different type of whiplash of his own. It was a hard, cold journey, and he missed his mother terribly, and he didn’t know how to answer Wanda when she started asking difficult questions. He didn’t think he’d ever know how to explain what had happened, because he wasn’t sure himself, how it had all gone so wrong, so quickly.
When they finally arrived in Westchester County, the first thing he felt was angry. Pietro was by nature a fairly calm sort of guy. His sister had her mood swings, and could flip from sunny placidity to screaming rage in a matter of seconds. It reflected her powers. His powers, on the other hand, were fairly consistent, and as long as he had a tune in his head and protective headgear, he was good to go. But when he saw the opulence of the idyllic suburbia around him, in comparison to the dumpster they’d shared with a pair of mangy alley cats two nights before to get out of the rain, anger was the only reasonable response.
Wanda squeezed her fingers around his, and he had to swallow the bitterness back, for her. It took them another hour to find the place, and he got through the gates with no problems. One of the men who’d been with the professor opened the door, looking angry and sort of blue.
“Oh, hey,” he said, and didn’t open the door any further. Pietro gritted his teeth. This man had come to him asking for help, and he’d been forced to let them in. And now this four-eyes wasn’t even letting Pietro into the house, eyeing him like he was a travelling gypsy, wandering from door to door to steal things and curse babies. In all fairness, he was a thief, but he didn’t deserve this. If he’d learned one thing though, it was that people were hypocritical.
“I need to speak with the Professor.” Wanda sniffled for effect, and he couldn’t have loved his sister more if he tried. She never really spoke much, but she definitely understood almost everything that was going on around her, emotionally and intuitively, if not intellectually. She was going to grow up to be the most kick ass partner-in-crime.
“Well, the Professor’s occupied at the moment, if you could maybe come back later?” the man asked, and made to close the door.
Pietro blocked with a palm flat against the wood and an echoing crack, before the man could really move. “You need to let us in, dude. We have nowhere else to go. The feds tracked us down.”
The door swung open when the man’s eyes widened in shock. “You led them here?” he demanded, but Pietro took the chance to push past, slipping into the mansion. The air was musty with disuse and dust, and it made Wanda sneeze. The man gaped behind them, but Pietro had no sympathy for him. If these people hadn’t come knocking at their door, none of this would have happened, and they’d still have a home to go back to, and a mother to take care of them. But he bit his tongue and addressed the guy’s concerns.
“I’m not an idiot,” he said, lowering Wanda to the ground. “There’s no way they could track me. We got out before they got in.”
“How do you know?” he demanded, and he could see the man’s hair bristling. He rolled his eyes, because honestly at some point it started feeling like all adults were the same.
He still moved Wanda behind himself, so he could shield her if he had to, but before he could answer, a third voice interrupted. “Because he’s accustomed to evading arrest after his many experiments with breaking and entering, Hank.” Xavier was moving in from a side room, using a wheelchair as if he hadn’t been walking around barely a month prior. The stubborn jut of his chin challenged Pietro to say something about it, so he didn’t. He liked being contrary, even in tense situations.
“We need a place to stay, Professor.”
“Peter, it’s been a long time since I’ve been a Professor. This school’s not open yet. It’s been closed for ten years and Hank and I are the only ones who care to fix it up. There’s nothing here for you.” The man’s tone was lifeless and matter-of-fact, as if the whole business had a foregone conclusion.
“My name’s Pietro, not Peter,” he said, and considered the man in the wheelchair. Wanda tugged at his hand, asking to be included in the discussion. She had a point. Few people in the world could resist her big blue trusting eyes. “This is my twin sister, Wanda. We think she can do magic. Go show the man what you can do, Wanda,” he said, and gestured towards Hank, making eye contact and not letting go until the other man broke it. He wanted to say some things but he wasn’t willing to say them in front of Wanda, so he had to trust her safety to someone else. Although it hurt like a severed limb for her to leave his line of sight, if he couldn’t trust a teacher at the school where he was seeking shelter, he’d never be able to trust anyone.
When Wanda and Hank left the room, he turned back to Xavier, who’d been watching him patiently. “The feds tracked us down. They broke into our house. My mother told us to run, like we’d planned. When we saw the thing with the Pentagon and the president on TV, she told me some stuff. About our dad. She met Erik Lehnsherr around eleven years ago, the man with metal-bending powers. They were together for a couple of months until she realised he was more interested in his agenda than anything else and they split up. By the time she got word that he’d been arrested, it was too late. She couldn’t tell him that we’d been born, and she didn’t think he’d be interested anyway.”
