So, I got to thinking that the Pietro we see in "Ascension, Part Two"and the Pietro we see at well, every single other point in X-Men: Evolution are almost like two different people. From self-serving jerk to a guy who goes halfway across the world to risk his neck to save his sister; that's quite a turn-around. But given that there are several episodes between the last one he played any major part in, "No Good Deed", when he was at about his worst, and the two-parter finale, I wonder if perhaps the fallout of that episode didn't give him something to think about. Here's my attempt.

Also, if you're wondering why there are more italicized-for-emphasis words in this work than there usually are in my work, it's because I picture Pietro to be that kind of guy.

I own nothing.

Well, what a fiasco that had been.

Pietro would admit that he had done at least a few ill-advised things in his life to stave off boredom (And destitution, and to piss off the X-Men). There was that time when he was six, when he'd tried to stand up on the seat of his bicycle while it was moving—his ears still rang a little from the dressing-down his father had given him as he bandaged his spectacularly skinned arms and legs. Then there was the first time he shoplifted when he was twelve (For a rotisserie chicken and a twelve-pack of soda, to be precise). Then there was the time when he stole a bunch of stuff and framed Evan for it. Then, easily the most embarrassing of the lot, there was that time when he was fourteen and Crissy Dawkins's father caught them together in her bedroom. Pietro counted himself lucky that he'd gotten out of the house too fast for Crissy's dad to get a good look at him; it was even luckier that his own father had thought the whole thing terribly amusing once he found out about it.

Sending Wanda into a meltdown on the middle of a moving train was another ill-advised thing Pietro had done, though to be honest he hadn't really meant to do it. She had seemed so much more stable than he remembered; he knew she'd get angry if he started talking trash about Father (especially after he'd had Mastermind go to work on her head), but he hadn't thought she would have a meltdown like she did when they were little kids. The ensuing mayhem was even worse than the incident in their elementary school cafeteria that had finally gotten Wanda pulled out of school.

The whole "stage accidents for fame and glory (and the fringe benefits thereof)" had definitely been the worst of it. Pietro, who was lying on his back on his sagging bed, frowned darkly up at the ceiling. Obviously, the next time the Brotherhood pulled a scheme, it needed to be something that didn't have the potential to so spectacularly blow up in their faces. As much as it pained Pietro to admit it, they were going to have to settle for something a bit more small-time in the future.

But this was not the story of how Pietro Maximoff realized that doing ill-advised things to stave off boredom was a bad idea, and that he should find something more productive (and legal) to do with his time. This was the story of how Pietro Maximoff rediscovered something of a conscience.

"You are such an asshole."

It started with Lance Alvers standing over his bed, glowering down at him.

Pietro turned his frown on his housemate and sometimes-sort-of friend. "I said I was sorry for the joke," he retorted peevishly. "It was a lousy joke; I admit it." And he really shouldn't have been talking about trains around Wanda. "Don't you think Wanda zapping me and you knocking the ground out from under was enough?"

Lance's scowl deepened. Pietro wondered if he'd be feeling the earth shaking soon; frankly, he rather preferred that to getting into yet another argument with Lance. "You jerk; you know exactly what I'm talking about. How could you leave us there?!"

Oh. He was talking about the other trains. Pietro slid off his bed and got to his feet, crossing his arms around his chest. "Uh, newsflash, Alvers, I'm not the only one who bailed. You sure didn't see Blob or Toad hanging around. Why aren't you having this "talk" with them too?"

"They're not the ones who pushed for us to start doing this stuff in the first place!" Lance snapped. If looks could kill, Pietro probably would have dropped dead by now; it was only practiced experience that kept him from taking a step back at the sight of Lance's furious gaze and curled lip. "And I'll bet they weren't the ones who messed with that last train. You know, Pietro, the next time you cause a mess, especially one that could get people killed, maybe you could actually stick around and clean up your mess? Especially if one of your friends is there trying to clean it up too!"

Pietro opened his mouth, but Lance was out of the room and slamming the door behind him before he could get a single word out. Pietro stared at the shut door. A bit of loose plaster on the ceiling drifted down to the floor in front of him.

With a huff, he flopped back down onto his bed, resuming the all-consuming activity of frowning up at the ceiling. But in spite of himself, he couldn't help but feel a little troubled.

