United States Military Base. Location: Classified. 03 April, 0900 Hours

Erik's jaw drops before he can stop it, blue-gray eyes going wide with what he knows can only register as unmitigated panic.

"Commander—sir. You—can't possibly be asking this of me—"

He fights to keep his posture, his composure, though it seems every muscle in his body has tensed up in response to Shaw's directive. His accent, hard-edged yet lilting, coming through heavier than usual, his first language spilling into his thoughts, rendering it all an echo chamber of annoyance. Fuck protocol, fuck the code—ich kann nicht es glauben—das ist total Quatsch, mein Gott—

Shaw cocks his head to the side, brow furrowed in concern, though his eyes betray a not-unkind twinkle of schadenfreude.

"Erik. Please. You're the best hope they've—we've—got. The people who kidnapped Dr. McCoy—they won't stop at that, and we really can't afford to give the humans something to worry about if news of the Virus leaks out."

We're already up to our asses doing damage control, he doesn't need to say.

And it's on your shoulders, is what Erik ascertains from the way his commander's words hang in the air, heavy with meaning.

Erik sighs, lifts a trembling hand and pinches the bridge of his nose hard, squeezing his eyes shut as if upon opening them all of this—this ridiculous conversation, this absurd order from his commander—will have merely been a bad dream, a nightmare leaving the taste of ash in his mouth. As if this whole situation in which he's found himself—the botched mission, the doctor's death—not to mention the collateral damage and expense wasted on this effort, nothing but bad press, another set of anti-mutant think-pieces no doubt gearing themselves up in the papers, on the news channels, those smug human bastards undoubtedly feigning concern and gloating inwardly about the failures of mutants to conduct themselves safely and properly, to prove they aren't the threat they so clearly are—

A groan ekes itself through unwilling lips from somewhere in his chest. He jumps at the sensation of touch. A fatherly hand patting him on the shoulder—considerate but firm. Unwavering.

"Erik. Lieutenant." The low voice indicating the non-negotiability of the order. The quiet tone demanding obedience.

"You're punishing me, Commander." Erik's voice surly and petulant as he slips comfortably back into the role of prodigal, unruly son, feeling like half his age in front of Shaw, like he always has, always does—

"I'm not."

Erik peels apart his eyelids with trepidation. "Sir?"

Shaw is grinning now, though the upper half of his face doesn't register it, forehead and brow line smooth and slick and un-furrowed—an unmistakable sign of vanity. His mutation. Something about it being better than Botox, evidently.

Erik idly wonders how old Commander Shaw actually is, because he's certainly not in his late thirties—

"Besides, they're cute in person. All sweethearts, even the teenagers. You'll do just fine."

Location: Classified. 02 April, 0000 Hours

"All right, officers—listen up. Commander Shaw's orders. This is going to be an extraction—simple, bloodless, painless, as long as you follow instructions."

The metal of the plane thrums around him, making him almost giddy despite the weight of the parachute on his back, the thudding noise his boots make, as he paces before his squad. Palms and the backs of his knees practically crackling with feeling as he stands in the center of this magnificent metal beast, even though his hands are encased in thick leather, his weather-beaten uniform separating his skin from the structure of the vehicle.

The officers—the cream of the crop that is the United States Mutant Special Forces Team—stand in a line before him, their eyes trained and focused. Waiting.

"Our intelligence has indicated that Doctor McCoy will be located in the brig of the ship. Fortunately, most of the agents on this ship are humans, so they won't put up much of a fight. However, it'll be a damned public relations disaster for the program if any of them die, of course—"

One of the officers curses under his breath, which makes the side of Erik's stern mouth quirk up, quick as a blink.

"—and, of course, since there's not really enough metal on that ship for me to take care of things myself, those damned bastards…" Erik pauses, cutting off his train of thought, and stops his pacing, coming to stand before a young officer—the one who had muttered something unkind about humans only moments ago. The young man with the stoic, freckled face and slightly upturned nose, and the power to create—and manipulate—ice.

He refuses to call the officer "Iceman," no matter what the rest of the lot call him.

"Drake—you'll be first on the ground, and you're going to incapacitate everyone on that ship you can find. Nothing lethal, of course—just make sure it'll take a few hours to melt them out."

Drake nods dutifully, mouth set in a thin line. Erik returns the nod and takes a step to the left, where he has to look down at the next officer to make eye contact—a young girl, younger than Erik would like to think about with regards to the danger of this job—a girl with prominent cheekbones and a gap between her front teeth.

