Chapter Text
Demi-god defeated, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters blown up and rebuilt, half the world torn all to shreds, general populace more divided than ever on the subject of mutants, which precipitates the formation of the X-Men, Erik Lehnsherr, AKA Magneto, AKA Peter's long lost father, villain turned hero (sort of, because one good act does not an acquitted man make), decides that now is a good time to pick up sticks and leave. Poof. Gone, and Peter Maximoff is actually, surprisingly okay with that, and anytime he feels like he isn't okay with that all he has to do is remember what his mom had to say about the guy and how it all gelled perfectly with what he'd seen in Egypt. Then he's okay. Mostly. Mom hadn't steered him wrong so far. He's lived twenty-six years without his biological father in his life, (if you don't count the hour and a half that it took to break him out of the Pentagon and drive to the airport) and he'll probably live a lot longer if he keeps him at a safe distance, so...
Right, training.
There is soooo much training to be done. As a team the X-Men function about as well as a car with square wheels. Scott is a one-trick pony. He finds a target and just blasts away, regardless of whether or not the thing he's blasting is a priority. Jean's great half the time but the other half she gets stage fright and can't bend a spoon, let alone fling a sentinel across the room. Ororo's attacks are strong and consistent and effective, but they also tend to encompass a wide area and they interfere with what the rest of the team is doing.
Kurt spends most of his time trying not to get struck by lightning.
Peter does damage control.
So at the end of the day the team does function. Jean eventually finds her feet, Scott finds a target, Kurt finds a way to get in and out and do some damage and Peter runs around saving the younger mutants from themselves, because they're getting there but sometimes they need a little nudge (Jean) or a slight shift in their aim (Scott). He doesn't mind. They've actually come pretty far in a surprisingly short amount of time, seeing as Scott's powers only manifested, like, four months ago and the team has been together for about half an hour unless you count Cairo. Peter remembers how awesome it was but also how much it also sucked when his power manifested. His mom had been convinced that he had a brain tumor or something because it took him a while to learn how to slow down his speech enough to make himself understood and he kept running into walls and falling down stairs. So, it's a learning process. Peter gets that, but it is going to be one damn long learning process from the way things are going. Peter can see that Raven is frustrated. Maybe she's never led a team before, or directed a team or whatever because she looks alternately like she wants to tear their heads off or write them off as a lost cause and go recruit some other mutants. She settles for biting Peter's head off. “Stop coddling them,” she says.
There's a problem with that because a) he doesn't know what that means and b) if he stops doing what he's doing the 'danger room' is going to become the 'certain death room' because, seriously, is there even a fail safe switch in here? Instead of voicing those points, though, he says “Sure, what should I do differently?”
She can't think of anything, so she hands him over to Hank for torture.
Sorry, not torture, training.
Peter has never actually trained with his powers before. They manifested when he was twelve and he'd been using his powers constantly ever since, and when his body wasn't moving fast his brain was. His powers weren't like Scott's, all dangerous and hard to control and pretty much useless unless you wanted to level a forest or blast a hole in a building or toast, like, every marshmallow in a hundred mile radius, and he wasn't afraid of his powers like Jean was afraid of hers. His speed wasn't scary, a little unsettling, sure, but not for him. He was just fast. Really fast. How fast?
“Two hundred and twenty miles per hour,” Hank tells him, holding a stop watch, standing outside the mansion in the early morning hours, watching Peter wear a rut into Xavier's perfectly manicured lawn. That's Peter's top sustainable speed: two twenty. He can sprint even faster over short distances but if he tries to hold any speed over two hundred and sixty miles per hour he starts to see spots, and running isn't all that Peter's speed is good for. Hank has him do crazy things like listen to records at the highest rpm the record player is capable of and transcribe what he hears. Then he writes an equation on a chalk board and hands Peter a calculus text book to see how long it will take him to learn how to solve it, and they never find out because after Peter gets it wrong twice before getting bored and doodling chicks in bikinis and psychedelic album art all over the board. So at least they know that Peter's speed does not make him a genius.
Hank is fascinated by Peter's powers, really more than Peter thinks he should be, until he realizes that Hank is a nerd and nerds loved science-y things that can be easily measured and quantified and predicted and so on into infinity and no matter how many times Hank does the math, Peter's numbers don't add up. Logically Hank thinks that Peter shouldn't be able to do half of the stuff that he does, so he keeps looking for a reason and that leads Hank to conclude “powers” plural because apparently super speed is Peter's primary mutation but he has a host of secondary mutations that he'd never given any thought to until Hank points them out, and they aren't all superfluous like his silver hair. His body has adapted to withstand extreme g-forces and to absorb impacts that would seriously damage a normal human (or the average mutant). That En Sabah Nur managed to break his leg is actually impressive to Hank because apparently Peter has very sturdy bones. “Thanks,” Peter tells him. His digestive system is also extremely efficient. His body produces almost no waste, even with the alarming (to other people) amount of junk food Peter inhales. Hank has Peter make a list of everything he eats for a week, which is tedious but insightful, and when the week is done and Peter hands in his homework Hank looks like he might be ill.
