Author's Notes: This is part of my 1970s verse. It takes place before, during, and after the first fic, Peter Maximoff v Life, Terrorists, & Awkward Family Conversations. I actually wrote/posted this one a week ago, but I forgot to post it on this site, sorry! Hope you all enjoy a little bit of Erik's POV.
Content Notes: There are mentions of an underage character being kidnapped and tortured, but nothing graphic is shown onscreen.
Erik Lensherr v Parenthood
"We should stop," Magda says one evening when they lay in bed together amid a messy pile of sheets and sweat and, tangled around Erik's ankle, Magda's silk brassiere. "We could go to Spain. They say the economic reforms are coming soon. I know you like Barcelona."
It is Argentina in the spring, so Erik's arm is not curled around Magda's shoulders, and Magda's fingers are not idly tugging at the hair on Erik's chest. Magda's swept her hair up and draped it over the far edge of her pillow, but the short and wispy curls at the nape prickle no matter how much she runs her hand across the back of her neck.
"We could start a family," Magda says when he doesn't answer.
Erik turns onto his side and rubs his thumb across her cheek and rests his hand on her chest above the swell of her breast. Her heart flutters beneath his fingers like a butterfly beating against a net.
"We've talked about this," he says. "I won't raise a family while he's still out there."
In the morning, when they've lain next to each other and pretended to sleep long enough to keep up the fiction, she'll shower first, and he'll lie in bed and watch her dress. She'll pluck the scrap of silk and lace still tangled around his toes and won't make a joke as she puts it on, and he'll watch her struggle to button the tight-fitting bodice that fit well enough seven weeks earlier and won't understand what it means.
Four days from now they will argue again. Erik will leave; he'll tell her he's going to Warsaw on business and she can follow if she likes. Magda will wait until she's sure he's gone and buy a ticket to New York.
But there is this point in time, now, where he strokes his thumb across her collar bone and lays a kiss on her eyebrow, where it is always November in Cafayate and they both still have faith that they will make it through because they love each other.
After Washington, the international community bands together and organizes the largest manhunt in history for him. Every lead is followed, no matter how small, and teams are dispatched to Moscow and Munich and Buenos Aires, where credible reports place the fugitive.
Erik hides out in a foreclosed bungalow twenty miles from the White House until he heals. He almost leaves without stopping, almost runs back to Europe and disappears. But it sticks in his head, the thing the boy said, bites at the corners of his consciousness until Erik steals a phone book just to prove to himself how stupid he's being. He's laughing at himself when he turns past a page full of Martins and his finger lights on the name at the top of the next.
You know, my mom used to know a guy who could do that.
Eight days later, Magnus Eisenhardt applies for a job at an electric plant in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He's a dependable worker, steady and quiet and quick, though his immediate supervisor occasionally finds himself baffled at Magnus' reluctance to take charge of situations or jockey for better hours.
After Peter goes missing, it takes Magda seventeen days to find him.
She shows up at the factory one day with dark circles under her eyes and a little girl on her hip. Erik recognizes the girl; he saw her in a photograph in Magda's house, perched on her big brother's shoulders in front of a circus tent.
"They've taken Peter," Magda says.
Six hours later, Erik rips open the metal door of a small cell in an underground bunker in a forest in British Columbia and recognizes the boy inside.
There is a moment where Erik stands in the dark hallway and blinks at the sudden light, and there is a moment where, seeing the boy, he steps forward and goes inside. And there is a moment in between the two where his heart restructures itself, and nothing is ever the same again.
Sonia Lensherr died in Auschwitz, and Maria Maximoff died in a cottage in Romania in 1949, but the boy in the cell has Sonia in his chin and Maria in his eyes and Erik in the thin tilt of his mouth. He's shaking and bruised and his t-shirt and boxers hang off of his frame, but he's crouching, tense, ready to run or to fight or to do whatever needs to be done, and that is Magda all the way through.
The boy (he's just turned seventeen, he's lonely, he goes by Peter rather than Pietro so he doesn't stick out more than he already does) smashes face-first into Erik when he tries to stand. Erik loops one arm under his shoulders and one arm under his knees and heaves him up against his chest. Peter stinks, of sweat and urine and waste and filth, and the skin of his arms and the skin on his knees feel grimy under Erik's hands. He's shaking and cold and when they go into the hallway he turns his face into Erik so his forehead presses uncomfortably against Erik's ribs.
This is the first time Erik ever holds his son.
The evening after Magda, still tall and proud and sharp like a knife with a long, long edge and a lot of weight behind it, leaves back for D.C., Erik waits until Peter falls asleep, as he has every night, and sits down in the chair at his side and prays the Mi Shebeirach over his bed.