"You, Rogue—you'll drop in next, and do another sweep of the people Drake's neutralized. Make sure none of them are hiding any surprises." He looks meaningfully at Rogue's hands, which, unlike Erik's and the rest of the team, are bare, the nails bitten to the quick, but steady by her side nonetheless. "Of course, Drake will be radioing back to us if he encounters any difficulties—that is, if any of the people on the ship happen to be one of us. In that case, you'll need to be completely ready to assist him."

Rogue nods in understanding, chin wobbling slightly, and Erik kindly pretends he doesn't see Drake's gloved hand brush reassuringly against Rogue's naked one.

Erik then turns sharply to face the officer on Rogue's right, another a pretty, pale young girl with large eyes, eyes with gray-blue daubs beneath them, to be sure, after all, none of them have really slept in the last week or so—eyes that nonetheless betray no fear.

"Pryde—you're going to do a sweep of the entire ship and locate Doctor McCoy. You'll then radio back with his location, at which point I'll drop in and recover the good doctor. By this time Pryde, with any luck, will have commandeered the vessel, and we'll then make our way to the rendezvous point. Do you copy?"

Erik would be lying if the way his officers respond instantly with "sir, yes, sir!" doesn't warm the cockles of his heart.

Of course, the mission doesn't exactly go as planned.

It starts off exactly as it should, with Drake sufficiently freezing every crew member he comes across—all human, it seems. Rogue, seemingly relieved to not have to use her power, strange and cruel as it is to her, is close by his side, just in case. Pryde follows, blurring through the walls of the wooden craft until she locates McCoy—still conscious, gagged, tied up with rope—and alerts Erik, who lands, sheds his heavy gear, and makes his stealthy way to the brig.

The good doctor's ashen face lights up when he sees Erik; as Erik sets about slicing through the rope and removing the rag in his mouth, he spits out, eyes wide with tears—"Oh, thank goodness, I thought I'd never see my family again—my wife would've killed me if I hadn't gotten out, ha, ha—"

It is, of course, when Pryde's begun to change course, the boat slicing through choppy blue-green waters, that a plastic bullet—seemingly appearing out of nowhere—grazes Erik's ear and strikes the soft flesh of Doctor Hank McCoy's neck, killing him instantly.

Erik's eyes widen in horror as McCoy crumples to the ground, whipping around to find himself face to face with a familiar young man with waxy skin and greasy dark hair.

"A—Allerdyce—" he manages to sputter out, using his gift to desperately feel around for a scrap of metal, anything he can use, because he sure as hell hadn't seen this coming—

"Pity Iceman's little freezer burn trick is useless against me, hmm?" the man says, smirking, withdrawing a single wooden watch from his sweatshirt pocket. Before Erik can crush the damned thing into a pulp, a searing heat wave crackles in his vision, a blinding light raising the hairs on his arm; he raises his hand in front of his face in a last-ditch effort at self-preservation, mind given over entirely to thoughts of Scheiße, diese Hurensohn—

Then suddenly the burning sensation is gone, and then Erik knows that Drake is by his side, somehow, his gloves removed, bare hand perfectly chilled as he rests it on Erik's forehead. Erik cracks his eyes open to find Allerdyce lying on the ground, unmoving, with the impossibly small figure of Rogue standing above him, looking white as a sheet, hands held out in front of her as if to keep Allerdyce's power as far from herself as possible.

United States Military Base. Location: Classified. 03 April, 0845 Hours

Erik fidgets in the plastic chair across the desk from his commander, a good-looking man endlessly skilled at schmoozing and getting his way, who was thusly promoted to his rank in an unprecedentedly short amount of time, and stares at his hands in his lap, where a pile of loose change has become, over the past few seconds, the following: an indeterminate blob, a miniature Model-T car, a tiny Koons-esque balloon animal of some sort, and a set of tweezers fit for a porcelain doll.

"It's my fault." His voice is flat as the metal in his hands separates into a clump of dimes once more, which he closes his fists around, looking up sharply to meet Commander Shaw's eyes.

"Now, Lieutenant—Erik—it's not your fault—we had no way of knowing that Allerdyce would be involved in this whole mess. Unfortunately, Drake couldn't really do much—it seems that Allerdyce was smart about it, played dumb while your team did their jobs, and then—"

Then Hank McCoy got a bullet in his neck.

—a plastic one.

"It's like they knew I was coming—there wasn't any damned metal on that ship," Erik grouses, as Shaw lets out a rueful sigh.

