Chapter summary: "Okay, tell you what. I'll cut my hair and dye it... if you grow a beard." Also: Peter asks his father a question about his propensity for lethal force.

The car was gone; that much was a fact. Peter had snuck back over to where they had been (after some trial and error; "Don't look at me like that; I haven't got a photographic memory or anything like that, and it was dark.") the night before and found the car gone. Erik could only assume that the police had impounded it; it seemed only natural that they would do so. He and Peter would have to find other means of transportation to Indianapolis, and then Detroit.

Upon scouting the area (a more respectable term for what Peter had actually done: zip around the countryside while Erik watched in bemusement, supposing that the boy might have been in mourning for the loss of his car and was working out his grief through exercise), Peter had discovered that there was a town about three miles from where they were now. "It's a start," Erik muttered. "Come on."

He pulled away immediately when he felt a hand on the back of his head. "Not like that, Pietro," he said, before Peter could do anything.

"'Peter'," Peter corrected him, but without any other comment. Too early in the gray, overcast morning, it seemed, and likely Peter was still hungry after their meager breakfast.

Himself, Erik had no desire to travel at the speeds his son could reach. He'd barely been able to get any food down this morning as it was. He didn't think he'd handle levitating too well right now, either. "You do whatever you want, so long as you don't draw undesired attention; I am walking."

Peter shrugged. "Have it your way." He began walking north. "The road's this way; once you get to it, all you've got to do is follow it, and you'll hit the city limits."

Erik caught glimpses of dark clouds through the canopy of trees and grimaced, hoping they'd get into town before it started raining. He really doubted Peter had packed an umbrella in that duffel bag of his, doubted that it would have occurred to him to do so even if he'd had some inkling that they were going to have to leave his car behind. At least it hadn't rained on them while they were sleeping. That would have just been the perfect end to a bad night.

Peter forced himself to—more or less—match Erik's pace until they got to the road. However, once that happened, he started zipping back and forth, presumably all the way to the town and back. Since he hadn't been shot yet and there was no blare of lights from a police car on the horizon, Erik could only assume that Peter hadn't been spotted yet by the humans. So much the better.

"You're probably going to have to dye your hair," Erik remarked on one of Peter's return trips, raising an eyebrow when he saw the boy polishing off a hot dog, but deciding not to comment on it.

At this, Peter shook his head violently. "No way, man." He grimaced hideously. "Tried that before, didn't work."

By 'before', Erik could only assume that Peter meant that he had tried dyeing his hair some time before they had met. Somehow, Erik doubted that Peter, even as fast he was, could make dye bleed out of his hair as fast as all that. He glanced at Peter and saw the preoccupied, even melancholic look that had stolen over his face. Erik suspected he knew why Peter had tried dyeing his hair 'before.'

That was probably not a wound, deep or shallow, that needed to be reopened. Erik remembered what it was like to be a self-conscious teenager, and never would he like the idea of telling a mutant, especially one who was young and (likely) impressionable that he needed to hide some quality that was likely the result of his mutation. Nevertheless…

"Pietro—"

"Peter."

"—Like you said yesterday, we are… Well, we're not on the run the way you seem to think we are; I've no intention of being shot down in front of a theater 'like Dillinger.' Nevertheless, we are indeed dodging the cops, the feds and anyone else who might recognize us and decide to mete out… justice." Erik couldn't help but frown darkly. "And your hair is easily your most salient feature."

At least he put that ridiculous silver jacket away. Peter had at some point in the past ten seconds traded in his silver leather jacket for a black sweatshirt—much more subtle.

But Peter, Peter didn't seem to accept the pragmatic solution. Instead, he scowled and set his jaw stubbornly. "Yeah, and you know what's going to stand out even more? A kid who's got brown hair and gray roots." Peter tugged on a lock of his hair. "You know, people see this hair, and they don't think 'mutant.' They think 'punk who dyes his hair.' Yeah, there's no roots, but people don't see that. But if people see a kid who's got normal looking hair all over his head except at the roots, they're gonna start asking questions."

