Who was it wanted more of my unseasonal holiday one shots? Well, you've got it. Because I've had a stinking awful day and the only way to make myself feel better was to dive straight into some Maximoff family cuteness. Enjoy!
Christmas music on the radio so early. Lorna fiddled with the car stereo. It seemed every year she'd be assaulted with Jingle Bells, or some other cheery classic, earlier and earlier in the year, but now? That was just way too much. Not when she was struggling to drive in the snow, not when she didn't even celebrate Christmas. Truth be told, Thanksgiving didn't have much meaning for her either, aside from family of course.
It would be the first Thanksgiving they'd all spent together for almost four years. Last year, Wanda had been in Sokovia when the festive season rolled around. The year before that, Lorna herself had been so heavily involved in a research project that she simply couldn't leave to see her family. The year before that, Peter was in Mongolia for months, and couldn't make it back in time. This year they had all made a solemn promise that they would all be there. She was looking forward to returning to the nest, enjoying some time without any pressure or stress. If only this snow would ease up. She found a music station that wasn't playing Christmas music, smiled as she recognised the song.
I've travelled the world and the seven seas,
Everybody's looking for something
It always made her think of her big brother. Not just because of that time he'd amused her miming along to the words with a hairbrush, looking for all the world like a rock star strutting around the kitchen, but also because it was so true. They were all looking for something, and somehow it felt that when they were all back at home, they'd found it.
The snow didn't ease. She parked up the street, covered and sparking by the time she had pushed open the front door. Warmth and cosiness and familiarity within. A hug from Wanda waiting for her that smelled of the cinnamon buns she'd been baking and her vanilla perfume and home and comfort. Looking over her shoulder to see her big brother there waiting his turn. Lorna couldn't help but be taken aback at how happy he looked – not that manic, frenetic happiness she'd seen there before, but some kind of deep contentment that was totally new to her. His body felt firm and strong when he hugged her tightly, familiar violet shampoo underscored with that sweet smell she associated only with him. He had a painful-looking black eye that she would have to wait until later to ask about, but it didn't seem to be bothering him.
Their mother as always, drying her hands on a dishtowel, throwing it aside to welcome her youngest daughter home. More grey in her hair now, but no less sparkle in her eyes. A kiss on the cheek that melted Lorna's heart like the snow in her hair. A glass of red wine pushed into her hands to warm the chill of the long drive. A family meal that sent her straight back to her childhood with the twins bickering, her mother keeping a serene kind of peace, Lorna just enjoying being with them all at last. Their mother hated them talking politics, so they had waited until she had given them all a fond kiss goodnight and they had settled downstairs in what she still thought of as Peter's Room.
Magda had never seen any reason to change anything down there, and it was almost exactly as he had left it. Like a little patch of their childhood that had been preserved over the changing years, waiting for them to come back. Lorna wondered if their mother kept it that way expecting one day that Peter would have to move back in, though that seemed unlikely now given how strangely adult and contented he looked. It made Lorna glad to see him that way, she remembered a little of how their brother had been when he was young, knew how hard a struggle it had been for him to get where he was now.
Wanda had settled herself onto the arcade stool, announced that she hadn't played Ms Pac-Man for years, laughed uproariously at herself when she found it far harder than she recalled. Peter took over, cracked his knuckles theatrically before showing her how it was done. Not taking his eyes off the screen as he semi-casually asked
"Did you guys see the news about the new vaccine earlier?"
Of course they had. They just hadn't wanted to bring it up. Leave it to Peter to always want to talk about the hard stuff – it was a bad habit of his, when he was younger it had been a way of taking attention off himself, now it was just ingrained.
"It's not a vaccine," Wanda had picked up a magazine, making a show of flipping through it casually, "It's a cure. Vaccines prevent diseases"
"Don't be a smartass all your life, Buttface," he smirked back at her, "Whad'ya think? I thought it was pretty weird"
"It's not a cure either," Lorna piped up. She usually stayed quiet, didn't get between her older siblings, but this was something she'd been steaming about ever since the broadcast, "Cures are for diseases. It's not a disease being a Mutant. It's just different"
"Did they cure annoyingness yet, Dogbreath?" Wanda asked sweetly. Her brother flipped her off, "Oh, I guess not. Littlest is right though, it's not a disease. Why do we need a cure?"
Lorna grinned, warmth flushing through her at the use of her childhood nickname. They almost never addressed one another by name when they were all at home – though Peter and Wanda would occasionally vary their insulting epithets toward one another. They'd been Dogbreath and Buttface as long as Lorna remembered, but she always knew who they were taking about when they referred to Four-Eyes (though Wanda hadn't worn glasses since high school) or Lard-Ass (though Peter had never been anything but slender). Their brother had played on for a few minutes before coming to join them, kicking his feet up into Wanda's lap and giving her a winning smile as she protested.
