ALEX POV

Unsurprisingly, the flight was awkward. The tension that had dissipated between Erik and Alex in the aftermath of Wanda's death had returned, maybe not to the level it once was when they parted ways in '63, but it was still up there.

And it wasn't hard to figure out why.

Both men were stressed. Their family and friends (more than friends?) were still missing, and they'd been stuck in a jet—fast moving though it was—following a half-assed plan that may or may not work. They were angry. They were scared, or at least Alex was—scared not for himself, but for his brother, for Peter, for Lorna . . .

It would have been an understatement to call it a tough situation, so maybe it was better that they simply sat in silence, but Alex couldn't take it anymore. He was running circles in his head of what could be happening to the others while they were all too slowly making their way to where they were not even semi-sure that everyone they cared about would be.

"I've never flown one of these before." Said Alex, finally just to break the loaded silence.

Okay, maybe that wasn't the best way to start a conversation based on the shade Erik quickly threw in his direction.

"That's comforting." Said Erik sarcastically.

"No, I—I didn't mean it like that—like I can't fly it. I can. I've flown similar jets, just not this particular model. I was just . . . I don't know, stating a fun fact. . . to take our minds off things or whatever." Said Alex backtracking.

"Noted." Said Erik, still facing forward, not finding his fact the least bit fun.

And with that, Alex thought his attempt at starting a distracting conversation had failed, especially as several minutes passed in silence, but then, Erik eventually spoke again.

"So you've met my daughter?" he asked glancing Alex's way.

Alex's hands nearly slipped off the yoke at Erik's question. He could feel his brow already breaking out into a sweat. Did Erik know how well he knew Lorna? That they'd dated? That they'd . . .

"I—what?" Alex sputtered out, not looking at the other man.

"I mean my daughter, Lorna. Charles said she attended the school, and I don't know much about what you've been up to these past ten years, so I thought maybe . . . maybe you've been around the school, maybe your paths crossed, even if only just before . . . everything. I was just . . . " Erik paused and Alex could tell he was struggling to phrase what he wanted to say next. "I just wondered what she was like. What she is like."

He knew what Erik was trying to ask but not quite managing to articulate—was she like him? Is that why she was doing this? Because there was some fatal flaw in Erik that he inevitably passed onto his children?

Alex swallowed and chanced a glance back over at the other man. Erik was clearly uncomfortable, clenching and unclenching his fists together, but Alex for one was relieved that was all Erik meant when he asked if he'd met his daughter. Alex could only imagine how uncomfortable Erik would be if he knew the extent of Alex's relationship with Lorna.

Alex cleared his throat before answering, trying to formulate an honest response that wouldn't give away too much. "Yea we've . . . met. She's . . . spirited."

"Like I'm spirited?" Erik asked after a moment of hesitation.

Alex couldn't help the slight smirk that formed on his face at that question. "Yes and no. She's . . . not you."

Thank. God.

"But she's definitely your daughter." Alex continued. "She's a fighter. Independent. Strong. Smart. Stubborn. Resilient. Opinionated."

Amazing. Funny. Clever. Beautiful.

"So you must have taught at the school then?" Erik prompted.

"What? No." said Alex responding without thinking. "I hadn't seen Charles for years before I brought Scott to the school. I hadn't been back there in a long time."

"But, you talk about my—about Lorna like you know her well." Said Erik, suddenly sounding suspicious.

"No—we—I met her outside of the school. We just—we hung in the same circles sometimes. Ran into each other." Said Alex trying to quickly and causally downplay his connection to Lorna, but he didn't feel like he did a very good job at it as he stuttered over his words.

Alex could feel Erik studying him, but he refused to look over to meet the man's gaze, knowing he would crack under the older man's intense stare, just as he had under Lorna's gaze many a time.

Instead, he kept a firm grip on the controls, white-knuckled and staring straight ahead. But in the end, it didn't matter because—despite his best effort to prevent it from happening—a blush crept up his face, exposing the truth. Or at least, that's probably what pushed Erik's suspicion over the edge into the land of confirmation.

