Chapter summary: Day one of the road trip, part one. Peter fidgets; Erik asks questions and reminisces.

The car, the one that Peter actually owned and wasn't 'borrowing' from his foster mother, was an elderly Chevrolet Nova—Erik had never cared much about cars and wasn't sure if this was supposed to impress him or not. It was, of course, painted silver. Peter quickly confided that he and Wanda had bought it a year and a half ago for a very low price, due to the fact that it was what was politely referred to as a "beater." The twins had then spent many a weekend resuscitating, repairing, and all-around making the car "better." Again, Erik wasn't entirely sure if this was supposed to be impressive or not. But the car looked sturdy, looked like it could carry them from Alexandria to San Francisco (Or wherever Wanda might be, if Erik heard from one of his accounted-for contacts that she'd been sighted somewhere else on the continent).

He'd instructed Peter that they were heading first to Detroit, and that they would be taking the back roads, not the interstate. Peter wasn't terribly impressed by the idea that they were heading to Detroit by way of Indianapolis, but he got over it when he realized that he'd have the chance to check out the Indianapolis Motor Speedway; apparently he was a fan of the Indy 500. "We're big into car racing." By 'we're', Erik supposed Peter was referring to Wanda.

Peter… was a surprisingly good driver. Erik supposed he'd expected him to be a bad one, since the boy had a decided aversion to sitting still which Erik had noticed on more than one occasion. Driving was an activity that required a certain amount of single-mindedness; Peter didn't seem to have much in the way of that either. However, he did an admirable job paying attention to the road, to other cars, to traffic lights and road signs. Erik wondered if Peter's mutant abilities didn't help with that.

(He also began to wonder, after a while, if Peter wasn't trying to impress him with how well he could drive. It was just a suspicion, of course. A suspicion informed by Peter trying and utterly failing to subtly sneak glances at him every time he came to a perfect stop in front of a traffic light or made a left hand turn from an intersection without crossing into the wrong lane.)

Regardless of that, Peter still managed to fidget, twitch, and squirm in the driver's seat of the car more than anyone Erik had ever witnessed drive a car. The car's young driver was constantly adjusting the air conditioning, the radio station, anything he could get his hands on. Erik wondered how long it would be before Peter jumped out of the driver's window just to see how long it would be before the car started spinning out of control without someone driving it.

If Erik had to use his powers to stabilize the car so he didn't die the ridiculously anticlimactic death of dying in a screaming car wreck, he was going to kill someone. Seriously. But not Peter, because hurting Peter would be unacceptable.

He knew he should have brought a book to read.

-0-0-0-

So far, so good. The trip was quiet, they hadn't been stopped by the police, and Peter hadn't wrapped the car around a tree. Peter… He'd been very quiet so far. Maybe he just felt like he needed to focus more on driving; Erik had known people like that. But it felt unnatural, somehow.

(He remembered another person who had fallen so unnaturally silent sometimes, usually when under extreme stress. He'd known Magda to go days without saying a word in the camp, not even to him.)

"Tell me about Wanda." He couldn't stand to frame it as a question. It seemed absurd that he should be asking someone, let alone his son, about what his own daughter was like. It seemed absurd that he shouldn't know. It still seemed absurd that he wouldn't know about his children until they were essentially adults, and the chance to raise them had passed him by.

Peter's gaze lit on him for a split-second before his voice filled up the interior of the car, drowning out the music playing on the radio. "Well damn, man, it's about time. I thought you'd never ask. I mean, come on; you find out you've got a daughter and you're not curious at all? So what d'you wanna know?"

Erik spread his hands—for a moment, the car shook, before he reined his powers back in and shook his head instead, trying to clear out cobwebs. "Anything you can tell me."

With that prompting, Peter launched into what felt like a thousand different anecdotes at once.

Wanda's mutant powers were, at best, ill-defined; no one in the Maximoff family had ever known what to call them. At a coin toss, Wanda always seemed to know if it was going to come up heads or tails. She was also a master at cheating at cards; she always knew what cards Peter was holding at any given time. When they were in tenth grade, Peter and Wanda had been picked on by a high school senior until, one afternoon, Wanda had glared at his car as he drove away until one of the back tires burst and the car had spun and spun and spun until it hit a lamp post.

