Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Erik receives the call from Charles around midnight in Paris. It's early evening in New York, and Charles sounds utterly exhausted and run down over the phone. Perhaps that's why he calls Erik on the telephone instead of beaming his voice directly into Erik's mind from an ocean away. Erik no longer wears the telepathy-blocking helmet and hasn't in years, but Charles has respected his privacy and kept his distance from Erik's mind.

Erik almost wants to tell him he doesn't mind the mental intrusion in an emergency, which this is.

“Peter's missing,” Charles tells Erik after their usual pleasantries. “Jean woke up screaming bloody murder this morning that Peter had been abducted by something red, and we've had no in luck finding him, or even determining who or what took him.”

Peter – Quicksilver - is an odd one, younger and less mature than X-Men team leaders Hank and Raven, but older than the other X-Men by about a decade. Although Erik remembers their first meeting when Charles enlisted Peter's help to break Erik out of the Pentagon in 1973, Peter only seems to have formally joined the School and its team of X-Men in the aftermath of the battle with En Sabah Nur eight years ago. He also was one of the few X-Men who didn't double as a teacher at the School, instead acting as a resident assistant for the students living at the mansion. And from what he'd seen of the students, they'd adored him.

Erik had a fondness for Peter as well. He's one of the rare few people Erik knows who's genuinely not afraid of him, or act like he'll immediately try to kill a third US President if he isn't handled like glass at all times. Peter treats him like a person – a person who has made some very poor decisions in his life, yes – but still a person. Not the mutant boogeyman lurking in the shadows, not a ticking bomb. Erik wonders if Peter knows how grateful he is for that.

“No luck finding him with Cerebro, I take it?” Erik asks.

“None at all,” Charles says sourly. “It's the damndest thing. There's no sign of forced entry anywhere on the grounds and everyone else is accounted for.” Charles hesitates. “Erik, please, I --”

Erik doesn't need to be telepathic to know what Charles is about to ask him. “Of course I'll come to the School. Anything you need,” he says. “Give me ten minutes, I'll be packed.”

Charles lets out a relieved breath over the phone. “Thank you, Erik. I can't tell you how much I appreciate your help.”

“Well, you have ten minutes to think of something,” Erik says with a small smirk. “See you soon, Charles.”

“Likewise, Erik.”

Erik has a duffel bag packed and sitting on the sofa ten minutes later, when a blue cloud of smoke appears in the apartment's small kitchenette with a loud crack. Large yellow eyes peer at him curiously as the smoke disappears. “Hallo, Herr Lehnsherr.”

So formal, even after eight years. “Guten abend, Kurt.” The response comes easily to his lips. In the aftermath of the second world war, Erik had travelled all over Europe as a refugee, carried by his anger and thirst for revenge. He'd picked up bits and pieces of different languages in his travels, but German was the one of the languages he had learned first and still knew best. It was rare, nowadays, that he had the opportunity to use it outside of speaking to Kurt. He usually makes it a point to not visit Germany – either Germany, before last year – if he had any choice in the matter.

“Bist du bereit zu gehen?” Kurt asks, his tail slowly drifting down.

Erik nods and picks up the bag's strap, slinging it over his shoulder. “Ja, ich bin bereit.”

It's hard to look at Kurt and not immediately have memories of Azazel sucker-punch him. Charles was always stubbornly insistent that specific mutant powers were not inherited from a mutant child's parents, only the X-gene itself, but Erik'll be damned if Kurt and Azazel weren't related in some manner. The physical similarities are just too close to ignore even if personality-wise, they couldn't have been more different. Kurt is gentle and kind and pious, where Azazel had...not been any of those things. At all.

“Lass uns gehen,” Kurt says with a melancholy smile, laying a hand across Erik's arm.

Erik takes a breath, and when he opens his eyes, they're on the front steps of Charles's mansion in New York. Hank and Raven are just inside the foyer, both looking up when they hear the loud rush of displaced air announcing his arrival, as well as the telltale cloud of smoke.

“Erik!” Raven calls. She hugs him tightly. It's been a few months since Erik's last visit, when he'd brought a mutant boy he'd rescued from a secret European Alchemax laboratory to the School.  ”Good to see you. The circumstances suck, but...”

“Hello Raven,” Erik says. “Hank,” he nods.

“Charles is in his study with Jean,” Hank says. He looks to Kurt. “Scott and Ororo are in the Danger Room if you'd care to join them.”

Kurt nods with a slight frown, hearing it for the dismissal it is, and then vanishes with another burst of blue smoke.

Hank and Raven walk with Erik to Charles's study. Raven's fingers entwine with Hank's casually, out of habit.

“How is everyone holding up?” Erik asks.

“We're all worried, especially since Cerebro can't find him,” Raven says. “Jean's insisting Peter's still alive, wherever he is, but he's just...not here.”

Erik hesitates. “Is he hidden from Cerebro somehow?” Erik himself had been impossible to locate using Cerebro while he'd worn his helmet and Shaw'd had his telepath-proof room of mirrors. If someone were to construct a cell or building that could block telepathy like that, any mutant inside would be concealed from Cerebro's invisible eye.

Raven shakes her head. “From what Jean's been saying, it's not that he's hidden, it's more like he's way, way outside of Cerebro's range.”

“Is that possible? I thought Cerebro could find any mutant on Earth,” Erik says, confused.

“With Charles using it, yes,” Hank interjects, clearly uncomfortable. Pointed teeth bite at his lower lip. “But Jean? She thinks Peter's not even in our dimension anymore.”

"He's in a mirror universe, like in 'Star Trek'," Raven adds.

Erik abruptly stops in the middle of the hallway. “You're joking.”

“God, I wish I was,” Hank mutters, letting go of Raven's hand to self-consciously fiddle with the glasses on his blue face. “The world made sense to me yesterday. But dimensional travel? That's all strictly theoretical. Untested. I wouldn't even know where to start.”

Erik raps on the wooden door to Charles's study. When Charles says, “Come in”, Erik pushes against the metal doorknob with his powers, opening the door.

Charles is in front of his desk in his wheelchair. Jean is standing stiffly in front of the lit fireplace, with her eyes closed. Small bands of flames hover around her arms and hands. Even though her body is present, her mind appears to be elsewhere at the moment.

“Erik,” Charles says, moving the wheelchair closer to him.

Erik sets the duffel bag down on a nearby chair and then leans over to hug Charles. “Hello, my friend.”

“Thank you so much for coming,” Charles says. When Erik pulls away, Charles gives him an exhausted smile. The other man's worry seems to hang over him like a shroud.

“If what Jean is saying is true, I don't know how much help I'll be,” Erik says, looking at Jean for a moment. “Alternate universes are hardly my forte.”

“Perhaps not,” Charles says with a smile that makes the tips of Erik's ears burn. “But I'm glad you're here just the same.”

Abruptly, Jean's eyes shoot open, her irises gold. “Peter,” she whispers.

“Jean?” Charles leans towards her in the chair.

Abruptly, Jean lets out a loud, high-pitched cry as the flames around her arms twist over her shoulders and shoot outwards from her back in a mimicry of wings. Erik immediately understands why she was positioned in front of the study's enormous fireplace.

The entire room watches Jean, until the flames suddenly disappear. She blinks her eyes as the golden light fades from them. “Professor?” she says, dazed. “I saw Peter. He's okay.”

“Where is he? What happened?” Erik asks.

“I was only able to make contact with Peter briefly,” Jean says. She leans against the fireplace mantle, rubbing at one eye. “I tried to skim his most recent memories, but you know what his mind's like, Professor.”

“Yes. It's hard to read something that goes so fast,” Charles says.

Jean nods. “I was only able to pick out a few things. Fragments.” She glances to the others in the study unsteadily. “Can I show you? All of you?”

Raven and Hank immediately nod. Erik does too, after a moment.

Jean closes her eyes again, and immediately Erik is plunged into the memories Jean had been able to see. It's a nauseating blur of colors, going too quick for him to comprehend. But he can make out voices – some of them Peter's, most of them not.

“Long lost bro get to squeeze his stinkin' sister to death or what?” That was Peter.

“Uncle P, are you feeling OK?” A young boy.

“I can't do anything to help if you won't let me be me. Don't make me be someone I'm not.” Peter's voice, pleading desperately with someone.

"It doesn't matter what I do, all I am is alone.” A crying woman.

“You're not alone, Wanda. I know for a fact that you've got a brother from another universe. See? That's something.” Peter. That seemed to be in response to the woman, Wanda, but 'brother from another universe'? What kind of nonsense was that?

“Vinnie's not my name. Not my real one.” A man.

“The first thing I can recall is driving into Westview with Wanda as my bride to our new house. I-I know that I love her dearly, but I can't remember how we even met.” Another man, this one speaking with an English accent.

“But I've seen stuff like this before. People losing control of their powers and doing something they didn't mean to do.” Peter.

“You have faith in my sister. Just hold onto it for a little while longer.” A third man, with a thick accent Erik couldn't quite place.

“My dad's a...reformed terrorist. He, uh, tried to kill Nixon once. Was locked up in the Pentagon for killing JFK, although that one wasn't actually him.” That's Peter's voice again, and it takes Erik a moment to realize Peter's talking about...him?

Erik is Peter's father?

It's absurd. Other than both being mutants, the two of them are nothing alike. They can't possibly be father and son.

Except then Erik remembers the elevator ride during the break-out from the Pentagon prison years and years ago, with Peter telling him, “They told me you control metal. Y'know, my mom once knew a guy who could do that.”

Oh god. That had been one of the first things Peter had ever said to him, and Erik hadn't even realized...

With a shout, Erik wrenches himself out of Jean's memories and back to Charles's study, suddenly cold and dizzy. His chest feels like it's in a vice.

Jean lets go of his mind with a quiet intake of breath. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Erik,” she says in a rush. “I didn't think...”

The others in the room come out of the vision Jean had been putting into their heads. Their eyes are all immediately drawn to Erik. Not one of them looks surprised at the revelation that Peter is Erik's biological son.

Erik takes a step back. “You all knew. How long have you known?”

“Erik...” Charles says, rolling his chair closer to him.

“How long?” Erik repeats louder. The clock on the fireplace mantle makes a loud rattling noise as the delicate metal springs and mechanisms inside quiver. The lamp on Charles's desk inches towards the edge.

Charles sighs, lowers his head. “The day he saved my students from the explosion that destroyed the School. The reason he was at the School in the first place was that he'd come to find you, Erik.”

Just after Nina and Magda had been killed. When En Sabah Nur had come to him. Erik looks around at all the sympathetic faces in the study and feels the walls start to close in on him, his blood pounding in his ears. “Eight years. For eight years, you've all known that Peter was my son, and none of you ever said anything to me.”

At least Raven and Hank have the sense to look somewhat guilty, unlike the two telepaths in the room. Jean's merely upset at having accidentally revealed Peter's dark secret, and Charles just gazes at Erik warmly.

“Oh, my friend. I'm afraid it wasn't our place,” Charles says gently, his eyes kind. “Peter wanted to tell you when he thought you both were ready for it. We all felt it best to respect his wishes on the matter.”

“And now he's disappeared to God-knows-where!” Erik says.

“Peter'll come back to us soon,” Jean says. “He said he would.”

“You don't know that. Not for certain,” Erik grinds out, glaring at her. He turns on his heel and yanks open the study's door with his powers, the hinges creaking loudly as they shake in the doorframe. He stalks down the hall.

“Wait, Erik!” Raven calls after him. He ignores her. They don't follow him out of the study.

Erik doesn't pay attention to where his feet take him until he feels the cold air of a November night on his face. He's on a balcony overlooking the manicured front lawn of the mansion, a pair of open French doors behind him.

He tries to calm his heart, his breath, but his heart is racing and his breath comes in short, jittery gasps that are threatening to turn into sobs, his hand gripping onto the metal railing tightly. The metal whines under his hands but doesn't move.

A son. Peter is his son, and he'd been around Erik for years and Erik had no idea. He thinks back to the battle with En Sabah Nur, realizing at last why it was Peter who'd accompanied Raven with her talk of family. Hell, Peter'd all but outright told Erik he was Erik's son then, but Erik had still been so blinded by rage and grief it hadn't registered. Erik had come so very close to watching his son's throat be sliced open less than a day after Nina and Magda's deaths, and he hadn't done anything to stop it. Was it any wonder why Peter hadn't tried to tell him the truth again after that?

Peter's mother has to be Marya. Erik hadn't thought of her in years. He and Marya hadn't ended on good terms, and he'd left her behind without a second thought. She must've been pregnant when he'd abandoned her. 

“Erik?” Charles's voice asks from the open doors.

Erik glances behind him, and is unsurprised to find Charles there. What does stun him for a moment is that Charles is both standing unassisted and has a full head of wavy brown hair.

“A projection, Charles? Really?” Erik forces out. He almost cajoles Charles over how young his mental projection looks, but thinks better of it.

Charles gives him a slightly sheepish grin. “I wanted to make sure you were all right, but I thought just my voice might seem too intrusive.”

“Ah. So instead you're changing what my eyes see as well. Isn't that more intrusive?” Erik asks.

Charles's cheeks flush slightly red as he glances away. “If you don't want me in your head, tell me and I'll stop.”

Once, years and years ago, Erik would've snapped at Charles to leave his mind alone. He'd worn the helmet for years specifically to shut Charles out, to protect his mind from the influence of telepaths like him and Emma Frost. But Erik's older now, tired of losing the ones he loves, and more than a little lonely.

“It doesn't matter.” Erik shakes his head and then looks back at the lawn. “You can stay.”

Charles 'walks' over from the doors with light footsteps, his clothes rustling, until he's standing next to Erik on the balcony. It really is a skilled projection. If Erik didn't know how impossible it was, he'd think the real Charles was beside him.

“Do the others know you're only half paying attention in there?” Erik asks, gesturing towards the mansion behind them.

“I'm fully capable of multitasking,” Charles says primly, and then falls silent.

Erik's breathing has evened out, and he looks up at the clear night sky. Far away from the city, the stars above him are visible, as well as the full moon. The bite of the cool air against his skin, and the hum of the metal railing under his hands gradually calms his heart.

Charles's projection is still there when Erik sighs, leaning against the railing. “Charles. I don't think I can stand to lose anyone else,” he says, his voice mostly steady. He'd been a father once before, too briefly, and it'd ended in tragedy. Now, to discover that he's been a father for far longer than he'd thought, only to find out when said son was missing, and apparently almost everyone else in Charles's mansion had known the truth...

Charles meets his eyes. “You'll get the chance to see your son, Erik. Peter's not gone from us forever,” he says reassuringly. “He's merely a little lost at the moment.”

“That makes him sound like a fountain pen someone misplaced,” Erik mutters. “He's in another dimension, Charles, and after listening to all those voices Jean heard, I'm even more confused as to what happened to him.”

A red streak suddenly appears in the night sky, shining like a comet. It veers towards the school, close enough to see that there's someone in the center of the streak.

“One of your students?” Erik asks.

“No,” Charles says in surprise. “None of them fly quite like that.” He squints at streak of light. “I don't know who she is. I believe she's blocking me.”

The comet plows a long trench into the front lawn until it's stopped right in front of them, the brilliant light fading. A woman hovers above the railing, dressed in a long burgundy coat. The dress and tights underneath are red, with black ankle boots. Her curly auburn hair drifts around her face and her burning red eyes.

“Where's Peter?” the woman shouts at them hoarsely. “He's gone, but he can't be. Tell me where he is.”

“Unfortunately, he's not here,” Erik says with a hollow laugh. “He's not anywhere we can get to.”

“You.” The woman's mouth thins as she glares down at him. “I know who you really are, Magneto. Do you know who I am?” the woman snarls.

Seeing the woman's face twisted in anger only highlights how strongly she resembles Marya.

“You're Peter's sister,” Erik says with sudden understanding. Marya must've had twins - Peter and this woman. Not just one, but two children he'd had no idea existed before today. He swallows, his throat like sandpaper. “You're my daughter.”

“Erik?” Charles says next to him. He actually sounds surprised.

“I should've known you'd be here, father, ” Erik's daughter hisses, disdain dripping from her voice. “You know, Peter just wouldn't shut up about you, back when you nearly murdered Nixon? He thought being a father might calm you down. But you, you would've used Peter as a pawn.”

Red light curls around her hands and burns in her eyes. Around them, the rest of the mansion disappears in a wave of red. In its place is an abandoned, derelict rotting shell of a building, the masonry of the balcony rapidly aging and crumbling beneath their feet.

The wave of red surrounds Erik, and when it fades, he's in the armor and cloak En Sabah Nur had created for him when Erik had agreed to be his Horseman, the cold metal of the helmet resting in his hands. It's all he can do to not drop the helmet like it's scalding.

"No matter what lies you tell yourself, you'll always be a murderer," his daughter says, staring at him, and it's hard for him to refute her words when they're ones he's thought himself.

Erik is mostly sure that what she's doing is nothing more than an illusion, fooling his mind into believing it's real, until he feels worry emanate from Charles.

“I can see it too,” Charles murmurs next to him, and a jolt of alarm shoots through Erik. For her to be able to trick Charles's mind means she'd have to be a telepath on the same level as him. Either that or she's not influencing their minds at all, but actually changing the world around her, which would make his daughter one of the most powerful mutants alive. Neither option is exactly comforting.

“Erik, she's trying to get in my head...” The projection of Charles doubles over with a grunt of pain before vanishing completely.

'Charles?!' Erik shouts in his head. He can still feel Charles's presence in his mind, but it's wavering and weak, barely hanging on to the connection. Whatever's happening, Charles isn't able to fight her off and project the image of himself at the same time.

'She's done something to the others,' Charles replies, his mental voice strained. 'I can't tell...it's taking all my concentration to keep her out of my mind.' Erik sees a brief image through Charles's eyes, of an empty, dust-covered room with the unconscious bodies of Raven, Hank and Jean lying collapsed on the bare floor in front of him, all three cocooned in red light.

“It's your fault that I'm like this,” Erik's daughter growls, tears running down her cheeks. The red magic surrounding her hands turns sharp and jagged, like shards of broken glass. “Do you know what I think, father? That the world would be better if you weren't in it.”

Erik can't move. His limbs are frozen in place against his will, waiting for the executioner's axe. 

His daughter lobs the red magic in her hands at him. It sinks deep into Erik's chest, passing through the armor like it wasn't there. An odd kind of cold numbness radiates out from his chest instead of pain. Erik is vaguely aware of his mental connection with Charles snapping like a frayed rope pulled too far, and then his mind drifts away.

Chapter Text

It's nothing more than a stray thought, or maybe it's a wisp of something else.

It doesn't know who it is, or recall any memories of its own, but it knows the memories of the mind it's nestled in almost instantly.

'Erik?'

It only has a few brief moments to bask in the familiarity of Erik's mind. The voices of a thousand other lives not lived flood in, each grabbing onto a part of Erik's mind and yanking, threatening to fracture Erik's mind.

“I call no one master, especially one who would destroy the innocent along with the guilty!”

“Should I teach these children to turn the other cheek? And when both sides have been slapped, what then?”

Another voice, this one roughened by age and imminent death, whispers, “All those years wasted fighting each other, Charles...to have a precious few of them back...”

It shivers. The abject misery and suffering of the Erik in the future that will never come to pass pushes it to carefully unhook Erik's mind away from the grip of countless other lives. It's slow, delicate work, but as it gradually shunts the other voices away, Erik's mind stops buckling underneath the pressure of being pulled in so many different directions.

'It's all right. Calm your mind,' it murmurs to Erik, gentle and soothing. The words are achingly familiar, an echo of something that it can't remember clearly, but they have the desired effect on Erik.

There are mental shields already in Erik's mind when it looks for them. They're not as elegant or strong as it's used to, but they'll do. It gradually raises the shields up as it untangles Erik's mind from the last of the other Eriks, until it's only this Erik again, as it should be.

Exhausted, it buries itself back into the comforting depths of Erik's mind and lets itself drift.

Awareness gradually comes back to Erik. He's still alive, which is a start. He hears heavy rain pound against windows, and the rumbling of thunder. He's lying on something soft. There's absolutely no metal around him that his powers can detect except for the armor he's wearing and the helmet, which is strange. Even out in the middle of the woods, he'd typically be able to feel the metal deep in the earth and the gentle pull of magnetic north. Now, there's nothing.

His head pounds, and he can't help but prod at the empty spot where Charles had been in his mind. It's raw and tender, like his daughter had reached inside his skull and ripped Charles out of his head with her hands. But it almost feels there's something still there, a glimmer of something left behind.

“So if that guy's Uncle Peter's dad, can we call him Granddad?” a young boy says nearby, trying to be quiet.

“I mean, he only looks, like, ten years older than Uncle Peter,” another boy answers. "Fifteen, tops."

Erik blinks open his eyes to a plain white ceiling. He's lying on a mustard yellow velour sofa, a matching pillow cushioning up his head, and still dressed in his ridiculous red armor, the long cape twisted around to cover him like a blanket. His helmet is resting on the coffee table next to the sofa.

He turns his head and looks at the two boys in front of the coffee table, who can't be any older than ten. A TV set displaying static sits behind them. One of them, wearing a red shirt, tugs on the green sleeve of the other boy as Erik sits up.