-0-0-0-

Pietro Maximoff was not the sort of person who often felt sorry for the things he said or did. He just didn't, and the truth was that, a lot of the time, he flat out did not care. The world was moving too slowly for that, and why should he feel sorry, anyways?

He didn't feel sorry about leaving his teammates or the X-Men to deal with that Sentinel Father had dropped them down in front of. He supported his father in his goals because Pietro agreed with those goals. Pietro had seen enough of the way humans reacted to mutants to know that "peaceful coexistence" was unlikely at best. Pretty much the only way that mutants were going to be able to be mutants out in the open would be if they were the ones running the show. And if Father wanted to introduce the world at large to the existence of mutants on his own terms, Pietro was okay with that too. He had played sports for long enough to know that the moment your opponent put you on the defensive, you were going to start losing ground. This wasn't something mutants could afford to lose ground on.

Maybe the fact that, after Wanda was put away, Father was all Pietro really had left had something to do with his support too. But that didn't account for all of it.

For the most part, Pietro did not care about whether what he was doing was illegal or "unethical." He didn't care if it made him look like a self-serving coward or, as Lance had so eloquently put it, an asshole. There had been two golden rules in his life. One: When Father told him to do something, Pietro was to do exactly as told, as quickly as he could. Two: Look out for number one above everyone else, even Wanda. (And he ignored the fact that both of these golden rules dated back to the night of Wanda being institutionalized.)

The stuff he was told to do that he agreed with, he could do without a second thought, without a single qualm. As for other things, well… If Pietro ever found himself bothered by something he was being told to do, or was doing something on his own and started to feel bothered by it halfway through, he told himself something else that he'd been telling himself for a long time:

Don't think about it too hard.

Those six words had gotten Pietro through a lot of uncomfortable stuff in his life. It was a good mantra, Pietro thought, since it allowed him to live up to the golden rules without anything getting in the way. Right or wrong, he didn't have to think about it. But the thing about not thinking about stuff too hard when it was going down was that, once everything was over and he could relax, he had to fight to keep from thinking about it then.

Maybe he was thinking a bit more closely about some things than he usually did.

-0-0-0-

Pietro sat on the back stoop of the boarding house, dribbling a basketball absently. It was his, the basketball. It was one of the things Pietro had taken with him from the old house, and these days, if he played, it was alone. No one around him knew how to play or wanted to learn. Not even Wanda, who was actually willing to spend non-violent time with him now, was interested.

And even Pietro himself couldn't confess to have the same passion for basketball that he once possessed. It wasn't like soccer, which he'd just lost interest in after elementary school. Though Pietro had lost interest (and to be honest, it wasn't much of a loss, then, as he'd never "officially" played; he would have needed someone to drive him to matches back then, after all), he could still play soccer without feeling sour. The same couldn't really be said for basketball.

Evan had been his friend, once.

Pietro caught the basketball in his hands and stared down at it, brow furrowed. He and Evan had been friends, once. In middle school, where they'd met, they'd been nearly inseparable, pulling pranks and cutting class together without a care in the world, and (almost) never getting caught. They'd had something of a rivalry when it came to basketball, but it was all in good fun.

All this had started falling apart once they entered high school. The fights were over basketball, ranging from casual boasting that inevitably cast the other in a bad light, to bitter arguments that left Pietro's blood boiling for hours after it was over. It wasn't like they'd never argued before—they'd argued over just about everything under the sun in middle school. But the fights had never gotten so bad before, had never led to anything that would end up ruining their friendship for good.

At the time, Pietro had attributed all of this to Evan being a complete and total glory-hog. Evan wanted all the glory for himself, and that was all there was to it. Pietro never saw anything more to it than that at the time, and had never seen anything lacking in his own behavior.

He really wished Lance hadn't called him out on that business with the trains. If he hadn't, Pietro probably wouldn't have started thinking about this.

Now, with hindsight as a truly inconvenient guide, Pietro looked back at his memories, and saw for the first time that whenever he and Evan had fought, he was usually the one who started it. Evan, for all that he was genuinely a hothead, rarely started fights, at least not with Pietro. He'd sure finish them, but he didn't go around looking for fights. He'd always been a reactionary in that regard, not someone who struck first.