"Fair enough. But you could at least cut it; it is rather long, don't you think?" Erik asked pointedly.

A sharp laugh filled the humid air. "You really have been in prison for ten years, haven't you?" Peter grinned, but without malice. "Okay, tell you what. I'll cut my hair and dye it… If you grow a beard."

The presence of the floating razor in camp this morning had not gone unnoticed, it seemed.

"Absolutely not."

"I didn't think so."

Peter began to run back and forth from the town again, having evidently grown bored of conversation. He would occasionally show back up with some sort of food item in hand, a candy bar, an apple, even a bag of boiled peanuts. He eventually showed back up with a Styrofoam cup of coffee.

"Here," Peter muttered, pressing the cup into Erik's hand. "You look kinda rough."

"Thanks," Erik muttered back. It was no use asking Peter if he'd paid for it or not; at the very least, Erik had no desire to have that argument again this early in the morning. He took a sip of it and tried not to grimace. The coffee was lousy. He drank it anyways.

Stuffing his hands in his pockets, Peter fell back in step with Erik. The boy kept his eyes trained on the ground, avoiding muddy spots on the side of the road with swift feet. He fiddled with the zipper on his duffel bag, perhaps contemplating getting some more food out, but eventually left the zipper alone, perhaps thinking better of it.

Erik considered asking Peter to go check the town for a bus terminal, before deciding not to; they didn't need to separate for too long. Peter had described the town as being big enough to have one. Even if it didn't, there would probably be a trucker or someone who'd be willing to take them closer to Indianapolis (Which itself was sure to have a bus terminal). Stealing a car would be too conspicuous, like tempting fate. While Erik supposed that it wasn't absolutely necessary to get to Detroit and the next two stops before San Francisco with backbreaking haste, he'd be happier once he had checked in on his contacts.

"Erm… Can I ask you a question?"

Peter was looking at him with an uncharacteristically tentative expression on his face. Erik stared quizzically back at him. "Has my displeasure stopped you so far?"

"I guess not." Peter nodded to himself and drew a deep breath. "Well… Okay, look." He swiped at the air with his hands. "I will completely understand if you don't want to answer this; I know it's a weird question and all that. Why are you so trigger-happy?"

Before Erik could even start to think of an answer, Peter started up again. "I mean, why is it that when you're in a bad situation your first thought is that the big solution to all of your problems is to kill you way out of the situation? You said it yesterday: you didn't start out like this." Peter's brow furrowed; there was a look in his eyes that seemed… troubled. "So… how'd you get to that point?"

It was a long time before Erik answered. He frowned abstractedly, nursing his coffee cup. "When… The first time I killed someone intentionally, of my own free will—" he remembered the camp, the lab; he would never forget that "—I was horribly ill afterwards. When it was over, and the adrenaline had worn off." And when he had put down his shovel and brushed the dirt and ash from his hands. "I felt… sick. In more ways than one."

"So why did you keep killing people if the first time made you feel so bad?" Peter was probing, in much the way Charles would have done, except with words instead of projected thoughts and gentle prods at memories and emotions. Erik wasn't sure if Peter was trying to accomplish quite the same thing as Charles would have been, either, but he had little doubt that there was a similar goal in Peter's mind.

Erik shook his head and let out a sharp breath. "Pietro—"

"Peter."

"The first time I killed intentionally, those whom I killed… They had murdered a member of my family, prevented me from rescuing her." He was still wanted in Ukraine. He could still remember the way the flames had leapt into the night sky. "I didn't feel 'bad' that I had killed them; I still don't. I know few who, in my position, would have felt remorseful about killing them."

Peter nodded. "And the next time?"

"It was after your mother and I separated. I was trying to track down a man who had been a doctor, though frankly using that term on him is an insult to actual doctors everywhere, in Auschwitz. I caught up with his partners in crime long before I caught up with him."