Once Hank has crunched the numbers he approaches Peter like he' s about to tell him that Little Debbie had stopped production and really, he might as well have because what he says is this: “I talked to the professor” -as if that was going to shield him from the fallout of what he's about to say- “and we'd like to see how you perform on a cleaner diet.”
“Okay,” Peter says, dying a little on the inside because of course he'd known where this was all going. It wasn't a big secret that he ate like a goat stuck in a vending machine. Garbage in, garbage out is what his mom used to say back when he'd been a pain-in-the-ass kid who wouldn't eat his vegetables at dinner, even when it was corn, and he'd been like, “yeah, right” and she'd been like, “fine, you win” and thrown up her hands and told him his teeth were all going to fall out by the time he was twenty. But look! His teeth are just fine, thanks. He's never even had a cavity. Strong bones, strong teeth. Good old secondary mutations, according to Hank, at least. But the point is that he's kind of thrown his lot in with the X-Men, and it's a really cool gig. He's living in a freaking mansion for crying out loud, training with other mutants in a super-secret bunker under the school. And they have radical nicknames like “Storm” and “Beast”. Peter is “Quicksilver” because he's quick and his hair is silver and, yes, he knows it's not that original but it was the best he could come up with and it's not as bad as Kurt, who's circus name stuck and now he's named after a type of worm, or Jean who is still just “Jean”. Oh! And he teaches PE! Okay, yeah, that doesn't sound as awesome as being a freaking X-Man but the mini-mutants are way cool. Like, a lot of them come from broken homes or have no homes at all and there are quite a few that are, like, damaged but Peter gets them. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that Peter is basically a large child and shares their love of video games and junk food and comic books and television, but, well, the point is that he's got a good setup here, so if the professor thinks that eating nothing but chicken breasts and bean sprouts will increase his speed or make him sprout wings or breathe fire then he'll have to bite the bullet.
Peter's high-minded acceptance of the situation lasts about twelve hours because he did not know that a person could go through Twinkie withdrawal.
“It's the sugar that your body is missing, not the particular food. Your system will need some time to adjust.”
“Uh huh,” Peter mumbles, sitting at the island in the kitchen, his pounding head pillowed on his forearms. He'd followed Hank's diet plan to the letter from the moment he woke up, even if black coffee tasted like stomach acid and egg whites and broccoli have no business being on the same plate let alone in Peter's stomach at the same time.
“Hank, I like you, and you're a smart guy and everything, but I would kill you for a Ding Dong right now.”
“No you wouldn't.”
“That's just 'cause my head hurts too much.”
“You're going to be fine, Peter,” Hank says, standing.
He pats Peter on the shoulder as he passes, and Peter groans dramatically. Still, he's a badass X-Man now so even though he's achy and snappish from Twinkie withdrawal he doesn't miss that evening's danger room training. He's actually pretty proud of how well he holds it together during the session. Then the session is over and they're all standing there icing their bruises and getting their notes from the professor and Peter can see Hank out of the corner of his eye kind of... watching him. Peter's not really listening to the professor's words, but he's nodding along dutifully while sweat beads on his forehead. Blah, blah, blah, teamwork, blah, cooperation. Then there's a little pause and Jean lets out one curious, “Peter?” and that's the switch the flips him into hyper-speed and sends him barreling down the hall to the nearest bathroom where he drops to his knees in front of the sparkling white commode and vomits. Nothing much comes up. Dinner was three hours ago and Peter hasn't had anything since, but that doesn't stop his stomach from trying as hard as it can to turn itself inside out. He can't stop dry-heaving even when he hears footsteps and voices and feels Jean laying a cold, wet washcloth on the back of his neck. When he's pretty sure he's done he thanks her, in his head because a) she can read minds and all, and b) he doesn't trust himself to speak without gagging, then he stands up and passes out cold.
He's only out for, like, a second, and he doesn't hit his head on the way down (Jean catches him with her power, thanks again, Jean) but it's enough to give Hank and the Professor minor heart attacks and earn Peter a trip to Hank's lab for a blood panel and a glass of ginger ale.
“Give it to me straight, doc, am I pregnant?” Peter quips while Hank frowns and reads a printout of medical gibberish, mumbling to himself.
It takes a second for Peter's words to filter past Hank's nerd-focus, but when it does he heaves a put-upon sigh.
“What, then? Mutant mono?”
