Chapter Text
Anya would've gone to Charles sooner, but Charles was preoccupied with the draft lottery; sitting tensely in his study long into the night until his voice grew hoarse under the strain of repeated telephone calls. It was 1968 all over again, when she'd become used to bringing their shared lunch to his study. They had sat in companionable silence while the radio droned on, both pretending that Charles hadn't lost enough weight to need a tailor's service.
Enough, she told herself sternly, clutching Director Carter's card, now gone soft and slightly ragged at the corners. She'd folded the memory of their meeting away, far from the surface of her mind where Charles would overhear. You have to tell him today.
She waited until she heard the tyres of Lilandra Neramani's car crunching over the gravel in the driveway before running up to Charles's study, projecting a hurried may I see you, sir? barely two feet from his door. Charles's yes, of course was a warm, curious spark in her head, and she turned the doorknob to see him clearing away the remnants of tea. One of the buttons of his shirt was missing -- it wouldn't have been obvious, she thought, if his tie wasn't also slightly askew.
Charles raised an eyebrow at her. Then grinned, unabashed, and just like that they were Uncle Charles and Anya, not the Professor and his student. She threw herself onto her favourite armchair, curling up close to the fireplace.
Humming to himself, Charles switched off the radio. "What is it?"
Silently, she slid the card across the table to him. She watched a host of emotions flickering across his face as he put two and two together, his eyes and mouth tight with something that an observer might call disapproval, but Anya knew it was closer to an instinctive, smothering protectiveness Charles was never quite able to shake off and didn't care to apologise for.
Strangely, it made her feel a little better.
"I assume they want to recruit you." At her nod, he said, "Do you intend to take up their offer?"
She met his eyes and gave a minute shake. "No. I don't know if they want me because of who I am, or who my father is."
"It's not inconceivable they might have found out, given the resources at their disposal," Charles admitted, looking far from thrilled at the prospect. "Conversely, it is equally possible they're simply interested in having an agent with a ready presence among mutant networks."
Anya wrinkled her nose. "It shouldn't be their job to police us. Mutants."
"Better SHIELD than the FBI, I suppose -- at least we have some traction with Director Carter." He contemplated her for a while. Not scanning her mind, but trying to read her face. "This isn't the only reason you're here."
"I guess-- no." She shook her head, disgusted at her own hemming and hawing. "I've been thinking for a while about my future and I want to talk to you about it."
"Ah."
"You had this talk with everyone else except me."
An embarrassed flush briefly tinged Charles's face. "Guilty as charged. I'm afraid I have been putting it off. I usually have a chat with the parents where possible, you see, though you're quite a bit older than your classmates. I had hoped you would have the opportunity to consult your father--"
"Why would I want to consult Magneto?" she exploded angrily, fingernails scraping against brocade where her fingers clutched the armrest. "He has nothing to say that I want to hear. What advice could he possibly give me? How to wipe out people like me?"
"Anya," Charles said gently. "Erik loves you, regardless of everything, even ideology. Whatever he's done, he did his best to be a father to you and your siblings."
"It takes more than a few Passover meals to be a father," Anya said, trembling. Her heart was beating against her ribcage like a drum. "It doesn't matter if I'm the exception to the rule when the rule is: kill all non-mutants."
"Erik doesn't actually want to kill all non-mutants, he wants to--"
"Uncle Charles, that doesn't make it any better."
He passed a hand over his face, weary. "No, you're right. All the same, he does care very deeply about you."
"It's not that I loathe him," Anya muttered, hating how small her voice sounded. "I don't. He's still-- he's part of who I am. But I'll never be as close to him as he is to Wanda and Pietro. I don't think I want to be, either."
The twins were young enough to look up to Erik Lehnsherr as a distant but loving father, but she'd grown up without him. She was 14 when he found her, old enough to be considered an adult and married off. She didn't even retain any memories of him before the fire and her mother's flight, which Charles said was a result of trauma. Erik still looked at her as if she was a wandering soul with an unwelcome attachment to him, or his eyes would linger on her hair and she knew he was thinking of Magda.
If she'd been a mutant, Anya thought, or if her father hadn't been one, they might still have built a good, solid relationship. Maybe. Or maybe all the might-have-beens would still have stood between them, and they still wouldn't know what to do with each other.