Little Lorna had taken her first faltering steps with Wanda holding her hands, trailing closely after her to make sure that if she fell, comfort would be soon to follow. She'd scolded Peter for trying to scoop Lorna up before she could fall to the ground. "How's she going to learn with you doing that?!" Wanda had asked, exasperated. When Peter relayed this part, he had adopted a high-pitched voice that Erik could only assume was supposed to be an approximation of his twin's. Somehow, he seriously doubted that Wanda sounded anything like a teenage boy practicing falsetto.

Wanda would drive Marya crazy by begging her to buy oranges from the grocery story only to do nothing with them but suck out the juice and refuse to eat the flesh. It was only when Marya had taught her how to candy the peel that she'd seen any use to oranges besides sucking out the juice.

And evidently, thanks to the combined efforts of the Maximoff twins, no door-to-door salesman within a fifty-mile radius was stupid enough to visit their house.

Bizarrely, Erik felt the faint stirrings of pride upon hearing that last detail.

"What does she look like?" There was no way Erik could think of to frame that as anything other than a question, even though it was even more absurd (and laughable, in a terrifying, painful, terrifyingly painful way, the way someone laughed when they realized that they'd had something dear to their heart stolen from them) that he shouldn't know what his own daughter looked like.

But Peter didn't laugh at him, didn't scoff, didn't mock. He just jerked his head towards the back seat. "I brought some pictures. They're in the duffel bag."

There was something metal in the duffel bag, though Erik wasn't quite sure what it was yet; thanks to that, it was easy enough to levitate the bag into his lap. He unzipped the duffel bag, and immediately saw where the metal inside of the bag had come from.

"Is this a flat iron?!" Erik asked Peter incredulously, taking the iron out of the bag and waving it around. "Why do you have a flat iron?!"

"Put that back in the bag!" Peter protested, glaring daggers at his father. "It's not mine!"

"You took Marya's flat iron? Why?!"

"It's not Mom's, either! It's Wanda's! She used to straighten her hair sometimes and she didn't take it with her when she left! Stop waving it around; you'll break it! I got that for her when we turned fifteen; now put it back!"

Erik sighed gustily, but did indeed—carefully—place the iron back inside of the bag. "You know, when someone is planning to run away, they usually pack more sensible items than flat irons."

"Weren't you digging through my stuff looking for pictures?" Peter asked pointedly.

Erik returned to rummaging through the duffel bag. There were, predictably, clothes, which he left alone, and a few more mashed-up Twinkies and Zingers that Peter had managed to sneak past Marya (No Ding Dongs, though). Eventually, he found a few photographs, held together with a paperclip. Erik slid the paperclip off of the photographs and stared at the one on top. He saw a teenage girl with long, curly dark hair ("Mom curled her hair for picture day; it doesn't normally look quite that… big."). Where Erik could see neither himself nor Magda in Peter, he saw them both in Wanda. She had the soft, ill-defined features of someone who was still growing into her face, but nonetheless possessed a sharp, narrow chin, delicately pointed nose and a mouth that quirked downwards even when she was trying to smile. Erik looked into her eyes…

…And was startled to see his own eyes staring back. His own intent, piercing gaze, restless, dissatisfied with the world.

"Is this your most recent picture of Wanda?" Erik heard himself asking.

Peter glanced at it and nodded; his shoulders tensed up slightly. "Yeah, it is. It's a couple of years old, but after that she wouldn't let people take pictures of her anymore. She… She wasn't happy that day."

Women usually stopped growing before men did; Wanda likely didn't look all that different now than she did then, unless she'd done something drastic like bleach her hair or something like that. Erik slid this photograph to the bottom of the pile (and in no way was he doing it so he wouldn't have to see his daughter's gaze—so reminiscent of his own—any longer) and began looking over the others.