"Among our kind, Erik, you're not exactly a well-kept secret." Shaw leans over behind his desk and withdraws a thick manila folder, which he then slides across his desk to Erik.

"McCoy was one of our own, as well," Shaw begins quietly as Erik flips open the folder, digging his teeth into his lower lip, and begins to skim through the pages contained within. A photo of the man with a motley bunch of people—his family, Erik presumes—stacked on top of lab reports, newspaper clippings…

"He was working on controlling—and creating a cure for—the Legacy Virus."

Erik feels an ice-cold drop of sweat slither along his spine. Hands growing clammy, a lump forming in his throat as he looks up from the file to meet Shaw's eyes.

The Legacy Virus—Scheiße.

"I thought the Legacy Virus was—was a myth," Erik manages to whisper at last, voice more hoarse than he'd like it to be. He licks his lips uselessly as Shaw shakes his head, his mouth twisted into a frown.

The Legacy Virus—exactly the thing that could wreck this farce of a truce between mutants and humanity—as tenuous as it is, if the humans learned that it was real—this thing that could kill them all with one fell swoop—

"Apparently the myth became reality." Shaw rests his elbows on his desk and folded his hands beneath his chin, looking at Erik, a grave expression slipping onto his face. "Doctor McCoy somehow acquired a sample of it, somewhere, somehow, maybe he developed a few milliliters for testing, for God knows what reason—scientific curiosity, I should hope—and was—well. Playing around with it. Getting to understand how exactly it worked."

"Did he succeed?" Erik wipes his sweaty hands on his khakis, briefly considering sitting on them to hide their incessant trembling before thinking better of it and closing the folder on his lap, lacing his fingers together on top of the thick beige card stock.

"Whoever kidnapped him seems to think so. Of course, we can't exactly ask him anymore…"

Erik looks down at his hands once more, feeling his shoulder blades move over knots upon knots of muscle in his upper back.

Shaw clears his throat, clearly sensing the futility of twisting the knife of Erik's failure further. "Luckily, Doctor McCoy was careful about documentation. And, even more luckily for us, he was very careful about storing his research. Our intelligence indicates that he kept his files in a safety-deposit box in a Swiss bank."

Erik flickers his eyes upward, thoughts collecting and stumbling from between tight lips. "So you need me to get into the bank?—it shouldn't be a problem, Commander Shaw—really, Commander, even if they've upgraded from steel to some kind of chemical whatever—I can do this, I will—"

Anything. Anything to make up for this mess. Really—Gott, anything, anything I can do—

Shaw shakes his head briefly. "I thank you for your eagerness to help, Erik, but we've got an easier way of doing this—a more legal, palatable way." He briefly rises from his seat, reaches across his desk, and plucks the file folder from Erik's lap with sure, elegant hands.

"This," Shaw says, handing Erik a slick piece of paper, "is his family."

Erik squints down at the black-and-white portrait, where Doctor McCoy and a pleasant-looking woman are sitting on a bench in some tree-lined setting. The woman holds a small bundle in one arm, with a small boy with unruly curls perched on her opposite knee. On Doctor McCoy's lap sits a little girl, her face pressed into a pout, while standing behind the bench are two teenagers, a boy in a hoodie and a girl who looks as though she'd rather be anywhere but there.

"Are they…" Erik begins, holding the photo closer to his face to try and make out more details.

"…Mutants?" Shaw finishes helpfully. He nods firmly. "Well, the kids are. They're adopted—the wife—the widow—is human, but the kids are our kind, just like McCoy was."

Hank McCoy and his wife took in abandoned mutant children. Erik feels a strange, unwanted prickle behind his eyes at the thought of those five children, who at one point must have been so alone, so afraid, so consumed with self-loathing as Erik had been all those years ago—

—what in the world wouldn't Erik have given, back then, to be raised with that kind of love—

"Luckily, Moira—that's McCoy's widow—as the doctor's former spouse, has the authority to go to Switzerland and retrieve the contents of the safety-deposit box. We can't know what we're dealing with—what we're up against with the good doctor's research, and, of course, this issue is now priority one for our division. I'll be accompanying her to Switzerland to make sure nothing falls into the wrong hands." Shaw presses his lips together, his voice dropping to a cautious whisper. "Imagine, Erik—if whoever is responsible for kidnapping McCoy got their hands on his research—everything we've worked for all these years, the trust we've been given, the concessions both sides have made to make this work—our coexistence—"

As much as Erik loathes humans on both a personal and ideological level—can barely swallow his disgust for them the vast majority of his waking hours—he agrees. We can't afford to have this virus out there. He places the photograph back onto Shaw's desk and sits back in his seat, drumming his fingers on his knee idly as Shaw tucks the photograph of the McCoy family back into the manila folder and places it crisply on his desk.