“Are you really Uncle Pete's dad?” Green Shirt asks Erik, eying him with suspicion.

“I know you're not actually our granddad, but is it okay if we call you Granddad anyway?” Red Shirt asks curiously. “We didn't have any grandparents before. Our mom's parents died a long time ago and our dad's an android.”

“I—what?,” Erik says, utterly confused.

“Billy, Tommy, take it easy on your grandpapa,” a man's voice calls from the kitchen. “I suspect he may still be a little, hm, discombobulated from his journey here.”

A man is suddenly standing behind the children, a bolt of light trailing behind him, pale blue eyes looking at Erik with concern. His hair's cornsilk blond but darker near the roots, and brown stubble lines his jaw. He wears a black track jacket with a stripe of white chevrons running down the sleeves, and dark sweatpants.

Even though Erik's head currently feels like it's full of sludge, he's able to recognize the man's power easily. Super speed, just like Peter.

“How are you feeling, Erik?” The man's voice, and his heavy but nearly indeterminable accent, is oddly familiar. It takes Erik a moment to realize where he's heard it before: he was one of the voices from Peter's memories.

“Who are you?” Erik says sharply, sitting up. “Where...what is this place? Where's Peter?”

“So many questions,” the man drawls. “All right. My name is Pietro. These are my nephews. This is Billy,” he points to the boy in the red shirt. “An--”

“I'm Tommy,” the boy in the green shirt announces. He zips upstairs in a flash, just as fast as Peter and Pietro, and then comes back down holding a framed photograph. “This is who you're looking for, right, Granddad? Uncle Pete?”

Erik takes the frame from Tommy, letting out a quiet gasp. In the photograph, Billy and Tommy are being hugged by a man with shiny red skin and silvery plates over his head and neck, a human woman wearing a red tiara in her auburn hair, and Peter, in a light grey jacket and a pair of goggles resting on top of his head.

Thunder rumbles outside, closer than before.

“Yes,” Erik says. “That's him.” He looks at the two boys. “Why do you call him 'Uncle Pete'?”

“He's our mom's brother, sort of,” Billy says, pointing to the red-haired woman in the photograph. “She couldn't find Uncle Pietro, so she brought Uncle Pete to Westview instead.” He looks up at Erik with a smile, like that explains everything.

Oddly enough, it does make a certain amount of sense. Thanks to Jean, Erik had heard Peter tell someone named Wanda that he was her brother from a different universe. It didn't seem like much of a stretch to assume the woman in the photograph was the Wanda he'd been speaking to.

Erik squints at the woman in the photograph. It's not very large, but he can tell that the woman there isn't the same one who came to the School looking for Peter and who catapulted him into...wherever he is now. He has a feeling that he's very, very far from home.

He tries to not dwell on what he'd seen through Charles's eyes, of Raven, Hank and Jean unconscious in front of him, or of Charles struggling to keep Erik's daughter out of his mind. It's surprisingly difficult to wrench his thoughts away from worrying over those still at the School. 

“Why couldn't she find your Uncle Pietro?” Erik asks, lowering the photograph.

Pietro clears his throat loudly and then steps forward, placing his hands on the two boys' shoulders.. “Billy, Tommy, why don't you go upstairs and play on your Mega Drive for a while?”

“It's a Genesis,” Billy corrects.

“Whatever that thing's called. I need to speak to Grandpapa Erik alone, please,” Pietro says, and then makes a shooing gesture. The two boys sulkily head upstairs.

Pietro watches them and sighs once they're out of sight. “They're going to listen in anyway,” he says to Erik in English, and then switches to Serbian. “I don't suppose you speak Sokovian?”

Erik does, apparently. “That's Serbian,” he replies in the same language.

Pietro raises a finger. “Ah! Don't you start too,” he says good-naturedly.

Two loud cries of disappointment come from the top of the stairs. “Not fair!” Tommy's voice whines.

“You shouldn't be eavesdropping in the first place,” Pietro calls up to them in English before smoothly switching back to Serbian – or Sokovian. “Sorry. I didn't want to talk about this in front of the twins. I'm not sure how much of the situation they understand.”

That sounds rather ominous. “...am I dead?” Erik asks.

Pietro snorts. “No, Erik, you're the only one of us here who's actually alive. I've been dead for years and my sister willed her boys into existence. The house, too.”

“That makes no sense,” Erik objects, looking from Pietro to where the two children are lurking just out of sight at the top of the stairs. “You all look alive to me.”

“No matter the dimension, it seems chaos and nonsense follows in the wake of the Scarlet Witch,” Pietro says. “My sister is the Scarlet Witch of her dimension, just like your daughter is in yours.”

Oh. That's why the man in front of him reminds him so much of Peter, despite not looking at all similar. “Marya's grandfather was named Pietro as well,” Erik says quietly.

“Hmm. Marya is Peter's mother, then? Interesting. My mother's name was Iryna,” Pietro says with a smile. “And my father was Oleg Maximoff. But I was named after my mother's grandfather too. Your dimension's version of me is just very...American.”

“If you're another version of Peter, why don't you look like him?” Erik asks, still trying to wrap his mind around the idea of different versions of Peter - his son, Peter - running around in different universes. Or dying in different universes.

Pietro raises an eyebrow. “I may as well ask why you don't look like Oleg. And my father didn't have any powers. There are differences between our dimensions, some fairly large ones.”

“Your sister is the one who stole Peter from our universe,” Erik says, looking down at the photograph again. Peter is smiling, and it looks genuine to Erik, but the fact that Peter looks so trusting and happy around the woman who abducted him from another dimension confuses Erik. He sets the frame down on the coffee table and levitates the helmet into his hands

“Yes, she was,” Pietro says, awkwardly shifting on his feet, very much like Peter does when he's anxious. “And I am sorry about that. It wasn't a conscious choice on her part. I was the one she truly wanted, but her magic found your Peter first, and...” He mimes a yanking motion with one hand.

“Then can't she put him back where he belongs? Return him to his home?” Erik asks. “We--Peter's loved ones are looking for him.”

“Oh, it's not a question of that,” Pietro says. “She definitely can. The problem is that what she did to bring Peter to her universe damaged the Nexus, which is what connects all the dimensions in the multiverse together. That's where we are now, by the way - in the middle of the Nexus. My sister made the first tear in the Nexus, but your daughter is making it much, much worse.”

Another crash of thunder outside punctuates his words.

“The storm is coming.” Pietro looks back at Erik, his face unexpectedly grim. “Erik, you're the only one of us who can leave the Nexus. I can point you towards the universe where Peter is now, but you must pass on a message to my sister, Wanda Maximoff, and Doctor Stephen Strange. Tell them the Scarlet Witch of your universe has awakened and that she'll unravel the very fabric of the multiverse if nothing is done. They will be able to help you and Peter, but they have to know that Peter's sister is a Scarlet Witch too.”

“How do I find them?” Names alone weren't much to go on.

Pietro smirks, and then leads Erik through the kitchen to the back door of the house. He opens the door and the only thing visible on the other side is a glaring white nothingness so bright that it hurts Erik's eyes. “That won't be an issue, I promise you,” Pietro says. “The difficult part will be remembering what I told you. Travel through the Nexus has a way of messing with your mind.”

Erik looks down at the helmet in his hands, made to withstand any telepathic onslaught. “Perhaps this will help with that,” he says.

The helmet disappears from his hands and reappears in Pietro's, who peers inside it curiously. “This thing? I suppose it can't hurt.” The helmet is unexpectedly placed on Erik's head, and Pietro gently taps his fist against the side with a teasing grin. “It'll protect your head from any rough landings, at least.”

Tommy and Billy appear near Pietro's elbow with a similar whoosh of air as Peter when he uses his mutation. Tommy has a hand bracing the back of Billy's neck, something Erik wonders if he picked up from Peter.

“Are you leaving, Grandad?” Billy asks.

Tommy frowns and grabs onto Erik's cape, like he's about to pull him away from the open door. “But you just got here!”

Erik knows the two boys calling him 'Granddad' should be offputting – he only just discovered he has two children old enough to possibly have children of their own – but it's not. The boys both seem to consider Peter a member of their family, even if he wasn't the 'right' uncle, and didn't hesitate to accept Erik as part of that family. They aren't afraid of him.

Erik nods and tries to smile. “I-I'm going to go see your mother. And your Uncle Peter.”

“And our dad too?” Billy asks hopefully, neither of the twins noticing Pietro wince behind them.

“Perhaps another time,” Erik deflects, hoping the lie sounds less forced to the boys than it does to his own ears. He then eyes Pietro. “What happened to their father?” he says quietly in Serbian.

“He should have arrived here with the twins and the house,” Pietro replies with a sigh, running a hand down his face. “But he didn't. I don't know where he is.” Thunder cracks outside, and Pietro's head swivels around to look at a nearby window. “Erik, you need to go,” he says, not unkindly.

Erik hesitates. “What about you three?”

“We'll survive as long as the Nexus does,” Pietro says with a lopsided smile that doesn't entirely reach his eyes. “Like the rest of the multiverse. But you should get going while there's still a multiverse to save.”

Billy frowns, looking between Pietro and Erik as they talk to each other in a language he doesn't understand. “I can't hear your thoughts,” he tells Erik.

Somehow, it doesn't surprise Erik that Billy is a telepath. “The helmet keeps people with your powers out of my head,” Erik tells him.

Billy's frown deepens. “But I couldn't hear your mind before you put on the helmet either.”

“You didn't?” Erik says, and then checks on his mental shields. Sure enough, all his shields were up as high as they could go, even though he has no memory of raising them. If he'd tried to bring his mental shields up during the conversation with his daughter at the School, it would've kicked Charles out of his mind.

Erik closes his eyes for a moment. Charles. The School, overgrown and abandoned. And his daughter at the center of it all, unwittingly tugging at the loose thread that threatens to destroy reality.

He's brought out of his dismal thoughts by Billy and Tommy tightly hugging him around the waist together. For a moment, Erik freezes. The last time someone hugged him like that had to have been Nina, years ago. 

"Please visit us soon, Granddad?" Billy says when they both let go.

"And tell Mom and Uncle Pete we said hi when you see them," Tommy adds.

"And that we miss them!" Billy interrupts.

"I-I'll try," Erik tells them.

The twins let go of Erik, stepping away from the door back towards Pietro. Pietro gently rests his hands on the twins' shoulders and then looks at Erik with a grin. "Goodbye, Erik." 

"Bye, Granddad!" the two boys say together.

"Goodbye." With a nod, Erik turns away from them and steps through the door, into the void of white light. For a moment that seems to stretch between a second and forever, he can't see anything except for white. He closes his eyes against the light and takes another step forward.

When the light dies down, he blinks his eyes open to find himself standing in front of a vacant lot of land between two suburban houses. When he turns around, the street behind him is blocked off by police cars and swarming with armored trucks and government agents in cheap suits and windbreakers.

"Fuck," Erik mutters under his breath.

Chapter Text

Erik remains still. He can sense metal again, feel it in the earth beneath his feet and hidden inside the walls of the houses on either side of him, and also in the government vehicles parked in the street, and the guns carried by about half of the twenty people in front of him.

By some miracle, no one had noticed his arrival to their universe. That wouldn't last. He's standing open and exposed in an empty lot. His Horseman armor wasn't meant to be inconspicuous, and he has no close cover to hide behind.

He's hesitant to use his powers in front of the government agents. As long as he doesn't, he's just a man wearing a strange outfit. If he starts flinging cars around or floating guns out of their hands, he'll quickly be labelled as a dangerous mutant. At the same time, he doesn't want to be cornered and attacked. Grimacing, Erik takes his helmet off.

Once, he wouldn't have hesitated to grab onto the vehicles with his powers and use them to clear the street of the loitering humans. But he is trying – trying – to be a better person than he was before.

Erik looks at the house he's closer to. A sheet of black plastic is taped over a large hole in the front of the house. The car that presumably rammed into the house is sitting on the lawn, its front half nearly crushed flat. None of the vehicles appear to be there to repair the house. Presumeably the damaged house is vacant, then. He might be able to hide and formulate a plan.

Human eyes are better at detecting fast movement than slower movement. Instead of running for the house, Erik holds his breath and then levitates himself just above the grass, slowly drifting towards the back of the house, his eyes trained on the humans in the street. Only a handful of the humans have line-of-sight on the house, but all it would take was one spotting him to alert the rest. 

Something burns inside Erik's head, a pulse of heat above his eyes. He drops back down to the grass, his powers suddenly failing him. A stab of panic goes through him, but he's close enough to the back of house to duck behind it.

None of the agents or officers look towards him as he pushes open the unlocked back door and slips inside the house.

Once Erik's feet touch the debris-covered floor, he sighs. He can sense the metal being carried on the humans outside, and none of them have moved towards the house. As far as he can tell, he wasn't spotted.

And then he hears a man's voice only a few feet away from him.

“Ma'am, with all due respect, it's best for you to vacate this house immediately, it's going to be conde—oh.”

Erik turns around to see two people sitting at a kitchen island covered by plaster dust and debris staring at him. One of them is a middle-aged man in an FBI windbreaker writing in an open notebook, his eyes wide. The other is a woman wearing a light purple blouse and dark pants, holding a teacup.

“Gosh!” the woman says, almost aggressively cheerful. “And who're you supposed to be, hon?”

“Uh,” the FBI agent says, quickly looking up and down Erik's armor. He relaxes only slightly when he doesn't spot any visible weapons. He slowly stands up, careful to make sure Erik can see his hands are nowhere near where his sidearm is holstered. “James Woo, FBI.” A small crease appears between his eyebrows as he examines the design of Erik's Horseman armor. “Do you happen to know a Wanda Maximoff?”

Erik is saved from having to figure out how respond to that question when a golden ring of light opens underneath his feet and he plummets down into it. 

The ring of light spits him out about ten feet above the floor of a large room built in the Art Deco style. Erik uses his powers to slow his descent to the inlaid wood-and-marble floor below him. He lands on his feet with all the grace he can muster, his cape billowing behind him. A man stands a few feet away from him and his outfit is even more preposterous than Erik's, with a long, high-collared red cloak and blue robes. The other man's dark hair is streaked with grey at his temples, and his facial hair is neatly groomed into a goatee

“So, I take it you're another wayward mutant,” the man says drolly. He looks at Erik with a clinical eye, not surprised by his armor like Woo had been, or even the small display of Erik's powers. And Erik had also heard this man's voice in his son's memories. He knows who the man in front of him is with a certainty that almost startles him.

Erik nods, placing his helmet on a nearby wooden table, next to a stack of musty leatherbound books. 'A quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore', he hears Charles whisper in his head, from when he'd read 'The Raven' to the students for Halloween. “And if I'm not mistaken, you're Doctor Stephen Strange,” Erik says.

The man raises his chin to meet Erik's eyes. “I am,” he confirms. “How'd you know that?”

“I was told to find you and Wanda Maximoff,” Erik says. “My name is Erik Lehnsherr. I'm from the same universe as Peter Maximoff. Please, where is he?” He tries to keep his nerves out of his voice and only partially succeeds.

Part of Erik still worries over his son rejecting him – that the reason Peter had never told him the truth was that he didn't want Erik as his father. Peter's twin sister had wanted nothing to do with him, even going so far as to send him hurtling out of their universe to be rid of him. As she'd snarled at him, Erik had innocent blood on his hands and he always would. His attempts at atonement since En Sabah Nur, to be the kind of man Charles had thought he could be when they'd met, seemed almost laughable in the wake of all the death and destruction Erik had wrought in the decades before. Why would anyone want Erik as their father?

“Your last name's Lehnsherr?” Stephen says with an odd half-smile. "Interesting."

“How is that interesting?” Erik asks.

"You can ask Peter about that yourself," Stephen says, pointing towards the staircase.

“Stephen?” Wanda Maximoff is at the top of the massive staircase, dressed in a cranberry red sweater and a pair of black leggings.

Just behind Wanda is Peter, in the same jacket from the photograph Tommy had shown him, but a different shirt. This one was dark blue, with the words 'The Moody Blues - Long Distance Voyager - World Tour 1981' forming a triangle around an illustration of one of the Voyager space probes.

Erik can't help but smile despite his unease. Peter. His son.

Peter stops dead when he sees Erik, his face going slack with shock. “No way. Erik?” He says and then zips down the stairs until he's in front of Erik. “Holy shit! How did you...” He trails off, staring at the fragile expression on Erik's face with obvious concern. “A-are you okay, man?”

Peter doesn't hesitate to approach him, even though Erik's wearing the Horseman armor he nearly ended the world in, that he watched Peter nearly get his throat sliced open in. And Peter's worried about Erik, when Peter was the one who'd been grabbed out of his universe.

“Peter...” Erik's voice is strangely hoarse. He latches onto his son's arms with shaking fingers, joy and relief running through him. He's real, and alive, and Erik has found him. “You're all right.” It's taking most of his self-control to not pull his son into a crushing hug, if only because he's certain he'll start crying if he does.

Peter doesn't have any such self-control and throws his arms around Erik's neck. Erik's hands hover over Peter's back, suddenly frozen, before he swallows thickly and slowly brings them down to lightly touch the thin fabric of Peter's jacket. His eyes are stinging, and when he closes them, a few tears escape, running down his cheek.

“So you know each other,” Stephen says with a wry smirk when Peter pulls away. Erik is tempted to grab onto the bits of metal on Stephen's outfit – there's a very large metal disc on his belt that'd do nicely – and push him out of the foyer.

“Yeah, yeah, we do.” Peter looks at Erik, and there are tears in his eyes too. “Erik, there's something I need to--I mean--” He gives a nervous chuckle. "Sorry. It's just, I have something important to tell you, and I should've told you a long time ago, but it was hard to find a good time and--"

Erik watches Peter babble and takes pity on him. “I know, Peter.” He tries to smile at Peter reassuringly. There was a time he was able to do it well, but it feels somewhat rusty to him now. “I know you're my son.”

Peter gives him a watery smile. “Way to steal my thunder, man. Who blabbed?”

“You did, in a way,” Erik says. “Jean showed us what she'd been able to pick up from your mind after you were taken, and one of the memories was you telling someone about your father you sprang from the Pentagon when you were seventeen.”

“I mean, I could've broken other people out of the Pentagon too,” Peter protests weakly.

Erik raises an eyebrow. “And that your father tried to kill Nixon.”

Peter laughs. “Yeah, that one's all you.” He looks down at his hands, tugging slightly at the cuff of his jacket. "I'm sorry. I wanted to tell you sooner. I just...wasn't sure how to drop the 'you're my dad' bomb. Are you disappointed?”

Erik's smile falters. “Disappointed in you? Not at all. After all I've done, you'd have more reason to be disappointed in me, I think. Why wouldn't I be happy to have you as a son?”

“I don't know. All I can do is run really fast. You can, what, swap Earth's magnetic poles if you felt like it?” Peter says. "And I lived in my mom's basement until I was twenty-seven."

“You've also saved my life and lives of countless others,” Erik tells him, putting his hands on Peter's shoulders. “You shouldn't sell yourself short, Peter. I would tell you that even if you weren't my son.”

Peter gives him a relieved grin. 

“You're Peter's father?” Wanda asks, standing near Stephen. Erik wasn't even aware of her walking down the stairs. She looks at Erik curiously and then tentatively offers him a small, almost hesitant, smile. “It's nice to meet you. I'm Wanda.”

Peter grins brightly and grabs Wanda's hand. “So, back in our universe, I've got a twin sister. Her name's Wanda too. And this Wanda is the version of my sister that exists in this universe.”

Interesting that he didn't mention Wanda had been the one who'd brought him to this dimension as a substitute for her brother. “I know. Your sister came to the School after you went missing.”

Peter winced. “Oh man. Was she really worried?”

That was one way of looking at it. “Yes, I would say so.” He takes a breath. “Peter, your twin sister is a mutant as well, and very powerful. She can change reality.”

“What?” Peter says, looking thrown. He exchanges a perplexed look with Wanda. “But my sister doesn't have any powers. She would've told me if she was a mutant.” He looks down. “At least, I hope she would've told me...”

“Your sister was less than happy to see me at the School,” Erik confesses. “She threw me out of our universe and into the Nexus.”

“Wait,” Peter says, his face rapidly growing pale. “Threw you out? That's how you got here?”

Erik nods.

Stephen sighs and then makes a complicated series of hand gestures. The room goes dark, only glimmering threads of gossamer silver and small points of light illuminating it. 

“Whatcha doing?” Peter asks.

“Checking on the Nexus,” says Stephen. He motions with one hand at several of the thin threads knotted together near his head. “This one's the universe we're in,” he says, and then points towards a massive tangle of shimmering threads hovering next to it. “And that's the universe you and Erik come from.”

Peter looks around at the other points of light hovering around him and then to the snarl. “Okay, so why's ours look like roadkill?”

“Something's going on in your universe that's dangerously destabilizing the barriers between it and other universes.” The cluster representing Erik and Peter's universe flashes red, like a storm cloud, and then lurches outwards.

“Isn't that what you were trying to prevent in Westview?” says Wanda.

“Yup,” replies Stephen with a nod. He stares up at the representation of the Nexus. “This needs intervention. It's a little out of my jurisdiction, but I'm not sure if your dimension has a Sorcerer Supreme to deal with it.” He frowns slightly, and then waves the illusion away. “If it does, they're doing a terrible job.”