Pietro remembered the sick thrill of horror he'd felt turning his stomach when he'd first found out about Evan's accident with that Pow-R 8 drink that was supposed to be toxic to mutants. He still remembered the fear (One drink can do all of that? What, is the government going to start poisoning our food now to try and get rid of us?), and still thought nothing of that—why shouldn't he be shocked to find out that a soda that he could very easily have drunk could have done something like that to him? Who knew what it would do to Pietro if he had drank it. He recalled nightmares he'd gotten just after his mutation emerged of going so fast that he'd never be able to stop, and frankly started to have them again, though he would never have been able to admit that.

And underneath all of that, though he'd not recognized the emotion for what it was at first, Pietro realized that he felt sorry for Evan. In spite of everything, despite all logic, Pietro felt sorry for Evan over what had happened to him. He felt sorry that Evan couldn't go out in public now without risking being harassed or attacked. At first, Pietro thought that he was only worried over what could have so easily happened to him if he had drank that soda, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized that risk to himself hadn't entered into his thoughts until later.

So what did that mean?

Pietro had almost always been the one who started the fights he and Evan had before they stopped being friends altogether, and he'd gotten him put in jail without a single qualm, but he had still felt sorry for him when he found out about the soda's effects on Evan's mutation. What did that mean? Did it mean that Pietro cared about him? And Evan had saved his life when Asteroid M blew up. Did that mean that maybe they could have stayed friends if Pietro hadn't gone looking to start fights with him? Did Pietro want that?

Pietro ran his fingers along the indentations in the basketball, feeling the sun beating down on the back of his neck more keenly than usual. He remembered sirens and the squeak of tennis shoes against waxed floors, remembered sharing grins and swapping lunches at school. He grimaced, and tossed the ball away.

-0-0-0-

The problem was that, once Pietro started to think, he thought way too fast for his own comfort. Quick thinking was always an asset on the battlefield, of course, and he'd gotten out of more than one jam thanks to having a brain that processed information a lot faster than the average human's. But off the battlefield, it had often proved more a hindrance than a help. Pietro finished tests so fast that his teachers often thought he had cheated somehow (which was only true about half of the time), and it was ridiculously frustrating to have to limit himself to a "normal" speed during basketball. Of course, all of that had been before he was expelled. Nowadays the ways quick thinking gave him trouble was when he started thinking about stuff like this.

He didn't have a whole lot of friends. Pietro knew that. He also knew that his social circle, such as it was, had shrunk significantly after getting outed as a mutant and kicked out of school. Wanda and the other Brotherhood guys (and were they even the Brotherhood anymore, since Magneto and Mystique were both dead? Pietro supposed that was a line of thought for another time) were pretty much the only people Pietro spoke to on a regular basis anymore. That, he supposed, qualified them as friends, or at the very least as allies.

Pietro knew also that his father hadn't been the best boss in the world, which was probably why the Acolytes had scattered to the four winds upon his getting vaporized by Apocalypse. The only one who hadn't vacated the old base was Pyro—and when Pietro had stepped in to pick up some stuff, he'd spotted Pyro watching and re-watching a video clip that made Pietro very glad that he hadn't brought Wanda along with him (Not that listening to his father's dying screams had been pleasant for Pietro either; now he had a new thing to have nightmares about). Father ought to have been able to call his underlings his allies, but he couldn't thanks to his own behavior. Sabertooth was the only one who seemed able to be genuinely loyal to him. Gambit was just in it for the chance to travel and hit on women, Pyro was just in it for the chance to set stuff on fire, and Colossus was only going along with all of this because he was being blackmailed.

So could Pietro call the Brotherhood his friends? Now that Father was gone, they were really the only people Pietro had left. You would think that he would have been able to call them his friends. But he wasn't really sure about that.

After all, did friends leave friends to deal with a derailed train?

-0-0-0-

And then, there was Wanda.

Pietro knew that he couldn't have stopped their father from institutionalizing her, or from having Mastermind alter her memories. When Father was bent and determined on doing something, there were very few who could ever talk him out of it, even they weren't always successful, and Pietro was not one of those people. He had no idea why Wanda ever seemed to think that he could have made a difference in her being institutionalized and left there for years, without so much as a peep from their loving father. Like anything he said could have ever made a difference.

But…

And these thoughts were the most difficult to countenance, because they'd been building up for years, and even when they slipped out from behind the blocks, they just kept building. They were the worst to deal with, the ones that made him feel most uncomfortable as all, but Pietro knew that they were the least likely to go away. Staring at the ceiling, counting the cracks in the plaster, that certainly wasn't going to make them go away.