Erik clears his throat. "Commander, if that's all there is to your plan, may I take my leave?"

Shaw sits back in his seat, a tiny grin curving on his lips as he crosses his legs. "I never said that was all there was to this operation, Lieutenant."

I don't understand—what could the Commander—

Erik narrows his eyes reflexively, mind beginning to whir with the grace and efficiency of a well-oiled machine. Fitting cogs into their places, the circular studded wheels of logic ticking away, tumblers into locks, all moving slowly, then more quickly, sparks beginning to fly as understanding dawns on him.

Scheiße.

Location: Oak Park, Illinois. April 14, 1000 Hours

8210 Summers Lane…

Erik studies the print-out in his hand one final time, already feeling a damned headache coming on as he looks back up, squints for the house number, wherever it is on this ridiculously unsafe fire-hazard clapboard monstrosity of a two-story house. The once perfectly-manicured lawn overgrown in places with dandelions and weeds, a little red wagon lying on its side a bright shout against the artificially bright greenery.

Well, there's definitely a child living here, Erik muses to himself caustically, mouth filling with a bitter taste for what seems like the eighteenth time since Commander Shaw had given him his orders.

Of course, Shaw could dress it up and sugarcoat it however he damned well pleased—dropping little notes of flattery here and there about how only his most valuable, most skilled officer Erik Lehnsherr could have passed muster for a job this crucial—how vital this assignment was for the division, the country, even the world, and how it really couldn't possibly be that hard; it's only for a few days, Erik, in a sing-song voice that really did nothing to make Erik feel less like he'd been put in some kind of time-out chair, as it were…

—It still wouldn't change the fact that Lieutenant Erik Lehnsherr, leader of the verdammt United States Mutant Special Forces Team, was being ordered to babysit.

"You really don't think this is—well—a waste of my skill set, Commander Shaw?"

Erik feels remarkably like a martyr as he picks up his single black suitcase, packed with three identical black turtlenecks, chosen for their utility as well as for comfort, three pairs of khaki pants, errantly fiddling with the zipper on his brown leather jacket without really thinking about it.

Shaw had looked at him, face gone completely serious.

"I have no doubt that you are the man for this task, Lieutenant."

Erik grits his teeth together as he makes his way up the red-brick pathway leading to the house's front door. Ticking off the information he'd been given in the dossier on the McCoy family—five kids, ranging from eighteen to fourteen months, keeping it all organized at the front of his brain. The oldest one, Angel, apparently flies, thanks to some iridescent sort of dragonfly wings she's got growing out of her back. The next one, Alex, sixteen, shoots some kind of blasty-firey energy out of his body—gee, won't that be fun to manage. The middle one, Raven, is a shapeshifter. The toddler, Sean, does something-or-other with sound waves, while the infant, Armando, seems to be incapable of getting injured—in a house with five children, one would think a baby would be the first to suffer in a chaotic moment, but so far, the dossier had noted, Armando had been able to survive burns, being left alone in the tub for too long, being dropped from a foot's height, being dropped from ten feet's height, and being left alone in a stuffy parked car for over an hour.

The dossier had also emphasized, with several underlines beneath the text, that none of the McCoy children have managed to control their powers.

Yay.

As he lifts his hand to knock on the door, Shaw's final comment floats back into his mind, unbidden:

"And remember, Erik—please smile. Trust me. Kids like that kind of thing better."

Rolling his eyes, Erik tugs his mouth into something showing teeth.

Well, let's get this damned job over with.

Erik has barely brushed his knuckles against the deep, rich brown wood of the front door before it flies open, revealing a small girl who comes just up to Erik's waist, a rosy-cheeked thing with long yellow hair who looks him up and down, staring briefly at his strange leering expression. With a noise like pages being flipped in a book, the girl begins to grow, to shift form, tiny blue feather-scales engulfing her body as Erik comes face to face with his doppelgänger, right down to the scuffs on the toes of his brown boots.

Erik's eyes widen at this sudden display, utterly taken aback—this must be Raven, the shapeshifter, he thinks wildly, stupidly, gripping his suitcase handle just a little more tightly as the Raven-Erik thing opens its mouth and screams bloody murder, the voice coming from his twin's lips that of a young girl's—high pitched, keening, digging right into his temples.