"Sorcerer Supreme?" Erik asks. "Is that anything like the Scarlet Witch?"

Peter glances at Erik, his eyebrows raised. "Where'd you hear about the Scarlet Witch? That's not something you would've gotten from Jean. Agatha only called Wanda that after I saw Jean in the Nexus."

Erik sighs and his eyes find Wanda's. "Pietro Maximoff told me."

"Pietro?" Wanda breathes, reeling back.

Something unexpectedly blares inside Erik's mind – hot, almost blinding in its intensity – and Erik lets out a shout, clutching at his forehead. A flood of emotions from Wanda pummels him like a tsunami – grief, a staggering sense of loss, regret but also love, and a deep longing for her family.

“Erik?” Wanda says, taking a step towards him, her hand reaching out to him. 

Erik drops to his knees, his fingers digging into his scalp. It's too much, far too much for him to bear. He tries to reach out for the helmet using his powers to block Wanda out, but it doesn't move from the table. He opens his mouth to beg her to stop, but all that comes out is a pained groan.

Wanda's not the one doing this to him. She's feeling the emotions, but she's not projecting them onto Erik. He's somehow picking up on them, like he has a window into her mind. 

Peter grabs onto his shoulder. “Erik, what's wrong?”

His focus abruptly shifts from Wanda to Peter and the worry shrieking inside Peter's mind like an alarm before the rush of emotions he's receiving abruptly vanishes, like someone hit a switch inside his head. A faint sense of embarrassment - not from Peter, Stephen, Wanda or Erik himself - flits across his consciousness, gone before he can pin it down.

Erik's still on the floor, his body trembling. For a moment, his legs feel numb and disconnected from the rest of him before feeling returns, pins and needles running down the lower half of his body. If there was any doubt remaining as to the cause of what he'd just experienced, it was gone.

Peter and Wanda help him up to his feet. Wanda looks at Peter, and then to Erik. “You're a telepath?” she says. 

Erik shakes his head, still too jittery to speak.

“His powers are over metal and magnetism,” Peter answers for him.

“C-charles,” Erik forces out, his head still aching. "It's Charles."

Chapter Text

“Charles?” Wanda says. She looks at Peter. “As in, your mentor Charles Xavier, the telepath?”

Peter nods. He still has his hands on Erik's arm and back, apparently worried he may fall again. “How's the Professor sending stuff into your head?” he asks Erik. “I know he's, like, one of the strongest telepaths on our Earth, but even Jean's Screaming Chicken had a hard time crossing universes.”

“I...don't know for certain how it's happening,” Erik admits. “It feels like him, but I think he's trying to hide his presence.”

Wanda glances at Stephen and then tightens her hold on Erik's arm. “I could go inside your mind,” she says to him quickly. “Only if you wanted me to, but I could help you see what was going on.”

Erik only has to consider it for a moment and then nods. “Please.”

A glowing red tiara appears over Wanda's forehead, her eyes flash red, and then her clothing changes into an armored costume strikingly similar in design to the Horseman armor Erik is wearing. It's dark red and black, like his, and the tunic of Wanda's armor is cut similarly to his at the waist.

Peter looks between the two of them and smirks, his eyes bright. “For not actually being Magneto's daughter in this universe, you two have the same taste in outfits,” he says to them.

Wanda smiles at Peter, and then reaches for Erik's temples, her fingers lightly pressing down.

“Charles?” she says quietly.

Between one blink and the next, Erik is standing in the study of Charles's mansion as it'd appeared in 1962.

Erik sucks in a startled breath.

Charles is sitting in one of the study's chairs, but he's both transparent and missing portions of his body, like a half-finished jigsaw puzzle. What little there is of Charles looks like how his mental projection from earlier had, right down to the dark blue cardigan. He looks up at Erik with only one eye and then scrambles out of the chair in panic. His body grows even fainter, and Erik rushes after him, trying to catch him before he disappears completely

"Charles, wait!" he shouts.

Erik reaches out to grab onto Charles's arm. For a moment, he worries that his hand will pass through Charles, that he'll disappear like vapor, but his fingers dig into the sweater Charles is wearing.

Charles squirms uneasily in his grip, not meeting Erik's eyes.

“What happened to you, Charles?” He lets go of Charles's arm when he's sure Charles won't vanish on him, taking hold of his hands instead. They look faint and ghostly against Erik's gloves. Charles's hands are as full of empty holes as the rest of him, unnerving even though the edges of the missing areas are bloodless.

Charles's hands quiver in Erik's. “I don't know.” He finally meets Erik's gaze with his one eye, the other half of his face simply not there. “I don't even know who I am. But I remember you, Erik. Your mind is calming.”

'Calming' is not how Erik would describe his own mind, not at all, but he holds his tongue. Presumably something about it is familiar to Charles, and if he has nothing else, anything familiar would provide some degree of comfort to him. Erik strokes the backs of Charles's hands gently. “You're Charles Francis Xavier. Whatever has happened, that's who you are.”

“Are you sure?” Charles asks unsteadily after a long moment.

“I know you, my friend,” Erik says, his voice soft. “Even if you don't know yourself right now.” He pushes a memory towards Charles, of a dark night in the sea, being dragged underwater by his powers as he tries to pull a submarine out of the water. Erik's vision starts to dim both from rage and lack of oxygen, until someone jumps into the water after him, wraps their arms around him and tries to tug Erik back to the surface. Erik struggles against them, unwilling to stop until he kills Schmidt.

'You can't. You'll drown. You have to let go. I know what this means to you, but you're going to die.'

The moment freezes, and the half-there Charles carefully examines the face of the man trying to rescue Erik. “That is me,” he says in surprise.

Erik's chest tightens. Something terrible must've happened to Charles for him to be so fragmented, to lose so much of himself.

The memory fades around them as Charles meets Erik's eyes. “Please. Will you let me look at your other memories of me? I think that seeing myself, even just through your eyes, would help.”

Erik hesitates. “Are you sure?” he says. The thought of Charles having to re-live the events of Cuba, Paris, Washington, D.C., and Cairo makes his stomach churn with shame. “You tend to be the one to suffer for my actions.”

“Well. I survived living through it, didn't I?” Charles smiles at Erik, guileless. Absolutely trusting.

It feels like a knife plunging into his gut.

“Barely.” Frowning, Erik still brings Charles's hands up to his temples and then closes his eyes. Then he lets Charles see everything.

It only takes a moment. Erik hears Charles sharply inhale, and one of his hands moves to gently cup Erik's cheek.

Erik blinks open his eyes, and stares at Charles's face. Some of the holes in Charles's projection are filled, and he doesn't appear as translucent as he had before. He has both eyes again, but there's still too much of him missing.

“Erik,” Charles says, and somehow he looks no less trusting of Erik than he did before. "Thank you, old friend."

In the Sanctum, Erik exhales and opens his eyes. Stephen, Wanda and Peter surround him with varying degrees of worry on their faces. Wanda moves her hand away from his head.

“What's the verdict?” Peter asks.

Wanda frowns slightly and then looks at Peter. “Erik isn't receiving telepathic messages from another dimension. There was another consciousness, but it was coming from inside Erik's head.”

“What?” Peter says, utterly confused.

Charles examines the most recent memories Erik has of him again, and offers a possible explanation to Erik.

'Are you sure?' Erik asks Charles.

'Well, no, but I think it's the only thing that really makes sense. It would explain why I'm missing so much of my memories.'

Erik clears his throat and looks at the others. “When my daughter confronted me, Charles was in my head telepathically. The connection broke when I was thrown out of my universe, I remember feeling it snap,” he pauses, lets out a breath. “Charles believes something of his mind remained in my mine even after the connection was cut.”

Stephen gives an unhappy-sounding hum. “Charles's mind splintered? Part in his body in your universe, part in your head here?”

“That would be our guess.”

Peter frowns. "What does that mean for the Professor's body back home if part of his mind's here with Erik?" he asks Stephen.

Stephen takes a moment to ponder Peter's question. "I'm not sure. It sounds somewhat like astral projection," he says. "I would think that his body is probably unconscious. But astral projection can be dangerous if it goes on for too long. Twelve hours is the longest I've done it, but I think a day is the maximum. Charles should be reunited with his body as soon as possible."

'Can't say I disagree,' Charles says. 'As hospitable as your mind is, I would like to be back in my own body.'

Erik reaches out a hand and easily floats his helmet from the table into his open hands, the metal singing to him like it's done for decades. He looks down at the helmet and frowns. Why had his powers failed him earlier? Had his daughter done something to damage his mutation?

'No. It's because of me,' Charles says unhappily. Now that he's not trying to hide, Erik can feel his familiar presence inside his mind again. 'I can use my telepathy somewhat while in your body, but it cuts off your ability to use your gift.' It's hard to name the emotion coming from Charles. Ashamed, possibly? If Charles had worried about being too intrusive with his telepathy earlier on the School's balcony, having to occupy a corner of Erik's brain is an invasion on a whole other level.

Not one that Erik finds unpleasant, however.

'I don't mind,' Erik tells him. 'But what happened with me feeling Wanda's emotions?'

Charles sighs. 'I don't have total control over my powers at the moment,' he admits hesitantly. 'It may be prudent for you to wear that helmet to mitigate any more of my slip-ups, and yes, I'm aware of the irony of telling you to put on the helmet.'

'But then you won't be able to use your powers at all,' Erik feels the need to protest, even though he knows Charles would be well aware of that.

'Erik, please, just wear it.'

Rather than get into an extended argument with Charles inside his head, Erik grimaces and slides the helmet on.

Peter glances at him and then raises an eyebrow, suddenly struggling to keep a straight face. “A-are you actually bickering with the Professor right now? Because you have that pissy look you get whenever he says something you disagree with.”

Erik is momentarily distracted by the sound of Charles bursting into laughter.

“I've talked to Wanda and Stephen and it seems like major world events stuff seems to line up pretty closely with ours even with no mutants here,” Peter says to Erik, unaware of the conversation happening inside Erik's head. “Or I guess, the history up to 1991, anyway. Oh, this universe is about thirty years ahead of ours. Welcome to 2023! Still no flying cars.”

'No mutants?' Erik repeats to Charles.

'Oh dear. That means the Cuban Missile Crisis still happened in this universe,' Charles muses.

'And JFK was assassinated,' Erik says to him. 'Or perhaps he never existed here at all.'

'Peter and his sister exist in this universe,' Charles replies. 'It may be that other mutants from our world are in this one, just...different.'

“Oh, wait, I have to show you guys something cool,” Peter says. Erik sees a blur zip up the stairs and back down again. Peter reappears with a wide grin on his face, holding something silver roughly the size of a deck of playing cards. “Look at this! It's a future music player that stores like, thousands of songs!”

Erik smiles. He may not have been involved much in his son's life, but even he knew that Peter never went anywhere without his Walkman. “It looks like something Hank would design.”

To Wanda and Stephen's obvious amusement, Peter excitedly demonstrates how his new "iPod" music player works to Erik, showing him exactly how many songs it has on it right now (1,683), and that it has music that doesn't exist in their universe yet.

“Getting back to the multiverse problem. There are a few possible points of entry into your universe,” Stephen says to Peter and Erik. “Westview is one, but the corresponding spots here where you two left your universe would also work.”

“So that would be the School?” Peter asks. His expression darkens slightly. “Or whatever it is here with no mutants in this universe.”

Erik frowns. He's still struggling to come to terms with a world without mutants, but Wanda clearly has powers very similar to what his mutant daughter has. “Wanda, you aren't...?”

“No, I'm not a mutant,” Wanda says, shaking her head. “What I can do were the result of years of being experimented on. So were Pietro's.”

Experimentation, like what Schmidt had done to him in the camps? Erik feels an unexpected flicker of sympathy for Wanda and her brother. “I'm truly sorry you had to suffer through that. During the War, I...” His throat goes dry, unable to find the words to continue.

Wanda gives a small nod and then looks down, her mouth pulled into a frown. Peter looks at Wanda curiously.

Stephen stares at Wanda, opening his mouth to ask her something, but then stops, apparently thinking better of it.

Erik wonders idly how much of his past Peter knows of. Several years ago, Erik had volunteered to speak to to the high school level history class about his experiences as a Jewish boy in Germany before and during World War II. Some of the X-Men had sat in to listen, but he can't remember if Peter had been one of them or not.

'Of course he was there,' Charles confirms, and then pulls up an image from the depths of Erik's mind – speaking in front of a class of solemn-faced teenagers, with Peter, Kurt and Ororo standing in the back of the room next to Charles. 'Do you really think he would've passed up a chance to learn more about you?'

He had thought that...he wasn't sure what he'd thought about Peter being present during that class. At that time he had primarily known Peter as the flighty, impulsive speedster who'd broken him out of the Pentagon and survived a hand-to-hand fight against En Sabah Nur with only a broken leg. It probably would've surprised him to see Peter there, patiently listening to Erik talk about something as terrible as the Shoah for an hour.

Stephen goes down one of the many hallways branching off from the main foyer and returns a few minutes later carrying a book that seemed to be made entirely of metal - even the pages. But something about the metal book makes the hairs on the back of Erik's neck stand on end. The book feels strangely slick and greasy and just generally foul to his powers, and whatever metal it's made from isn't one he's ever encountered before.

“Wong'll stay here to hold down the fort. What's the address of the School?” Stephen asks Peter.

“1407 Graymalkin Lane, Salem Center,” Peter rattles off. “It's in Westchester County.”

"Not far, then. Good." Stephen slips a large brass ring onto two of his fingers. He holds it out, and then makes a circular motion with his other hand. A spinning ring of sparks identical to what had teleported Erik from Westview appears in front of Stephen. The entrance hall of this dimension's version of the School is visible inside the ring.

'It looks like the mansion before it was rebuilt,' Charles says. 'Presumably, no mutants means no En Sabah Nur.'

Peter sticks his head through the ring of sparks, which for some reason unpleasantly reminds Erik of a lion tamer placing his head in a lion's mouth. He has to stop himself from yanking his son back through before Peter blips again, abruptly standing between Erik and Wanda. "I didn't see anyone," Peter says. "The place looks kinda abandoned."

"That works in our favor," Stephen says, floating into the portal.

Peter looks at Erik and grins. "After you."

Erik grimaces slightly, and then passes through the portal, standing on top of the Xavier family crest inlaid into the wooden floor of the mansion's main hall. Wanda and Peter step after him. Stephen makes another gesture with his hands and the portal disappears.

Cobwebs hung down from the chandelier and off the banister of the grand staircase. All the furniture in the entrance hall was covered by dusty white sheets. It almost looked like the entrance hall was ringed by lumpy, oddly-shaped ghosts.

Erik lets his awareness of metal sink into the floor beneath him, extending deeper into the ground, searching. All he could sense were the metal pipes, ducts and wiring he'd expect in a typical house, nothing that would indicate anything like the Danger Room or Cerebro hiding underground.

Peter is quiet as he looks around, a somber look on his face. "It's weird seeing the mansion like this," he says to Erik. "I've seen it exploding, and under construction, but I've never seen it deserted."

Erik can feel the unease coming from Charles. Unconsciously, his feet take him to the closed door of Charles's study. He presses down on the handle, and the door creaks open into an empty room, the few pieces of furniture remaining also covered in sheets. Dust covers the empty wooden bookshelves and a broken mirror hangs above an ash-covered fireplace. The stained glass Xavier family crest is barely visible at the top of the windows through the layers of grime covering the glass.

'It looks like no one has been here for a very long time,' Charles notes, a pang of melancholy in his mental voice.

The floorboards creak as the other three join Erik in the hallway outside the study. 

"You guys okay?" Peter says, and it takes Erik a moment to realize he's directing the question to both Erik and Charles.

'Are we?' Erik asks Charles in his head.

'I'm all right,' Charles replies, only a touch unsteady. 'But I think seeing the mansion in this state is bringing back more of my missing memories. Not very happy ones.'

For a few moments, Erik sees an angry, unshaven Charles with a ratty bathrobe hanging off him lurching down the hallway on unsteady legs, his eyes bloodshot. The vision disappears, leaving bile burning in the back of his throat.

"We did come here to return to our dimension," Erik states out loud to the others. "Perhaps we should get started with that?"

"Are we going to work out some sort of a plan first, anything?" Wanda asks, looking to Stephen and Peter. "Or are we just going to wing it?" 

Stephen shrugs, tucking the metal book under an arm. "It sounds like the catalyst for the other Wanda starting to break down her dimension was Peter disappearing from their universe. I'm hoping that showing her he's okay will be enough to snap her out of it before the damage she's doing becomes too severe to fix."

"But if her powers are out of control, and if she already doesn't like Erik..." Wanda trails off, biting her lip. "Maybe he should stay behind in this dimension?"

Erik understands her concern - if his daughter sees him again, she'll likely do something far more permanent than just punting him out of their universe - but he is not letting his son go back to their dimension without him. Absolutely not. Erik's never been patient, and he's not going to just loiter around the abandoned mansion waiting for the others to fix the problems caused by his daughter. The one person that might be able to convince him to stay is Charles, as right now Erik would be putting Charles's life at risk as well as his own, but he can sense that Charles wants to go back to their dimension just as much as Erik does.

"No. I'm going," Erik says simply.

Stephen looks at the other two and then opens the metal book, the corner of his cloak curling up to hold it for him. "Then let's get started," he says.

Chapter Text

Erik leads the group onto the balcony overlooking the front lawn of the Xavier estate, the doors unlocking and stiffly opening before him with a drawn-out screech of metal. He half expects to see his daughter hovering over the balustrade, but no one else is there, of course. The balcony is as abandoned as the rest of the mansion.

“Here,” he says.

Stephen floats onto the balcony, still reading the metal spellbook, Wanda and Peter behind him.

“Wanda, I'm going to need your help with this,” Stephen says, turning to face her. “Your magic is going to be powering most of the spell.”

“It's not going to hurt her, right?” Peter asks.

Stephen shakes his head. “The energy she'll be channeling won't be any more than what she was using in Westview, and this'll only last for a few minutes.”

Wanda grins at him. “It's all right, Peter. I can handle this.” Two orbs of red energy appear in Wanda's hands, her fingers moving above them in a manner almost unnervingly similar to the gestures Erik makes to manipulate magnetic fields. She rises from the ground and flies over to Stephen. The two converse quietly over the pages of the book.

Despite Wanda and Stephen's reassurances, Peter still looks somewhat unconvinced.

“You're worried,” Erik says.

Peter lets out a breath between his teeth. “A little,” he admits. “The last time Wanda used a lot of her magic, it almost killed her, and that was only a few days ago...”

“Why are you so concerned about this Wanda? She was the one who kidnapped you from our universe,” Erik says quietly. “This whole mess with the multiverse collapsing started with her.”

Peter looks at him sharply, his dark eyes narrow and suddenly cold. “Honestly? She reminded me of you,” he says. “This Wanda's been through a lot. She lost her parents during a bombing when she was ten, she and Pietro were lab rats for years, Pietro was shot to death, and then her robot boyfriend died not once, but twice, right in front of her. Or three times, now." He pauses, and then rolls his eyes. “And, get this, a crazy alien warlord snapped half of all life in this universe away five years ago after killing her boyfriend the second time. Wanda was one of the half that died, and it was only reversed a few weeks ago.” His mouth thins. “So yeah, she grabbed me from our dimension and started this whole thing. She didn't do it on purpose and she had no idea that this would happen."

Erik stares at Peter for a moment in stunned shock, before Peter winces and turns his head away, apparently embarrassed at his outburst. “Sorry,” Peter says. “I'd just...hoped you'd understand what she's going through. But that's a big ask. I get it.”

'I'm afraid you were asking for that one, my friend.'

Reflecting on it, Erik hesitantly agrees with Charles. 'I suppose it is hypocritical to berate Peter for forgiving Wanda when he's forgiven me for far worse.' Erik had not actually ended the world, but he'd come very, very close.

'Peter has quite the talent for kindness and empathy,' Charles says gently. 'My belief is that he gets it from his father.'

That statement is so ridiculous Erik can't help but chuckle out loud. Kindness? Few people can hold a grudge quite like he can. 'Charles, really--'

'He's also just as stubborn and bullheaded as you,' Charles says offhandedly. 'I'm surprised you never figured out he was your son from that alone.'

'Charles!'

'You are a better person than you think. I'm not sure you realize just how far you've come since En Sabah Nur, Erik. And even before then, if you'd truly hated all humans as much as you said, you wouldn't have found happiness with Magda.'

Erik lowers his head. Magda. His grief at the thought of Magda and Nina is a palpable hollowness in his chest, but no longer the smothering, all-consuming anguish it'd once been. He bites his lip. “I'm sorry,” he says stiffly to Peter. “I shouldn't have said that. It was uncharitable of me.”

Peter looks at Erik askance. “Wait. Are you actually apologizing?” He says suspiciously.

Erik nods.

“Huh,” Peter says, taking a moment to think about it, and then he snorts. “Did the Professor put you up to it?”

“He pointed out I was being an ass,” Erik says. “So did you.”

Peter looks at him, eyebrows raised. "And you listened to us?" he says after a moment.

“I do, occasionally,” Erik says, and then tries to change the subject. “ Now I've got a question for you. Doctor Strange seemed to recognize my name when I told him who I was. Do you know why?”

