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beforetimes · 3 months ago

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amusing myself with a post-dofp, pre-apocalypse fix-it wherein peter goes back to the x mansion much earlier and gets to help in fixing it up. because, like, as lowkey traumatizing as erik's speech probably was for peter in the moment, i can't imagine he'd want to squander the opportunity to take a look back at these ppeople who had brought him into the fold of this new world they'd introduced him to before anyone else knew about it. i think it's plausible that he didn't go back to the school after that speech because, maybe he wanted to lay low so his little sister and mother wouldn't get dragged into whatever mess he'd been complicit in unleashing on the world. but i don't buy that he wouldn't go back earlier, either, especially with all the time in the world to think [agonize] over these strange people who were like him when he didn't know any mutants before, either.

so! let's say peter goes back to the mansion following erik's news broadcast to keep distance from his family to keep them safe. what next?

well when he gets there, it's obviously a dump compared to what it used to be. charles hasn't bothered to fix it up when he was on a ten year bender and hank was busy keeping charles from self-destructing and logan was there for a day at most

peter, however, is armed with superspeed and is an overzealous teenager who was challenged ("how fast do you really think you can clean all this? what, half a day?" "half a day for one room? you're kidding, man—") and now he has his pride on the line so obviously he commits to clearing out dust to prove he's the best duster to ever step foot in this stupid mansion

and he's maybe, like, halfway through the first room before he's realized what he's been roped into but also he doesn't really care because he's so bored and by now he'd probably have ramsacked a grocery store near home for more food he doesn't need but his heart squeezes a little at thinking like that—thinking about using his powers so openly after seeing this guy threaten to kill the president and now everyone knows about mutants and their only examples are 'terrorist' and 'not terrorist' and he really doesn't want to think about his sweet little sister still small enough to sit in his lap watching him step outside to break the law like that man did and phew why does being associated with this guy he broke out of prison make his chest hurt so much? whatever he'll just ignore that and keep cleaning because if he's cleaning he's not putting his family in danger and who knows maybe other kids will find their way here

and then he imagines little gap-toothed mutants about five or six years old running down the empty halls of this forboding sad mansion and the dark hallways make him feel a little more sick so he runs through and opens every curtain in about two seconds and feels less like throwing up and wow he doesn't think he's ever felt this lopsided in his life

and so peter works through about two floors by the end of the day and crashes in a bed to sleep for five hours before immediately raiding the fridge for about three thousand calories worth of food and makes his way through most of charles' newly restocked perishibles before the man even makes his way into the kitchen looking for some coffee or whatever

and peter isn't really mad but he is feeling a little off-centre about the fact that this was the guy who brought him to the pentagon to break a terrorist out of jail and even though it was really cool and he had so much fun doing it and it was the first time in a while he wasn't bored for an entire day he still feels a bit cheated because he didn't know he was breaking out a terrorist but charles definitely did and he was mad but he kind of didn't care and he left peter with a car to drop off and nothing else even though he dragged peter into this mess and was now pretending nothing happened

so peter leaves the room before charles can blink and spends the next week dodging him and hank is stressed and charles is stressed and the woman from the cia who visits, like, once, can feel it too because peter can tell she's stressed by the look on her face he snags a glance at when he's rooting through her wallet in superspeed and everyone is tense and stressed and peter is kind of regretting this because he could just hide in his basement until he's absolutely sure no one from the pentagon remembers his face and the fbi won't break down his mother's door to take him away from his family

and one night he's really not feeling it so he calls his mom and he doesn't really look at the date but he guesses it's important because the moment the phone picks up and he says "hello?" his mother is just spilling out so many things to him like one secret after the other and peter can usually notice everything because he's always got time to look at the details but everything feels syrupy and goes in one ear and out the other until the next morning when he sits down at the table and is in the same room as charles for the first time in weeks and all he can think is my mom knew someone who could do that

so now he's got this whole mess to think about so he doesn't have any time or energy left to be mad-not-mad at charles and hank which is crazy because he has so much energy all the time and he guesses that the pair of adults are taking their blessings without questioning them because they continue on as normal and peter only gets one day of things being sort of not entirely awful while the news settles in before he opens the door at eleven in the evening and finds magneto from the news on their porch with blood all over his side

and peter kind of blanks out or he stares too long or something because magneto says something and then all of a sudden peter's rushed the two of them down to hank's lab where hank pretends he wasn't listening to black sabbath because he's distinguished or whatever and there's a lot of yelling and panicking and peter stays at the side while charles joins them a few minutes later to talk calmly while everyone yells and eventually no one is yelling and magneto is fixed up and charles is staring and hank is glaring and peter opens his big dumb mouth and trips into the worst situation of his life entirely by accident

which is where he invited magneto to stay until he's feeling better

and everyone looks at him and even he's not sure why he said it because he doesn't know how he feels about magneto because he's been dreaming about having a father for years and years and he always imagined him as a boring old man who wasn't particularly anything special at all and the type of person who would float from city to city just working as a placeholder for a lot of other women instead of specifically screwing over peter's mom

and he didn't think his father would be a terrorist and he doesn't know if he wants to imagine magneto and father in the same sentence but all he's really thinking about is that new animated robin hood thing he saw with his sister and how that marian wondered if robin remembered her and robin wondered if marian remembered him and they were both thinking about each other without knowing it and peter doesn't know if his—magneto—remembered his mother but he can't stop himself from offering anyway