From deeper within the house, Erik hears a woman's voice, sounding ragged and pleading: "No—Raven, honey, please don't start screaming—you'll only set off Sean—" followed by several sets of footsteps on wood floors, growing louder and louder as Raven's scream is echoed by someone else, only louder and more pure, somehow, followed by what can only be the sound of glass breaking—

Raven-Erik looks over its shoulder and quickly reverts back to the blonde girl in her pink nightgown, looking innocent as can be; Erik follows her gaze to see what looks and sounds like a damned adult in this madhouse, finally, a harried-looking woman with brownish hair and doe eyes carrying a small baby in her arms, a ginger toddler at her heels, who pauses behind Raven in the doorway, breathing heavily for a moment, as she considers the man standing on her doorstep.

Erik's cheeks are becoming numb from holding the smile for so damned long. "Ah—I'm Erik Lehnsherr," he says abruptly, hoping to establish some damned clarity, holding out his free hand before realizing that the woman's arms are full of drooling infant.

"Oh—oh thank god you're here, Mr. Lehnsherr—I'm Moira, Moira McCoy—I'm Hank's widow," the woman sputters out, relief etching itself into the lines of her forehead, her exhaustion plain as day, all hollow cheeks and quick, nervous smile as she looks down at Raven, who has since turned her attention back to Erik. "I'm almost packed and ready to leave to meet Commander Shaw—thank you so, so much for doing this, Mr. Lehnsherr—really, I-I can't thank you enough—"

The screaming starts up again as the red-headed small child turns and runs back into the depths of the house, accompanied by loud popping and tinkling noises; Moira closes her eyes for a moment, clearly debating the merits of scolding and/or shushing a child whose voice can clearly turn glass into dangerous little points of light and broken edges, scattered all over the floor—

"Please, please come in, my gosh, I'm so sorry to keep you waiting on the stoop like this, where are my manners—" Moira opens her eyes sharply, quickly pulling Raven away from the doorway as Erik steps tentatively across the threshold, resisting the urge to look backwards, back to the street outside, back to freedom and not these children as he pulls the door shut behind him.

The foyer of the McCoy household is not particularly notable or unique—mid-century, warm cream-colored walls and nondescript floor rugs. A staircase a few yards ahead of him leads up to a second floor, and as Erik's gaze trails upwards he catches a glimpse of what can only be a lightbulb-less chandelier, the oxidized metal buds curling around nothing.

Moira follows Erik's sightline and smiles apologetically. "Sean—my second youngest—he's still, um, working on controlling his voice. There—there used to be lightbulbs and everything in it, I swear, but with Hank gone, it's become a little—"

She presses her lips together as if she's said too much; Erik has rarely seen someone looks quite so lost as Moira looks right now. He meets her gaze and nods quickly, allowing his facial muscles to relax, mein Gott, as a strange sort of awkwardness begins to bubble in his stomach. He looks down at his boots and shuffles them a bit uselessly on the carpet, as if to remove any errant mud from the heels.

Moira takes a short, shallow breath, and ushers Erik out of the hallway and into a frankly destroyed-looking sitting room, where the paintings and pictures all seem to hang at the same crooked angle, the walls below them covered with trailing lines of crayon, broken toys littering the floor; as Erik nearly trips over some vapid-looking Barbie doll, fighting the urge to swear loudly and in several languages, Moira gingerly sets herself down onto a once-presentable, now stained-couch. Erik coils himself into a too-small rocking chair across from her, feeling Raven's eyes crawling along his skin like an army of insects from where the tiny girl has seated herself on the couch next to her mother.

Armando, the indestructible infant, wriggles giddily—is that it? Erik wonders sardonically—are babies even capable of emotion beyond "feed me" and "I've just shit myself"?— in Moira's arms as she leans over, presses her lips to Raven's round cheek.

"Honey, this is—" she looks Erik up and down, clearly weighing how best to broach the fact of just who Erik is—"this is Mr. Lehnsherr. He's from the military—the mutant division, and he's going to be helping out around the house while I'm gone."

Technically, it's Lieutenant Lehnsherr, he wants to quip under his breath, then bites his tongue as he stretches the lower half of his face into something that is definitely not a grimace.

