Wanda sat back in a chair, processing everything Peter had told her. Each time she thought about the horror he'd been put through, a knot tightened itself in her stomach, threatening to explode out in a fit of tears. Erik... they must have lied to Peter because Erik could not be her father, he could not be their father. He just couldn't, that man was an absolute psychopath. He dropped and entire stadium over the White House. He killed one President. He nearly killed another. That type of guy was not father material. Sure, he'd helped get Peter out of a sticky situation, but come one, the guy owed Peter for what he'd done for him, breaking someone out of the Pentagon is no easy feat. She ran a hand through her hair and looked back up at Peter who was drumming his fingers impatiently.
"You done thinking yet?" he asked, "Only, I'm getting a little bored here."
"You literally dropped a mind bomb on me, let me absorb it all." she said with an eye roll.
Just then, Magda came back into the room, opening the door for Lorna who cantered in with four flimsy tupperwares full of Chinese take-away piled up in her arms. Lorna deposited two chicken chow meins on Peter's lap and some other weird chicken thing that smelt of her shampoo, if it was chicken flavoured, on Wanda's lap before sitting down on her own chair with her own tub of egg fried rice on her knees. The three all dug in as Magda glanced contentedly between them, her kids. Hers, not Erik's, hers. Things seemed, at last, to be looking up for her family, sure, there were a whole bunch more obstacles to overcome, but they'd cross each bridge when they came to it.
Peter and Wanda glanced at each other, eyes saying words their mouths were too full to.
You should tell mum you know, Peter said with a look, jerking his head a fraction in their mother's direction.
She knows too? Wanda's brow furrowed.
Yeah. I didn't tell her though.
Erik? She raised her eyebrow.
A nod, That's the one.
"Mum..." Wanda said, wiping her mouth with a tissue before tossing it into the bin along with the, now empty, tupperware box.
"Mhm hm?" Magda said, looking up from her own box of food, brought out of her thoughts, "What is it?"
"How do you know Magneto?"
"He..." Magda frowned, before glancing at Peter who, as ever, had the expression of the guiltiest angel trying to play innocent on his face, "You already know how, don't you?"
"I want to hear it from you." Wanda said stonily.
"We go way back, back to the war." she said, hesitating slightly before bringing up the war, "We... we got away, away from Poland, and started up a new life for ourselves. We had a daughter."
"Me?" Wanda asked.
Magda shook her head, "Anya." she told her.
"I have another sister?" Lorna asked, piping in.
"Not anymore sweetie, she..." her voice began to crack, "She died in a fire, she was... she was only five years old."
"Oh..." Lorna said, looking down at her toes with a frown, "Was she nice?"
"She was wonderful; you would have loved her sweetheart." Madga said with a teary eyed smile as she pulled Lorna closer to her, needing the warmth of someone else to latch onto to be able to get through the story, "But Erik... he..." she shook her head, "They wouldn't let us into the building, they wouldn't let us go back for her and he got angry, he got so angry his powers got out of control. He killed every officer on the scene. This was the first I'd heard about his powers, I thought... I though he was a monster. So I ran, I came to America and then, 8 months after Anya died, you two were born. He is your father, I have no doubt about that." she assured them, "I didn't want to tell you, I didn't want you to grow up knowing your father was a monster. But then your mutations appeared and I... I didn't know what to do. I thought about tracking him down so many times but I couldn't. I couldn't bring myself to do it. You two were my priority. But then...but then I met him once more, years later, at a bar. It had been a rough day, you'd been stealing again Peter and I needed a drink." she told them slowly, voice wavering as she did so, "And we... you know."
"I don't wanna know." Peter interrupted, making a face.
"When was this?" Wanda demanded, shushing her brother with a vague wave in his direction.
"Around..." she paused, it was now or never, "Around n... nine months before Lorna was born."
"No..." the twins said in unison, "You're kidding me."
"Like..." Peter only just managed to stop himself swearing to express his bewilderment, Lorna was in the room and he had always been determined to not be the sort of brother who taught their eight-year-old sister swear words, "Gah, uh... I thought I was the joker in this family. Is this some kind of weird twisted joke?"