There was a photo of Peter and Wanda, a few years younger, it looked like, with a tiny girl whom he assumed was Lorna. Lorna was wearing a frilly, bright pink costume dress covered in rhinestones and was grinning from ear to ear. For some reason, the twins both wore sheepish, uncomfortable expressions and didn't particularly look like they wanted to be in the picture.

There was a photo, again of both of the twins, as small children themselves, blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. The date on the back of the photo was 1960—the twins' fifth birthday. Erik didn't see Marya—she must have been holding the camera—but he recognized a few other faces in the background.

There was a picture of Wanda from 1962 in a flower girl's dress, holding a white wicker basket and beaming brightly. "One of Mom's cousins got married," Peter informed him. "I was the ring bearer; I didn't bring that picture. No loss, really. I lost the ring; it took hours to find it. Nobody's let me do anything in a wedding since. That was right before Wanda got her powers."

Below that, there was a picture dated '1957, June'—Magda with the twins. Peter was trying to climb over her shoulder; Wanda sat sedately in her lap. Magda was smiling brightly, but it didn't quite reach her eyes, which looked fond, but tired. Erik felt his stomach swoop just a touch to look at her, but the sensation wasn't pleasant as it had been, what felt like a lifetime ago. He slid the photo to the bottom of the stack more quickly than he had the others.

Then, Erik came to a photograph that gave him pause. It was dated 1966, when Wanda and Peter would have been about eleven. They appeared to be standing in their backyard, and were wearing a decidedly odd assortment of clothes. Peter was wearing swimming goggles and what looked like a blue-gray leotard, over which was a silver jacket that was clearly the predecessor of the jacket he seemed so fond of these days. Wanda wore a sleeveless red dress, red tights and opera gloves, a glittery masquerade mask that covered the upper half of her face adorned with green and purple feathers, and on top of all that, a red beach towel pulled around her neck like a cape, fastened with a costume brooch.

"What's this?" Erik held the photo so that Peter could see it, eyebrows raised quizzically.

When Peter saw it, he grinned hugely. "I remember that! Mom took a color photo of that specially, said she wanted to remember what we looked like in color."

"Why are you dressed like that?"

"Heh." Peter laughed sheepishly. "You know, we thought we looked so cool when we did that, but damn we looked stupid." He cast a sideways glance at Erik. "Guess I finally know where we got the sucky fashion sense from. You and that god-awful super villain get-up."

"I'm not trying to set a fashion trend," Erik rejoined, glaring lightly at him. "And I hardly think that trying to keep mutantkind from being massacred by the human population is the behavior of a super villain."

Peter rolled his eyes. "Whatever. Keep saying that, keep doing stuff that makes the Joker, Lex Luthor and Vandal Savage look like small-time shoplifters. Anyways, don't you want to know why we were dressed like that? I'll tell you.

"Me and Wanda, we always liked superhero comics and the cartoons, the Superman and Batman stuff and all that." Peter quirked a smile, but it wasn't a particularly happy one. "When Wanda got her powers, we started playing superheroes for real. One of us would be the hero, the other would be the villain. It was kinda like cops and robbers, 'cept with superheroes and one of us could make stuff break if she wanted to. I remember how happy she was when I got my powers. That—" he pointed at the picture "—kind of turned into Superman versus Flash. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver." Peter's gaze grew distant; his hands clenched down tight over the steering wheel. "I think it was probably the only time she was ever really happy using her powers."

That didn't sound like something that boded well. Erik stared down at the photo of the eleven-year-old twins, ran his thumb over their faces. "Pietro…"

"The name's 'Peter,'" Peter asserted, visibly disturbed. "Come on, don't tell me you're forgetting my name already; that's not supposed to happen until you're like, in your seventies."

"Why did Wanda run away?" he asked quietly. The answer? Erik suspected that he already knew the answer was, but the question bore asking anyways.