He hadn't known that Father was planning to have Wanda put away until it was happening before his eyes. Pietro had gotten the impression that their father was reaching his breaking point with her, but that wasn't enough to make him jump to "Father's going to send Wanda to the nuthouse." He hadn't known that Father was planning to have Mastermind alter Wanda's memories to cut out everything about the mental institution until after the fact. Pietro knew that Father was planning to "neutralize" the threat Wanda posed to him and his plans somehow, but he hadn't expected brainwashing to be involved. He thought that Father was going to talk to her, maybe even apologize for never going to visit her after she was hospitalized and never reassuring her that she wasn't dead to him or anything like that. In retrospect, Pietro supposed that he really should have known better.

Pietro couldn't change the past, and when his father was bent and determined to do something, it wasn't like the man was going to change his mind and stop what he was doing just because Pietro told him to. But he could have cried in the car on the way home. He could have fussed and cried for his sister and demanded that they turn around and go back for her, instead of what he'd done instead, just sitting silently, with his forehead pressed against the window, trying as hard as he could not to look at Father as he drove them home. Instead of just curling up in on himself, and telling himself to forget her when he woke up the next morning and felt his sister's absence like a gaping wound.

There were so many things he could have done, but didn't. Like crying when he missed Wanda. Like asking Father if he could go visit her in the hospital, or trying to visit her on his own when Father was away. It wasn't like he didn't know where Wanda was being kept. Once Pietro's mutant powers emerged, he could have gotten there in a split-second; he wouldn't have needed someone else to drive him there.

And when Father had Mastermind mess with Wanda's head, there were so many things Pietro could have done then, too. He could have argued with their father about it instead of pushing his discomfort down where he couldn't see it. He could have told Wanda the truth instead of letting her think that the lie that was planted had always been the truth. He could have said what was in his heart—"This isn't right and you know it! If you want Wanda to stop coming after you, why don't you actually, you know, make an effort to get her to forgive you?! How is this supposed to be 'reconciliation'?! It's all just one big lie!"

Pietro winced when he realized how much he sounded like Lance had yesterday.

He was glad that Wanda didn't try to kill him half the times she saw him anymore. He was glad that he could have a normal conversation with his twin sister, his twin sister whom he had missed so much since they were separated, without her snarling at him and screaming that she hated him. He was glad to be able to have Wanda in his life. But it was all a lie.

And now, now that Father had had her brainwashed, Pietro should have been able to form a closer relationship with his sister again, but couldn't—or rather, was afraid to. He was looking at someone who looked like Wanda, walked and talked like Wanda, tried desperately to act like Wanda, but couldn't pull it off, because she wasn't quite herself anymore. When Mastermind had changed Wanda's memories, he changed her too. It was like looking at a copy of his sister, and Pietro always had to watch what he said around her, because he never knew if some offhand comment he made about their childhood would conflict with the brainwashing and that would either be enough to break it or it would be enough for Wanda to start unraveling again. All of this was a lie, but the thought of Wanda falling back into the state of murderous rage she'd occupied when first freed from the mental institution appealed to Pietro even less.

Why can't I just tell her the truth? It's rough, but it's got to be better than having everything she believes about our father based on a lie. Right?

Right?

-0-0-0-

The following morning, Pietro rather uncharacteristically walked down the stars instead of zipping down them in the blink of an eye. He was trying to work up the nerve (and quell his pride enough) to say what he knew needed to be said to the people he'd find downstairs in the kitchen. It needed to be said. That didn't mean he had to like it.

Sure enough, Pietro spotted Lance, Fred and Todd in the kitchen, trying to scrounge up some food for breakfast. Fred was busy downing a bowl of cereal—Pietro couldn't help but think that the milk looked a bit past its expiration date, but he'd seen Fred eat worse with no ill effects, so there was probably nothing to worry about. Todd was trying to catch flies again (and he wondered why Wanda couldn't stand to be around him. Well, aside from the horrible stench, that was), and Lance was actually trying to cook something. Who knew how good it would actually be, but he had a frying pan over the stove and everything.

Everybody looked up as Pietro wandered into the kitchen, but maybe because it was too early, nobody said anything. Fred and Todd gave him the same sorts of looks they normally did this time of day. Lance looked up from his frying pan and glared briefly at him, but he had nothing to say, and went back to watching his eggs.