“Your electrolytes are out of balance and you have low blood sugar.”
“Can I have a Twinkie now?”
Hank shakes his head and doesn't look up from the printout. He says, “It also says here that you're an overly dramatic man-child. You're fine. Your body is throwing a temper tantrum because you stopped main-lining Coca-cola. It'll pass.”
Peter had really been hoping for mutant mono. Or mutant flu, or anything that wasn't the sugar shakes. He's hardly ever been sick, probably another by-product of his mutation, and outside of the one time that he managed to over-indulge in alcohol (Peter is not a cheap date) he'd never been sick enough to throw up, so he was actually feeling a little vulnerable, and the closest comparison he had to this feeling was when Apocalypse had snapped his leg like a matchstick, and his dad -Magneto- had just floated there and watched it happen, and, well... it had turned out fine. Everything had been fine. The broken leg had sucked. How could it not? But Magneto had done the thing with the metal and everyone else had done the other things with their powers and Peter had done a lot of cowering and ducking and trying not to be burned alive.
There are goose bumps on Peter's arms.
“Cold?”
“Yeah.”
“Your body is more efficient at dispersing heat than it is retaining it.” Which probably explains why Peter always feels the need to wear a jacket.
Hank fills a hot water bottle and Peter hugs it gratefully to his stomach. He also brings him some kind of pills that he says are an analgesic, “basically mutant Tylenol.”
Cool. It's a placebo, but Peter takes it anyway.
“How long is this going to last?” Peter asks. His legs ache, especially the one that used to be broken and still has metal plates in it.
“I'm not sure, really. A week or two?”
Peter blows a breath out.
“You should feel much better when it's all said and done, though.”
“Looking forward to it.”
Hank is a genius, though, so he's right. Peter bitches and snaps and pukes after every other training session and just generally makes Hank's life miserable but about nine days in he turns a corner. By then he's lost all the baby fat in his cheeks and pretty much everywhere else and Hank has him increase his calorie intake so that he doesn't start to lose muscle mass. He's still a little sulky about his junk food but his endurance is up, he's burning energy more efficiently (he still eats like a horse, just a smaller horse, a pony maybe), and he's even thinking more clearly, so he guesses that's worth the trade off.
The X-Men continue to be astonishingly bad at teamwork... and pretty much everything else. Peter's starting to think that defeating Apocalypse was a fluke, and hey, he's glad they got lucky that time, but it seems like the team is just not shaping up the way that the professor envisioned it. It might have something to do with the fact that more than half of the team aren't old enough to legally drink and it also probably doesn't help that their erstwhile captain, Raven (sorry, Mystique) has been leading a pretty successful solo career for the past twenty years and she seems to be having trouble going back to the drawing board. Meanwhile, Hank never left the drawing board. He's a good teammate but his forte is lab work, which generally takes place outside of a group setting. So, pretty much everybody comes to the same conclusion at about the same time: they need a leader, not, like, a general, because the professor and Raven are kind of like the general and lieutenant general of their tiny mutant army, but they need, like, a captain or a sergeant or something to get them organized when they're on the ground.
Scott volunteers.
There are some raised eyebrows but Peter's eyebrows are not among them. Peter prefers to avoid responsibility where he can, so if Scott wants to be in charge, good for him. Peter will just continue as before unless told otherwise.
It turns out that Scott's favorite command is to tell Peter otherwise.
By now Peter has picked up on the fact that he's not Scott's favorite person. Ninety-five percent of the time that Scott has a smart remark for someone, that someone is Peter, like he sees Peter as his competition or something. For his part Peter is willing to cut the kid a lot of slack because of his brother. Most of the rest of the mansion is still grateful to Peter from pulling them out of an exploding building but Alex Summers died in the blast without Peter even knowing he was there. He'd never really bothered explaining to Scott that Alex had probably been charcoal before Peter made it up the driveway.
Anyway, he writes off Scott's jabs as teenage angst until suddenly Scott is his captain and he's required to listen to the words coming out of Scott's angsty teenage mouth. For example: Peter gets a talking to for leaving the rest of the team behind during a maze scenerio while he races to the end and back. Following that Raven arranges a search-and-destroy with the added complication of total darkness. That should have made Peter's powers completely useless but didn't because he told Ororo to summon lightning, and that lit the maze up like it was broad daylight for long enough that Peter was able to find the target. Jean dismantled the not-a-bomb and Scott got all pissed because Peter didn't tell him what he was doing and Scott ended up standing in the dark with his thumb up his butt (not literally) but Peter can't help it. When he waits for Scott's orders they all come so slowly that half of them are useless before they leave his mouth, and by that Peter means that he knows they're useless even if Scott doesn't know it yet because Scott can't think as fast as he can.