"You—Son of a bitch! You're seeing my daughter! Going with her!" Erik exclaimed angrily (and loudly), and Alex swore he saw his life flash before his eyes.

"No! I'm not!" Alex replied quickly and chanced a glance over at Erik, immediately regretting it when the other man's impression gave him the feeling that Erik was debating whether or not he should strangle him or throw him out the front windshield.

Alex trained his eyes back to the front of the jet. He figured he had a better chance of staying alive if he didn't make eye contact because although Erik (in Alex's opinion) sometimes had questionable morals, he seemed like the kind of guy that wouldn't attack someone he had once called a friend when their back was more or less turned, right? Raven was more of a one-off incident, then a pattern . . . right?

Then again, even if that were the case, none of Erik's other friends (ex-friends? Frenemies?) had dated any of his children. Somewhere in his terror, Alex turned over Erik's particular choice of phrasing in his mind. Going with her. Of all the ways to accuse Alex of having a relationship with his daughter, it was ironic that he had put it like that because even when they were together, more often than not, it felt like they were going in different directions, or at least . . . Lorna was always going somewhere without him.

Since he was still breathing, Alex pressed on. "Really, we're—we're not together. Not right now. And I don't just mean that literally. We are NOT in a relationship. We . . . have been before, dated I mean!" Alex added hurriedly at the look on Erik's face. Yes, they had been together like that too, but that's not something he was about to share with Erik. "But we're not currently dating. We still get along. I saw her before . . . you know . . . , and she was her usual self. But we haven't been officially together for some time now. . ."

Alex trailed off, almost wishing that Erik would throw him out the windshield, just to put him out of his misery. Alex looked over the other man again, hoping that Erik would realize that there were greater matters at stake than the fact that Alex had dated his eldest daughter, even if the topic was doing pretty good job of distracting them both from their fears.

Erik's nostrils flared and after what felt like an eternity he angled his body away from Erik and finally spoke. "We're not talking about this anymore."

Alex let out a breath he didn't realize he had been holding. "Oh thank god." He said quietly. "That's—yea, that's probably a good idea."

"And stop looking at me like I'm going to murder you." Erik growled turning back toward Alex once again.

"Ha, I wasn't thinking that." Said Alex chuckling nervously.

Erik just raised a disbelieving eyebrow.

"Like you could even kill me. I'm your pilot, so that's insurance in and of itself."

"You're forgetting that I can fly . . . without a plane." Erik replied matter-of-factly, even though they both knew that Erik's form of flight and a jet's were much different.

"Right . . . well thanks for not murdering me then." Said Alex, half-way sincere.

"Trust me Alex, you're low on my murder list, though you may have moved up a few notches in the last few minutes." Erik retorted in such a way that it wasn't quite clear to Alex whether or not the man was joking.

"Right." Said Alex, not having a better response.

Erik sighed. "As difficult as you're making it for me to do so in this exact moment, believe it or not, I do trust you Alex. . . you're one of the few people I trust. You're a good man, or at least a better man than I've ever been . . . And Lorna . . . is an adult, who has never met me . . ." Erik's voice wavered before he cleared it with a sharp cough and continued. "She doesn't exactly need my permission as to who she can or cannot date. But if you do resume relations with her at any point in the future and then proceed to hurt her in any shape or form. There. Will. Be. Consequences."

Alex laughed, but the despondency of their situation and gravity of Erik's words made any real humor die in his throat. "I'd be scared, but I'm afraid you'd have to wait in line, because if I hurt her, she'd probably beat the shit out of me herself."

At Alex's reply, Erik's lips twitched upward into the first hint of a smile he'd given since Nina had awoken back at the mansion.

But it didn't last long.

PETER POV

Peter was having a really shitty day.

Sure, it was more exciting than most of his days, which were typically spent robbing convenience stores, baffling cops, playing video games in his basement, and/or babysitting his sister. It might have even been more exciting of a day than when he broke that dude out of the Pentagon (or out from under the Pentagon to be more specific).

Weird. He couldn't remember . . . was that two days ago? Three?

He'd never been great at keeping track of time, even before his powers emerged, but lately he'd felt like his days were all screwed up.