“Yeah,” Peter says, and then reaches into the inner pocket of his jacket, not meeting Erik's eyes. “So when it looked like I'd be staying here a while, Stephen offered to conjure me a fake ID for this universe. But 'Maximoff' is pretty distinctive and we didn't want anyone connecting it to what went down with Wanda in Westview. He asked me if I had something else I wanted to use instead, so...” He pulls out a thin blue wallet and hands it to Erik.

Erik's hand is shaking slightly as he opens the wallet, tugging out the driver's license Stephen had forged for his son. Peter is grinning broadly in the black-and-white photo. To the right of the photo is LEHNSHERR, PETER, D.

Something cracks inside him slightly. He can't say what it is about seeing Peter use his family name, even just as an alias, that threatens to break him. Perhaps that he had given up on the dream of ever having a family of his own after Nina and Magda had been killed, who had taken the name of his fake identity in Poland. Or that it in some way solidifies that Peter truly is his son. Or that it's almost like a glimpse of what might have been if he hadn't abandoned Marya, where he might have been able to have a hand in raising Peter and his sister. It's probably all three.

“Erik?” Peter says.

He tries to surreptitiously wipe the tears out of his eyes and then hands the wallet back to Peter. Peter puts the wallet back inside his jacket pocket and then puts his hand on Erik's arm.

“It's a lot all at once, I know,” Peter says. "This isn't how I'd wanted to tell you. But it is what it is, right?"

“What does the 'D' in your name stand for?” Erik asks a few moments, when he feels steadier.

“Oh! Django. After -”

Erik smiles. “Marya's father.”

Peter grinned back. “Yeah. He passed away when I was little. But he used to tease me about my hair. It was always silver.”

“I think that's it,” Stephen announces, closing the spellbook. He creates a portal next to him, and a Chinese man is visible, seated at a wooden desk, surrounded by shelves and shelves of books. Stephen places the metal spellbook on his desk. “We're heading out.”

The man nods and then looks at Stephen stonily. “I'd tell you to be careful, but under the circumstances recklessness is probably your only option.” His expression softens very slightly. “Please don't get kidnapped by aliens again.”

“I don't think that's in the cards this time, but with reality breaking, who knows,” Stephen says. “I'll tell you all about it when I get back.”

“Bye, Wong!” Peter shouts from the ground. “It was great to meet you!”

“Thank you for helping me,” Wanda says. “And for giving me and Peter a place to stay.”

Wong nods and then regards them all slowly, like he's committing them to memory, his gaze lingering on Stephen. “Good luck to you all.”

Stephen closes the portal. He stares at the empty space where it had been for a moment and then moves himself down to the ground, next to Erik and Peter. Wanda lowers herself as well, the red magic still curled around her hands.

“Alright, step one: we have to form a circle. Peter, Wanda, either side of me. Erik, between them,” Stephen instructs.

Once the three of them are in position, Stephen holds his hands out, extending all his fingers except for his middle and ring fingers, and a glowing golden mandala appears underneath their feet. Erik looks down at it. Writing is visible along the outside of the circle, but it's not in any alphabet he recognizes. The patterns of circles and lines inside the larger circle reminds him slightly of an astrolabe, or perhaps the levers and gearwheels inside a clock.

“Wanda, you're up,” Stephen says.

She twitches her fingers, red energy gathering into her palms. She clenches both fists tightly until red light is leaking out from between her fingers and then she snaps her hands open. Wanda's magic shoots out from her hands and into the mandala Stephen had created, gradually filling in the smaller circles inside.

Wanda lowers her hands, not appearing more than a little winded. Peter is watching her like a hawk, but stays put.

Stephen makes a series of hand gestures in front of his chest, and a bubble of red light rose up from the circle, enclosing them inside. Bands of golden magic appear wrapped around Stephen's forearms, the same runes from the mandala visible. “The engine's primed and the tank's topped off,” he says. “All that's left is to turn the key in the ignition. Everyone ready?”

Wanda nods. Peter gives an enthusiastic thumbs-up to Stephen.

Erik squares his shoulders, clenches his fist. “Yes.”

The bands around Stephen's arms grow brighter. “All right. Brace yourselves,” he warns. “This is going to get weird.”

Next to Erik, Peter lowers the goggles on top of his head down over his eyes.

Erik frowns. “Weird h--?”

But Stephen is already crossing his hands over his chest. A pulse of golden magic shimmers around Stephen, and then, as he'd promised, it gets weird.

It's a little like being launched into orbit from the deepest depths of the ocean in three seconds. Erik has never done LSD, having spent most of the 1960s locked inside a cell, but he imagines this is what an acid trip must feel like. Standing still but moving faster than the speed of light. Colors swirl and flash around him, too fast to see, and his stomach seems to drop straight into his feet. Erik squeezes his eyes shut in a desperate attempt to alleviate the nausea. The sensation reminds him slightly of Peter running him past the Pentagon guards, although that was a quiet Sunday afternoon walk compared to whatever this is.

Erik is suddenly glad he was unconscious for his first trip through the Nexus. Then his stomach clenches again, and all of Erik's thoughts immediately turn to keeping himself from throwing up inside the bubble.

'I think I can help. Let me just…' Charles murmurs and prods at something inside Erik's head. The waves of nausea pummeling him lessens, although it doesn't go away completely.

Erik sighs.

Peter lets out a loud whoop of excitement next to him. Erik cracks an eye open to look at him. Peter has a wide, slightly manic grin on his face, like he's riding a roller coaster. Erik turns his head slightly to look at Wanda and Stephen. Wanda's eyes are open, glowing red, but her mouth is scrunched up, on guard. Stephen looks… perfectly normal. Like he does this every day. Maybe he does. Stephen is a magician, after all.

The streaks of color surrounding their bubble veer away, one by one. The Nexus itself is still a churning, wild mass of colors, but the pressure Erik felt during blast off is gone.

“Aw,” Peter says, disappointed. He puts his goggles back on top of his head. “Why'd we slow down?”

“We needed to be moving fast to pass through the dimensional barrier,” Stephen says. “We're still going the same speed, but without the, uh, turbulence going through the barrier causes, it's a little less disorienting.”

“So we've reached the Nexus?” Erik says. His eyes linger on a small facetted purple crystal hovering in the midst of the Nexus, the sound of someone sobbing faintly audible from it. If Erik squints, he can just make out the shadow of a man inside, although his form seems...nebulous. A large bat wing explodes out from his back before being reabsorbed and a curled horn from his forehead vanishes the same way.

'I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry…' Erik can hear faintly. It sounds like Stephen's voice.

“Yes,” Stephen says slowly, also staring out at the crystal before tearing his eyes away. “It's going to take about ten minutes to reach our destination. But, uh, time moves oddly here, so - could be sooner, could be later.”

Peter considers this, and then grins. “You're sailing softly through the sun, in a broken stone age dawn, you fly so high...” he says to Stephen.

Stephen's lip twitches into a faint smirk. “Strange Magic, Electric Light Orchestra, Face The Music.” He thinks for a moment, and then says, “The trees are drawing me near, I've got to find out why, those gentle voices I hear, explain it all with a sigh.”

Peter laughs, and then gestures down to his t-shirt, pointing to the Moody Blues logo on it. “Dude, too easy. Tuesday Afternoon, The Moody Blues, Days of Future Passed! That was one of the first albums I had.” He counters with, “Do you have to be so hard to get? Especially with those emerald eyes. You might have been a neon lover, but you didn't have to advertise.”

Stephen's amused smirk has turned onto a full-on grin. “Up and Down, The Cars, Panorama.”

Feeling like he missed something, Erik looks to Wanda, who is watching Peter and Stephen volley song lyrics at each other with the attitude of someone who'd seen this before. “What exactly are they doing?” he says to her quietly.

“It's a game. They're trying to stump each other with their extensive music knowledge.” Wanda rolls her eyes good-naturedly. “They can keep this going for hours.”

“Music is that similar in our universes?”

“It seems to line up pretty closely,” Wanda says. “Peter got Stephen once with a disco song by Dazzler, but Peter said she was a mutant and her powers were a big part of her act, so...” She trails off and then shrugs.

'Oh, Alison Blaire! I remember her,' Charles says to Erik. 'Her mutation's changing sound into bursts of light. She's performed at the School a few times. The students adore her concerts.'

'You're starting to remember on your own. She wasn't in any memories I shared with you,' Erik says, pleased. The time Charles and Erik had spent together isn't much, considering how long they've known each other, but Erik had been a consistent visiter at the School after he'd helped rebuild it. He still doesn't recall ever seeing Dazzler there.

'Perhaps I just needed a jump start,' Charles says.

Wanda looks over her shoulder, staring out at the Nexus. "Pietro?" he hears her say softly.

“Are you looking for your brother, Wanda?” Erik asks her.

Her eyes flick to him, and she gives a short nod. “Once I gained my powers, I could always tell where he was, what he was feeling. When he died, I could feel the bullets tear through his chest, and then he was just...gone." She looks back out to the vastness of the Nexus, resting her hand against the barrier. “I can feel him, here in the Nexus somewhere. But I don't know if it's really him or...or if he's just another wish I made that came to life. If there's even a difference anymore.”

Erik looks at her. There were so many loved ones Erik had lost that he would do almost anything to see again - Nina, Magda, his parents. If he'd been gifted with Wanda's powers, if he could reshape reality itself to pluck living versions of them from other dimensions...the temptation to do so would be very strong. And if she hadn't even been fully aware she'd done it...

She smiles at him ruefully, although all of the bitterness seems to be pointed towards herself. “You don't like me very much, do you?” 

“I'll admit that your kidnapping Peter from our universe wasn't a very good first impression, but it's been pointed out to me that I shouldn't be passing judgment.” He pauses, realizing too late what he'd just said wasn't a denial. “I don't hate you.”

“Lots of people hate me, and with good reason. I brainwashed an entire town. Turned everyone who lived there into the extras of the sitcom I'd turned my life into.” Any thoughts that perhaps she's speaking figuratively vanish as she says, “I forced a new identity onto them, and turned everything black-and-white, like an episode of 'I Love Lucy'.”

Erik blinks. What a strange use of her ability to change reality. “...Why a sitcom?”

Wanda shrugs. “Growing up, sitcoms always made me happy. And I guess deep down I wanted a life where the worst thing that happened was trying to fit in with the neighbors or the washing machine overflowing, not innocent people dying because I made a mistake with my powers.” She gradually lowers her head as she speaks until she's staring down at the glowing lines of the mandala underneath them.

Erik looks at her evenly. If she's confessed that to him, it only seems fair to respond in kind. “I once joined forces with an ancient mutant who wanted to end the world,” he admits.

Wanda shakes her head slightly. “My brother and I worked with an evil robot who was going to wipe out all of humanity,” she says.

“Is that all? I took control of an army of mutant-killing robots to try and murder the President of the United States,” Erik replies. “Oh, and his Cabinet as well. If I'd succeeded, I would've created a nightmarish future for both mutants and humans.”

Wanda looks up at him. Erik feels a small grin pull at the corners of his mouth as something like understanding passes between them. Wanda gives him a slow, genuine smile. "Thank you," she says.

Erik rests his hand on Wanda's shoulder and gives it a light squeeze.

Peter is still in the middle of his game with Stephen, neither of them seeming to have overheard the conversation between Erik and Wanda. Peter, much like Charles, has always been a hero. He has never had innocent blood on his hands and he's never felt the need to make amends for what he's done, for all the lives he's destroyed. Peter does not have those kind of regrets, has never suffered the kind of loss that shatters you from the inside out. This Wanda has. And Erik knows how difficult it is, how hopeless and isolating it can feel, to try to claw your way back out again.

After a few more minutes of watching Peter and Stephen, a large haze of red light becomes visible in the Nexus outside their bubble. Stephen trails off in the middle of identifying the lyrics of 'Hotel California' by the Eagles, staring out at it.

Peter follows Stephen's gaze and turns to look. "Is that her?" he asks.

As they draw closer, Erik can make out that the haze is actually made entirely of thin, jagged lines of red magic tangled and melded around each other into one solid, shapeless mass. It's beautiful, in a way, but also solid and immovable, like it's made of stone, and it clearly doesn't belong here. The Nexus stutters around the magic instead of flowing like it does around their bubble. As they watch, the red magic extends outward, reaching towards them.

"Oh, sis..." Peter murmurs.

"Wanda?" Stephen asks without looking away. "It doesn't look like Peter's sister wants company."

Wanda's eyes have gone red again, burning brightly. Her magic flares to life in her hands. "I can get us through it."

Chapter Text

Wanda easily passes through the red barrier protecting Erik, Peter and Stephen from the Nexus, floating in front of it.

She twitches her fingers, her hands enveloped by the red glow of her magic. All Erik can see is her back, but she noticeably tenses as she raises her arms.

The obstruction in front of them wavers very slightly, but it's still coming towards them. The end suddenly splits apart into four jagged points, sharp as knives, all them aimed at Wanda's torso.

His daughter is going to kill Wanda.

Erik instinctively calls upon his power to protect her, but there's no magnetic field to draw upon in the Nexus. He feels the bits of metal Stephen and Peter have on their clothes roughly jerk towards him, but nothing else.

“Wanda!” Peter yells, pressing his hands against the barrier.

Wanda thrusts her hands out, a hexagonal shield of red magic shimmering into existence in front of her and the bubble. It shudders with the impact as the barbs strike it and rebound, but it holds.

With a shout, Wanda flies in front of their bubble with her shield, cutting a path for the bubble through the mass of red magic. The obstruction finally breaks apart with a sound like shattering glass.

Suddenly, it's gone entirely, replaced by the tops of sickly trees and a blood-red sky. The grassy lawn of the Xavier estate rushes towards them, except it's the color of rust.

“Hang on!” Stephen shouts, trying to make a series of complicated hand gestures.

“To what?!” Peter yells back, which is a very reasonable response. Stephen and Wanda didn't create the bubble with any grab-handles.

Still in front of them, Wanda flips around and places her shield between her own body and the bubble, pushing against it. She groans, and it takes Erik a moment to realize she's trying to use her shield to slow them down before they strike the ground.

Erik reaches for his powers again. They're out of the Nexus now, and he feels the Earth's magnetic fields respond to him this time, if somewhat sluggishly. He closes his eyes and concentrates, pushing against the bubble with his own powers to help Wanda decelerate it.

Between Wanda and Erik's efforts, the bubble gradually slows down until it's almost lazily drifting down to the balcony of Charles's mansion.

Wanda lands on the railing as the bubble sets down on the balcony. The red bubble disappears as it touches the stone.

This is supposed to be his dimension, but it's nothing like what Erik left. The air around them is stagnant and acrid, with no breeze blowing. The fine hairs at the back of Erik's neck prickle as he turns. Everything around them – the trees, the lawn - is either dying or in a state of decay. And there isn't any sign of Charles's students or the X-Men. It's impossibly still and quiet.

“Are you sure this is my dimension?” Peter asks, turning to Stephen and Wanda. “I mean, did we take a wrong turn somewhere?”

“This is it,” Stephen confirms.

"Then where is everyone?" Erik asks.

“She's altered it,” Wanda says, her eyes wide. “It's like what I did to Westview...”

Erik notices something glowing golden on the back of Peter's neck and frowns. He hooks a finger into the back of Peter's jacket collar and tugs it down, fully exposing the circular mark. It takes a moment for him to recall where he'd seen it, but it's that same symbol that was everywhere inside Stephen's building. “Peter, what is that on your neck?” he asks curiously.

Peter freezes, the tips of his ears turning red. “Uh...”

“That's the Vishanti's Blessing,” Stephen answers quickly. “It's a protection spell I'd placed on him a few days ago."

“I see,” Erik says. If they're all heading into this mess, at least Peter has Stephen's magic to help him. 

While Erik can mostly understand why Peter and Wanda would bond so fast, Stephen is the wild card. He and Peter had apparently fallen into an easy friendship over the few days Peter had been in the other dimension if what he'd seen a few minutes ago was any indication. Erik envies Peter's ability to win people over so fast – it was never a skill he was very good at. Even at his most charming and affable, Erik is always too…too...

'Intense,' Charles suggests tactfully.

That's it, too intense to be able to put others at ease. Sometimes that worked to his favor, like with Marya, Magda...even Charles, argueably. Most times it did not.

Peter cocks his head to the side. “You guys hear that?”

Erik listens. There's a faint sound coming from inside the School. A sobbing child. One of the students?

“Oh, that's not good,” Stephen mutters behind him.

“You always say that,” Peter says.

“Yeah, because it's always not good.”

Erik places his hands on the handles of the glass doors leading inside and tries to pull the doors open. Both doors shear off their hinges at the slightest movement. Erik latches onto them with his powers and catches them before they can strike the ground and shatter, setting them off to the side.

He lifts his head and peers inside the doorway. Instead of the familiar halls of Charles's School, what he sees is a bedroom, larger than the uniform dormitory rooms for the students of the School. There are a handful of plush toys and dolls scattered around the room, along with a few books and a drawing pad. A red plastic record player rests on top of the desk, a few albums nearby with one labelled 'MEET THE BEATLES' on top. On the floor sits a wooden dollhouse replica of Charles's mansion. A small bed is pushed into the corner, next to a window. A girl is curled up tightly in the middle of her bed with her back to them, on top of an orange coverlet, shaking and sobbing into the pillow.

“Sis,” Peter says quietly.

“Why is she a child?” Erik asks. She's only a few years older than Nina had been, nothing at all like the woman who'd hurtled Erik out of this universe 

Stephen gives a considering look back at the girl and then turns to Peter. “How old were you when you first developed your powers?”

“It was in 1966, so I was ten,” Peter says, and then looks at his sister. So does Erik – ten years old looks to be a good estimate for her current age. “You think that has something to do with why she turned herself back into a kid?” Peter says.

Stephen nods. “Her abilities probably appeared around the same time as yours.”

"Sis, hey," Peter says, taking a step towards her bed.

The girl curls tighter into a ball. Only her auburn hair is visible. She makes no attempt to look at Peter. “No, no. Go away,” she sobs. “You're just another fake, not my real brother.”

Peter stops, a look of shock on his face. “Of course I'm your brother, Wanda.”

“No, he's gone...” the girl breaks off into sobs.

“Wanda,” Peter tries again, his voice soft.

“Leave me alone!” she shrieks, and a barrage of red magic erupts from her back. They strike Wanda's hexagonal shield, which abruptly pops into existence in front of them. Wanda dissolves the shield as she steps past Erik to stand between the rest of them and the girl.

The girl on the bed is clutching her head now, and both her hands are glowing red. “S-stay back!” she repeats, only now she sounds afraid.

“It's all right,” Wanda says, but doesn't step closer to the girl. She bends down. “We're here to help you.”

"No, you're not." The girl trembles on the bed, and then sniffles. “You're the one who stole my brother away, aren't you?” she says, her voice flat. She sits up on the bed, clutching a white plush toy to her chest. “Peter vanished, and it's all because of you.”

“Sis, look at me. I'm right here,” Peter says, stepping forward next to Wanda. “Don't you recognize me?”

“You're not Peter,” the girl says bitterly, wiping at a reddened eye. “We're twins and you're way too old! I'm not stupid.”

“Peter's the right age, Wanda,” Stephen says. “You're supposed to be thirty-five, like he is.”

“Shut up,” the girl snarls at Stephen. Her eyes flash red.

When Stephen opens his mouth again, no sound comes out. His hands fly to his throat, and then he stares at the girl. She's taken away his ability to speak.

Wanda touches Stephen's neck, the glow of her magic briefly flaring underneath her fingertips.

“Thank you,” Stephen says quietly to Wanda, who nods and gives him a quick smile.

"You shouldn't use your powers against other people like that," Erik says to his daughter, and then braces himself for her to angrily hurl him back into the Nexus.

To Erik's surprise, she doesn't. She just sighs. “Mr. Vee told me I should be more careful with my powers too,” the girl says slowly. “But sometimes I don't even realize I've done anything...”

Peter looks at Stephen and Wanda out of the corner of his eye. “Who's Mr. Vee?” he says carefully.

The girl holds up the plush toy. It's sewn into a human shape, with two small blue button eyes and a shiny blue satin triangle in the center of its forehead. For some reason, it has a gauzy white cape and embroidered detailing on its chest and face that almost make it look like it's wearing armor. “Mr. Vee. He's a robot, but he's nice to me. I like him.” Her expression darkens. “Most of the others aren't as nice...”

'Others?' Charles repeats.

“Oh my god,” Wanda whispers, staring at the toy. “Vis?”

Both Stephen and Peter visibly start at that. The name doesn't mean much to Erik, although the mention of Mr. Vee being a robot does. Wanda's husband was an android, wasn't he?

“That's Vision?” Stephen says in disbelief. 

“Shit,” Peter says, his face pale, and then points to the bookcase, then the dresser. “Erik, look...”

There's a firebird marionette hanging near the bookcase, and on top of the dresser, three plush toys that are all blue with yellow eyes – one covered in fur with a tiny pair of wire glasses, another with embroidered scales and red yarn hair, and the last with pointed ears and a long tail.

Jean. Hank, Raven and Kurt.