The first time Erik had killed one of them, one of those former Nazis who might have known where Shaw was, it was an accident. He hadn't meant to do it. He had started by leaving them bloodied and bruised, but otherwise unharmed. Then, slowly, he went from leaving them bloodied and bruised to leaving them with injuries that would have necessitated hospitalization. It seemed a natural progression, and besides, the injuries these people suffered were nothing compared to the people who had starved and wasted away, to those who had bled to death on the ground, to those who had become ash and dust.

The first time Erik killed one of them, it was an accident. The first time, he would like to make this very clear. He was looking at the man, a former SS officer who was now living a comfortable life in Damascus, and thinking of all of his own people, his fellow survivors. Many of them had tried to return to their homes, only to those same homes occupied by those to whom they had been assigned by the occupying Nazi government. They were met with hostility, threats and sometimes outright violence when they tried to protest that these were their homes, and this man was living well off of stolen gold when he should have been rotting in prison or dead.

Erik had only been trying to frighten him, trying to sweat Shaw's location out of the man. Floating knives were good for that. But then that man, that blood-stained man, he had lunged forwards and tried to overpower Erik—not so much of a coward as many of his partners in crime. He'd fallen on the knife. The house maid found her master the next morning, lying on the floor of his bedroom with that same knife sticking out of his forehead.

(He remembered feeling sorry for the maid, a guileless girl of around sixteen or so who had been easily overawed and had readily opened the back door for a gaunt stranger who looked in desperate need of a good meal. She had clearly had no idea just who her master was. Erik wondered what had become of her, sometimes.)

Peter grimaced. He could take a hint, at least in that regard. "Okay, that I get," he muttered. "There aren't a whole lot of people in the world who really fall into the group of "needs to die", but Nazis?" He grimaced again, rubbed the back of his neck. "Yeah, I get that."

It had gotten easier, over time.

It got easier to just kill them, rather than leaving them alive. Dead men tell no tales, and all that. And it occurred to Erik, more and more, that these men and women who had committed genocide, didn't really deserve to live when so many who deserved to be alive were dead, when they had so much blood on their hands that Erik was amazed that they didn't reek of it wherever they went. They looked so normal, so unassuming, and they really didn't deserve to; they were alive, and they didn't deserve to be.

The only ones Erik left alive anymore were the bankers who had taken Nazi gold, the landlords who had sheltered Nazi war criminals knowing who they were, and others who had sheltered and aided the perpetrators of genocide after the fact. He frankly had even more contempt and disgust for them than he had for his targets and his ultimate target themselves, but they had no blood on their hands. Erik would only kill them if they tried to do harm to him.

It got easier to kill them over time. This had never struck Erik as much of a loss, that it had gotten so easy for him to shed blood, that he no longer retched or vomited or dreamt about the screams at night. By the time he finally caught up to Shaw, by the time he was finally able to kill him, he didn't even hesitate at all anymore.

"And those cops last night?"

"Alright, I think I've answered enough—"

"I'm just trying to understand you better," Peter said, cutting him off. There was a faintly pleading quality to his voice, an odd, ambivalent pull on his mouth. "We spent all day yesterday in the car together, and that's a really long time for me, but most kids get a lifetime with their parents. I've only been around for what, thirty hours? Thirty hours, tops." He looked down for a moment before meeting Erik's gaze again. "I'm just trying to understand you better," Peter repeated.

'Most kids get a lifetime with their parents.' That wasn't right. There were plenty of kids who didn't get that; in all the world, the number of kids who grew up with their parents didn't even come close to amounting to 'most.' And so much for completely understanding if I don't want to talk about this, Erik thought, rolling his eyes discreetly (As discreetly as anyone ever rolled their eyes).

"I'm just trying to understand you better."

Are you really?

"Pietro—"

"And it's still Peter; seriously, are you ever gonna tell me why you're calling me that?"

"—Powerful people within this country have been rounding up mutants for experimentation and extermination for years." Erik's voice was hard. He remembered how Emma used to poke fun at his expense about how easily angered he was. They had never really been friends, but he still felt her absence as a loss, just like the others, and remembering her only made him angrier. "From both within government and from without, there have been those among the human population who have been intent on turning us into lab rats, intent on seeing us dead. We are surrounded by people who hate and fear us for reasons beyond our control, and there are plenty who will commit unspeakable atrocities to see us dead. These people tend to use the police as their enforcers."