"Do you see me laughing?" Magda pointed out, her face resigned as she ran a hand through her bleached hair, "Listen. There's only a fifty percent chance she could be his. I went back the next night but… but he wasn't there. And that was the night I met your step-father. Lorna's father. Well, I thought he was. I didn't want to believe the other way."
"Mum!" Wanda exclaimed, looking at her in outrage. She'd never taken her for someone who'd sleep around, well, she had, it had just never been something she wanted to think about.
"I'm confused…" Lorna mumbled.
"It's nothing, sweetie," Magda said calmly, cupping her younger daughter's cheek lightly with a warm smile upon her face, "Could you do me a huge favour honey, could you run and find Erik. I think we all need to have a little talk."
"I can't." Lorna said, glancing down at the ground, the tell-tale sign that a child knew more than they were telling.
"Why not?" Wanda asked.
"Because he's not here."
"He's not... where did he go?" Magda asked her daughter.
"I'm not supposed to tell you." Lorna said as she tapped her toes on the wooden floorboards, twiddling her thumbs as she tried, and failed, to maintain and innocent face.
"Lorna..." Magda said, voice deepening and hardening, "I don't care what he told you to do, you tell me where that man is right now!"
"He went to get Pete a get well soon present." Lorna huffed, folding her arms, "It was supposed to be a secret." she said accusingly, after all, in her mind they'd all just ruined the surprise.
"Did he tell you that was where he was going?" Charles asked, suddenly appearing in the doorway of the room, he hadn't been able to help but overhear the conversation, but once the topic moved to where Erik had gone, he grew worried. Gifts weren't Erik's style.
"Not exactly..." Lorna mumbled, "I asked him and he said yeah and he told me to keep it secret!" she whined.
"Thank you Lorna, you've been very helpful." Charles said kindly, wheeling himself over to the family, that was when he noticed it. On the silver tray, where there should have been two plastic disks, there was one, "Where's the other disk?" he asked, voice suddenly becoming very grave. He knew exactly what Erik had done, exactly what his so-called get well soon present for Peter would be.
"The other...?" Magda trailed off as she noticed the empty space, "He hasn't... oh god..."
"I'm afraid he has," Charles said with a dark nod, he didn't need to read her mind to know what she was thinking, Erik had gone to hunt down Stryker, he'd made himself bait.
Erik strolled down an empty street, tracker in his pocket as he waited for Stryker, he made sure to pause every so often outside an abandoned house, hoping to give the impression that that was where he and Peter were hiding. But in reality it was just him, and he was far from hiding.
"Show yourself Stryker." he muttered to the thin air, growing impatient as the night grew darker and steadily colder.
And then there it was, he felt it before he sensed it. The trucks, the jeeps, the iron in the blood of the soldiers. They were here. There was something wrong, he could feel it, but at this distance, he didn't quite know what. He shook his head, he couldn't focus on what could be wrong, he had a job to do. It just so happened that that job remembered exactly who he was and exactly what he could do. It just so happened that that job was carrying a glass dagger and a plastic gun.
The cars were abandoned a kilometre away from Erik. It would do no good to outright hand, or rather drive, him weapons if they valued their lives and the job they had to do. Stryker took one final glance at the screen inside the truck, memorising the location of the flashing red dot, and motioned for his troops to follow him through the beat up neighbourhood. Half the houses they passed seemed abandoned, and the other half seemed occupied by people who no longer seemed to care how they lived or whether they did or not, people who just went about the routine of life with a leaky roof over their heads and surrounded by draughty walls. These houses seemed to be mostly made of wood, though from the outside he couldn't guess what the foundations contained or what metal appliances the houses themselves contained. Though he'd hazard a guess that Erik had taken Peter here because he knew he'd have enough metal at his disposal to protect his son with. Erik Lehnsherr's son...he'd never forget the euphoria he felt as that discovery was made. Two monsters for the price of one.
Stryker had made Alves wait behind, he didn't want to lose this doctor. Her medical prowess was magnificent for one thing, but her mutation was quite another, manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum and blocking telepathy, really quite remarkable. No, he'd rather not find a replacement doctor, and it would take an annoyingly long amount of time better spent to find another doctor who possessed a desirable mutation to him.