One year, Erik arrived two days before Purim and stayed through Passover. They spent the first week awkwardly trying to be a father and a daughter to the other, before giving up the attempt as futile. To their probably mutual relief, they proceeded to assiduously avoid each other for the rest of the month. Erik spent more time with Charles than her, she thought, and clamped down on it, hard, because she knew what her father was doing with the man who raised her. It made her feel a little shocked, still, and a lot weird in a way that was not-good, and she didn't want Charles to know more about it than he already did.
Charles brought his wheelchair closer and took her hands in his, squeezing gently. His eyes were sad and kind, and she wished she wasn't too old for a hug, in this country and among Charles's people. Where were Aunt Bova and the Maximoffs now? She still missed them. Anya wished her mother's father was alive -- he was Jewish like her father, that much she knew, and there must have been some scandal there for him to marry a Sinti woman. Or perhaps he and her namesake had simply bumped into each other in the market and fell in love, despite the odds.
Perhaps he and Magda understood wanting to try to be everything she was in a way that wasn't how Erik did it, maybe even worked out how to say these things better than she could. She would've liked to know her grandfather's stories and her mother's stories and all the stories of the families no longer on this earth, instead of the things left unsaid in-between her father's carefully-picked tales and the news headlines.
"What do you want to do, Anya?" Charles asked, when she was no longer in danger of weeping into his sleeve.
"Anything that's not teaching or secretarial work," she said promptly, disengaging her hands from his. "I made a list of my skills and came up with several possibilities."
"Of course you did."
"Don't laugh."
"I'm not! I won't, I promise."
"I don't know if I want to go to college." At his visible alarm, she added, "Not right now."
"Possibly you will, though? In the future?" he pressed. "You're a graduating a term early, so you'll have time to think. A bachelor's degree could open doors for you. I must admit I was somewhat concerned at first, but your grades are acceptable to any number of perfectly good universities."
"Uncle Charles."
His blue eyes were terribly tragic, and she wanted to laugh in his face. "All right, I'll stop pushing."
"College is more of something Wanda might want for herself." They shared an unhappy look, knowing that Erik was likely to persuade Pietro to join him; and wherever Pietro went, Wanda was almost sure to go with him. Anya said, slowly, "I want to travel. I'll pay my own way -- I thought I'll start with London, then eventually Calais and from there, I'll work my way to Transia and find my foster parents."
"I see." Charles's eyes flicked towards the globe on his desk. "I've always wanted to travel the world, myself. I thought I had time -- after my PhD, after we stopped Shaw, when the school stopped tripping into an emergency every other day. It never did happen."
And now you sit at the center of the web, spinning away. Anya knew Charles heard the thought, but he was well-versed now in the art of acknowledging only what was verbalised -- at least on normal days, when he hadn't just been attacked by any number of their enemies or the other person wasn't too obtuse for even Charles's famous patience.
"Are you absolutely certain about this?" Charles asked.
"Yes. Uncle Charles, you know I won't be an innocent abroad," she said, raising her chin. "Please, don't tell my father. I'm 19 and I don't need his permission."
"Anya, I can't not tell him."
"I'll write a letter for him," she bargained. "I'm leaving in spring, so if I see him before, I'll tell him in person. And I'll write to you as often as I'm able."
Charles smiled at her, a little wistful, a little heart-broken, and perhaps this was what it felt like to have a parent who was an anchor instead of an absence. He's not that old, Anya thought with a jolt -- perhaps not even old enough to actually be able to have fathered her -- but Charles had always been the teacher and substitute parent a homesick child desperately wanted.
Just in case, he said in her head, unspooling numbers and names and faces from his thoughts. She gave a wordless assent, and the knowledge was there, ready for recall: Charles's contacts and friends, scattered around the world.
"I'll miss you," he said.
"Me too," she said, because some things are too important to be unsaid, even to a telepath. Anya rose to her feet, paused, then leaned down to kiss him on the cheek. "See you at dinner."
In her room, Anya took out the list she made. She added a few more items in her neat, bold hand. Surely there must be a place in the world for a girl seeking her fortune; one who could speak six languages, knew a few secrets to bear-taming, played the violin, and had Logan to teach her as many dirty tricks as she could learn in hand-to-hand fighting.
Even if there wasn't, it was 1969 and she had the rest of her life to live. If Valentina Tereshkova could go to space and Golda Meir could become prime minister of Israel, she could make room for herself.