so now after a lot of silent conversation between charles and hank where peter is left out of the loop because his brain makes charles nauseus, magneto is given a room to stay in under the condition he doesn't try to, fucking, blow up the school or whatever the hell he wants to do to make everyone think mutants are evil. peter paraphrases the rules to sound like that in his head because charles is much more formal aloud

and if he thought the stress and regret and everything else that made him want to throw up was bad before, then phew he had no idea what was lying in store with him when it came to magneto because that guy is a perpetual storm cloud over a bright and sunny day no matter what happens, somehow

and peter knows he probably has a tragic backstory because he heard as much from charles late one night when they both couldn't sleep and peter couldn't help but ask what magneto was like when he was younger and charles looked so sad peter almost regretted asking but didn't because curiosity was going to eat him alive before he got a chance to blink

so peter doesn't know all of it but he knows it was bad and magneto is allowed to be upset but also it isn't cool he tried to murder the president and that's the one part that keeps screaming in his head every time he reconciles with the fact that he invited this guy to stay at someone else's mansion when the only reason peter was here was to keep his family and by proxy himself safe from this type of stuff

so he's proven to himself he's the dumbest person alive about three times over and he's still helping with renovations in that stupid mansion and he's wiped at the kitchen table when someone slides a glass of orange juice to him at ten in evening and he looks up and hey it's magneto he knows that guy

and that guy is like, terrifying as fuck so peter kind of chokes on his thanks which makes magneto's eyes look stormy and kind of sad and wow he didn't know that was a thing that could happen he sort of throught terrorists were above feelings especially after attempting to kill presidents

so peter kind of says sorry and magneto says sorry and no one says anything until magneto says its very impressive how much he's been doing to help out around here and peter is like wow really you think so because he still loves praise and people seeing how cool he is and it bugged him the tiniest bit that magneto walked by without saying anything when he broke him out of the pentagon btut he's glad that dusting and sweeping and mopping has impressed this guy so much

and magneto says something about how he's greater than he knows and that his gift is something that no one else possesses or something like that all peter knows is it's verging into territory he doesn't like and he keeps thinking about how much magneto hates humans and he keeps thinking about how his kid sister and mom are humans and he wonders if his dad hated his mom and thats why he left and he zooms upstairs to grab his walkman and put on his headphones before coming back downstairs while magneto's mid sentence to make him go away because peter was here first

magneto kind of blinks and goes blank and peter sort of welcomes it because magneto is frightening when he gets so into this whole mutant supremacy thing he has going on and peter is regretting asking him to come by at all before the guy stiltedly asks what he's listening to, which, like, what?

and peter finds out that magneto has never listened to like, a single band that wasn't playing on a radio he accidentally happened to be in the vicinity of and peter blinks and all of a sudden he's bugging a terrorist who hates humans to listen to his vinyls because he's somehow convinced himself in a moment of hysteria or delusion or psychosis that if he woos magneto with human music he'll decide that he doesn't want every human dead, just the bad ones and peter won't have to try and kill him or something and wow that's a lot to think about because peter doesn't think he'd ever murder someone but his dad murdered a lot of people or tried to and if they're blood related there must be some of that in him or something but thinking about that makes his chest twisty and he's only like eighteen or nineteen so he throws that worry aside but doesn't do too great of a job at it

because he's sitting in his room and they're both listening to queen and peter's mind can't stop going in circles and circles and circles and his mouth is open and he's asking magneto hey do you think you'd kill a human even if you loved them once before he can stop himself and magneto's staring at him and peter's staring at the ceiling and his chest is this tight ball of frizzy hairs of anxiety or something gross that feels like a million pounds

and magneto very slowly says why do you ask before he continues like he's peter and he can't bear to be interrupted and says something or other about how no humans are trustworthy and peter can't shut his dumb mouth so he asks more directly if he's loved a human before

and now magneto's staring and not saying anything and peter's kind of hoping and kind of not hoping that this guy who he's spent the past few weeks bonding with over late nights and vinyls and breakfast-for-dinners will either put the pieces together or say no and prove peter right and peter will make sure he never knows that peter's kid sister and his mother even exist

but magneto surprises him and says he's loved someone once and it would be a lie for him to say he hasn't loved humans when they didn't know what he was and when people found out what he was there was always a problem and that's why humans are a problem

and peter wonders if finding out that someone was pretending to be something theyre not would make magneto as upset as it did humans because he thinks he's going to go insane if he keeps pretending he's not magneto's kid and he's still kind of hoping for magneto to be more outwardly evil about hating his mom and kid sister so peter can just mentally disown him and get this weight off his shoulders

and he keeps waiting and waiting and waiting and magneto doesn't say more and peter doesn't say more but now this thing is sitting in between the two of them and peter's given away more of the game than he wanted on the last day before magneto's supposed to leave because of his fully healed wounds—which he had many of

except when he goes back to down to breakfast the next day he finds a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee and magneto is sitting at the table reading the newspaper that charles somehow gets delivered here and when peter finishes his glass and has four more magneto tells peter to call him erik

so now it's peter charles hank and erik living here and peter waits and waits and erik doesn't leave and they don't talk but he doesn't leave and peter is still waiting for erik to leave when charles wheels in a few days later and says they're going to go look for students and when erik just hums and says he'll come with peter stares and charles stares and hank stares and no one says anything

and then the days pass and they get a longer and longer list of students and peter's run out of places to clean and erik is still here and they don't talk about it but they listen to vinyls and erik is still here

erik is still here and peter is still here and nothing is really fixed but nothing is broken either and peter is content to sit in this space of being and not being until he's sure that there's more erik in magneto than there is magneto

and erik is still here. and peter is glad. secretly

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