His eyes fly to a fashion doll with a white mohawk on top of the desk. A plastic action figure of a cyclops with a translucent red eye on a bookshelf near the firebird.

Ororo. Scott.

She's turned the X-Men into her toys.

'Erik,' Charles says urgently inside Erik's mind, but he's already bringing his hands up to yank off the helmet, to set Charles's powers free. Erik's fingers unconsciously press against his temples.

Charles's telepathy oppressively settles over the room as soon as the helmet is off Erik's head. Peter doesn't react, apparently used to it, but Wanda and Stephen both shift on their feet uneasily and turn to look at Erik, able to tell the strange sensation they're feeling is coming from him. Erik's daughter is completely unreadable, a person-shaped void, easily blocking Charles out again.

Undaunted, Charles tries to reach out to the toy X-Men and the adult Wanda's husband with his mind, but there's nothing there for his powers to latch onto. Frowning inside Erik's head, he narrows his focus to just the plush doll of Raven, the mind he's known the longest, but he still can't hear any whisper of her thoughts.

Erik's vision whites out as a splitting pain shoots through his head. This sort of power wasn't meant for him and for a moment he's afraid something will burst inside his brain if it lasts much longer. 

Charles recoils and pulls himself back. The pain disappears, and the room swims back into view. 'Sorry, darling. The last thing I want is to hurt you.'

'Were you able to pick up anything from them?' Erik asks.

'Sadly, no. My mutation doesn't work when there's no actual flesh-and-blood brain to read,' Charles says. 'And it appears she turned them entirely into toys. Nothing in their heads but plastic and fluff at the moment.'

This doesn't sit well with Erik. 'Then how can she hear them?'

'She was the one who transformed them. Her powers follow their own rules.' Erik can feel the smallest hint of a grimace from Charles.

Peter picks up the Ororo doll carefully. From the furious blinking of his eyes and his trembling mouth, he's trying very hard not to cry. Out of the younger X-Men, Ororo was the one Peter had seemed to be the closest to. “Wanda, what did you do to them?” Peter asks unsteadily.

“I didn't want to be alone.” The little girl clutches Mr. Vee across her chest tightly. “Now nobody can leave me ever again.”

Chapter Text

The adult Wanda is the first to react to the younger girl's words. “Please,” she says gently, pleading. “Don't do this. I-I know that you're lonely, and upset, and you think this will make you feel better, but it won't. These are real people you've trapped - your brother's friends - and all you're doing is hurting them, Wanda.”

Erik's daughter blinks, and then the expression on her face hardens. “You don't get to lecture me,” she mutters darkly, glaring at the other Wanda. A wisp of red light appears above the girl's forehead, mimicking the shape of the adult Wanda's crown before it fades.

Wanda's lips thin, but she doesn't look away. “I'm not proud of what I've done,” she says. “And I'm sorry that I took your brother away from you. I know what it feels like to lose your twin. My brother, Pietro, died years ago and..it’s been so difficult without him. But your brother's still alive, Wanda. He's right here.” She gestures to Peter, who gingerly sets Ororo back down on the desk.

“That’s not him. You're lying,” the girl says, tightening her grip on the Vision plush. Outside, thunder rumbles, shaking the windows in their frames. “Stop lying to me!”

Wanda shakes her head and puts her hands up. “I'm no--”

“Yes, you are!” Erik's daughter cries out, her eyes on fire. “You're lying! You're all lying!”

A red maelstrom of light erupts from the girl. The hexagonal shield appears in front of Wanda again, but as Erik blinks, it shatters from the strength of the girl's fury. Wanda stumbles backwards into Peter with a cry of pain, a thin line of blood trickling down her nose.

“Wanda!” Peter says, grabbing onto the adult Wanda’s arms to steady her. 

“I’m all right,” she says to Peter, gently wiping away the blood with the back of her hand. “She’s stronger than I expected.”

“Home field advantage?” Stephen suggests. “This is her world, after all.”

The girl is sobbing again. “I just, I can’t stop it,” she says. “It explodes out of me…”

Lightning strikes outside. Erik's head turns towards the doorway leading to the balcony outside. Glowing white fissures are starting to form in the sky, radiating outward from a jagged crack, like a shattered mirror. At the center of the creak is a familiar, nauseating whirl of color that appears to be seeping through. The Nexus. He can see the cracks spreading, chipping away at this dimension as he watches.

“That doesn’t look good,” Erik says.

Stephen, already quite pale, goes even paler. "Oh, crap," he mutters. He looks to Wanda and Peter, clearly torn between staying with them or trying to keep the crack in the universe from growing larger. “If the dimensional barrier falls, everything in this world will be pulled into the Nexus.”

“Then I guess someone should shore up the barrier,” Peter says, jerking his head towards the crack. “It’s OK, Stephen.”

Stephen rests a hand on Peter’s shoulder for a moment, locking eyes with him. “Good luck,” he says, and then quickly flies out of the room. Erik can see thin golden lines encircle Stephen's arms as he speeds towards the tear. A moment later, one of Stephen's glowing seals appears over the crack in reality, flickering slightly.

‘I don’t think the good doctor’s going to be able to hold that closed for long ,’ Charles says. Erik has to agree. From the way the seal is flickering, Stephen’s obviously struggling to stop the crack from growing larger.

Erik has never felt so helpless. Reality itself was breaking apart outside the School and there was nothing he could do. He's failed on a level almost incomprehensible to him.

'This isn’t failure. You’ve done everything you could to save this dimension,’ Charles says.

'It still wasn't enough.'

'I'm not going to sit here while you chastise yourself for not succeeding at a nearly impossible task. Erik, you have always fought your hardest for those you care about. '

'Yes, and all that ever accomplished was making bad situations even worse. My rage and grief already almost ended everything, Charles, or have you forgotten Cairo again?'

'Oh, my friend, our dimension is tearing apart at the seams,' Charles says gently. 'What do you think could be worse than that?'

'We could spend our last moments before our universe collapses as a child's horseshoe magnet, ' Erik replies dryly. Knowing his daughter’s hatred of him, he’s slightly surprised she hadn’t stuck him down or transformed him into a toy as soon as he’d entered the room.

The adult Wanda's shimmering magic appears floating above her hands. She moves her fingers contemplatively, staring down at it and then looks back at the girl on the bed as the magic in her hands grows brighter.

“Wait, what are you doing?!” the girl wails. 

“It’s all right, Wanda. I think I can reverse what you did to Peter’s friends,” the adult Wanda says with a slight smile. Her eyes flash scarlet, and then she throws out her hands, a bright light surrounding her. She hovers slightly above the floor.

The transformed toys that had been the X-Men in the girl's room all pulse red in response, floating towards the adult Wanda. They hover in orbit around her as she moves her fingers experimentally above her orbs of magic, apparently examining the spell Erik’s daughter had cast on them.

Erik's eyes are drawn to a bright light coming from his daughter's bed. The Mr. Vee plush is also glowing red like the others, but the girl is holding it tightly in her arms, refusing to let go even as the adult Wanda's powers try to tug it away.

“Stop it! That hurts!” the young girl shouts, large tears rolling down her cheeks. “Why won’t you just leave me alone?!” A haze of chaos magic began to whirl around Erik’s daughter, her face drawn tightly in pain.

The adult Wanda lowers her hands in concern, the red light fading slightly from the ring of toys floating around her.

“Wanda!” Peter shouts.

Several things happen at once, seemingly too fast for Erik to see.

A bolt of crackling red light shoots through the adult Wanda's chest, like an arrow. For a moment he sees Magda and Nina, impaled by the same arrow, and his mind freezes.

The toy X-Men all drop to the wooden floor, the red magic surrounding them gone.

The adult Wanda at the center of them has disappeared.

Peter is now no longer beside Erik but in the open entrance to the balcony, skidding to a stop with his arms cradling something to his chest. Erik can see the golden mark of protection on the back of his neck glowing brightly.

Peter slowly raises his head up. Clutched in his arms is a floppy rag doll with button eyes, reddish-brown yarn hair, and a felt version of Wanda’s distinctive red crown sewn to its forehead.

“W-wanda. Oh, fuck,” Peter chokes out, his eyes watering, and then he meets Erik’s horrified stare as tears run down his face. “Dad. I, I wasn’t fast enough...” 

Erik’s heart is thudding against his ribcage. He holds out his hands to Peter, and his son abruptly appears in his arms, hugging Erik with one arm while his other hand is still clutching the ragdoll Wanda.

“I didn't mean to do that. I'm sorry,” the girl on the bed whispers.

“You have to turn them all back,” Erik says to his daughter firmly. “This isn’t right.”

“How?!” The girl protests. “I don’t know what I did!”

“You have to at least try, Wanda. You can’t turn living people into your playthings.”

“I know I messed up! That’s all I do!” The girl lets out another ear-piercing scream of rage as another wave of chaos magic pulses from her. “Stop telling me that!”

Blood red ribbons of magic lash around Erik, yanking him off the ground to dangle in mid-air like a fish caught on a line. He grunts and tries to move his hands, a bead of sweat running down his brow, but he's completely immobilized by the girl's powers. He can't even lift the metal in the tone arm of the record player a few feet away.

A cloud of noxious red is encircling Erik’s daughter, her eyes burning with hatred. The strings around his neck tighten slightly, burning across the skin unprotected by the collar of his Horseman armor.

It was only through sheer luck that Erik had survived her throwing him into the Nexus. Whatever happens next, he doesn’t expect to be that lucky again.

His only regrets are that his son will be forced to watch him die, and that Erik’s death will kill Charles at the same time.

‘I’m sorry ,’ Erik thinks to Charles with regret. Yet again, all he’s done is hurt Charles. 

‘Don’t be. There’s no one else I’d rather have with me, if this is the end.’ 

“Dad!” Peter shouts, panic in his eyes. “Wanda. Please, I’m begging, leave Erik alone.”

“Peter, run. Get out of here,” Erik grinds out, looking down at Peter.

“Screw that!” Peter says, his voice breaking. “I'm not letting you get hurt!”

Erik chuckles weakly, his eyes softening as he focuses on his son. “Don't think you have much of a choice...”

“Goddamn it,” Peter sobs. He glances around the room, at Stephen outside struggling to keep the crack closed, and then back at his sister. “Sis, please. You have to stop!”

The girl looks down at Mr. Vee, frowning, and then tosses the plush doll to the ground, clamping her hands over her ears. “I don’t know how! Just shut up, shut up, shut up!”

“I’ve heard that before.” A grim smile appears on Peter’s face as he puts the ragdoll Wanda down on the desk. “You want me to shut up, you’ll have to catch me first.”

A bolt of chaos magic shoots out from the girl, heading for Peter. It strikes the empty floor. Peter laughs mockingly at her from the other side of the room, leaning against the bookcase. “Nope, not there!”

The girl gives a petulant frown, and another burst of her magic bangs into the bookcase, scorched pages fluttering down, but Peter’s moved in front of her bed. “It’s really hard to hit a moving target, right?”

“Ugh. You’re so annoying!” the girl shouts.

The next magic blast strikes Peter in the chest, and he’s propelled backwards into Erik by the sheer force of it. Then they both are falling backwards, Erik's back slamming against the wooden floor as the red strings restraining him suddenly disappear.

Peter groans next to Erik. “She caught me.”

“Peter?!” Erik shouts, clutching at Peter’s arm tightly. He sits up and tries to see if Peter has any visible injuries. “Are you hurt?”

“Hey, Dad. I'm fine,” Peter says weakly. He taps the back of his neck, where Stephen’s mark of protection is. “Just winded.”

“...is that really you, Peter?” the girl says on the bed faintly.

Erik's eyebrows climb up his forehead.

Peter grins faintly, giving the girl a small wave from the floor. “Hey, sis. Took you long enough.”

“Only my brother could be that irritating," she says with a small grin, which quickly dims. "I’m sorry, Peter. I didn’t...I-I don’t know what’s happening.”

Peter gets up and holds out his hand to help Erik stand. "I know."

“Please,” Erik says. “Wanda. Hear me out.”

The girl looks at him, her dark eyes cold but thankfully free of red magic.

“I know that you hate me for…all I’ve done. Your hatred’s entirely justified. And I was a terrible father to you. But if I’d known about you and Peter, nothing would’ve kept me away.”

“Yeah, just so you could make us the next generation of mutant terrorists,” his daughter sneers, the expression too mature for her ten-year-old face.

It's a low blow and it finds its mark. But Erik exhales and continues on.

“No. Because you're both my children,” he says simply. “Everything I’ve done, at its core, has been for those I consider my family. My parents. Mutantkind. My wife and daughter. I spent years thinking that I was the last surviving member of my family, when it turns out I wasn't nearly as alone as I thought.” He sits down on the bed next to her, sweeping his cape to the side. “Until a few years ago, I never considered starting a family of my own.”

The girl stares at him, although her sneer has mostly faded into something more neutral. “What changed your mind?” she asks.

“After Washington, D.C., Charles made me consider that perhaps mutants and humans could co-exist mostly peacefully. I fell in love and married a human woman I met in Poland, Magda. She gave birth to a daughter. Her name was Nina.” He smiles wistfully. “She would've turned seventeen a few weeks ago, if she and my wife hadn’t both been killed.”

“Oh,” is all the girl says.

“Not helping Marya raise you and Peter is something I’ll always regret. Always. But those years are gone. All we have is whatever lies ahead," Erik says. "But Wanda, if you don’t help us set things right, it’s all going to end, right now.”

Erik’s daughter gapes up at him, her eyes wide. “I don't know how to fix it.” She looks through the open doorway and flinches at the cracks in the sky that Stephen is still trying to contain. “I can’t control my powers at all. When I get angry, things begin to happen. I think all I can do is just make everything worse.”

Erik swallows thickly. Maybe he and his daughter are more similar than she’d like to admit.

“Sis, the other Wanda can help you,” Peter says hurriedly, pointing at the Wanda ragdoll. “I mean, you’re both Scarlet Witches. Maybe togeth--”

“Oh, Peter. Don’t you see? None of that matters anymore,” the girl slides off the bed, walking past Peter to the center of the bedroom. When she turns around to face Erik and Peter, she abruptly becomes an adult again, dressed in the same burgundy coat and red dress from when she first appeared at the School. Her hands look oddly discolored, the skin stained gray. “What I did and what the other Wanda did, it’s going to unmake this world. There's no stopping it now.”

“I don’t believe that,” Erik protests, standing up from the bed. “We're still here. We can try to undo this instead of watching everything fall apart.” He knows Charles can pull out a stirring speech at the drop of a hat when all seems hopeless, but this is much harder than he’d imagined.

Wanda shakes her head and then looks at Erik with confusion. "This world's taken so much from you. Why do you even want to save it?"

"Because I know the future can be better, Wanda. The two of you are proof of that." Erik offers her a wan smile. "It's the only thing that's kept me going, sometimes."

She looks down at her gray fingers and sighs. “Y’know, this is why I didn’t want these powers in the first place. They’re just too big for me to deal with. Maybe they’re too big for anyone.” Wanda raises her head, her lips trembling. The visible skin of her neck is quickly turning the same ash-gray as her hands, advancing up her chin and across her cheeks, seeming to suck all the life from her. She shudders as streaks of white appear in her auburn curls.

“Wanda, no,” Peter says, grabbing onto her arm to help keep her standing. “Your power’s draining you. That happened to the other dimension’s Wanda too. You have to undo the changes you made to reality or it's going to kill you.”

Wanda sighs, and closes her eyes. Peter lets go of her as she brings her hands together, but no magic sparks from her fingers. She moves her hands again and then shakes her head. “Looks like I’m all tapped out,” she says quietly. Her eyes are glowing a dull red, but all her visible skin has turned a flat gray. As she moves her fingers again, cracks form along her skin and her entire hand flakes off into a cloud of dust. In shock, Wanda slowly lowers her arm and more gray dust pours from the sleeve of her coat.

“Wanda?” Erik says, unsure of what’s happening to her. The coat sleeve hangs from her shoulder, clearly empty. Erik cautiously places his hand on her shoulder, afraid that gentle touch will break more of her. Even her tears carve small trails into her cheeks. She lowers her head, all of her hair now bleached white.

“Sis,” Peter says quietly, taking his sister’s remaining hand gingerly. “There’s gotta be something we can do…”

Wanda looks to her brother and then her father, deep cracks splitting across her face as she lets out a faint sob. “I’m so sorry.” She throws her arm around Peter, remaining whole for just a heartbeat before her entire body collapses into ashes.

Chapter Text

Gray cinders drift in the air where Erik's daughter had been only moments earlier.

Peter and Erik stand next to each other, Peter's arms still extended out to hold his sister. He's frozen, as still as Erik has ever seen him. 

Erik is numb, his body seemingly moving by itself. Some part of him is darkly amused that he's apparently so toxic that his children now die within hours of his first finding out about them. 

Peter starts to sway on his feet. Erik takes hold of his arms and carefully guides him down to the floor before he falls over.

A horrible crash, like a hundred mirrors breaking, sounds from outside, drawing their attention back to the fissures in the dimensional barrier. The spiderweb of cracks in the sky has grown bigger, so much bigger, and Erik realizes it’s finally become too much for Stephen's magic to contain. The gold light of Stephen's mandala over the center of the cracks flickers like a guttering candle and then fizzles out completely.

“Stephen!” Peter shouts.

Erik’s heart falls even further. Stephen had been their dimension's last hope. 

A moment later, Stephen drops out of the sky, but before Erik can think to use his powers to slow his fall, Stephen's red cloak snaps out taut and catches his limp body. The cloak floats Stephen back to Peter and Erik horizontally, carrying Stephen like he's on a stretcher. It gently deposits Stephen onto Peter's lap, his head resting on the tops of Peter's thighs. Stephen's eyes are closed and his face slack. 

Peter’s breath quickens and becomes ragged with panic. Erik quickly realizes why he’s so afraid.

Charles briefly touches Stephen's mind just enough to confirm Stephen’s not about to wither away from overusing his magic. The gentle rise and fall of Stephen’s chest indicates he's nothing more than momentarily unconscious.

“Peter. He’s all right,” Erik says quietly, placing a hand on Peter’s back.

Peter gives a short nod to show he’s heard. Letting out a breath, Peter lowers his head to Stephen's until their foreheads nearly touch. 

Stephen stirs and slowly opens his eyes, looking up at Peter's face above him. “Hey,” he says hoarsely to Peter. He glances to Erik and then tries to look around the room, still magically transformed into the childhood bedroom of Erik’s daughter. “There's your dad, but where are the Wandas?” 

Peter recoils like he’s just been punched in the stomach. One of Peter’s hands drops to the dust surrounding them on the wooden floor, and then he turns his head to look at the Wanda doll on the desk and the ring of X-Men toys lying around them.

Stephen's gaze follows Peter’s. When he sees the ragdoll with the other Wanda’s tiara, he inhales sharply. His face softens with sympathy. One of his heavily scarred hands reaches for Peter's, covering it. “I’m sorry...”

“Don't apologize to me.” Peter says with a brittle smile. “I'm the reason you got dragged into this mess. Stephen, you need to go back to your own dimension. Can you do that?”

“Oh, come on. I’m not abandoning you and your universe just to save my own ass,” Stephen says flatly, rolling his eyes.

“But if the barrier falls, it'll take you out too,” Peter says, his voice wobbling. “And I don’t…” He trails off before swallowing and trying again. “I really don’t want you to die.”

“Thanks, but you think I want to watch you die?” Stephen shuts his eyes, letting his head drop back down onto Peter’s lap. “Besides, I've died many, many times,” he says, his voice hollow. “What's one more?”

Peter’s fingers start to nervously smooth  a loose lock of Stephen’s hair curling over his forehead. “God, Stephen. That’s the saddest fucking thing I’ve ever heard,” he says through a thin laugh threatening to turn into a sob.

Erik turns away from his son and Stephen, oddly feeling like he's intruding on something extremely personal. Instead, he bends down and gingerly picks up the Raven plush toy lying near his feet, staring into her plastic yellow eyes. He carefully collects the rest of the X-Men from where they’d dropped after the other Wanda’s attempt to turn them back, careful to not grab them too hard or hold them by their arms, legs, or in Kurt’s case, tail. From what his daughter had said, they were all somehow still aware of what was happening around them, just trapped inside unmoving bodies of plastic and fabric, and not especially happy with what she had done to them. 

He spies the white Mr. Vee (Vis? Vision?) plush near the bed, where his daughter had thrown him down. He carefully picks him up and then collects the Wanda doll from the desk.

Erik arranges the X-Men, Vision and Wanda around Peter and Stephen. At least they’re all together now, and not lying discarded on the floor like an afterthought.

“I’m sorry,” Erik says to them quietly. For a moment, he feels somewhat silly addressing a row of toys, but these aren’t really toys - they're thinking, feeling people who have no way to communicate with them and must be quite scared and upset. The least he can do is treat them with as much dignity as he can. “I think this is all we can do for you now. I don’t know how we can change you back.”

Jean the phoenix marionette topples over onto her side from where he’s placed her between Kurt and Scott.

Erik sighs and then kneels down to sit her upright again. ‘I feel like I’m rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic,’ he thinks to Charles.

Charles lets out an unhappy sigh inside Erik’s mind, but doesn’t disagree with him. Even Charles, the eternal optimist, seems to be viewing their situation as hopeless.