"If you don't want your feet hexed I suggest you move them" she warned. He didn't. She didn't do anything. The black eye was already starting to fade almost as Lorna watched – just an accident, she'd eventually found out. It left a nasty mark when people forgot where you were standing when they opened the door of a military jet. Wanda had of course told him that not getting a concussion clearly proved how thick his skull was.
"Would you take it, do you think?" he asked. He'd retrieved a plastic band from a pocket and was twirling it rapidly between his two hands, "If it was safe and all?"
"Of course not!" Lorna responded immediately, "Why should I? There's nothing wrong with being how I am!"
"Yeah except when you were a kid and all the cutlery used to throw itself at you when you got annoyed about something" Peter remarked, gave her a very big brotherly look, "Or that luscious green hair of course"
"You're one to talk, Anderson Cooper" she retorted. He mussed her hair in just the way she hated in retaliation.
"What about you Buttface?" he asked, "Any chance you'd take a shot to get rid of Weird Wanda for good?"
"I do far more good with my powers than I ever could without them. Besides, I'm not ashamed of being a Mutant. Why would I ever want to take something like that away? It would be like trying to cure me of being… I don't know, of being Jewish or something!"
"Do you think there's a cure for that? Bacon really does smell great…."
"Thinking with your stomach as usual" Wanda laughed at him, gave him a hard poke in the gut that made him jump enough for her to get out from under his feet. "Surely you wouldn't take a cure, would you? You'd have to give up running. And you'd get fat"
"Ahh but I wouldn't would I? Because I wouldn't get so hungry if I didn't have my powers, so things would balance out… and I could still run. Just not at super-speed. Nothing stops humans from running you know"
"You cannot have seriously thought about this, Bro" Lorna looked aghast, "I mean, you wouldn't would you?!"
"C'mon Littlest, would it really be so bad?"
"To take away your gifts?! Yes, it really would be that bad! You're lucky your father isn't here to hear you say that, he'd crack your head open for you"
"Or make sure Hank opened the door of the Blackbird harder next time" Wanda added, "She's right, why would you ever want to get rid of your gifts? I wouldn't have thought you of all people would be up for a Mutant Cure"
"Why not?" Peter sounded serious suddenly, looking up at her in a hurt little way she thought he'd grown out of, "I guess I get you two not wanting it, you can control your powers better than me. I just think I'd be pretty cool to not get so aggravated with the way everything's so slow all the time"
Lorna smiled at him sadly, came to join them and butted him to the side with her hip before arranging herself with her arms around her brother's waist, resting her face against his back. It was easy to forget that Peter could do a lot more than run, and that to his eyes everything was always going in slow-motion, thoughts running at the speed of sound. The normal world was deeply annoying to him, always had been – Lorna sometimes wondered how he kept his sweet temper when everything was so frustrating.
"It's not right though" Wanda was saying. She let him put his feet back in her lap, squished a little closer into the pile of Maximoffs that was developing on the sofa, "We shouldn't feel we have to be cured when there's nothing wrong. We're special, that's part of what makes us who we are"
"Maybe I don't want to be special"
"Maybe some people who're born gay don't want to be that way? Or black? Or who grow up to be really tall? That doesn't mean we should have cures for those things. It means we should try to cure the way people think about them"
"She's right, Bro" Lorna gave him an extra-tight squeeze, "We're not the problem. The world that wants us to go away is"
Peter sighed, let Wanda rest her head on his shoulder, pulled gently at the red curls that hung down around her face.
"I just think it's not so bad to have a chance to be normal" he said. His sisters were quiet for a moment until Lorna had said
"We're here together for the holidays, having sibling time. Tomorrow we're gonna watch Snoopy and you'll fall asleep on the sofa because you ate too much, and Wanda will put make-up on you while you're crashed out. She'll probably blame me, but Mom won't believe her. Mom will rob us all blind at poker, and then we'll go to bed and go back to our jobs on Monday. What could be more normal than that?"
He thought for a moment, reached for a hand each from both of them, and smiled.
"You've got a point."
They were silent a little while longer, enjoying the ability to be together and to curl up on a two-seater sofa with three of them squeezed onto it, before Wanda had broken the quiet
"You look pretty good in my lipstick you know"
"Can you not put the pink on me again?" he asked, "the plum goes so much better with my hair"
A/N : Obviously, this is not really a 'crossover' as such, but making it one is the only way to tag Wanda in the characters. The 'Anderson Cooper' joke is a shout out to the MTV After Hours short 'Group Therapy' which you'll probably find pretty amusing if you enjoy a bit of X-Men crack. And who doesn't?