Peter shrugged. He stared straight ahead, into the rearview mirrors, anywhere but at Erik. "Wanda always seemed… Well, she never seemed completely happy with her life, even before she got her powers. It always felt like she was waiting for something, though it's not like I ever really found out what she was waiting for. I'm not sure she knew, either. Sometimes…" Now, Peter did look at him, his eyes hard. "…Sometimes, I think she was waiting for you to show up. When we were little, we used to play these games where we tried to guess where you were and what you were doing. We used to put bets on when we thought you might show up. Once Wanda got her powers, I always thought that if she placed her bet on when you'd show up, you would." Peter looked away. "She was never right."

Erik shut his eyes tight, trying not to remember what he had been doing while Peter and Wanda—his children—had been placing bets on when their absentee father would, at last, come looking for them. I never regretted any of it.

But I regret this, don't I?

"Once she got her powers…" Erik listened to Peter as he went on. "…It wasn't… Well, it wasn't good. She couldn't control them, not at first, and even the last I saw of her, she couldn't control them all that well. She might be trying to make a glass tip over and end up flipping the table instead. She got to where she was afraid to use her powers. She was afraid…" Peter's voice had gotten oddly high-pitched. "…She was afraid of herself. What she might do. Wanda could always take care of herself—she was better at that than me—but she always seemed really tense. Like I said, she was afraid of herself. It wore her down. And when she got mad, really mad, stuff would just break and fall over and blow up all over the place."

That sounded more familiar to Erik than he would have liked.

"And I don't think it helped when I got my powers." Peter let out a small, quavering breath. "Wanda got her powers when she was seven; I got mine when I was ten. You know, three-year gap, and she spent all of that time thinking that she was by herself, that she was alone. It didn't help her, thinking she was alone; it didn't help her at all." Somehow, that sounded familiar too. "At first, when I found out how fast I could go, she was really happy, but when she realized how different our powers were—she had something we didn't know how to identify, something she couldn't really control, and I had no trouble controlling what I could do at all—it made her angry. She'd gotten stuck with her weird powers, and I had powers like a superhero's." Peter sighed heavily. "It didn't help.

"And then she got expelled from school."

At that, Erik's eyes snapped open (The world suddenly seemed far too bright). He stared at Peter, feeling confused for some reason, though he had no idea why he should feel particularly confused. "Why was she expelled?"

"Vandalism."

"Vandalism," Erik repeated blankly.

"Yeah, I know!" Peter laughed humorlessly. "Everybody expected me to get expelled first, not her." When he caught Erik's still-blank stare, he elaborated, "Look, I told you, Wanda had trouble controlling her powers. When she got mad or upset, stuff broke. And you know, it's pretty impossible to avoid getting mad or upset at school, especially with all the assholes in our high school. At first, it wasn't anything anyone could really pin on Wanda. The leg on somebody's chair would break while they were sitting in it, a cafeteria tray would crack while someone was holding it, the seams on their book bags would break and all their binders would come spilling out. Like I said, nothing anyone could pin on Wanda. But if you really think the teachers missed the fact that all of this was happening to people Wanda had just had fights with or to people who had picked on her, you've got another thing coming.

"And then…" Peter ran a hand through his silver-gray hair (and if Erik hadn't seen pictures of him as a small child with that hair color, he would have sworn Peter was dyeing his hair), making it appear even more unkempt than it already was. "Then there was this time when she was alone in the gym after school. I don't know what she was doing in there; I just know that she was there. She lost control and, well, a lot of stuff got broken. She didn't mean to do any of it—she never meant to do any of it, except when she did—but a lot of stuff still got broken. And here's the thing." He fixed Erik with another hard stare. "The system doesn't care a whole lot about kids like us to start with. Kids like us, foster kids with 'behavioral problems'—" Peter sounded out the words as though he was saying something more vulgar than he would ever normally countenance saying "—the system doesn't give a rat's ass about us. Kids like us don't get second chances. Second chances are for rich kids. So Wanda got expelled. The school had gotten the word out; nowhere else would take her. And from then on out, it was countdown to that moment when Wanda would have all she could take and couldn't take no more."

