Author's Note: So this fanfic got its' start in a very weird series of places. First was one of the many now long abandoned fanfic prompt communities on LiveJournal, then there was my brother with his concept that Cerebro would have issues picking up mutants at extreme points on Earth (islands in the middle of nowhere, above the Arctic Circle line, etc.) and thirdly my mom, of all people, who watched X-Men Evo with me patiently but while watching the X-Men First Class movie declared that Azazel was a total letdown in characterization and design and she expected better writing for a theoretical father of Kurt.
And thus this is my first time dipping my toes into the water of X-Men fic. Over the course of my life I've read quite a bit of it and admired many a fic, but never have I made a story like this for fear of the whole thing turning into a Marty Stu 'look at how cool my character is' parade. I am therefore begging people to tell me if the story gets that vibe going and to tell me what to improve so we don't end up with this being a trainwreck. To me, although there's a bigger, overarching plot, the core of this should be about Kurt and the incredibly messed up father he has learning to come together, not a My OC Is Teh Awesome lovesong I end up writing to an increasingly disappointed audience.
To summarize: when I say I want constructive criticism, I mean it.
Also we get to the Kurt centric pieces more next chapter but this was running long and I decided to try and pick a good end point instead of posting a too-long, rambling chapter. (Like this isn't already one.)
The town of Ayon in Russia's Far East was not the end of the line. It was far, far past the end of the line, the kind of remoteness people rarely were even aware existed. Siberia would've been easier to get to, had more roads and been less desolate. At least Siberia had trees, after all, so there were ways to live off the land. This was up withinin the Arctic Circle, beyond the treeline, beyond the domain of predators, an island time forgot nestled in the East Siberian Sea just beneath the Arctic Ocean in all its' magnitude.
This was where one particularly over-qualified town doctor lived. Over the years he could honestly say he'd been in worse spots. Here the population of not even two hundred people needed his services as an amateur medic enough to get him a free apartment in the nearly empty buildings that were leftover from the town's glory days during the USSR's reign. He had enough white Russian in him to command authority but enough Chukchi to keep him included in the 'one of us' category with the locals and the people who came in the summer, dwindling though those numbers were. He could chisel out a living from the ice of the far north part of the Far East and make it through day after day, week after week, until time blurred by and he'd been here ever since his wife ran away with his son, a personal tragedy that he kept locked up inside. He took it out on himself in a way, with questions on how he could've let it happen and not have seen it coming, but the thing about Ayon was that even the harshest problems had a cure handy and nearby: alcohol, of the hardest, most awful tasting variety possible. He was not above taking a day off to lay on his mattress on the floor and stare at nothing when the mood struck him, and people tolerated it because it wasn't a regular occurrence.
He'd always put his hope into the remoteness of this place and places like it. In a place with too many people they might ask questions and report impossible things to the authorities. Here, he was too much a part of the system to be removed, so if multiple people had seen him teleport clear across what was left of the town or pop in and out of place, it could be ignored. Everyone was a drinker to some degree here and even if they all knew that wasn't a good enough explanation for what they'd seen, they couldn't afford to chase the town doctor out. So long as he didn't hurt anyone and didn't do much more than work and sit in his apartment reading the same books over and over, he could stay here in peace, an oddity tolerated for his usefulness. Only rarely did the past rear up to try and choke him, times cured by a hard drink and a long walk in the cold to clear his head.
It wasn't until there was a knock on his door one Tuesday morning he realized he still hadn't managed to run far enough to put the past behind him.
The morning was off to its' usual start. He'd been woken up before sunrise by Elena, whose father was once again drunkenly proclaiming he could see the spirit of death itself. That meant hauling the man into his house, making sure he hadn't actually ingested anything that might bring about his own death, and, once his daughter was out of the room, informing him he was an awful father and hoping this guilt trip would work. It wouldn't; they never lasted more than a month without an incident like this from him, but it was a job. He'd gotten back to his apartment, made some tea and tried his luck with the TV, whose static-filled news channel barely came through even on clear days. As the sky lightened he had gotten ready to do his bi-daily rounds when there was a knock on his door, and it said something about him that he knew the sound f everyone's knock and footsteps enough to know that this wasn't someone he'd talked to before.