He tried to think back to what he had been doing before he woke up in a posh room he didn't recognize and suddenly had to save everyone because in his casual exploring of the place he happened upon an explosion—a totally normal thing to find. Not. But he hadn't come up with anything more than flashes of his aunt scolding him and Magnets on the nightly news before he'd been distracted by the impending explosion.

And yea, he made light of rescuing everyone and definitely had fun doing so because that's what he did . . . but it wasn't exactly what he expected to wake up to on a random . . .

Wednesday? Thursday? Morning? Afternoon?

And apparently he hadn't saved everyone. He'd missed the guy closest to the blast, Scott's brother. Although he knew it wasn't his fault, it still didn't make him feel great. And he couldn't help but wonder, if he hadn't taken the time to bop around the upper floors of the building before discovering the secret lair in the basement, if he could have saved him too.

But how was he supposed to know there was an explosion happening beneath him? He hadn't even known where he was when he woke up. And even now, when he tried to think back on how he'd gotten there, all he got was a whole lot of nothing between when Marya had screamed at him for recklessly breaking into the Pentagon (even though after the screaming stopped, she had hugged him more tightly than usual and sent him to bed early) and the time he woke up at Chuck's place.

Well not nothing. That wasn't exactly right. There was something there. But every time he tried to think too hard about it, his head felt weird . . . or . . . weird-er than normal.

And he had a tattoo and a brand—a freakin' brand!—on his arms from unknown origins. And a new haircut, which yea paled in comparison to the tattoo and the brand, but was certainly still noteworthy and something he surely should have remembered as self-conscious as he was about his hair.

None of that made him feel very good about how he had ended up at 'Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters' in the first place.

Like, was he roofied? Or . . . or something worse than that?

Also, that hippy dude totally lied about his card being old because if that school was as rundown as the guy had led him to believe, then he wouldn't have had to rescue anyone in the first place.

So, all and all, he was tired, but at the same time hyped up on far too much anxiety and not enough sugar. All he wanted to do was go home, maybe convince his aunt to make him her homemade pierogi, watch some bad tv (maybe even let his little sister pick which channel), and not move for hours, which was a true testament for how out-of-sorts Peter felt.

But instead, he was stuck in the middle of a freakin' apocalypse with people he barely knew, who had kept looking at him like he should know more about what's going on here, but clearly he didn't. He should've asked Spock, the government lady, blue-chick, blue-boy, red-eyes, or red-hair back in the prison. He should've asked in the hanger. He should've asked on the jet. But he didn't. . .

Because he was scared.

Scared of what the answer would be. Scared of the new scars on his body. Scared of what he couldn't remember.

He was just scared. He still was. Raven had hit the nail on the head when she'd said that he was scared of the green-haired girl and everything else happening around them. Though he didn't really appreciate her pointing it out so blatantly, he got that she was just doing so to try to get the girl to stop her metal rampage, but it didn't seem to have worked. The swirling metal fields were going just as strongly as ever.

He looked over at Raven for some idea as to what to do next, but she looked just as clueless as him, which wasn't reassuring in the least.

With no help there, he glanced around and, by chance, he spotted their jet—or the jet they had commandeered—flying through the air, or more like plummeting to the earth at breakneck speed.

"Raven!" Peter exclaimed, grabbing her arm and pointing at the careening aircraft.

She followed his gaze and tensed when she spotted what he was making a fuss about. "Go! Peter, go!"

He didn't have to ask to know what she meant, and he took off at once, dodging fallen debris and flying metal. He would have gone even without her command. Even though he didn't really know the people he'd come here with, they had just spent hours together and some of them had even been kidnapped with him, which Peter counted as quite the bonding experience. So he definitely didn't want any of them to die, especially because most of them were like him, and before this week, he'd never met anyone like him before, at least not outside of Wanda, but she was his twin so that didn't really count.

Nevertheless, he had been frozen when he'd first seen the jet speeding toward the earth. It was all just too much. He wasn't qualified to be here! He should probably be in school right now, not in what was essentially a war zone. And saving people from a stationary building was one thing, pulling people out of a jet before it smashed into the ground seemed like another thing altogether But Raven's command pushed him out of his frozen state, and he headed off to where he thought the jet would collide with the earth all the same.