Raven considers the implications of her mother's statement, brow furrowing in concentration; another scream, clear as a bell, breaks through the moment of quiet, growing ever louder, Erik screwing his eyes shut and willing himself not to fly into a frustrated rage as Sean, the mop of red hair attached to a skinny, sunburnt body, rushes into the room like a ginger tornado and flings himself onto his mother's lap on the couch, only stopping the keening from the back of his throat when he makes accidental eye contact with Erik, looking for all the world like a constipated shark with all of his teeth showing, and quickly falls silent, hands flying upwards to cover his mouth.

Erik considers this something like a small victory that he's managed to make the damned child shut up, and for a moment the smile is somewhat genuine.

Heavy footsteps sound on the steps, the squeak of what sounds like too-new combat boots on hardwood floor just as unpleasant as Sean's incessant glass-breaking squealing, break the silent truce Erik seems to have established; Sean lifts his hands from his mouth and starts screaming again as a boy and a girl enter the sitting room—Alex and Angel, Erik thinks frantically, the boy's shiny Doc Martens sliding on the floor combining with Sean's screams to drill what feels like a very deep hole into the center of his forehead.

Of course, this is the precise moment when a car's obnoxious honk decides to cap everything off, adding the apparently-needed cherry to this ice-cream sundae of cacophony. Moira's eyes widen, her face slipping out of worry into downright alarm—"that's my taxi to the airport—oh, goodness—" With a series of jerky motions she peels herself from the couch, handing Armando off to the oldest girl, Angel, who accepts the baby without a change in expression, her mouth flat and eyes narrowed in suspicion as she regards Erik, this strange intruder going and wrecking what fragile peace her family had cobbled together this morning; Alex, looking like he's smelled sour milk, pushes his hood down around his shoulders and clomps on over to the couch, where he slides in between Raven and Sean, who, Erik really must admit, has quite the vocal stamina—

Moira reappears, face flushed, two duffel bags pulling down her shoulders in equal measure. "All right, kids—I love you, I love you, please be good for me, okay?"

The five McCoy children immediately gather around their mother, each fighting for a piece of her to hold on to, anything, because this Erik recognizes, this primal fear electrifying the McCoy children's limbs, even the baby's—the fear, unspeakable except for a silent scream, that they might never see her again.

That she won't come back… just like their father. Erik swallows down a lump in his throat as Moira presses kisses onto each child's head, even the oldest two, and then, with another breathless rush of "thankyous" directed at Erik, wedges the door open and shuts it behind her.

The house is silent, save for the trace sounds of the taxicab pulling away from the curb.

Erik lets out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding as he surveys the five children under his care, however loosely that word can be defined—they'll survive until their mother gets back, dammit. They each look at him, eyes displaying varying degrees of wariness and reproachfulness.

He surprises himself by clearing his throat, rising from his seat and standing straight at attention. "All right, children," he begins slowly, unsure of how to address these miniature people, because they sure as hell aren't the officers and soldiers he's used to commanding, "I'm going to be in charge of you all while your mother is away. Now, as long as you all follow my instructions and do precisely as I say, we won't have any—"

Sean's resurgent screams cut him off as the child, wretched thing, begins to run around the sitting room, each wail punctuated with a giggle as one, two, three lightbulbs in the ceiling pop and rain down shards of translucent glass, just as Alex, who has begun glaring at Erik, rolls his eyes and quips, "nice accent there, mister whoever the hell you are," as Erik fights the urge to snarl in return, "that's Mister Fucking Lieutenant Lehnsehrr to you, Dummkopf," Raven decides that this is the perfect moment to throw herself onto the worn-out couch, tears streaming down her face, her hiccuping sobs managing a strange, discordant harmony with the noises coming from Sean; meanwhile, Angel merely looks at Erik coolly, proffers Armando, and states flatly, "I'm eighteen years old, and you're not my dad," before turning on her pointy heel and disappearing to wherever eighteen year-old girls disappear off to.

Erik, caught off guard by the sudden addition of infant to his person, silently curses the day he ever heard the name "Hank McCoy," scrambling to find a hand-hold on Armando, Armando, the one damned child in this family who has not managed to piss him off yet, though, of course, give things time—

It is at this moment, amidst Raven's pitiful weeping and Sean's gleeful destruction, a path of violence that has since seemed to spread to the rest of the downstairs area of the McCoy house, that Armando, sweet, docile Armando looks up at Erik, opens his mouth, and spits up on him, the sticky, pungent liquified whiteness splattering all over Erik's jacket, turtleneck, and chin.

Verdammte Arschmade—