There were a few people who lived on Ayon Island without living in the town of Ayon themselves, for reasons he didn't pretend to understand. That was his first thought, and he was already in his coat, so he'd started to go for his bag when he heard two voices speak softly to each other. One was female and young, the other male and adult, but the stand out detail was that they were speaking English, something so insane that for several moments he stood, unable to move, worst-case scenarios playing out across his mind. He could teleport out of here, of course. The problem with that escape plan was that Ayon Island was not a place one could disappear from without a plan. He'd never teleported himself down an entire frozen road down to the mainland and had zero desire to try even on a day where the weather was holding steady. Once out, what would he do? He was running out of places in Chukotka to hide in at this point and so, with no other option, he opened the door like a condemned man facing a firing squad.
The woman was striking, African but with hair whiter than the snow, and a friendly gleam to her surprisingly blue eyes. The man she was with was in a wheelchair and his immediate thought was that if he was expected to treat paralysis or complications from it they were all doomed, because that had just never come up in his varied medical career. This far north, there was a certain unspoken knowledge of what happened to people who could no longer walk. This was the first wheelchair he'd seen since he'd worked in Anadyr years and years ago, back when he'd been a bit less desperate and less careful.
Apparently they knew about those days, too, because the first words out of the man in the wheelchair's mouth were, "May we come in?" followed by a quieter, "We know you speak English, Mr. A-"
"Come in," he said too quickly, looking beyond them down the hall. No one was out, but that meant nothing. Anybody not native to the island would be the talk of it for weeks after they visited, especially out of season like this. "Keep your voices down."
What name did they think he was going by? A, A… he'd used Avilov in Yuzhny, Anosov in Egvekinot, Abashkin in Elvuney so long ago that he barely remembered it, but he'd changed his lettering over the years. He'd done a lot of things over the years, really, from bleaching his hair with beach not meant for anything but industrial use to using an oil mix to make his hair jet black. He'd had shaggy hair, military-cut hair, a widow's peak, a traditional Chukchi ponytail and traded in clothes and traded away possessions at every stop. He was a very different man depending on the town and the year, and had hoped to make this the last stop, the place he would settle in for the long haul. He'd had four years here, good, solid years as a doctor and nobody, a part of the town instead of an outsider. All it would take for that to crumble would be the kind of rumors no town took in stride – 'did you hear, the Doctor's real name is…' would turn into 'we should radio or write Pevek to be safe' and when Pevek authorities realized their own mysteriously vanished doctor from a decade ago had the same lack of credentials and documents they'd contact Anadyr and that would get the kind of attention he didn't know how to run from.
"Calm yourself," the man in the wheelchair said in a soothing tone, earning only a slightly raised eyebrow in response. "We aren't here to turn you in to any authorities."
"Just being here will ensure that," he replied without an ounce of emotion in his voice. If he got angry, he was too likely to lash out, and at any rate the feeling of dread that was filling him up showed more signs of turning into true exhaustion. "You've done a lot of damage just by speaking English to me where soeone might overhear it." But there was no reversing that now. "Who are you and how did you find me?"
"My name is Professor Charles Xavier. This is Ororo Munroe, a teacher at my school. The means by which we found you is a bit harder to explain than I think can be done properly." He took in the flicker of rapidly-concealed insult that flashed across the Russian's face and added, "It isn't because I doubt your intelligence. We've been in Russia long enough to have heard some of the more intolerant statements."
"You can just say 'the Chukchi jokes'. We're all thinking it." He wasn't sure why that immediately made the white haired woman stifle a laugh. "It's not a secret in Russia there's a bit of hierarchy even out here."
He had come into this world knowing he was going to get sneered at and talked down to all his life because of his heritage. That was the fate of being anything other than purely white Russian and living in Russia, and that was why he'd chosen Ayon for his attempt at a permanent settlement. Almost all of the people here were Chukchi. They would make no jokes to his face or behind his back, which was where the worst of it tended to be, and his wages wouldn't be suspiciously lower than what they should have been with a flimsy explanation. It was one of the reasons he'd taken Russian names of various rarity or commonality over the years, but sometimes that alone wasn't enough to wipe away the bits of him that somehow failed to pass the racial litmus test people ran each other through even at what seemed to be almost literally the ends of the Earth.
"Mr. – I'm sorry, how would you like to be addressed?" Charles made a valiant attempt at manners to a man who unfortunately associated manners with con artists and corrupt officials.
"I've been using Nagayev here." That much, at least, was unfiltered truth.