Pietro stared at them. God. As lazy, slovenly and sometimes outright disgusting as some of them (he wasn't going to name any names, but the main culprit's initials were T and T) could be, they were his friends, weren't they?

Okay, fine. Maybe he could suck up his pride long enough to say what needed to be said.

"I'msorryIleftyouguystodealwiththetrainsitwasastupidplanandyouallcouldhavebeenkilledI'mgoingtogotalktoWandanowifIstartscreamingcall911."

Not that Pietro could quite find it in him to say all of that at normal speed. He wasn't sure he'd ever managed to say quite that much in one breath before. That had to be some kind of accomplishment, though Pietro wasn't sure what.

With that, Pietro left the way he'd come, leaving his three non-sister housemates to stare at his back in wonder and growing alarm.

"Did Pietro just apologize for doing something stupid?" Fred asked in disbelief.

"Yeah, someone check the calendars," Todd added nervously. "Is it 2012?"

Lance smiled briefly, but said nothing.

Pietro heard none of this. He was too busy drumming up the significantly greater amount of nerve that was needed to go talk to Wanda, especially considering what he was planning to say to her. It was a little thing, compared to what he had contemplated the night before, but little things were rarely little when it came to Wanda, and Pietro knew that this wasn't little to her. Still, it had to be said. He knew how Wanda could get, remembered it from when they were kids, even before her mutant powers emerged. Even when she said she wasn't angry with you anymore, she probably still would be if you didn't apologize for making her mad. Wanda was very good at holding grudges, as their father had discovered.

Her door was shut, as it often was, and probably locked, too, to keep Todd out (If he tried coming in through the window, Wanda usually just zapped him so he'd fall into the bushes below). Even if it wasn't locked, Pietro knew better than to go into his sister's room unannounced. She'd been really jumpy as a kid, even before she got her powers. Wanda didn't like being snuck up on.

Pietro sucked in a deep breath and knocked on her door.

It took a long time (or what felt like an excruciatingly long time to Pietro) for Wanda to answer. He began to wonder if maybe she'd gone out for the day, before remembering that Wanda didn't really have anywhere that she went now that she wasn't trying to kill their father anymore. Maybe she was still asleep, or—

"It's not locked," Wanda called.

Oh.

With great reluctance, Pietro pushed open the door and stood in the doorway. Wanda was sitting on her bed reading a magazine (sometimes, Pietro wondered how just how literate Wanda was, as she'd been institutionalized when they were still in elementary school and he doubted she'd received much schooling in the hospital; he wondered if she ever noticed a difficulty with reading, if it ever bothered her, and how she explained it away in her head), looking remarkably content, but when she looked up and saw Pietro, she scowled. Yeah, she was definitely still angry over that.

"Umm, Wanda…" Pietro swallowed; why should this be harder than apologizing to the others over the trains? "…I'm sorry for what I said…" Sorry, but by no means did he no longer believe it; if Father was going to go pick a fight with the most powerful mutant who had ever lived, he shouldn't have been surprised when Apocalypse turned out to be more than he could handle (didn't mean he didn't have nightmares, though) "…and I'm sorry I made you freak out on the train," he mumbled, looking away.

Wanda said nothing. There were no outbursts, no shouts or screams or recriminations, no flash of blue energy that would leave him twitching on the floor. She just stared at him with her eyes narrowed, and seemed uneager to say anything herself.

Pietro sighed. That was probably about as much as he was going to get, and he supposed he should take a lesson from that day on the train: Don't push Wanda beyond her limits unless you're prepared to deal with the consequences. He wasn't, so he didn't press any further. "Okay. Well… I'll just go now."

"Pietro, wait." It wasn't his sister's words so much as her tone that stopped Pietro in his tracks. When he turned about, Wanda was wearing a tired expression to match her tone. Her lips quirked downwards unhappily. "Can we talk? We never really talked about it."

He had a good idea of what Wanda wanted to talk about, and Pietro would be lying if he said he did too. But in a morbid kind of way he was curious to hear what she had to say, and maybe… Maybe it would be okay. However, he did need some assurances first. Pietro raised an eyebrow. "You promise not to zap me?"

Wanda snorted. "Only if you promise not to be unreasonable again."

Pietro would have liked to say that none of what he'd said on the train was unreasonable, but knew he wasn't going to win that argument if he tried to have it. "Deal," he said, nodding firmly.