Xavier was silent, and waiting. Pietro shrugged, letting his gaze slide away because it was difficult to maintain unflinching eye contact with this man, who looked like he knew his innermost thoughts and secrets. “We knew it was going to affect us. Because I helped you. And he’s not listed on our birth certificates as our father, but mum thinks-thought they’d know anyway. She’s dead, now. She stayed behind while we ran. So we had time.”
And suddenly he could feel the rage bubbling up in his veins again, and he glared at Xavier. “I don’t care what you want. I’ll do anything. If you want me to leave, I will, but please,” his voice broke against his will. “Please take care of my sister.” He didn’t want to, but he was begging anyway. He had no dignity when it came to Wanda’s wellbeing.
“You said she’s your twin?” Xavier asked, and the question was so out of the blue that he blinked in surprise.
Then he processed the question, and nodded. “I age faster than normal people. I was born six minutes before Wanda, but I think I feel almost nineteen? Or twenty? I’m not sure how it works, or even what’s really going on. But my mum used to have to get new fake IDs for me all the time because no one believed I was five when I looked fifteen.
“But that doesn’t matter. I know you’re worried about my record and stuff. I’ll leave in ten minutes if you like, but you just have to look after Wanda.” He had to make his point, he had to get it across, because he honestly didn’t know how he would be able to survive with her on the streets. He’d manage on his own, but not if she was with him. And then he’d have to resort to truly desperate measures.
Xavier’s hand on his own interrupted his whirling thoughts. “I’m not going to throw a ten year old out, Pietro. Neither you, nor Wanda.” Pietro froze, because it had been a long time since anyone had considered him to be ten. Even his mother had treated him like an eighteen year old, so he’d had no choice but to act like one. “I’m not worried about your record. I can handle that. I’m not worried about money either, before you offer. The only issue is that the school isn’t ready yet.”
They studied the hall around them in silence, illuminated only by the sunlight filtering through grimy stained glass windows. It was a strange dichotomy of wealth and neglect, and not entirely comfortable, but definitely preferable to a dumpster. “We don’t have any teachers, or any certifications. Half the building doesn’t have running water and a quarter of it doesn’t have electricity. We’re going to have construction workers traipsing in and out to fix up the place, and it’s going to be loud and dirty and busy. Both Hank and I have issues we’re dealing with…” he trailed off when he saw the look on Pietro’s face.
“But it’s pretty clear that you do too.” His voice sounded certain, like he’d just made a decision. Pietro let himself hope, despite the disastrous results of the last time he’d dared to hope. “Tell you what. If you don’t mind the conditions, the dust and the bats and the construction workers, and you and Wanda help chip in, in whatever way you can, to get this place up and running, you and your sister are welcome to stay for as long as you like.”
He nodded, because he remembered what he’d thought about charity being the remit of those who could afford to be kind, and he’d never really experienced kindness from people who weren’t related by blood so this was a novelty, and still, he hoped. “Yes, please, Professor.”
“Charles, Pietro. I don’t deserve to be called a professor until I’ve got students. While we’re working on this dump together, we’re equals. Call me Charles.”
Pietro smiled faintly and nodded, extending a hand to shake the way he’d seen grown men do all across the country, firm and assured. He could only hope that he appeared confident, and not like he had no idea what he was doing. Charles grinned in response, but not as if he was laughing at Pietro. More like he was agreeing with him, even though he hadn’t said anything.
“Say,” he broke the silence suddenly. “What’s your power anyway?”
Hank walked back in to the room that moment, a lot bluer and furrier than when he’d left. Wanda was on his shoulders, fingers tangled in his fur/hair, grinning like Christmas had come a day early. “Oh, kid,” he sighed, shaking his head and making Wanda giggle. “He’s going to turn your world up-side down.”
Pietro didn’t say anything, but he figured he was kind of getting used to it.
Author: obsessionality
Fandom: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014); X-Men: First Class (2011)
Pairing: None
Relationships: Wanda & Pietro Maximoff
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Minor Character Death
Summary: It was strange how the tables turned, and how anyone could get dragged under the rip tide of life. Even quicksilver Pietro, who escaped every obstacle by simply being too fast to be caught. The problem with running was that sometimes there was nowhere to run to, and there was a big difference between running away from a thing and running towards it. Maybe Hank was right. Maybe no matter how good you were, the house always won, and in the end, life always screwed you over.