Peter cast a sideways glance in Erik's direction. "So even when there's just two of us, you've still got a speech ready to fire," he mumbled. "But what if they—"

Erik raised a hand to cut him off before he could get any further. He fixed his son in a piercing stare. "Alright, before this goes any further, you need to know that there is a phrase that you should never say in my presence."

"What's that?"

"Do not ever tell me that they were 'just following orders'," Erik spat. "I don't give a damn about their orders. Those people, policemen and soldiers who rounded mutants up on Trask's orders and sent them to his laboratories, they had a choice, and they made it. Everyone who has ever committed such an act while following orders had a choice."

Peter held his hands up to placate him. "I wasn't gonna. It's just…" His brow furrowed. "You were just going to kill them last night, and for all we know, they might not have had a clue who we were. There could have been any number of reasons why that second cop showed up. They might not have even known we were mutants. I mean, you look 'normal.'" Peter grimaced at the word 'normal.' "Wanda looks normal. Apart from the hair, I look normal. Nobody's gonna look at us without knowing who we are and immediately think 'mutant.' I've thought about it some, and we could have gotten out of there fine. But you were just gonna kill them." He trailed off.

There was a question hanging in the air. Though left unspoken, Erik knew what it was, knew it like the words engraved on his own soul.

"Sometimes," he murmured, "sometimes you can't take that chance. Not with your own freedom. Not with your own life."

"Is that why?" Peter asked, and he didn't sound bitter, or sad, or disappointed. He didn't sound… Well, he didn't sound anything. But Erik knew what it sounded like when someone was deliberately keeping all inflection out of their voice, knew that there were more questions that, for whatever reason, Peter didn't feel like voicing.

But they'd come eventually. Of course they would.

Erik wondered how much Peter knew about death, and suffering, and cruelty. It was clear that Marya had done her best to insulate him from the latter two, the way any loving parent would, especially one who had been through as much as she had as a child. But Erik looked at Peter and could tell that likely the closest he had ever come to seeing death up-close was news reports on Vietnam. Seeing corpses carried out in body bags on television was no comparison for the real thing. It was just an image. It didn't capture the smell of death, the reek of suffering and despair. It didn't capture the tension and unease in the air, the fear that you could be next, at any moment. Peter was the type who wouldn't recognize death until it was staring down its nose at him.

It was something to think about.

Peter himself resumed his previous activities—running at his incredible speeds, back and forth, back and forth. When Erik finally reached the town, he found him sitting on an overturned waste basket outside of a gas station, petting a stray dog that had trotted up to him. He also spotted Peter feeding the dog what looked like a sausage; that had likely helped in getting the dog to come up to him.

The dog, some kind of lab or retriever, wagged its tail when Erik walked up; he patted its head absently before saying to Peter, "Come on; I need to go look for something in town."

"'Kay." Peter tossed the remains of the sausage on the ground for the dog to eat, and followed after Erik, managing to go only a little faster than him. Erik had been known for having a brisk stride, but Peter could outpace him easily without even trying.

After some time walking through town, Erik finally spotted what he was looking for: a small, hole-in-the-wall clothing store with a "CLEARANCE—EVERYTHING MUST GO!" sign pinned up over the awning. If he was going to be spending his nights sleeping in the forest, it would look less strange for him to be wearing scruffier-looking clothes than a suit.

He came out about fifteen minutes later, met by Peter smirking at him. "Guess I know where we got the leather jacket fetish from, too," he muttered.

Erik chose not to respond to that. Instead, he pulled a black cap out of the bag with the new umbrella in it, ripped the price tag off of it and held it out to Peter. "If you're not going to do anything about your hair, then put this on."

Peter's eyebrows shot up as he took the hat. "Thanks." He stared at the hat for a second, but then pulled it down over his head and tucked the ends of his hair under the cap.

It would do until they got to Indianapolis.