With the X-Men and the other world's Wanda effectively taken off the board, and Stephen's magic depleted, was there anyone left who could save their universe?

No.

But he wasn't going to let his dimension vanish without a fight. Not when his child’s life is at stake.

“Peter,” he says. 

Peter looks up at Erik.

Erik smiles down at him. “I'm so very proud of you and all that you've done. And I'm glad that you're my son.”

A small crease of concern appears between Peter’s eyebrows. “Da--?”

Erik flies out of the room, towards the cracks. The wind whistles past his ears – it's been a while since he's flown so fast without his helmet, but he still hears Peter's voice crack as he shouts out Erik's name.

When Erik had been a child, he had struggled to move the coin on Schmidt's desk. When he'd been a younger man, it'd taken Charles to help him turn the satellite dish. His powers had grown as he'd gotten older – moving the stadium in Washington, D.C., destroying Auschwitz and then almost destroying the world. It had been eight years since he'd used his ability to that extent and he wouldn't have En Sabah Nur boosting his powers this time. 

But maybe it would be enough for what he had in mind.

If he was going to die today, so be it. He's been outrunning death since he was a child; it's only a matter of time before it finally caught up to him. But he'd do his damnedest to keep the rest of his world from dying with him.

The cracks ran across the red sky, jagged and multiplying, bleeding the rainbow of colors from the Nexus. Voices, just barely perceptible, whisper around him where the barrier is weakest.

'Erik,' Charles says. Warmth wraps around him like a soft blanket. There's so much love-pride-affection there it nearly overwhelms his senses. 'Whatever help you need from me, it’s yours.'

Erik sighs. 'Oh Charles. Right now, I wish you were anywhere but with me.' 

He feels Charles's rueful smile. 'And I wish you weren’t about to sacrifice yourself to save our dimension. But when have either of us gotten what we really wished for, my friend?'

 'Never.'

Erik reaches down, down, down with his powers, past the veins of metal in the Earth's crust that light up to his senses, straight to the molten iron and nickel buried deeply within the Earth. He anchors himself to it until he's immovable as a mountain, and reaches out to the invisible magnetic fields, gathering them around him like a shield. They curl and twist across his gloved hands and he lets out a thin hiss. Levitating himself or individual lumps of metal is one thing, bending so much of Earth’s natural magnetic fields to his whim is another. It's a strain on his abilities, a low burn inside of his mind, but it's not unbearable. Not at all. 

Charles doesn't ask what he plans to do, and for that Erik is grateful. He only has a wisp of an idea himself. Odds were the dimensional barriers had been formed naturally between universes. Maybe he would be able to manipulate it with his powers.

He moves his fingers around the magnetic fields he's turned toward him, idly considering how likely this is to fail. He doesn't know if his power will be enough to prevent the Nexus from consuming his universe completely if the barrier falls. It probably won't. And he'll be the first one dragged into the Nexus before it swallows the rest of his dimension.

But he'd meant what he'd said to his oldest daughter: Erik will always try to protect those he loves. He will always work towards a better future for them. 

Any future, now. 

'True focus lies somewhere...' Charles says, echoing a memory.

“...between rage and serenity,” Erik finishes out loud.

He thinks of his parents, and how'd he'd lost them both to genocide. He thinks of the women and men he's loved, all those he's helped and those he's hurt. He thinks of the children of Charles's school, the team of X-Men making the world safer for humans and mutants alike. He thinks of the other Wanda and her children, and Pietro. Then Erik thinks of his own children – Nina, Peter and Wanda.

‘The pure integral form /Austere and silver-dark / Is balanced on the storm / In its predestined arc,’ Charles whispers.

Erik brings his hands up, feeling every ripple and eddy of the magnetic fields surrounding him. He’s distantly aware of a loud ringing in his ears nearly drowning out all other sounds. His sight whites out for a moment as he grabs hold of the magnetic fields before him with his powers and begins to sculpt them into something else.

Filling in the cracks of the dimensional barrier, smoothing them over. Sewing the fissures closed with a row of neat, small stitches, like how his mother would fix a hole in his clothing when he was a young boy.

But to Erik and Charles’s mutual dismay, it's not enough. Erik’s repairs split open again as soon as his focus wavers even slightly from the cracks. All he's doing is sticking his finger in the dam.

Erik grinds his teeth and continues working. Fine. If he can’t fix the barrier, he can at least try to keep the Nexus from swallowing his universe whole for as long as possible.

He thinks of his daughter’s body crumbling into dust again, her powers consuming her. He’d probably give himself a stroke long before his own abilities hollowed his body out. 

‘I couldn’t save my parents. I couldn’t save Magda and Nina and Wanda. If I succeed at nothing else in my life, please, let it be this.’

Tears run down Erik's face. He can’t see anything but white. Grunting, he squeezes his eyes shut.

“Erik,” multiple women’s voices say in unison, layered on top of each other.

He turns his head slightly. 

A woman made of red light hovers beside him. He sees the outline of the Scarlet Witch’s tiara over her forehead clearly but the features of her face are shifting and indistinct. It could be his daughter’s face. It could also be the other Wanda's, but he can't make their voices out from the many the woman speaks with. The Scarlet Witch holds out her hand to him, the fire of her wonderful, terrible magic hovering above her upturned palm. “You don't need to do this by yourself.”

Erik doesn’t hesitate. He grabs onto the Scarlet Witch’s hand. Her magic burns against his gloved hands and then his mind splits.

He’s not alone. There are so many of him from throughout the dimensions connected by the Nexus, people he might’ve become if circumstances had been different. He sees dimensions where his actions are responsible for snuffing out all life on Earth, balanced by just as many where he’s the world’s unlikely savior in the face of impossible odds. In some worlds he’s born an ordinary human and is murdered in Auschwitz without reaching adulthood. These are all lives he’s never lived, alongside friends and family and bitter enemies he’s never seen before. There’s an infinite number of him out there, that answer when he calls out to them, almost as many as there are dimensions, even if the others he sees sometimes answer to different names:

Max.

Erika.

Magnus.

Enrique.

Alone, Erik will fail. But he’s not alone here, his mind opened to the others as their minds are to him.

Help is offered to him and Charles willingly, and he accepts it.

Erik draws on the powers of the others like him from different worlds throughout the Nexus. For a moment they all touch across the multiverse, joined together, and united they are stronger than the crumbling dimensional barrier. More powerful than the pull of the Nexus trying to swallow his dimension whole. He is iron alloyed into steel.

And when all of them and the Scarlet Witch reach out together to smooth over a jagged crack in the dimensional barrier, it stays closed.

‘It’s working!’ Charles shouts. ‘Erik, it’s working!’

It feels almost like a dream. His powers have been used to destroy and kill, but rarely to create and heal. That’s what they and the Scarlet Witch are doing now, creating another barrier, melding it with the old one until it’s whole again.

Someone is screaming, and it takes Erik a moment to realize it’s him. Charles is hollering with him inside his head, his own powers stretched to their limit trying to hold the pieces of Erik’s mind together. But Erik continues, trying to seal the cracks and strengthen the barrier so it will never break again.

An eternity later, the Scarlet Witch lets out a breath. "It's done," she says.

Abruptly, the power from the others across the multiverse is cut. Erik cries out again, feeling strangely empty and alone even as he feels Charles still there inside his head. His vision clears enough to see that the cracks in reality have almost entirely disappeared. All that's left is the original center of the cracks, which is softly glowing yellow.

Erik lets himself drift down to the ground. A moment later, the other universe’s Wanda lands next to him unsteadily, no longer a toy, the red energy that was suffusing her body gone.

"Wanda? You all right?" The words feel clumsy in his mouth, and they come out slightly slurred together.

The other Wanda stumbles slightly as she steps back to look at the only remaining sign of the dimensional barrier nearly shattering. "I'm okay."

“What was that? What happened?”

Wanda shivers for a moment before answering. “I'm not sure how to put it into words..."

“Dad! Wanda!” Peter shouts, suddenly appearing behind them with Stephen, who quietly dry heaves for a few seconds before getting his stomach under control. Erik abruptly has his son tightly hugging him and Wanda at the same time. "Ohmygodiwassoscareddpleasepleasepleasedontdoanythinglikethateveragain."

"Breathe, Peter," Erik says as he lets go.

Peter looks up at him and his eyebrows raise. "Dad, your hair..."

"Oh? Did I go bald?" Erik asks, lifting a hand to his head. He wouldn't be surprised if he had. The strain of fighting off En Sabah Nur's takeover of Charles's body had permanently seared all the hair from Charles's scalp, it made a certain kind of sense that whatever it was he'd just done might have had a similar effect. But he still feels hair, and it doesn't seem in danger of falling out when he tugs on it slightly.

"No," Peter says. "Your hair's still there. But it's all gone white - it looks a little like mine now."

Erik grins. "Well, you are my son, after all." White hair he can live with - he is sixty-one years old, even if he doesn't remotely look it.

"Yeah, but usually the dad goes gray first," Peter points out, and then looks down. For the first time, Erik notices Peter's carrying a Xavier's School tote bag with the X-Men and Vision, still toys, inside it. He sighs. "I don't know why, but I thought maybe I'd see Sis with you guys here too..." He looks up at Erik and the other dimension's Wanda, a frown pulling down his face. "I still can't believe that she's really gone."

"I don't think she is," Wanda says slowly. "Not exactly."

Erik freezes, not breathing, not daring to hope. What she's implying is impossible. It has to be. Dead is dead.

"What do you mean?" Stephen asks after neither Peter or Erik say anything.

Wanda looks from Peter to Erik. "When we were fixing the barrier, it was like I was all the Scarlet Witches of the multiverse at once.” She hesitates, chewing on her lip, and then adds, "Peter, Erik, your Wanda - she was with me there too. I could feel her. She was the one who called the other Scarlet Witches here to help."

"But her body is ashes," Erik says, perhaps too bluntly from the way Peter flinches next to him. "How...?"

"Wanda and I and half of all life in our universe spent five years as dust clouds before we were all brought back to life," Stephen says. "Weirder things have happened, that's all I'm saying."

Peter glances over his shoulder and then frowns. “Speaking of weird. Yo, Wanda, doesn’t that look familiar?” he says, and then points at what had been the center of the cracks.

The yellow glow has turned into a large wooden door with a stained glass window that appears to be hanging suspended in the air about ten feet above the dead grass of the School's lawn.

Erik looks up at it, squinting, and then turns back to Wanda.

Wanda is staring at the door, rigid with shock. She takes a step back, away from the door. “No. That shouldn't even exist anymore,” she says. "Not after Westview."

Stephen makes several apparently magical gestures with his hands, and a representation of the Nexus appears in front of him. The massive snarl Erik remembers seeing earlier is gone, but he can’t help but notice the silver thread attaching the point of light he assumes is this universe to the rest of the Nexus looks much thinner than the other nearby dimensions’ threads.

“Interesting. Thanks to you and Erik, the crack in the dimensional barrier was sealed,” Stephen says. “But you did too good a job. The barrier's like a brick wall now when it's supposed to be somewhat porous. I think that’s the only way through to the Nexus from this universe now.” He points to the floating wooden door.

“But that’s from my house...” Wanda says and then looks to Peter. "Isn't it?"

Peter smiles at her. “Sure looks like it.”

Wanda opens her mouth to say something else just as the wooden door loudly swings open.

Chapter Text

“Mom! Mom!” Billy and Tommy cry out as they appear from the open door.

To Erik’s shock, they both spring out of the door, apparently not noticing how high it is from the lawn until there’s nothing but air beneath their feet.

Erik raises his hands to try and slow their fall, but Wanda is faster.

“Boys!” Wanda’s magic springs from her fingers. Red light appears around both her children, catching them before they hit the ground and gently lowering them down.

Tommy grabs onto Billy’s arm as soon as the red magic fades and runs them towards their mother. As soon as she’s close enough, the two children grab onto her around the middle, hugging her tightly.

“I don’t believe it. Billy, Tommy, are you all right?” Wanda says, running her fingers through their hair in disbelief and cradling their faces in her hands, as if to convince herself that her children are really in front of her. They both appear solid and tangible, and Wanda drops to her knees.

“We’re fine, Mom! We had Uncle Pietro looking after us,” Tommy says.

“Of course you did,” Wanda says. Tears are freely running down her face now.

“He said he couldn’t come with us. He said to tell you he really wished he could, Mom," Tommy says.

“I like him. He’s really nice,” Billy adds.

“And fast!” Tommy says, bouncing up and down on his heels. “He can run faster than me! And he’s been showing me how to stop better.”

“Oof. That's very important,” Peter says from behind Wanda.

“Uncle Pete! Granddad!” Billy and Tommy run over to where Erik and Peter are watching.

“Hey there!” Peter says. He kneels down in the grass, letting both of Wanda’s children hug him around the neck. “How’re my favorite little Maximoffs?”

“Uncle Pete, Uncle Pete! Look how fast I can go now!” Tommy shouts. He vanishes a moment later, leaving a crackling trail of green light behind him.

When he doesn’t reappear after a few moments, Peter chuckles and hands the totebag with the toy X-Men and Vision over to Stephen. “I’ll try and catch Tommy before he reaches Connecticut,” Peter says to Wanda as he lowers his goggles down over his eyes, and then zips away after him.

“Mom, where’s Dad? Isn’t he with you?” Billy says, looking around.

“Um. That’s a little complicated, sweetie,” Wanda looks at the tote bag and then up at Stephen.

Stephen lifts the tote bag up. “You ready to turn everyone back, Wanda?”

“What are those?” Billy asks curiously. “Toys?”

“Yes and no. Most of them are actually your Uncle Peter’s friends from this universe,” Stephen says. He plucks the white Vision plush doll out of the bag. “Except this one.”

Like Wanda, Billy recognizes the white robot toy for what (or who) it truly is. “Dad!” Billy’s powers yank the plush toy out of Stephen’s grip and into Billy’s hands. He looks down at Vision and then up at his mother. “Mom, is he okay?”

Wanda kneels down next to Billy.  “I think so, honey. But we’ll turn him and Uncle Peter’s friends back to normal, and then we can be sure,” Wanda says.

Billy looks up. “Uncle Pete’s friends?”

“Yup. The other members of his X-Men team,” Stephen says and then looks to Erik. “Although I don’t know who’s who.”

“Did Peter tell you about the other X-Men?” Erik asks, curious.

“Yup. I can guess who a few of them are - like the Cyclops toy - but, uh, the three blue ones I have no idea.”

Erik pulls the X-Men toys out of the totebag and sets them on the ground, naming them as he does so. “Jean Grey and Scott Summers. Ororo Munroe. Raven Darkhölme. Kurt Wagner. Hank McCoy.”

Billy puts the Vision toy at the end, next to Hank. “And Dad.”

But they’re still missing someone.

‘ Where are you, Charles? ’ Erik thinks.

‘ My body is still in the School somewhere, probably turned into a toy as well .’

A truly horrible thought occurs to Erik. ‘And what about your students?’

‘ We were the only ones here when this happened. The school’s closed for Thanksgiving break until next week .’ Charles’s immense relief that none of the children were harmed hits Erik all at once. ‘ This is the first year we’ve had since the school was rebuilt where all the children wanted to go home to their families for breaks.’

Erik closes his eyes. 

“Why are your emotions all jumbled up?” Billy asks, looking at Erik. “You’re happy to see me and Tommy, but also really sad at the same time?”

Erik gives a slight chuckle, shaking his head. “Can’t hide anything from a telepath, I suppose.”

Erik feels Billy start to curiously probe deeper into his mind, only to be gently repelled by Charles. ‘ That’s not very polite, Billy .’ Charles tells him.

Billy’s eyes widen in surprise and then he quickly withdraws. “I’m sorry!” Billy says out loud. “I thought maybe there was something I could do to help.”

“You can just ask instead of rooting around in my head,” Erik says, not unkindly, with a small smile. “Your Uncle Peter and I, our Wanda, she’s…not truly gone, according to your mother, but right now she’s beyond us, and we don’t know if she’ll ever come back. That’s why we’re sad.”

Billy’s shoulder’s slump. “Oh. I don’t think I can help with that,” he says slowly.

Erik kneels down and ruffles Billy’s hair, chasing the dour expression away. “You’re helping more than you realize.”

Billy raises his head. He suddenly hugs Erik, burying his face against the hard plates of the Horseman armor. “You’re a good granddad.”

Erik smiles. “And you’re a good grandson.”

“Billy, would you like to help me turn everything back to normal?” Wanda asks.

“Me?”

Wanda nods. “You should get a chance to practice with your powers too, and I’ll need some help with this.”

Billy grins widely. “Sure! What do I do?”

As Wanda demonstrates to her son how to use his magic, Erik looks back at the School. He can see some of his daughter’s bedroom through the open entrance to the balcony. 

He levitates up to the balcony, peering inside the replica of his daughter’s childhood bedroom one last time. His daughter isn’t here, of course. He may never see her again. But it feels wrong to not show his gratitude to her, for what she did to save this dimension. And this room, a creation of her magic, is the closest he can get to her now.

“Thank you,” he says into the room. As he’d expected, there’s no response, only the soft rustle of tree branches outside. He lets out a quiet sigh.

Then Erik’s eyes land on the dollhouse replica of Charles’s mansion sitting on the floor. The first one, before it had been rebuilt, and Erik wants to slap himself for not realizing its importance sooner. His daughter wouldn’t have had a dollhouse built to look like an exact replica of the Xavier mansion when she was a child. This is Charles’s body, transformed into a plaything like the rest of the X-Men, while Charles’s mind was embedded inside of Erik’s head. 

‘ Ah. Very on the nose ,’ Charles says while Erik is still staring at the dollhouse.

‘ My daughter turned Scott into a cyclops action figure, I don’t think she was trying to be subtle. ’

Erik carefully picks up the dollhouse and flies it back to Wanda, Billy and Stephen outside near the floating door. Peter and Tommy have returned, Tommy now splattered with mud but smiling from ear to ear. “Grandad! I got to Rhode Island before Uncle Pete caught up to me,” Tommy says happily when he sees Erik.

“We need to get you some goggles to protect your eyes, little guy,” Peter says. “You have to be able to see where you’re going when you’re running at the speed of sound.” He freezes, and then mutters to himself, “I sound like my mom.”

“Can they look like yours?” Tommy asks.

Peter gives him a slightly wan smile. “Sure thing, speedy.” He looks at the dollhouse Erik is carrying with confusion, and then sudden understanding. Unlike Erik, Peter had only seen the old Xavier Mansion once, while it was exploding. “Oh. That’s the Professor?” he asks.

Erik nods, setting it on the grass next to Jean. He looks to Wanda and Billy. “We have everyone now. Charles said there was no one else in the School.”

Wanda nods, and then looks at Erik. “Before I change everyone back, I need to place Charles's mind inside his body. And that means taking him out of your head, Erik.”

Erik takes a step back from her before he realizes what he’s doing. “I--” He starts to say, and then stops. Of course Charles needs to go back to where he belongs. But there is a part of him that doesn't want to give Charles up. What if something goes wrong?

‘My friend, I’m afraid that this isn’t your choice to make. I do need my own body back ,’ Charles says, gently but firmly. ‘ I’m willing to take the risk .’

Erik nods, although he’s sure Wanda can feel his hesitance rolling off him. 

“It won’t hurt,” Wanda promises, mistaking the source of his reluctance. 

Erik almost scoffs. He can handle physical pain. That’s not what he’s afraid of. His own words to Charles from earlier come back to him: I don't think I can stand to lose anyone else . His parents, Magda and Nina are years dead. His oldest daughter is missing and he may never see her again. Peter came close to dying when this dimension was nearly sucked into the Nexus. If something happens to Charles now…

Wanda’s expression softens in understanding. Whether she’s skimming his surface thoughts like her son or if it’s that visible on his face, Erik can’t be sure. “Charles means a lot to you, doesn’t he?”

“Of course he does,” Erik says immediately, without any venom. It’s a simple statement of fact.

Inside his mind, Charles seems to brighten.

Wanda smiles. “I’ll be careful, Erik.”

When Erik lowers his head, Wanda places her glowing hands on Erik’s temples, like when she had tapped into his mind in Stephen’s Sanctum to reach a Charles who hadn’t been all there.

Wanda’s magic doesn’t hurt, exactly. But he can feel something as she sifts through his mind - a pressure, like her fingers are passing through his skull and she’s going to yank Charles out of Erik’s brain with her bare hands, which is a somewhat disturbing mental image.

Wanda laughs, although to Erik it sounds like she’s standing a good distance away from him instead of less than a foot. “You and Peter think alike, sometimes,” she says offhandedly.

‘You’ve gone through Peter’s mind as well?’ Erik says without opening his mouth.

The answer plays before his mind’s eye like a movie - Peter allowing Wanda into his mind to see a conversation he’d had with her twin, Pietro, when they’d both been thrown into the Nexus.

Wanda is still going through Erik’s mind, trying to figure out the best way to put Charles back into his own body. Erik can tell Charles and Wanda are talking to each other, but he can’t hear exactly what they’re saying, which seems odd as they’re conversing inside Erik’s head. They must be deliberately blocking him out.

‘ Apparently our minds are fairly well mashed together. Wanda is going to try to untangle us before she tries putting me back in my body ,’ Charles says to him, apparently noticing Erik’s growing unease. 