Peter's dead to the world, sprawled out undignified with one foot hanging off the bed, one hand tucked up under the chest of his sleeveless t-shirt, and that ridiculous gray fleece blanket drawn up over his chin and nose.
Hank comes in halfway through, but he stays in the doorway until Erik finishes. He's got a thermometer, a pair of disposable rubber gloves, and a new IV bag with a messily-scrawled label on it. He crosses to Peter's other side, where the IV stand sits when it's not in use, and slips on the gloves with a practiced snap. He manhandles Peter's free arm, sets the thermometer up in his armpit, and starts prepping the IV.
"Not that I'm not grateful," Erik says, "But when did you get a medical degree?"
Hank's eyes rake over him, and his lips thin. The clamp of the IV line snaps onto the bag, and he pulls a packet of sterilized needles from the drawer of Peter's nightstand. "Someone had to take care of Charles after Cuba, and there weren't a lot of people left that he trusted."
He makes a displeased 'hmm' under his breath when he reads the thermometer.
"Still low?"
Hank shrugs. "Ninety-seven. This should help." His fingers are gentle as he slides the needle home into the back of Peter's hand and tapes it down. Peter doesn't stir.
Erik stands up. His back pops, and he groans and rubs at it. Forty-two isn't nearly as old as Peter thinks it is, but it's old enough, some days.
"Peter said you're staying." Hank settles the IV stand near enough the bed that Peter won't yank the line out if he moves in the night.
Erik waits.
"He tried to be cool about it, but you're the one who rescued him." Hank lifts an eyebrow. "He looks up to you like we used to."
Peter does twitch, minutely, when Erik shifts the blanket away from his face, but he settles down when Erik spreads it out so it covers him from feet to shoulders. "I have nowhere else to be." Erik takes another long, long look, takes in his ridiculous boy, safe and sound and breathing. "I'm sorry, about Cuba. And everything else."
Hank takes a breath and slips the gloves off and waits until Erik starts moving to answer. "Alex and I are re-flooring the passageway off the library. We could use some help with it."
He's standing tall at the bedside when Erik says he'll start on it tomorrow.
"Charles will forgive you almost anything," he says, "But if you leave Peter now, I don't think he will again." He turns back to clearing the clutter on the nightstand, and Erik leaves.
Charles calls to him from his study when he steps into the hallway.
"Would you like a game?" he asks when Erik looks in on him. The chessboard's on a low table at his side, and there are two glasses with whiskey next to it.
Erik's exhausted, honestly, and what he really wants is to sink down on the obscenely comfortable bed in the guest room he's taken over. But he says yes. Of course he says yes.
"Hank will come around," Charles says when Erik makes the first move. "Given time."
"I thought you didn't look into our heads without permission."
Charles's bright red lips widen over his teeth in a mischievous grin. It's been eleven years, but Erik doesn't have to close his eyes to remember exactly what they feel like against his own.
"I can stop from looking, but making myself willfully deaf is another matter entirely, my friend. If you wish to have a private conversation, you should shut the door."
Erik takes a pawn off the board and sets it to the side. "My apologies."
"Hank was right, though," Charles says after a moment. "You do mean to stay."
Erik shifts in an effort to ease his backache and fails. Somewhere down the hall, Hank switches the light off and shuts the door to his own bedroom. Peter's, Erik knows, will be left ajar. "I've planned on staying since the day I found out about him."
"And the rest of the world? They don't need you to fight for them any more?"
Erik shrugs. "You weren't entirely right," he says, "But you weren't entirely wrong, either."
"How magnanimous of you."
"It's a matter of pragmatism." The whiskey's sweet in his mouth and burns just a bit when he swallows it down. "Pro-mutant sympathy is high at the moment, thanks to you and Raven. I'm not blind enough I can't see the opportunity when it's right before me."
Charles looks very hard at him for a moment before he reaches out and sets his hand on Erik's shoulder. For all they've sat across from each other at meals or watched together at Peter's side, it's the first time they've touched since the conference room in Paris.
"For what it's worth," Charles says, "You were right about one thing. There will always be danger and hate for who we are. But we can keep it isolated and small and take care of each danger as it arises. And this time we will keep them safe."
"You sound as if you have a plan."
Charles lets his hand drop away and smiles. "I'm sure Hank will tell you all about it. Eventually." Abruptly, he straightens and wheels his chair back away from the table. "He was right, too, you know. But for now, I think, I've kept us up too long. There's a busy day ahead of us tomorrow."
"The game—"
"Can wait. Time for bed." Charles doesn't stop until he's past the door, when he turns and quirks a skeptical eyebrow.
Well? asks a familiar voice in Erik's head. Are you coming or not?
Erik, naturally, does.