Wanda pulled up her legs so that Pietro could sit on the edge of her bed. For all of the quite gothic tastes she'd picked up since being freed from the hospital, her room was remarkably ordinary looking. Then again, Pietro wasn't sure that Wanda had cared too much about the place where she'd slept when she was plotting to kill their father, and once her memories had been altered, she might have some day been expecting to move back into their old house. Fat chance of that happening.

"…You're still mad at him for leaving us, aren't you?" she asked him, her voice bizarrely soft. Her face was so much softer than Pietro was used to as well, the lines of tension and anger disappearing, to be replaced with something very much like sympathy tugging at the edges of her eyes and mouth. When Pietro said nothing, only stared at her, wide-eyed, Wanda went on, "Look, I was too, for a really long time."

Pietro frowned, narrowing his eyes at her. "I thought you said you couldn't remember why you were mad at our father," he pointed out.

Her eyes clouded over, and Pietro immediately regretted bringing that up. He wondered if he could get out of the room in the time it would take for her to get mad enough to break her promise and zap him. But Wanda just shrugged, looking away. "Toad said I hit my head at the ski resort. I've heard your memory can get pretty foggy after head injuries. I remembered again; that's all."

"Oh." Pietro wondered if Mastermind's brainwashing had had layers, or if maybe this was a sign of it starting to fall apart. Either way, he was suddenly struck with the urge to punch their father in the face. It was a pity Apocalypse had vaporized him; there wasn't even a corpse to punch.

She pressed her fingers to the top of his hand. "I mean it, Pietro," she said earnestly. "I was angry at him for a really long time, over all the times when he left and wouldn't be back for ages, and when he finally left for good. I was so mad that sometimes I'd want to hurt him—" Hurt him? More like carve his heart out with a plastic spoon "—and to be honest, I kind of scared myself. But he really did love us, Pietro, and we are not—" her voice hardened "—better off without him."

"I never said—"

"You were thinking it."

Only sometimes.

"What, you're a telepath now, too?"

"Oh, shut up, Pietro."

During other times, Pietro could admit, however painful it might be, that he still loved his father. More painful still was that he had to believe, had to hope, that their father still loved them too. But it was oddly easy to admit that, between the cause and the wear of years, Pietro really wasn't sure that Father had had enough room in his heart for people anymore. He was always taking off, over and over again, starting with a day to a few days when the twins had started school (Pietro had later found out that Father had had people watching the house while he was gone, but that didn't really change the fact that inside the house, they were by themselves), to a few weeks once Wanda was gone, to over three months at one point, until finally, when Pietro was about fifteen, he'd vanished altogether.

Oh sure, Father had made sure to leave money for groceries and things like that, and if he was gone for a long time, occasionally an envelope would come in the mail with more grocery money (Though sometimes he seemed to underestimate just how much Pietro, a teenage boy, a sports-inclined kid, and a mutant whose mutation meant that he could eat enough for three people and lose weight, needed to eat). The bills were always paid on time; Pietro never had to deal with anyone shutting off the electricity or the water. Gambit had mentioned also that he liked it better when Pietro was around, if only because Magneto was more likely to keep a handle on his temper when his son was around.

Maybe Father had had Wanda brainwashed because he still wanted a relationship with her; Pietro didn't know. He did know that if he wanted Wanda gone, he probably wouldn't have bothered with the brainwashing. It was cutthroat, but if Father had wanted Wanda gone, he probably just would have killed her. It wasn't like Wanda wasn't still a liability. Even before she had been put in the mental hospital, even before her powers had emerged, she had had these wild fits, and once her powers came in to complicate matters, they'd only grown more dangerous. Agatha Harkness's lessons had helped her, but not entirely.

So maybe, in his own twisted way, their father really did love them.

But loving them from afar and sending Pietro money to make sure he didn't starve, was that really enough? And if altering Wanda's memories to make her believe she had had a happier life was an expression of love, it was a truly perverse expression of love. Frankly, it was just plain sick, no matter how you looked at it, if you tried to sugarcoat it or looked at it with the most jaded eye possible.

And now, Father was dead.

"I wish you had just asked him while there was still time," Wanda remarked sadly. "He would have told you the same thing he told me. You would have understood if you'd just asked him, Pietro."