“Otherwise we might end up with both of you in Charles’s body,” Wanda says out loud. She takes one hand off of Erik’s temples to gesture towards the dollhouse, which floats towards them. She directs it into Erik’s hands and then places her hand back on his temple. "All right, we're ready."

The bright light that Erik associates with Charles starts to dim inside his head. Erik’s stomach lurches, but he swallows thickly, closing his eyes.

' Erik, it’s all right , Charles soothes, his voice growing fainter with each word. ' Calm your mind. '

And then Erik can’t feel him at all.

Erik reminds himself that most people do not have someone else riding along inside their mind, and in fact he himself had worn that telepath-proof helmet for many years specifically to keep Charles out. But now that Charles’s mind isn’t there, Erik feels very alone inside his own head, with his own thoughts. He wouldn’t admit it out loud, but having Charles in his head had not been the horrible mental invasion he’d had nightmares about.

“Hm,” Wanda says in front of him. Erik opens his eyes. She’s frowning slightly, staring at his forehead. The dollhouse in his hands looks exactly the same as it did before Wanda placed Charles’s mind back in it. 

Erik raises an eyebrow.

“Something isn’t letting me take the last piece of Charles out of your head,” Wanda says. At Erik’s bewildered frown, she quickly adds, “It’s not something you or Charles are doing, Erik. It’s just that the final part of Charles’s mind isn’t budging from yours, and I don’t think I can take it out.”

“Will that hurt Charles? That part of him staying in my head?”

Wanda considers his question, worrying at her bottom lip. “It’s so small I don’t think it’d make much of a difference. And Charles might be able to get it from you once he’s a person again - he knows your mind better than I do. And his own mind too, obviously.” She lets go of his head. "All right. Erik, could you put Charles with the others?"

"See you soon," Erik says to Charles quietly as he places the dollhouse back down on the grass.

“Good. I think we’re ready,” Wanda says. She turns to Stephen. “Would you be able to shield Peter, Erik and Tommy? I don’t want to expose anyone to too much of my magic if it’s not necessary, not after what happened to Monica…”

Stephen nods. “I’m still a little wiped from earlier but I can do a shield no problem.” He crosses his hands in front of his chest and a dome of golden magic closes over him, Peter, Erik and Tommy, sealing them inside. 

“Deja vu,” Peter says, between Stephen and Erik. 

Stephen chuckles lightly.

“All right Billy,” Wanda says with an encouraging smile. “Like I told you.”

Billy closes his eyes and loudly exhales and then thrusts his arms out towards the School.  Both of Billy’s hands light up with blue instead of red like his mother’s. A wave of blue magic leaves his hands, encircling the building and the grounds.  Billy directs his magic with a hand as it washes over the trees and lawn, restoring them to normal. The grass is still brown and the trees are still bare - but they look normal for November, and not like a wildfire had burnt everything. As Billy’s magic skims over the School, the building is returned to how it looked when Erik and Jean had rebuilt it. Overhead, the color of the sky turns from rust into a pale purple, the sun peeking over the horizon. It’s almost dawn.

Next to him, Wanda kneels down, focusing on the row of toys as her magic appears hovering beneath her hands. One by one they light up red with her magic. When Wanda closes her eyes and stands, the toys lift off the ground with her. Like the first time she’d tried to turn them back, the toys float around her in a loose circle.

Wanda’s fingers twist around the globes of red chaos magic. A small crease appears between her eyebrows and then she throws her hands out.

The magic surrounding the toys grows brighter, until it’s almost painful to look at them. Stephen flinches and raises his arm to cover his eyes, while Peter squeezes his eyes shut and clamps his hands over Tommy’s eyes. Erik’s eyes are watering as he finally looks down.

“Dad!” Billy cries out as the light fades. 

Erik looks up, blinking his eyes clear.

Billy has his arms around the waist of the red android man - Vision - from the photo Tommy had shown him earlier, and as soon as Stephen’s shield vanishes, Tommy zips over to Vision as well, nearly knocking him and Billy over.

“My boys,” Vision says, kneeling down on the grass. He looks over the heads of his sons and smiles broadly at Wanda, who gives him a brilliant smile back. Tears are forming at the corners of her eyes, like her heart is close to bursting with happiness as she flies over to her family. She lets out a quiet sob, and then embraces her husband.

“God, Vis. I thought I’d never see you again,” Wanda says.

Jean, Scott, Ororo, Hank, Kurt and Raven are on the lawn next to Vision. The six of them look shaken but otherwise not visibly harmed by being turned into toys by Erik’s daughter. Charles is seated in his wheelchair beside Jean, his head tilted down, apparently unconscious.

“P-Peter?” Kurt says faintly, his tail curling.

Peter is in front of the other X-Men in the time it takes Erik to blink. “Are you guys OK? Anybody hurt?”

“I think we’re fine,” Jean says. “But the Professor - I couldn’t feel his conscious mind, all through that. Just his empty body.”

Erik removes the gloves of his Horseman armor - at some point, he’ll need to have Wanda or Billy turn the armor back into what he’d been wearing when Kurt had brought him to the School - and then leans over Charles’s limp body in his wheelchair. “Charles?” Erik says, touching his cheek. His skin feels warm.

Charles’s eyes flutter open at the touch. He smiles up at Erik. “See? Like I said. Nothing to worry about,” he says.

Erik laughs out of sheer relief. When he looks up again, all of the X-Men are staring at Erik and his white hair.

“That’s…different,” Raven says, raising an eyebrow.

“Oh, shit,” says Scott, apparently on the verge of panic. “How long were we toys?”

“Less than a day,” Erik says. He has to stop himself from reaching up to his head again.

“That happened when you and the Scarlet Witch stopped the cracks in the sky, didn’t it?” Jean says. “I couldn’t use my telepathy very well when I was a puppet, but I could tell when you and all the other yous began to fix the hole in the sky with the Scarlet Witch. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

“I hope I didn’t frighten you too much, Jean. Most of my mind was buried within Erik’s when he was sent out of this dimension,” Charles says. “Erik and the other universe’s Wanda helped me pull myself together, so to speak.”

The X-Men look at Wanda and her family. Tommy is running in a circle around his parents and brother to show off his increased speed again, only visible as a smear of green around his family.

Raven snorts. "That one's gonna be trouble, I can tell.”

“So that’s a different version of your twin sister? Another ‘Scarlet Witch’?” Ororo says to Peter.

“Yup.” Peter's cheerful grin slips, replaced by a more somber expression.

“And she was the one who took you from this universe this morning?” Hank says, trying to sound neutral, but his disapproval clearly slips through. “Why?”

“Pietro - her version of me - has been dead for years,” Peter says bluntly. “He’d just gotten his powers and he wasn’t able to outrun bullets yet, so he used himself as a human shield to save two other people. Almost everyone that Wanda loved is gone. I got pulled into her dimension when the grief became too much for her and she lost control of her powers.”

“Oh,” Kurt says quietly. His yellow eyes look very large and watery. “That’s horrible.”

“And now her family’s alive again?” Ororo says, sounding confused. 

“Some of them,” says Peter. “Her kids Billy and Tommy and her husband Vision. It’s complicated. I don't really understand what happened either.”

“And did I hear that right? You’re the grandfather to the other Wanda’s kids?” Raven says to Erik.

“Honorary grandfather,” Erik says. “On account of being Peter’s father, since he's their 'uncle'. The other Wanda’s parents died when she was a child and Vision is some sort of android.”

"Oh, that raises so many more questions,” Raven says, pinching the bridge of her nose. It's a gesture Erik has seen Hank do so many times that he quietly laughs at seeing her do it.

“Wait, android?” Hank says, surprised. He turns to look at Vision again and then looks back at Erik. “You mean he’s not a mutant?”

Peter shakes his head. "Nope. Android."

"Synthezoid, technically," Stephen says, floating over with his cloak dramatically billowing behind him. He lands next to Peter.

“Oh, oh, guys. I gotta introduce you!” Peter says, grabbing Stephen's arm and pulling him towards the X-Men. “This is Doctor Stephen Strange, he’s a sorcerer from the same universe as the other Wanda. He’s got really cool magical powers and a record collection to die for.” 

Erik chuckles at Stephen’s slightly bewildered expression.

Undeterred, Peter grins brightly at Stephen. “Stephen, these are my friends: Jean Grey, Scott Summers, Ororo Munroe, Hank McCoy, Raven Darkhölme, and Kurt Wagner. And you already know Charles Xavier, kinda, but he's next to Jean. They’re the X-Men.”

"Nice to meet you, magic guy," Scott says. "Are you a mutant?"

"Was I born with my powers, you mean? No, I spent years studying how to harness magic."

"Is that what your doctorate's in? Magic?" Raven asks, only half-joking.

Stephen shakes his head. "I was a neurosurgeon before I became a sorcerer."

"Someone can just learn how to do actual magic in your dimension," Hank says. "That's fascinating."

"Yeah, mutants didn't really seem to be a thing in that dimension," Peter says. "There were people with superpowers running around but it wasn't because they had the X-gene."

"Stephen!" Wanda shouts. She points to where the door to the Nexus had been, and now isn't. There's nothing glowing in the sky, no door. Everything is back to normal.

His face pale, Stephen makes the gesture from before to check on the Nexus and its connection to other nearby dimensions. This time nothing appears in his hands. He tries it again, his scarred hands trembling - still nothing.

If the door was the only way back to the Nexus, and now the door is gone...

Stephen turns to Wanda and her family, visibly trying to control his growing panic. Wanda grips onto Vision’s hand tighter and looks away.

They can't return home. They're stuck here.

Chapter Text

Erik sits in one of the chairs in the School’s dining hall, back in his old clothes. His fingers nervously find the necklace he’s wearing, rolling the thin chain between his fingers to remind himself that he has it back. Next to him is Charles, lost in thought. Raven, Hank and the other X-Men sit nervously around them at the large oak table. According to the grandfather clock in the School’s foyer, it’s time for breakfast, and Peter had taken Tommy on a run out to a nearby diner to pick up enough fluffy pancakes, French toast, scrambled eggs, and an assortment of bagels with lox and cream cheese for the X-Men and their “guests”.

Even with all the delicious food spread out on the dining room table, no one seems very hungry.

Wanda, Vision and their twins take up the other end of the table. Peter sits on Wanda’s other side, nervously fiddling with the iPod device he’d shown to Erik earlier. He and Wanda had just finished telling the X-Men what had happened after Peter had been pulled out of this dimension and into hers.

Erik and Charles had heard a shortened version from Peter earlier, but having Peter and Wanda lay out everything, in detail, makes it even more astonishing what Peter had been able to do after being abducted. He'd had seen Wanda was deeply in pain and had done everything he could to help her. Even when a chance to try and escape Westview had appeared, Peter had stayed to help find Vision. Peter’s a much more selfless person than Erik is. If he had been in Peter's position, abducted from his world and forced to play-act being this Wanda's sitcom father, his first impulse once he'd been freed would’ve been to snap Wanda's neck. Which would have been a waste, since it sounded like Wanda had controlled everyone in Westview but Peter, who had been under the spell of a different, even nastier witch.

“What happened to the other witch, Agatha?” Ororo asks. “The one who put that spell on Peter.”

Wanda freezes for a moment. An odd look flashes across her face. Guilt?

“She's not a witch anymore,” Peter answers for her, somewhat stiffly. “Wanda took away her powers, turned her into a sitcom noisy neighbor instead of an evil witch.”

That's not at all what Erik was expecting. From Wanda's reaction, he would've thought she'd killed the other witch outright. But he supposes having your mind permanently changed into another persona is a kind of death. Death of personality.

Kurt changes the subject before Erik can truly start dwelling on the moral implications of what Wanda did to Agatha. “What was the future like, Peter?”

The scrambled eggs on Peter’s plate disappear as Erik watches. Peter idly balances his fork between his fingers as he makes a face. “Kind of gloomy and sad, actually,” he says. “Half of Earth’s population had just come back from being dead for five years after a big purple alien with a hard-on for death disintegrated them, so it was also chaotic as hell.”

Kurt looks somewhat disappointed with Peter’s answer. “Oh. That's quite...interesting.”

“So that’s what we have to worry about? An alien’ll make half of all life on Earth disappear in about thirty years?” Raven says.

“Maybe not,” Peter says brightly. “That dimension didn’t have Apocalypse tear through it in 1983. Our worlds are similar but they’re not an exact match.”

Raven does not look reassured. “OK, but what you’re saying is that this Thanos guy might never show up here at all, or he might come visit Earth at any time? That’s not much better.”

Ororo makes a displeased hum of agreement.

“We can give you all the information we have on Thanos,” Vision says, looking to Wanda. “If a version of Thanos does eventually come here looking for the Infinity Stones, it may give you the upper hand in stopping him before he can decimate your universe.”

“Hey, Vis,” Peter asked. “How much do you remember now? 'Cause you only had some of your memories in Westview, right?”

“I remember everything now, Peter. Both what happened before my deaths, and in Westview.” He pauses. “I remember fading away from Westview, and then I found myself being pulled somewhere else, like I was needed, and then I was a small plush toy in your sister's hands, trying to console her.”

Stephen is floating cross-legged across the table from Peter, his hands resting on his knees. His expression is unreadable, and he hasn’t spoken since they came inside the School. Peter keeps sneaking small, worried glances at Stephen, clearly thinking he’s being subtle about it.

“Now that we’re all on the same page,” Charles says. “Anyone have any ideas as to returning our guests to their home dimension?”

“We can’t leave the same way we came,” Stephen says heavily. He levitates two slices of French toast from the platter at the other end of the table onto his plate and then does the same to the glass bottle of maple syrup. “Any attempts to open the dimensional barrier enough for us to get to the Nexus risks it collapsing again.”

“Well, we certainly don’t want that,” Charles says, pushing the last of his eggs around his plate with his fork. “Hank, your thoughts?”

“Magic might be the best angle to approach this problem,” Hank admits hesitantly. “I might be able to figure out how to get everyone back, but it’d take years. Maybe a decade, if we were lucky.”

Erik tries not to flinch. A decade? It easily could’ve been Peter trapped in the other world for ten years. So much more time he could’ve lost with his son, when he’s already lost too much.

Stephen’s face falls at Hank's estimate, although he quickly catches himself and smooths it into a neutral expression. “So I'm probably going to miss Christine's wedding then," he says flatly.

Erik looks to Wanda and Vision. Wanda looks more lost in thought than disappointed. And Vision...it's hard for Erik to get a read on Vision. There doesn't seem to be much that phases him. Their boys apparently haven't been alive long enough to become attached their original universe - so as long as they have their family with them, Erik doubts they would really care which world they end up in.

“You are all more than welcome to stay here for however long you're in this universe,” Charles offers. “Lord knows I have the room.”

“I can check if there are any Masters of the Mystic Arts in this universe who’d be willing to help,” Stephen says. “And see if there’s a version of me running around here. That’ll be fun.” He makes a face.

“With that goatee of yours, does that mean you’re the evil Stephen?” Peter asks playfully.

Erik is somewhat curious as to how Stephen will react. Stephen gives a small smirk. “Life doesn’t always follows Star Trek rules.”

“There were those two episodes of Knight Rider too. Oh, and WKRP in Cincinnati. The evil twin always has a goatee.”

“He’s right,” Wanda says next to him through a mouthful of pancakes.

“What if the other me has a goatee too?” Stephen asks after a moment. “Which one of us would be the evil twin then?”

“The one that had the pointier beard, duh,” Peter says.

“What was your version of Peter like, Wanda?” Ororo asks, curious.

Wanda looks up in surprise at being asked a question directly, before a fond look appears in her eyes. “Pietro was my twin brother and best friend. He was a charmer, quick-witted, but he was also…” She hesitates. “...Bitter. Obsessed with revenge. We both were, after our parents were killed.”

“And you said Erik wasn’t your father there?” says Hank.

Erik looked down at his toast and says nothing. Touching the multiverse and briefly seeing the lives of other versions of himself had shown him the fate of the Erik Lehnsherr who’d existed in the other Wanda’s world. Like too many of the others, he’d been killed as a child, his body buried in a mass grave in Auschwitz. In every other universe he’d seen where Erik’s counterpart, male or female, had survived to adulthood, the Maximoff twins had been born. If Erik was dead, they weren’t. It didn’t seem to matter who the other parent was - Marya, Magda or other women and men he hadn’t recognized. Erik was the key that brought the Maximoff twins into being.

Without Erik, the Wanda and Pietro of that dimension shouldn’t have existed at all. But through some quirk of fate, in that universe, the Maximoff twins had been born to different parents decades after the Erik of that universe died. Perhaps it meant nothing, but to Erik it felt like there was a reason for it that he wasn’t quite seeing. Like the universe had managed to redirect itself around that Erik's death to ensure that the Maximoffs were born.

Charles catches his eye, and Erik knows he had been listening to his thoughts.

‘I’ve been finding it difficult not to hone in on your mind since I was put back into my body,’ Charles admits in his mind, sounding apologetic. ‘It’s very odd. I’m still able to block out the others like before, but your surface thoughts and emotions are particularly piercing now.’

‘Because you were stuck inside my head? Or because there’s a fragment of your mind still left in mine?’

Charles quietly sighs, shutting his eyes for a moment. ‘I don’t know. Both, perhaps.’

Scott's French toast sits untouched on the plate in front of him. Out of the X-Men, he seems the most...twitchy, after everything that had happened.

Jean is seated next to him, and she places her hand on his knee. Her gaze sweeps down the table before landing on Peter. She frowns. “You’re planning on going somewhere?” Jean asks him.

“Yeah. I need to go to my mom’s place in Virginia. Tell her and Lorna about what happened to my Wanda.” He blurs again. Another serving of scrambled eggs appears on his plate and then vanishes just as quickly. “Gotta make sure I have enough juice to get down there.”

“I could portal you,” Stephen volunteers.

Peter gives him a tired smile. “Thanks, man. Appreciate it.”

“Oh! You can teleport too?” Kurt says brightly, smiling at Stephen. Erik admires Kurt’s ability to roll with whatever outlandish situation comes his way. The other X-Men are, perhaps understandably, somewhat skittish around their visitors from another universe, but Kurt appears to be taking everything cheerfully in stride.

Stephen gestures to the large brass ring on two of his fingers. “I can open portals with my Sling Ring to anywhere on Earth.”

While Stephen and Kurt begin to compare how their methods of teleportation, Erik clears his throat and then turns to his son.

“Peter…” Erik starts, and then hesitates. “Would your mother be agreeable to seeing me? I’d like to talk to her.”

Peter frowns, mulling his question over. “I don’t know, man. She was really, really pissed at you for a long time. But I can ask her, see what she says.”

Erik nods. That’s probably the most he can hope for. “Thank you.”

After the breakfast dishes are cleared away, Charles takes the guests from another universe to the rooms they’ll be using while they’re staying at the School. Erik follows, curious. Tommy and Billy will share one of the dorm rooms for students, while Wanda and Vision get a larger room typically used for married staff across the hall. Stephen also gets a staff room. They’re only a few doors down from Peter’s room.

The empty rooms are clean, have fresh linens on the beds and an overwhelming bland, beige decor. They remind Erik of hotel rooms. But that's their purpose, isn't it? To be blank canvases for their residents to paint on.

“Would you mind if we redecorate a little bit?” Wanda asks Charles.

“Not at all,” Charles says.

“Awesome!” Tommy zips Billy back to their bedroom, and from what Erik can hear, tries to convince Billy to cram an entire theme park into their bedroom with magic.

“A little, boys,” Vision sighs, trailing after them. He’s taken the appearance of a pale, sandy-haired Englishman, despite Hank and Raven both pointing out that if there’s one place in this universe where he doesn’t have to disguise himself, Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters is it. Hank rarely uses the serum to look human anymore, and Raven is almost always in her blue form whenever Erik comes to visit.

Stephen is already fixing up his room with magic when Erik walks past on his way to Peter’s. The massive walnut four-poster bed is a little too ostentatious for Erik’s tastes but the built-in bookshelves flanking the bed are an improvement. Stephen has also commandeered a coat rack for the Cloak of Leviation to rest on.

Peter is sitting on his bed when Erik stops in front of the open door. Faded posters for bands Erik has never heard of line the walls. One end of the room, underneath the window, is taken up by Peter’s elaborate stereo system and four-foot-tall speakers, and his collection of vinyl, cassette tapes and CDs. Peter’s holding a small framed black-and-white photograph in his hands, his head bent down over it.

“Peter?” Erik asks quietly.

Peter loudly sniffs, wiping at his face before he looks up. His eyes are red and puffy. “Oh. Hey, Dad.”

Erik sits down on the bed next to Peter. Wordlessly, Peter passes him the photograph. It’s Peter and his twin sister, playing together in the grass, when they were no more than five. The lack of color in the photograph disguises the silver of Peter’s hair somewhat. Erik’s also surprised by just how short it is.

“Did Marya…shave your head?” Erik says, squinting at the photo.

Peter laughs, although it sounds somewhat hollow. “Yeah. Mom tried a few ways to hide my grey hair when I was little. Dying it brown, buzzing it all off, stuff like that. Eventually she just gave up.”

“Dying it? But your eyebrows are grey as well.”