As Stryker and his troops rounded the corner, their rubber soled boots pounding on the tarmac as they moved towards the shadowy figure in the middle of the street.
"Where's the boy?" Stryker asked, walking towards Erik with a smirk upon his face.
"Did you honestly think I'd be so foolish as to bring him here?" Erik scoffed as he stepped into the light of a lamppost, "But I'm impressed. Plastic tracers, even I couldn't sense them." he said, taking it out of his pocket and holding it up into the light.
Stryker scowled at it, this he hadn't expected. He knew Erik was psychotic but he'd retained the hope that he would at least treat his spawn humanely, but no, it seemed that he'd cut the tracer out of his body. "Merriot, take your team and search the buildings, start with that one." he said, gesturing with his gun towards the one directly behind Erik.
"I see you came prepared for this fight." Erik noted, observing the gun with a slight scowl. He couldn't control the bullets unless they were metal. He couldn't turn the gun against Stryker unless it was made of metal. Or unless he surrounded it with metal.
Magneto's arms rose from his sides and into the air as he lifted himself up into the night sky. He could sense the metal of the pipes beneath the earth as easily as a human could hear the tweet of a bird or feel the breeze on their skin. The metal called out to him, and he answered. He drew it to him, raising it up from beneath the ground and causing the tarmac to crack and crumble. Crevices snaked their way towards the troops as metal began to rise from the ground all around them. He could hear Stryker yelling for his troops to shoot, to bring the monster down. Fingertips twitched towards triggers as metal snakes streaked towards the barrel of each gun. It was a race, one visible to only those who moved at extraordinary speeds. The bullets were quick off the mark, tearing down the barrels of their guns, inching closer and closer to freedom and their target. The snakes of metal bore down on the guns, successfully plugging the barrels of all but one. And that one, came from behind. As Erik filled the guns with metal, coating the insides and the outsides in his element and efficiently halting the bullets in their track, another figure stood behind him. He was the youngest of Stryker's troops, not expecting to be fighting mutants when he signed up for the military, but fighting them none the less. He fired his gun at Lehnsherr's shoulder, deliberately aiming away from vitals.
The bullet entered his shoulder and Magneto fell to the torn up ground. He propped himself up on his good arm with a groan, scowling as he glanced over his shoulder at the young man who had shot him. Erik had barely any time to move before the youth was on him. His fist clocked Erik on the head, with more force than would be expected for someone that scrawny, and the mutant terrorist fell to the ground, very much unconscious.
"Johnson, take Arthur and take Lehnsherr back to the jeep. Bandage up his shoulder. If we can take him alive then we will." Stryker's voice boomed out and the scrawny guy and one other quickly jumped into action. Erik was hauled up onto the shoulder of a young black man marched down the road towards the jeeps, Johnson leading the way.
Srtyker was looking in shock at the spot on the ground where Lehnsherr had fallen, eyes fixated on that spot of ground.
"Sir, I though you said to kill Lehnsherr on site." Higgins piped up from somewhere near the back.
"I did..." Stryker muttered, brow furrowing as he looked in the direction Johnson and Arthur had just gone in, "That wasn't me..." he muttered, "STOP THEM!"
Johnson heard Stryker's voice, it had taken him long enough.
"You hear that?" Arthur asked, halting where he was.
"Yeah, I heard it." Johnson said, a smirk that completely didn't fit his persona crossed his face, "And I'm gonna ignore it." he said as he disappeared in a ripple of blue scales, leaving a woman standing in his place.
"What the –" Arthur began, but was quickly silenced by a blue elbow in the face. He dropped the unconscious form of Magneto on the ground before being completely knocked out by the butt of the gun in Mistique's hand.
She stood over Erik, sighing to herself as she crouched down and tried to wake him, "Honestly Erik, I didn't even hit you that hard." she muttered with an eyeroll as she shook him awake.
"Did you need to hit me at all Raven, or shoot me?" Erik muttered in a groggy growl as he propped himself up on his good arm.