Wanda, it's too late for him to make things right. Especially not with you. He didn't even try to make things right with you. Pietro found his thoughts caught between frustration and melancholy, and that same disturbed sense he got whenever Wanda talked about Father like she thought he had been a good parent, but nonetheless, he found himself curious again. "Well, what did he tell you?"

She shrugged her slight shoulders, and Pietro felt his heart sink as Wanda got that all-too-familiar vague look on her face. He'd been hoping that maybe Father really had given Wanda an explanation for why he kept leaving them when they were kids, but it appeared that the message Mastermind had implanted in Wanda's head was the same Pietro had told himself over and over again for years: Don't think about it too hard. "He…" Wanda faltered and frowned, and Pietro struggled with the impulse to scream "…He just made me see how important it was for him to be doing what he was. Not just for mutants in general, but for you and me too."

"Yeah."

"Pietro…" Now, Wanda's tone had taken on a faint tinge of embarrassment; she grimaced, fiddling with one of her bracelets as she did so "…I know I could be really nasty to you when we were kids." Pietro wasn't sure if they were moving into falsified memories now, or if she was thinking about stuff that had happened before she was sent to the mental institution; no matter what it was, he couldn't help but tense a little. "But if it makes you feel any better, I was pretty jealous of you for a while."

Okay, they had to be moving into falsified memories again.

"Jealous?" Pietro couldn't help but blurt out, staring incredulously at her.

"Yeah." A thin, choking laugh escaped her mouth, and Pietro couldn't help but stare even more. He couldn't remember the last time he'd heard her laugh. Definitely before the mental hospital. "I mean, you didn't get in trouble with Father nearly as much as I did. Before I got pulled out of school, you had better grades, you played sports, and you could actually make friends with other people. And I was the girl best known around school and the neighborhood for having temper tantrums at the drop of a hat," Wanda muttered bitterly.

It occurred to Pietro that maybe it was strange that Wanda—who had always been a quiet girl, when in a good mood—was talking so much now, but still, he couldn't help but relax. So far, so good. She was talking about things that she still would have remembered even if she hadn't been brainwashed. Maybe they'd get through this conversation without any more—

"And then you got your powers."

Once again, Pietro's heart sank, this time so low in his chest that he was surprised it didn't push his pancreas up in its place.

"You got your powers three years after I did, and yet you mastered them so quickly. I still had a hard time not making things explode on accident—I still have a hard time with that—and you were running circles around me. You had normal powers too, powers that were straightforward and made sense, and Father and I didn't really even understand how my powers worked until Mystique had Mrs. Harkness help me figure them out. Father thought they had something to do with probability, but he was never able to prove anything."

Pietro couldn't bring himself to go along with this. He only stared, huge-eyed, at his sister.

"And I'm not saying I thought Father was perfect, Pietro." Wanda tilted her head, that horrible look of understanding reemerging on her pale face. "I mean, you remember that time when we were eleven—" another memory that didn't belong to Wanda "—and Professor Xavier came to our house looking for him."

Despite this being a memory that, by all rights, should have only belonged to Pietro, he nodded. He shouldn't have been enabling this, he knew that, but he added, "Yeah. I remember how mad he got when we told him we hadn't heard from Father in over a month. He tried to hide it, but I could tell."

"He got a hold of Father and threatened to call the cops on him if he didn't come home." Wanda's bluish-gray eyes glazed over, and she smiled softly. "He stayed home for nearly four months after that; do you remember that?"

"Yeah."

Pietro also remembered it as being the time in which he'd met Sabertooth and Mystique. In retrospect, he knew that Father had been bringing his "work" home with him for years, and knew that he'd probably been holding meetings with his underlings in the house while his children were either in school or asleep. However, this was the first time he'd really been allowed to meet his father's underlings. It was the first time he'd learned exactly what Father was doing when he left the house.

At the time, he'd been so happy that his father had become a regular fixture in his life again, but with the benefit of hindsight, Pietro could see that it was the beginning of the end, if a different beginning than Wanda's hospitalization had been. Sometimes, he wished Professor Xavier had called the cops on his father. Maybe he wouldn't have finally left for good, and come back into Pietro's life only as a visionary intent on gaining another recruit. Not as a parent.