A/N: This was partially based on a one-line text post from tumblr which I can’t find now, which said “can you imagine what would happen with Peter Maximoff turned up outside Xavier Mansion after DOFP, like hey Prof, do you mind if I crash on your couch a bit?” Like I tend to, I took the prompt and beat it to death.
“What are you doing?”
“Holding your neck so you won’t get whiplash.”
“What?”
“Whiplaaash.”
The thing is, sometimes things happened too quickly, even for him. Sometimes, even Pietro got whiplash, and for someone who could move ten times faster than the speed of sound, that was a pretty big deal. Hank used to say that it was because even their extraordinary abilities had a limit, that there were fixed points in time that couldn’t be changed, and that like Oedipus, life would always screw them over eventually in a self-fulfilling prophecy. No matter how good you were, the house always won. He’d been forced to back down when Havoc said his argument sounded like faith in a higher being, like he believed in ineffability, someone setting events in motion beyond their control. Hank had backed off, because the mutants of Xavier Mansion did not have a healthy relationship with God, and frankly, no one blamed them for it.
Their mom, his and Wanda’s, had done everything she possibly could. She really had. Pietro worked hard to pretend he was an ordinary teenager, but ordinary teenagers didn’t age twice as fast as their twin siblings. Ordinary teenagers weren’t forced to learn about a harsh world in a far shorter time than everyone else. Ordinary teenagers didn’t have to help their single parents travel across the country, moving from city to town to city again, looking for a safe place to live, where their abilities wouldn’t get noticed. Ordinary parents didn’t have to raise two children whose abilities they couldn’t even begin to understand, short on money, time and support, and god knows she’d done the best she could. He knew what people thought about him, that he was nothing but a trouble-making klepto punk, who wouldn’t know familial duty and loyalty if it bit him in the ass. But if he was loyal to one person, it was to his mother, and he’d die before he let anything happen to her.
His mom had raised them single-handedly and she hadn’t complained, even when Wanda had unwittingly levitated a social worker’s car in broad daylight, and they’d had to pack their bags and leave town before she could return with her colleagues the next day, to point fingers, and tell them in no uncertain terms that they did not belong. Even though there had been way too many boxes of instant mac-and-cheese, too many jars of peanuts butter and far too many nights spent sleeping in a car while mom drove them into yet another state, she’d never abandoned them, never even considered it, and Pietro knew they were luckier than most. He’d had classmates whose parents had abandoned them for being mouthy little shits, and he suspected that raising twin mutants with dubious looking birth-certificates and no partner to confide in was far more difficult than raising ordinary snot-nosed brats whose only flaws involved eating too much, and being rude to their elders.
He thinks, if he could have wished away their powers, he would have, no matter the consequence, even though the only time he felt he could breathe freely was when he was racing ahead of everyone and everything, and it felt like he could defy gravity by stepping outside the slipstreams of time, and the ordinary atmosphere. He would have given it all up, if it had meant his mother had an easier time of it. But there was nothing he could have done, no one he could have turned to for advice or help.
So he pretended to be a mouthy little shit, and occasionally stole packets of chips from corner shops to distract the police from the fact that he was stealing (and selling) larger electrical components from car dealerships and computer shops barely seconds after. It wasn’t that he didn’t doubt the rightness of what he was doing, it was just that he didn’t have a choice. And if it helped his mum pay for milk and vegetables for Wanda, and for a new fake ID for him whenever his body decided to age a little bit more, then he really didn’t have a choice.
It wasn’t like there were people who’d help them without asking for things in return.
And as far as Pietro was concerned, courtesy was free, but charity was a luxury only the wealthy could indulge in. He didn’t make a habit of giving people food out of his sister’s mouth, and he never would. But when Charles Xavier and the two other dudes turned up at his front door, he gave them a chance and listened to their hare-brained plan. There was something in Xavier’s eyes that made Pietro feel that he understood loss, and pain, and suffering. Something that made Pietro identify with him, in the way he snatched that card away like it would burn him, like it was a hope that would never be fulfilled. Like Pietro’s hope of a normal life, close enough to touch, but always evading him. And he believed in Xavier, somehow, even though faith and trust were in short supply. He believed that it would be okay, in the end.