"Mr. Nagayev, we're here because we know two things about you that are very important to us. The first is that you have a gift, one which most people remain ignorant of. I suspect that to be the reason our last reliable source on your location knew you by a different name." He looked away, and a book from the shelf simply floated over into his hands, getting the Russian's undivided attention. "The school I run is for young people with gifts of various natures, to give them a place that they can feel safe and learn to harness their powers. There are many more people like us than you might suspect."
"I know. I've met a few in my lifetime. What's the second reason?" He had already internalized the concept of a school for people like them as 'nothing to do with me' and, as fantastic as it was on its' own merits, it was much too late for that to make an impact in his life. He looked younger than he was, but even then he couldn't pass himself off as 'young'. Like news about Moscow, it didn't matter if it wasn't going to impact this endless icy land he'd called home his whole life. Charles had better have something very good to justify ruining his Ayon homestead-
"The second reason we are here is because of your son." Ororo stepped forward to hand him a picture, and the world came to a sudden, screeching halt. She gently placed a hand on his shoulder as he stood still as stone, and continued speaking softly. "He's grown into a fine young man since he arrived at the school."
He swallowed and found it hard to breathe, let alone speak. They had the same blue-black hair, that dark color that was so common among Chukchi men, but his skin was the warm blue of his mother's, smooth appearing to those who didn't know about the thin layer of fur that he had. His son might've gotten that from being born in such a cold point in Russia; that had been the working theory he'd had when his boy was a baby, at least. He was lean and long limbed like his father, but smiling, bright-eyed, happy. His tail had gotten longer over the years than it had been as a baby, back when it had been such a nightmare to navigate diapers around. Apparently it didn't impede his ability to walk or function, weird as it might've looked. And it hit him then, how many years he'd missed, how he hadn't gotten to see his son's first steps, his first words, that stage kids went through where they asked 'why' all the time, talk to him at all, take him to school, see him make friends and enemies and go through that horrifically awkward first crush all people were doomed to have, try to be cool…
"What's his name? I know his mother never wanted to stay here, so… where did they settle? What's he going by? Is he doing okay?" There were more questions, but Charles raised a hand to stop the onslaught.
"He goes by Kurt Wagner. He was adopted by a German couple who named him that. We don't currently know who his mother is. Linking him to you was only possible due to your mutation. Teleporting is not a power we've encountered outside of the two of you."
"Germany," he muttered in disbelief, shaking his head. "I knew she wanted out of this place, but Europe on foot, that's as insane as it gets. As if Europeans would magically manage to be better to him, to her, when the truth came out… she knew better, and she did it anyway. But dear sweet God, Germany… She never even told me he – I thought – I thought he was…"
The word dead didn't need to be spoken, it was implied in the slight shaking of his hands. He wasn't aware he was crying until a tear fell onto the photo, and he shook the moisture off, frowning at himself. He couldn't pull it together. It took too much to process what he was seeing. Pride welled up in him despite the fact he'd had nothing to do with the boy's upbringing; his son was smart, he spoke German and presumably English, he was learning how to use his power, he was good looking if one didn't have a prejudice against the coloration. His son could go on to do so many things he'd never had the opportunity to do. A lump formed in his throat and he looked over at the Professor with an expression that was equal parts gratitude and confusion.
"What happens now?" he asked the man quietly, holding the picture of his son – Kurt, what a German name – to his chest.
"Now, Mr. Nagayev, we would like you to come and teach at the school. Your experience with mutants and time put in towards learning control by trial and error is invaluable, and could be greatly utilized to help the students in their own struggles. And, in addition, it would give Kurt peace of mind to know where he comes from, and perhaps allow for improvements to be made on the system we use to find young people with these powers. They could use the help, and you could be instrumental in giving them the chance to seize it."
"You have no idea who I really am," he pointed out quietly. "I've done some things I'm not proud of. Survival and hiding was never easy even before the region's economy collapsed. How far back did you manage to trace me? I'm willing to bet it's not back to the correct starting point. This… this is a lot of trust to put in a stranger."
"It is," the Professor agreed with a solemn nod. "But as far back as we could find possible records of you, you have always been a doctor and a helper of your community. You deserve not to have to run any longer, Nagayev. You deserve to see your family, to have a family. I realize I'm asking you to leave a tremendous amount of personal history behind for the unknown. And I know that it must be hard to trust strangers after all the time you've spent running. But I believe that your future can be better than your present, and you can make a better future for others. Will you at least give this a chance?"
The word family hit him like a knife to the chest, and slowly, as if in a dream, he nodded.