Listening to Peter's tale, Erik wasn't entirely sure what to feel. There was anger, yes, and sadness, and if there was guilt there too, that was only natural, and he told himself that he didn't need to look into that too closely.

Wanda was angry, confused? Erik knew anger. He knew confusion. She felt isolated? Erik knew isolation as well. The emotions were close kin to him, had always been. If I had been there…

But Erik wasn't sure what to say to Peter. When Charles was confronted with a story like this one (and he had been, Erik knew that; he'd borne witness to it himself), he would usually spout something he thought sounded very wise, but inevitably left the person he was talking to looking at him in mild confusion. Occasionally, Charles had managed to hit the nail on the head, but frankly, there had been occasions when Erik suspected that all that had saved Charles from getting punched in the face (usually by Alex or sometimes, surprisingly, Sean) was that what he said was so obviously well-intentioned that it was difficult to stay angry with him. Charles had always meant well. Erik missed that, in the life where he was once again on his own, without Charles. But then, he'd missed a lot about Charles.

He put his hand on Peter's arm. "We will find her," Erik said quietly.

To his surprise, Peter actually grinned at him. "I know we will."

(Erik tucked the photo of Peter and Wanda in their 'costumes' into his coat pocket. He was trying to be surreptitious, and failed miserably. Peter caught him doing it and grinned even more widely than before.)

-0-0-0-

"Pietro—"

"It's still Peter."

"—I'm going to turn the radio to a news station."

"What? Come on!"

"It won't kill you to go without music for a few minutes, even an hour."

"Yeah, but what about you?"

"I don't follow."

"Oh, come on, man, you've missed like, ten years worth of new music! I know you weren't getting music in that cell of yours! Pink Floyd, Queen, The Who, The Moody Blues, Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles! You've got a ton of catching up to do!"

"I didn't miss The Beatles, or Simon and Garfunkel. The latter wasn't always known by the name that they are now, and the former are highly overrated."

"…Wow. Just… Wow."

-0-0-0-

Erik hadn't known that Magda was pregnant again when they had separated. How could he? She wasn't showing, might not have even known herself, and if she had, she certainly hadn't told him. Would that have changed things?

He looked down at some of the photos of the twins, those he'd not yet put back into Peter's duffel bag. Their fifth birthday, the picture Marya had taken of them their first day of school, a baby picture in which, for the life of him, Erik could not tell which child was which. This one, the oldest, had been taken in black and white—he couldn't even tell what color their blankets were.

Over the years, the long years, he'd forgotten how to be a parent. Perhaps more accurately, Erik had forced himself to forget how to be a parent, how to be someone who had a family and a life that didn't involve tracking Shaw down and making him pay. He had devoted himself to that exclusively, spent years doing very little to nothing that didn't involve furthering his goal of killing Shaw. If he had found out about Wanda and Peter in the years between his and Magda's separation and his imprisonment, if he had known…

What would I have done, at that?

Erik would have liked to say that, if he'd discovered that he had children during those years, of course he would have taken custody of them. He would have liked to say that of course he would have taken responsibility as their father, of course he would have done his best to care for them and raise them.

But he wasn't sure. He really wasn't. There had been days (and weeks and, sometimes, months) when all he could do was fantasize about how Shaw would scream when he drove that coin through his head and out the other side. The man he had been then would not have wanted anything distracting him from his quest for revenge. Children, small children who needed looking after, they were the ultimate distraction from such things.

And if, by some chance, Erik had found out about the twins, had taken custody of them, he would not have been a good father. He was honest enough with himself to admit that. He had been so consumed with killing Shaw, and a life like that had no room for children. Even at their unhappiest, Peter and Wanda had been better off without him. Erik could admit that, even if it did feel like the bullet that had grazed his neck, courtesy of Raven.

He glanced over at Peter, who, having won the battle over the radio station, had gone back to driving in peace and silence. For once, Peter seemed to be entirely ignorant of his scrutiny. Erik knew that his children had been better off without him, that he wouldn't have made a good father, but he prayed, he hoped, that Peter would never realize that.