When he sat there and watched Magneto threaten the president in front of the whole world, he knew he’d made a mistake. He should have known that a man who’d killed one president wouldn’t hesitate to kill another one, and that trusting strangers only ever worked out in fairy tales and tv shows. Not in real life.
He’d held his sister and hoped, for three days. He’d hoped very hard that the backlash wouldn’t affect them, because he wasn’t stupid enough to think there would be no backlash. But he wasn’t stupid enough to think they’d be unaffected by it either, and still he hoped anyway. He didn’t sleep and he didn’t eat, and he watched the front door through the night, because any minute, any second, he was expecting it to be kicked down. His mother had protected him from many things, from many people who hadn’t been very happy with the neighbourhood’s resident teenage klepto punk. But she wouldn’t be able to protect him from the secret service, and they both knew it.
When the birds fell silent, and the kids playing outside were ushered indoors by parents listening to a non-verbal gut instinct, he knew trouble had come a-knocking, and it was time for them to get going. They didn’t have the time or the ability to take much with them, so they didn’t bother with anything beyond the clothes on their backs. He kissed his mother’s cheek, hugged her tight, then picked up his sister and ran. He didn’t look back.
He didn’t stand in the backyard of a house two doors away, and he didn’t wait to hear his mother scream. They’d discussed this a hundred times in the past six years; a hundred thousand times, developing the plan further each time, with backups galore. It didn’t make it any easier to take Wanda and leave his mom behind. Even for an ordinary teenager the concept of never seeing his only parent again would have been mind boggling, and Pietro was no ordinary teenager; forever was a long time. But for the first time in his life, he didn’t have enough time. They had to run with barely a chance for whispered farewells and ‘I love you’s’, and he tried to memorise the endearments, both for his and Wanda’s sake, because there was no one left to tell Wanda and Pietro that they loved them, ever again.
He’d have taken her, he’d have given anything to have her with him, so they could run away together, and he wouldn’t have had to be alone, but then they’d have been chased. This way, she could give them a fighting chance, a head start, if the Government stooges believed her story about a delinquent punk who ran away, leaving his deadbeat mom behind. If they believed she didn’t know where he was, or where he was going. And Pietro knew that she genuinely didn’t know, because Pietro himself didn’t know where they were going, but they didn’t know that, and Pietro knew people did terrible things in the pursuit of power and information. He could only hope that they believed her.
And oh, people would kick up a fuss, but they couldn’t criminalise neglectful parents, or half the country would be in prison. It was hardly unbelievable that a kid would run away from home, but a small part of him knew there was little hope. He still hoped that maybe there would be no screams to hear, even if he had waited. Maybe they’d search the house and leave his mother alone, leave her unharmed and unmolested. But he knew in his gut, the same way the birds knew to keep quiet, and parents knew to keep their kids indoors, he knew he’d never see his mother again. So he kept his mouth shut, and he ran.
The problem with running, though, was that sometimes there was nowhere to run to, and as a runner he knew there was a big difference between running away from a thing and running towards it. He wanted to be running towards a better future for Wanda, and for himself, but he was just a scared teenager, and he was running away from his worst nightmares.
It didn’t hit him until much later that night, when they’d taken shelter in a quiet corner of a warehouse on the outskirts of the city, and he’d draped his jacket around his sleeping sister in an attempt to ward off the chill. For someone who’d laughed at everyone else being really slow, it took him a really long time to process how dramatically his own situation had changed. They’d gone from being a loving, if dysfunctional family, to being orphans without a place to call their own, or even a roof over their heads, in the span of a few hours. He couldn’t even afford to cry because his calm was the only thing keeping Wanda panicking. No matter how he pretended for her, though, nothing would ever be okay again. And somehow, he’d have to take Wanda through it, on his own.
And he didn’t know where to run.
He blames his own lag time on the fact that he was in shock, and the fact that he didn’t sleep for the next two days, watching over his sister, because he’d heard of what happened to little girls who were picked up off the streets. When he woke up from his unintended nap to find his sister beaming at him in a way that made it clear she had no idea what was going on, it finally hit him that he did know where to go.
Xavier owed him a favour, and it was time to collect.