But then, Pietro had started to have suspicions on exactly what he was to his father even before then. He'd been ten with his mutant powers, and his father had stayed home more often for a while after that. Pietro had been happy then, too, almost ridiculously happy that his father was there and not off somewhere he couldn't ever get a hold of him, but whenever Father interacted with him, it was to train him in the use of his powers. He'd had to wonder exactly what he was to the man, if that was the reason he was taking more of an interest in his son.

(He also wondered why on earth Father had had Mastermind alter Wanda's memories and yet implant the memory of his constant comings and goings in her head. If he was trying to get Wanda to see him as a loving parent, letting her "remember" that he had eventually abandoned her was a weird way of going about it. It seemed positively self-sabotaging to Pietro.

He considered, briefly, that maybe Father had planned it like this so that Pietro would have an easier time upholding the masquerade when he was around her. Pietro wanted badly to be able to believe it, but in the back of his mind there would always be a niggling doubt.

Father was dead, and couldn't answer any of his questions.)

"And do you remember that time when we were six?" It was so weird to see Wanda smiling, especially that reminiscent smile she wore now. "Father was away, and we'd just found out about that old story about dropping Mentos in Diet Coke. The soda got everywhere, on the floor and the kitchen cabinets and the ceiling. We tried to clean it up, but we couldn't get all of it. When Father came home, even though we'd both had the idea, you tried to take all the blame so I wouldn't get in trouble. It didn't work, of course, but I never forgot it." She smiled at him, and Pietro swallowed hard.

Yeah, he remembered.

Remembering sucked. Almost as much actually thinking about the things he did and acknowledging that what had been done to Wanda was horrible and messed up and sick, but not by a whole lot.

Pietro remembered. Once upon a time, he'd been a person who stuck up for his sister and tried to protect her, even when he'd thought she was annoying and a nuisance. Once upon a time, he'd been a person who wouldn't have just stood by and said nothing if someone messed with her head.

Once upon a time, he'd been a person who would have told her if he'd found out that someone had messed with her head.

"Wanda…" It was impossible to deny the way his voice shook. Pietro hated it, but it was the truth. "…I'm sorry."

She could only look at him with a confused air about her. "For what?"

"I just… I just am."

There was then initiated the most awkward hug in the history of hugs. The Maximoff twins, through good times and bad, had never been what anyone would call touchy-feely people. Pietro knew from pictures that they'd climbed all over their father when they were little, but that had been a long time ago. They'd been different people, back then.

But surprisingly enough, when Pietro hugged his sister, he felt a little better, if only for a short time.

-0-0-0-

Later, Pietro found himself back where he often was these days when he didn't have anything else to do: lying on his back on his bed, not committed to anything in particular.

Even if Wanda had never been given knowledge of a motive as to why Professor Xavier had showed up at their house all those years ago, Pietro remembered. It was because he'd found out about Wanda. More specifically, he'd found out that Wanda had been left in a mental institution two years ago, and no one had ever been to visit her, let alone her father.

Pietro could only suppose that the good professor had gone to confront Father over abandoning Wanda. Imagine his surprise when he'd gotten Pietro instead, telling him that he hadn't seen or heard from his father over a month, that he had no idea where he was (it wasn't like the money envelopes Father sent home ever had return addresses or anything like that), and that he had no idea when he'd be back. After a few questions and some gentle prodding, Professor Xavier had written his phone number down on a slip of paper and gave it to Pietro, telling him to call if he needed anything.

For whatever reason, Pietro had never gotten rid of the slip of paper. He was holding it in his hands now, staring at it.

Whatever Mastermind had done to Wanda, Professor Xavier could probably undo the damage. The professor's mental powers far outdid Mastermind's; it would likely be easy for him to undo the effects of Mastermind's work. All it would take would be one phone call, or one face-to-face meeting, one meeting explaining what had happened, and Wanda would have her real memories back.

He wouldn't be doing it. If Wanda got her real memories back, she would go back to hating him, and with Father gone, there was always the chance that she'd choose to kill Pietro as an accomplice after the fact in her brainwashing. And, having thought about it (and that was still something of a novel concept), Pietro would admit that he probably did deserve a thrashing for not raising a fuss about it. But that wasn't all.

Wanda was his sister. More than that, with Father gone, she was the only family he had left. Though he knew it wasn't right, he couldn't stand the idea of losing whatever it was he had with Wanda now.

But he stared at the piece of paper, at the neat, precise handwriting and the digits written there, and his heart was troubled.