Peter grimaces. “She’d darken them with an eyebrow pencil.” He gives a sigh. “Mom really, really wanted to pretend that I was normal. She was already an unwed mom with two kids and a distinctly un-American last name, so we, uh, moved around a bit when Wanda and I were kids. Then she married this accountant guy named Arnold Dane - he’s my little sister Lorna’s dad - and he seemed OK at first. Liked his booze a little too much but he wasn’t abusive or anything. It was just nice to have any dad, I wasn’t going to be picky. And then, about a year after they got hitched, Arnold hightailed it out of there, like, the day after I got my powers like the fucking house was on fire.”

“He abandoned your family?” Erik’s beginning to understand why Peter hesitated for so long on telling Erik the truth. Once bitten, twice shy.

“Yeah, turns out he realllllly didn't like mutants. Oh, and keep in mind Lorna had just been born 'bout three weeks before. He left for the office in his LeSabre like normal and then never came home. I remember Mom managed to find which hotel he was staying at and yelled at him over the phone about what a spineless, pathetic asshole he was.” Peter pauses and then interlocks his fingers together. “I didn’t see him again after that. Just the checks he sent to the house every month until Lorna turned eighteen." He looks at Erik. "He also died last year so, no, you can’t go beat him up.”

Erik doesn’t try to claim the thought hadn’t occurred to him.

“And the last time I saw my Wanda before today was when she came to visit me in the hospital after Apocalypse broke my leg,” Peter says. “Before that I hadn’t seen her at all since she left for college. I'm not even sure how she knew which hospital I was at. She hadn't spoken to the rest of my family in, like, a decade.”

“Oh, Peter.”

When Erik looks up, Wanda is standing in Peter's door with deep understanding in her eyes. She quickly sits down on the other side of Peter. Without another word, she hugs him tightly.

Peter lowers his head and rubs at his wet eyes. He gives a rough laugh. “You could feel that, huh? Guess I'm putting out bad vibes.”

“I don't need magic to tell you're upset,” Wanda says gently.

Erik rests his hand on Peter's back.

The three of them sit on Peter's bed, Wanda and Erik's arms around Peter. Between them, Peter breathes heavily, on the verge of crying again. They stay that way until Peter's breathing steadies and he wipes at his eyes, saying he should probably head to down to Virginia soon.

Stephen creates a sparking portal to the Maximoff house in Virginia in the School’s foyer. Looking grim, Peter crosses to the Virginia side and then reaches back to grab onto Stephen’s arm before he can raise his hand to close the portal. “Could you come with me?" he asks. "I can’t bring Erik, and somehow, I don’t think Mom’s gonna be ready to meet your dimension’s Wanda and her family yet either.”

Stephen looks at him in suprise for a moment. “All right,” he says, and then steps through the portal after Peter.

“See you in a few,” Peter says to Erik as Stephen makes the gesture to close the portal from Virginia. The portal spits out a few sparks before disappearing completely.

When Peter and Stephen return to the School several hours later, a young woman with hair dyed neon green, dressed in a black leather jacket dotted with silver studs and artfully torn jeans follows them out of the ring of sparks.

“Erik, this is my little sister, Lorna Dane,” Peter says. “Lorna, this is my dad, Erik Lehnsherr.”

“Ah, the great and powerful mutant Magneto, the master of magnetism,” Lorna says with a smirk. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“All of it bad, I’m sure," Erik says.

“Oh, the worst,” Lorna laughs.

Lorna doesn't stick around at the School for very long, just enough to say hello to the other X-Men, before Stephen opens the portal back to her house. Marya is sitting on the sofa in the Maximoff living room when the portal opens. She doesn't look up as Lorna sadly waves goodbye to her brother and passes through the portal back to Virginia. Age has started to fade Marya's hair and wrinkle her skin, but she still looks like the vibrant woman he remembers.

When the portal disappears, a weight Erik wasn't aware of lifts, leaving him feeling slightly dizzy.

Erik waits all day for government agents or a news crew to show up outside the gates to ask about the cracks in the sky that had appeared over the School. At this point, all the local government agencies know that anything weird that happens nearby is almost always due to something at Xavier's. Erik watches the local evening news on the rec room's TV, just to be sure, and there is no mention of the cracks or anything unusual appearing in the sky. All the news is deceptively normal.

Nearly everyone on the planet has no idea how very close they came to annihilation today.

Charles has also lent Erik a room at the School with the invitation that he's welcome to stay as long as he likes. The bed is comfortable and warm, and he's very tired, but his brain will not quiet down enough for him to fall asleep. Each time he closes his eyes, he sees his daughter turning to dust, or some horrid memory he'd gathered from the other Eriks during the brief time they were joined together. Most of the other memories are even now starting to blur and fade – one man's mind wasn't built to hold the memories of so many of his alternate selves – but it seems somewhat unfair to be tortured by nightmares that aren't even his.

Worst of all are the memories of a man very much like Erik – the man Erik would've become if Logan hadn't been sent back in time to 1973. An echo from a timeline that no longer existed. That Erik never had Peter break him out of the Pentagon. He'd only learned of Peter and Wanda years after they'd already been killed by Sentinels. The other Erik never fell in love with Magda in Poland, never had Nina, and hadn't become the Horseman of War, but their lives up to Logan's intervention were identical. Seeing the depths of the other Erik's cruelty in the future, the lengths he had gone in his attempts to eradicate humanity, makes his stomach lurch.

That set of memories, he knows, will never fade away. He'll go to his grave with the memories of that Erik still lodged firmly in his brain. A cautionary tale.

He sighs, staring up at the darkened ceiling. “All those years wasted fighting each other, Charles...to have a precious few of them back...” he says out loud, giving voice to the other Erik's dying words that had been rattling around in his head for hours.

Erik is still distrusting of humans. He will never feel comfortable among them no matter how "accepted" mutants become. Perhaps he's right and the war between mutants and humans he'd been predicting for decades will come to pass, but even he has to admit it seems farther away now than it did twenty years ago.

And a lot of that progress can probably be traced to Charles and his X-Men.

'You think too loudly, Erik,' Charles grumbles in his mind. He sounds as exhausted as Erik feels.

'Sorry. Am I keeping you up?'

'Yes, along with everyone else in the School. It's one o'clock and almost nobody is sleeping,' Charles says with a sigh. 'Scott's somehow asleep but he's having a nightmare where he's an action figure being roughed up by himself as a child.'

'Peter?'

'Not even in bed. He and Stephen are going through his record collection.'

Erik listens and he can barely hear muffled music coming from the direction of Peter's room. What the hell are they listening to at one o'clock in the morning, he wonders.

'2112 by Rush,' Charles answers. 'Peter's convinced it's one of the best prog rock albums ever made. Stephen disagrees.'

Erik exhales, trying to quiet his mind again, for Charles's sake, by attempting to shield his mind off. Once Erik's mind is as blocked off from Charles as he can get it, his thoughts drift again to the other timeline's Erik. He had died an old man clutching onto his Charles's hand, wishing desperately for a second chance. He'd gotten his wish, and Erik can't help but feel that he's wasted it somewhat. More fights, more tragedy, and more deaths on his head. And while the ideological gulf that separates him from Charles is smaller now than it once was and easier to cross, it's by no means gone entirely.

Erik knows he can't carry around the older Erik's unrequited love for Charles in addition to his own. The weight of two lifetimes' worth of longing over Charles Xavier would crush him to death.

He knows that something has to change. He has to be the one to change it.

A few moments later Erik gets out of the bed and walks down to the first floor, until he's standing in front of Charles's closed bedroom door.

“Come in,” Charles says after a moment.

Erik enters the room as Charles turns on the lamp on his bedside table, burrowed under a thick quilt. His wheelchair is parked next to the bed. There's an armchair in front of Charles's bed, next to the large windows, but Erik sits down on the mattress, next to Charles.

“What is it, Erik?” Charles asks, pushing himself up. “Is something wrong? You seems unsettled.”

Erik stares at him. Unsettled? He's far past that. “Shouldn't you know? You've been inside my head. Hasn't it been blaring across my brain for years?”

Charles looks taken aback. “Erik, I'm not sure what you're talking about...”

Erik laughs out of raw frustration. “That I love you, Charles. That I've been in love with you for decades! Are you just ignoring it so we don't have to address it? That we can pretend it doesn't matter?”

“No! I-I wasn't ignoring it,” Charles protests, his cheeks turning bright red. “I've tried to stay out of your mind as much as I can, Erik, I know you don't like me spying on your thoughts. And of course I can tell you care for me very deeply, even without telepathy, but I thought it was strictly platonic!”

Platonic. Erik suddenly wishes he could be thrown out of this universe again just so he didn't have to continue humiliating himself in front of Charles. Nevertheless, he takes a deep breath to calm himself enough to continue. “Charles. My feelings for you haven't been platonic since 1963,” he says quietly.

“I'm beginning to see that, yes.” Charles is still red. “But I also thought...if you loved me in that way, perhaps you'd want to stay with me, instead of always walking away. Leaving me behind.” It sounds more bitter that Charles probably intended, and echoes of a much earlier, louder conversation: “You abandoned me!”

Erik moves closer to Charles. “No matter where I am, I can't stay away from Westchester. I always come back to you, don't I?”

"Eventually." The blush is starting to fade from Charles's face but he doesn't meet Erik's eyes. “Between '64 and '82, I saw you exactly once, Erik.”

“I was in the Pentagon for half of that time. And I've been here more often after I helped rebuild the School,” Erik points out.

Charles rolls his eyes. “Yes, when you were also deeply mourning your murdered wife and daughter,” he says. “I would've felt like a tremendous asshole if I'd tried anything while you were still grieving. And you were grieving for a very long time.”

Tried...anything?

For the first time, Erik realizes that Charles might actually reciprocate his feelings.

“Charles. Do you want me to stay with you?” he says slowly. Erik had settled in Paris after Cairo because he'd thought his presence on the School grounds would needlessly complicate things for Charles and the X-Men. Difficult to say your goals were strictly peaceful when a notorious mutant terrorist lived in the same place as the young, impressionable mutant children.

Charles just stares at him a moment with his too-blue eyes. His mouth opens, and then closes. “If I said yes, would you actually stay this time?” he asks eventually.

“I would.” After all, Charles was here and Peter was here. He'd always been of the opinion that home was where his family was. Erik smiles, and it doesn't feel forced at all. “There's no place on Earth I'd rather be than with you, Charles.”

Charles leans forward, bridging the gap between them, until those bright blue eyes are nearly all Erik can see. “Glad to finally hear you say it out loud, darling,” he says, and then he kisses Erik on the mouth.

Chapter Text

Peter and Stephen end up in Peter's room after dinner is over, Stephen flipping through the milk crates stuffed with records. Most of Peter's collection are things he purchased (or stole) new – Stephen's collection in the Sanctum, several dimensions away, was almost all secondhand, except for the reissues. (Stephen had told him vinyl makes a surprise resurgence decades after it was left for dead and it still seems like a gigantic joke to Peter. Thousands of songs in something the size of a deck of cards and almost all music ever recorded available 'streaming online', but vinyl – scratchy, easily-damaged, cumbersome vinyl – makes a comeback? The future is extremely weird.)

Peter's Pink Floyd collection is spread out on the quilt of Peter's bed – he's got all their studio albums up to their most recent, 'A Momentary Lapse of Reason'. Thanks to Wanda's magic iPod, he's also got the next two albums that technically don't exist yet.

Stephen is sitting on Peter's bed, looking at the back of the double-record live album Pink Floyd released a few years ago, 'Delicate Sound of Thunder', wearing Peter's faded 'Dark Side Of The Moon' shirt and an old pair of Erik's sweats for pajamas. He still looks exhausted - the tremor in his hands is more noticeable than it typically is. Stephen should be sleeping, not staying up past midnight going through Peter's music collection. There's a little curl of guilt twisting in Peter's stomach over bringing him home to Virginia to act as a level head about Peter's disappearance and what had happened to Wanda when Stephen was still coming to terms with having to stay in a different world indefinitely, but...Stephen had agreed to come, hadn't he? He could've said no. And his mom and Lorna had seemed to like him.

Placing the album on the bedspread, Stephen moves off the bed to kneel in front of the milk crates, flipping past Peter's Plimsouls, Police, Prince, Psychedelic Furs and Queen albums before reaching the 'R's. “You have a lot of Rush,” he notes between 'Hemispheres' and 'Permanent Waves'. He goes back and counts them all before looking at Peter over his shoulder, one eyebrow raised. “Seventeen Rush albums, really?”

Peter shrugs from where he's lying down on the rug with his hands behind his head. He's not about to apologize for having taste. “Yeah, 'cause they're great.”

Stephen wrinkles his nose slightly. “Uh huh,” he says dubiously.

Well. This insult will not stand.

Peter takes 'Animals' off his turntable and slips it back into the cardboard sleeve. Quickly reaching around Stephen, Peter takes '2112' out of the crate and holds it in front of Stephen's face. “Dude, I know you've listened to this before. It's only one of the best prog rock albums ever recorded. How could you not love the band who made it?” He pauses. “Is it 'cause they're Canadian?”

Stephen gently pushes the album down and smirks up at Peter, a wicked gleam in his eyes. “No, Peter. It's because Geddy Lee's voice sounds like a dying cat.”

Peter gasps.

Stephen's grin widens. “Always has.”

Peter gasps louder, dramatically clutching at his chest like Stephen just stabbed him through the heart before collapsing bonelessly to the floor with '2112' still in one hand. “Stephen, I don't think we can be friends anymore," Peter says weakly.

Stephen laughs, reaching over to take the album from him. “I haven't listened to this since high school,” Stephen admits, flipping it over to look at the back cover. “Maybe time will have softened my feelings towards it.” He slides the record out of the sleeve and then levitates it up onto Peter's turntable.

Peter presses down on the switch to start the turntable spinning, watching the tone arm jerkily lift up and move into position over the record. A hiss crackles through the speakers as the needle touches down. A moment later, sci-fi synthesizer sounds whoosh across the speakers as the first song begins.

“This part always reminded me of an off-brand version of the Doctor Who theme,” Stephen says.

Peter shushes him.

Stephen is quiet after that, both of them sitting on the floor in front of the speakers. Peter closes his eyes and lets the music wash over him.

Rush is one of his favorite bands, and this album in particular is the one he's listened to the most. It's comforting to listen to it now, like sinking into a warm bath. Music had always calmed him down, and he needs it tonight more than ever.

As the last song on the first side starts, Peter opens his eyes and turns to look at Stephen. Stephen is lying on his back with his eyes closed, his head turned towards Peter. From how slowly he's breathing, he has to be asleep, and doesn't answer when Peter calls his name quietly. Yup. He's out cold.

Peter rolls his eyes. Stephen would probably appreciate sleeping in an actual bed tonight and not the floor of Peter's room. Peter can use his speed to run Stephen back to his own bedroom so he doesn't spend the night on Peter's floor. If Peter does it right, it won't even wake Stephen up. There. He's got a plan.

Peter goes into superspeed, the music from the speakers slowing down to a crawl. He gathers Stephen into his arms with one hand under his knees and the other supporting Stephen's back and runs him out of his room, into the hall and into Stephen's new room. He lets go of Stephen to pull down the quilt and blankets, and then gently lowers Stephen down onto the bed. He counts to ten in his head to make the transition easier on Stephen and then jumps back into the normal flow of time. Stephen mumbles something in the back of his throat and shifts slightly on the mattress, but doesn't wake up.

The Cloak, from its stand near the bed, perks up once it notices Stephen and Peter in the room, sleepily waving at them. Peter waves back. Wong had said that the Cloak was somewhat choosy about who it liked, but it'd seemed to take to Peter quickly.

Turning back to the bed, Peter leans over to pull the covers up over Stephen. His hand lingers over Stephen's chest until he lets go of the quilt and pulls his hand back. Peter leans closer to Stephen, staring at the other man's face for a moment. He looks more relaxed. Peaceful. The little stress lines around his eyes and forehead have smoothed out in sleep, and his lips are slightly parted.  

'He's so beautiful,' Peter thinks.

As soon as that thought flits across his mind, Peter's cheeks turns bright red. He's in his own room less than a second later, quietly closing the door. The first side of the record is almost finished but Peter doesn't hear it at all over the blood pounding in his ears.

Peter can't forget cradling Stephen in his arms when it looked like the world was minutes away from ending, and wishing that Stephen had stayed behind in his own universe. Trying to convince Stephen to save himself, not being at all surprised when he refused. When Stephen had admitted he'd lost any fear of death after dying and coming back to life too many times to count, what had been left of Peter's heart after watching his sister disintegrate felt like it would crack in two.

And now, leaning against his bedroom door, Peter has to admit something he'd been wondering since Westview but the past day has crystalized: he's got it bad for Stephen. Really, really bad.

Brave, sarcastic, clever, stylish, great taste in music and he's literally magic? Peter never stood a chance.

Peter laughs quietly, letting the back of his head gently hit the door.

Nope. Not a chance.

Chapter Text

Wanda drifts through the Nexus, the voices of the other Scarlet Witches still ringing in her ears from when she'd extracted herself from the shared body.

“Wanda, come back! Please! Come back! Don't do this!”

None of them had shouted louder than the Scarlet Witch who'd taken Peter, who'd lost her brother, and who had the most reason to hate her.

Wanda feels so tired, floating along the eddies of alternate universes, letting herself lose track of time. This isn't death, but it's not life either. She's stuck in-between, her body dust but her soul or mind or whatever she is now still lingers in the Nexus.

Not much of her is left. The other Witches had given her enough magic to recreate her physical body – a lot of magic to one Scarlet Witch that was only a little when all the Scarlet Witches across the multiverse contributed. Instead, she had used it to give Billy and Tommy the opportunity for a real life with their mother and Vision. And it had pushed her to the brink of nonexistence.

Wanda curls in on herself, barely more substantial than a flicker of red light. She can draw on the energies of the Nexus to sustain herself, to slowly begin to heal the damage – but not much more than that. Not for a long time. Maybe someday she'll be strong enough to create a new body, make herself a real girl again, but she has no idea how long that'll take. A century? A week? Time runs funny here. And with the door to her world gone, even if she does manage to cobble together a new body, she still may not be able to return home again.

She's not expecting someone to poke her flickering shoulder.

“Found you.”

It's the same voice she'd heard the night her powers had first manifested.

She gasps, raising her head. “What?”

The Quicksilver in front of her is the wrong one – not her brother, not Peter. It's the other Wanda's twin, Pietro, the one whose death years ago had set everything that'd happened today into motion. He smiles at her kindly and she has to resist the urge to shrink away from him. She doesn't deserve kindness, not after what she's done. What she'd almost done to her universe.

“That was a very kind thing you did for my sister and nephews,” Pietro says eventually. He lifts her glowing red hand up with his like it weighs nothing. She can see through her fingers to the sleeve of Pietro's jacket. “But I see you paid a very heavy cost to do so, Wanda.”

Wanda yanks her hand back. “Leave me alone.” Her voice is barely above a whisper. She's just so tired...

Pietro's blue (not brown) eyes widen, apparently surprised that she'd even say something like that to him. “What? And just abandon you here? What kind of brother would that make me?”

She shakes her head. “I'm not your sister.” He has to know that, with his...odd connection to the Nexus, even if she doesn't look like much of anything right now. His Wanda is still fully alive, not a half-there wisp of scarlet energy.

Pietro looks at her warmly. “No? If our twins can consider themselves siblings, I don't see why we can't do the same.”

Wanda meets Pietro's eyes. “It's not safe to be around me. I'm too dangerous.” She'd nearly destroyed her dimension, came close to killing her father and would've killed Peter if the sorcerer he'd been mooning over hadn't put that protection spell on him.

Pietro snorts, his expression darkening slightly. “We're all dangerous, make no mistake about that. The only reason I have my powers is because I asked to be turned into a weapon.” He pauses. “And I've been dead for eight years; there's not much more you can do to hurt me.”

That's probably true, but she doesn't want to concede the point. Instead, she goes for the low-hanging fruit. “Yeah, well, dead or not, your hair looks dumb,” she mutters. The darker hair visible at Pietro's roots makes the pale blond look like a bad dye job.

“No, it looks amazing. You're just jealous,” Pietro says, smoothing a longer lock of his hair back. “And insulting my hair? I'm afraid you can't get rid of me that easily. But if it makes you feel better, please, belittle my wonderful hair some more. With the boys gone, the only other person I have for company in the Nexus is the crying monster man.”

Wanda's eyebrows rise. “Crying monster man?” 

Pietro nods. “Oh yes. He can be fun, when he's not in a mood. I can introduce you, if you'd like.”

Wanda looks at Pietro. Looks at his open, earnest face. He's different, yes, not just in appearance but in attitude - Pietro is more prickly than Peter, quicker to anger - but she can see the traits that this man and her twin brother share.

They're both extremely loyal to their family and they're also just so goddamn stubborn.

“You're not going to let me just float around and be miserable in peace, are you?” she sighs.

“Of course not. You've been alone for too long, I think. We Maximoffs have to stick together.” Pietro takes her hand, which is apparently solid enough for him to touch. He gently pulls her towards a two story house sitting in the middle of the Nexus, another creation of the other Wanda. “C'mon, Wanda. Let's go home.”