It was a good thing his mind worked a lot faster than normal minds too, so he could remember the address on the little card: 407 Graymalkin Lane, Salem Centre, Westchester County, New York. And still, it was one thing knowing an address, and it was another thing entirely getting there. It took weeks on foot, not because it was far away, but because he had to stop so Wanda could sleep, and eat. He could probably have gone without it, and made it there in a matter of hours if not less. But it wasn’t an option. Wanda would have suffered whiplash, and he was suffering a different type of whiplash of his own. It was a hard, cold journey, and he missed his mother terribly, and he didn’t know how to answer Wanda when she started asking difficult questions. He didn’t think he’d ever know how to explain what had happened, because he wasn’t sure himself, how it had all gone so wrong, so quickly.
When they finally arrived in Westchester County, the first thing he felt was angry. Pietro was by nature a fairly calm sort of guy. His sister had her mood swings, and could flip from sunny placidity to screaming rage in a matter of seconds. It reflected her powers. His powers, on the other hand, were fairly consistent, and as long as he had a tune in his head and protective headgear, he was good to go. But when he saw the opulence of the idyllic suburbia around him, in comparison to the dumpster they’d shared with a pair of mangy alley cats two nights before to get out of the rain, anger was the only reasonable response.
Wanda squeezed her fingers around his, and he had to swallow the bitterness back, for her. It took them another hour to find the place, and he got through the gates with no problems. One of the men who’d been with the professor opened the door, looking angry and sort of blue.
“Oh, hey,” he said, and didn’t open the door any further. Pietro gritted his teeth. This man had come to him asking for help, and he’d been forced to let them in. And now this four-eyes wasn’t even letting Pietro into the house, eyeing him like he was a travelling gypsy, wandering from door to door to steal things and curse babies. In all fairness, he was a thief, but he didn’t deserve this. If he’d learned one thing though, it was that people were hypocritical.
“I need to speak with the Professor.” Wanda sniffled for effect, and he couldn’t have loved his sister more if he tried. She never really spoke much, but she definitely understood almost everything that was going on around her, emotionally and intuitively, if not intellectually. She was going to grow up to be the most kick ass partner-in-crime.
“Well, the Professor’s occupied at the moment, if you could maybe come back later?” the man asked, and made to close the door.
Pietro blocked with a palm flat against the wood and an echoing crack, before the man could really move. “You need to let us in, dude. We have nowhere else to go. The feds tracked us down.”
The door swung open when the man’s eyes widened in shock. “You led them here?” he demanded, but Pietro took the chance to push past, slipping into the mansion. The air was musty with disuse and dust, and it made Wanda sneeze. The man gaped behind them, but Pietro had no sympathy for him. If these people hadn’t come knocking at their door, none of this would have happened, and they’d still have a home to go back to, and a mother to take care of them. But he bit his tongue and addressed the guy’s concerns.
“I’m not an idiot,” he said, lowering Wanda to the ground. “There’s no way they could track me. We got out before they got in.”
“How do you know?” he demanded, and he could see the man’s hair bristling. He rolled his eyes, because honestly at some point it started feeling like all adults were the same.
He still moved Wanda behind himself, so he could shield her if he had to, but before he could answer, a third voice interrupted. “Because he’s accustomed to evading arrest after his many experiments with breaking and entering, Hank.” Xavier was moving in from a side room, using a wheelchair as if he hadn’t been walking around barely a month prior. The stubborn jut of his chin challenged Pietro to say something about it, so he didn’t. He liked being contrary, even in tense situations.
“We need a place to stay, Professor.”
“Peter, it’s been a long time since I’ve been a Professor. This school’s not open yet. It’s been closed for ten years and Hank and I are the only ones who care to fix it up. There’s nothing here for you.” The man’s tone was lifeless and matter-of-fact, as if the whole business had a foregone conclusion.
“My name’s Pietro, not Peter,” he said, and considered the man in the wheelchair. Wanda tugged at his hand, asking to be included in the discussion. She had a point. Few people in the world could resist her big blue trusting eyes. “This is my twin sister, Wanda. We think she can do magic. Go show the man what you can do, Wanda,” he said, and gestured towards Hank, making eye contact and not letting go until the other man broke it. He wanted to say some things but he wasn’t willing to say them in front of Wanda, so he had to trust her safety to someone else. Although it hurt like a severed limb for her to leave his line of sight, if he couldn’t trust a teacher at the school where he was seeking shelter, he’d never be able to trust anyone.