He ran up the side of a building, which he'd never really attempted at quite that scale before, but fortunately, it was just like running up any other wall, only longer and more dilapidated. He reached the top of the building, just in time to see the tip of the jet a mere inch away from the colliding with the roof.

Taking a deep breath, he adjusted his sunglasses, wishing that he had his goggles instead, but when he was assembling his attire back at Chuck's place, he hadn't really expected to be running in quite so dire of circumstances. But fortunately, the sunglasses worked well-enough. Peter jumped on the front of the jet as the tip touched the building's surface, already knowing that in what other's perceived as normal time, it would soon be a ball of flame and everyone inside and in the immediate area would be dead, which—if he wasn't careful (and he usually wasn't)—could include him.

Peter peered through the front window of the jet, expecting to see the fearful faces of his new acquaintances, but instead there was only one terrified face that looked back at him—a young man, older than Peter, but probably no more than twenty.

Peter had time to realize that Kurt must've gotten everyone out, and enough time to think that since he wasn't with them, the dude inside the plane was not their friend. But . . . he couldn't just let him die.

Peter flew—not literally, he'd leave that to the guy with wings—up the jet, grateful for the gaping hole on top of it (that was definitely not there when they'd flown it before).

He hesitated for a moment on the edge, all too aware that even in his advanced speed, an explosion was growing at the front of the plane, and he didn't have much time. But what if he couldn't get back out? What if his foot got stuck on something, or there wasn't enough room to maneuver? What if? What if? What if?

But he thought back to the guy's face, and he knew he couldn't leave him. Making his decision, Peter jumped into the plane, kicking off one wall and then another until he was right behind birdman. He reached out, pushing the guy's wings in, so that he could get him out the way Peter had come, wincing slightly as the metal feathers, cut into the palms of his hands. And then, as the explosion reached the front window shattering the glass, panicking slightly, Peter wrapped his arms around the other boy, cutting his hands on the feathers again, and ran back the way he'd come, jumping off the jet's roof and off the edge of the building as the explosion creeped up behind him.

Once on the ground and far enough from the building so that he wasn't worried about it collapsing on them, he laid the winged dude down and fell to his knees behind him. Peter coughed for several seconds, having inhaled a little more smoke in his rescue mission than he would've liked, and then he studied his hands, which were stinging something fierce.

They were red with blood and dirty from the dust and other debris, but (depressingly from personal experience), he thought they probably looked worse than they actually were.

He rubbed his palms on his jumpsuit, wishing he had something to wrap them up with. Beside him, he heard Tweety Bird gagging beside him, and he looked over to see the other boy retching, before looking up at Peter confused, disoriented, and obviously surprised to be alive.

"Yea! Surprise! I know." Said Peter, with a little more venom than he would normally have used, but he was pretty sure the guy was on the side of this whole worldly mess, so he felt somewhat justified with being a little bitter. Plus, thanks to bird boy, he'd probably have some gnarly scars on his hands once the cuts healed up.

Turned out, scars were really starting to be part of his aesthetic whether he liked it or not.

The other boy didn't reply, and honestly, it didn't look like he could. Peter had gotten them out of there rather quickly, and according to other people, his way of travel could be 'quite uncomfortable.'

"Alright man, well I'm going to take off and find my friends." Acquaintances? Allies? "Be a good birdy and don't try to kill anyone because if you do, the next time I see a jet speeding toward the ground with you inside of it, I'm going to be like 'he's got wings. Not my problem.' Capisce?"

Peter paused to let that sink in, or he felt like he paused, it was always difficult to tell how much 'regular time' had passed. "Also, if we're both standing when this is all over, you've got to tell me how you sleep at night because those barbs on your back are deadly! Okay, later!"

And in a flash, Peter was gone, leaving a cloud of dust behind him that would make the Road Runner proud.

{Author's Note: Happy New Year! Maybe I'll finish this story this year . . . but if not, good thing I didn't make it a New Year's resolution.}