When Wanda and Hank left the room, he turned back to Xavier, who’d been watching him patiently. “The feds tracked us down. They broke into our house. My mother told us to run, like we’d planned. When we saw the thing with the Pentagon and the president on TV, she told me some stuff. About our dad. She met Erik Lehnsherr around eleven years ago, the man with metal-bending powers. They were together for a couple of months until she realised he was more interested in his agenda than anything else and they split up. By the time she got word that he’d been arrested, it was too late. She couldn’t tell him that we’d been born, and she didn’t think he’d be interested anyway.”
Xavier was silent, and waiting. Pietro shrugged, letting his gaze slide away because it was difficult to maintain unflinching eye contact with this man, who looked like he knew his innermost thoughts and secrets. “We knew it was going to affect us. Because I helped you. And he’s not listed on our birth certificates as our father, but mum thinks-thought they’d know anyway. She’s dead, now. She stayed behind while we ran. So we had time.”
And suddenly he could feel the rage bubbling up in his veins again, and he glared at Xavier. “I don’t care what you want. I’ll do anything. If you want me to leave, I will, but please,” his voice broke against his will. “Please take care of my sister.” He didn’t want to, but he was begging anyway. He had no dignity when it came to Wanda’s wellbeing.
“You said she’s your twin?” Xavier asked, and the question was so out of the blue that he blinked in surprise.
Then he processed the question, and nodded. “I age faster than normal people. I was born six minutes before Wanda, but I think I feel almost nineteen? Or twenty? I’m not sure how it works, or even what’s really going on. But my mum used to have to get new fake IDs for me all the time because no one believed I was five when I looked fifteen.
“But that doesn’t matter. I know you’re worried about my record and stuff. I’ll leave in ten minutes if you like, but you just have to look after Wanda.” He had to make his point, he had to get it across, because he honestly didn’t know how he would be able to survive with her on the streets. He’d manage on his own, but not if she was with him. And then he’d have to resort to truly desperate measures.
Xavier’s hand on his own interrupted his whirling thoughts. “I’m not going to throw a ten year old out, Pietro. Neither you, nor Wanda.” Pietro froze, because it had been a long time since anyone had considered him to be ten. Even his mother had treated him like an eighteen year old, so he’d had no choice but to act like one. “I’m not worried about your record. I can handle that. I’m not worried about money either, before you offer. The only issue is that the school isn’t ready yet.”
They studied the hall around them in silence, illuminated only by the sunlight filtering through grimy stained glass windows. It was a strange dichotomy of wealth and neglect, and not entirely comfortable, but definitely preferable to a dumpster. “We don’t have any teachers, or any certifications. Half the building doesn’t have running water and a quarter of it doesn’t have electricity. We’re going to have construction workers traipsing in and out to fix up the place, and it’s going to be loud and dirty and busy. Both Hank and I have issues we’re dealing with…” he trailed off when he saw the look on Pietro’s face.
“But it’s pretty clear that you do too.” His voice sounded certain, like he’d just made a decision. Pietro let himself hope, despite the disastrous results of the last time he’d dared to hope. “Tell you what. If you don’t mind the conditions, the dust and the bats and the construction workers, and you and Wanda help chip in, in whatever way you can, to get this place up and running, you and your sister are welcome to stay for as long as you like.”
He nodded, because he remembered what he’d thought about charity being the remit of those who could afford to be kind, and he’d never really experienced kindness from people who weren’t related by blood so this was a novelty, and still, he hoped. “Yes, please, Professor.”
“Charles, Pietro. I don’t deserve to be called a professor until I’ve got students. While we’re working on this dump together, we’re equals. Call me Charles.”
Pietro smiled faintly and nodded, extending a hand to shake the way he’d seen grown men do all across the country, firm and assured. He could only hope that he appeared confident, and not like he had no idea what he was doing. Charles grinned in response, but not as if he was laughing at Pietro. More like he was agreeing with him, even though he hadn’t said anything.
“Say,” he broke the silence suddenly. “What’s your power anyway?”
Hank walked back in to the room that moment, a lot bluer and furrier than when he’d left. Wanda was on his shoulders, fingers tangled in his fur/hair, grinning like Christmas had come a day early. “Oh, kid,” he sighed, shaking his head and making Wanda giggle. “He’s going to turn your world up-side down.”
Pietro didn’t say anything, but he figured he was kind of getting used to it.