There's a particularly tense debrief one day following a search-and-rescue scenario (Raven sometimes has them practice rescuing a mannequin family who are so cracked and burned by now that they look like victims of a warehouse fire). They rescue the mannequins, who are none the worse for wear, at least not today, and Scott stalks up to Peter when its over and makes him explain why he disobeyed literally every one of Scott's commands. Peter does that, and doesn't even take offense at Scott's tone, but the longer he talks the more the cords on Scott's neck stand out until Scott thunders, “You didn't stick to the plan!”
Of course, as soon as Hank started the program Peter had known that the plan wasn't gong to work. He tells Scott this, then says, “Did you want me to stand around and let you fail?”
“Yes!” Scott explodes.
And right about then it strikes Peter that he, not Scott, is the asshole in this situation. Yes, success matters. Getting to the target matters. Rescuing their maimed mannequin family matters, but Scott is never going to learn how to do any of that if Peter doesn't get out of his way.
So that's the day that Peter figures out what the word 'coddling' means. Raven will be so proud of him.
“Alright,” Peter says. “Soooo... do you want to run it again?”
Scott draws in a breath like he's going to launch into a tirade, then he turns his head to the side, like he's listening to something and Peter figures that the professor is talking to him telepathically from the control room. When he turns his attention back to Peter he says, “Alright.” He points a finger at Peter's chest. “Don't go rogue again.”
“Sure thing.”
Peter follows Scott's plan to the letter. They fail the scenario, Kurt sprains his wrist, and they need to buy a new mannequin family. All in all it doesn't go as badly as Peter thought it would. Scott is still upset, of course, but at least he's upset at himself and not Peter and Peter can go off and listen to Pink Floyd in his room while Scott reviews his shortcomings with Raven and the professor.
Peter is lying on his bed with his headphones on. The Thin Ice is playing and Roger Waters has just taken over for David Gilmour on vocals when there's a knock at Peter's door and Jubilee pokes her head in. Peter takes off the headphones. She says, “Hey, Peter, your mom's on the phone for you.”
“Thanks. I'll get it in the hall.”
The mansion has five phones throughout the house that are all on the same line. There's one in the kitchen, the den, the main living room and one in the hall on the second and third floors outside of the bedrooms. The professor has his own private line and a set of phones in his study and bedroom. Plus Hank has his own line for undisclosed reasons that probably have a lot to do with his frequent use of highly combustible materials in his experiments. Hank also has a Ham radio somewhere in the basement and then there's Cerebro and the telepaths, so all in all the mansion is pretty well connected to the outside world.
Peter picks up the phone and says, “Mom?” and hears Jubilee hang up from wherever she picked up the line.
His mom's voice sighs out, “Hi, Honey.” There's a slight tremor in her voice, which is enough to set off alarm bells and flashing lights in Peter's head because Mom is a rock, totally unflappable most of the time. She has Peter for a son after all, so the fact that something's upset her puts him on high alert.
“What's wrong?” he asks, thinking there's been an accident or something has happened to his half-sister Lindy.
What she says is, “I haven't told your sister yet, and I'm not going to for a while, but I need someone to know.”
“Hey, are you sick or something, Mom?” he asks. He tries to keep the fear out of his voice.
“Well... uh... ” the tremor in her voice gets worse, like she's on the edge of tears. “Yeah, yeah, I'm sick. I, uh... okay, I didn't think it would be this hard. I'm sorry.”
“Don't be,” he says sympathetically, starting to feel sort of sick himself. “Just tell me what it is, okay?”
“I haven't been feeling very well. I thought it was some stomach bug or something. I went in for some tests and, uh... the results weren't great. My blood work had markers for pancreatic cancer.”
Peter's heart drops into his shoes. “Are they sure?” Peter asks. “Because they could have messed up the test or gotten your results mixed up.”
“They're sure. I had some follow up tests and... my doctor wants me to come in for surgery.”
“Okay, when?”
“It's scheduled for Monday morning at seven.”
“Okay, I'll be there.” Of course he'll be there. This is his mom, and she lives alone now because her smart, beautiful daughter went off to college and her lazy, underachieving son moved out of her basement to fight robots in another basement two states away. Mom divorced Lindy's dad, Frank, thirteen years ago and never remarried. Frank lives with his new wife and their daughter in North Carolina, so he's not coming out to hold mom's hand while she comes out of anesthesia. Besides, Frank is an asshole. Okay, maybe that's not true. Peter just thinks of Frank as an asshole because Mom and Frank divorced when he was a teenager and Peter thought everyone was an asshole when he was a teenager. Plus, Frank is paying Lindy's college tuition and would have even if she didn't have a partial scholarship. So Frank's not really an asshole but he is a dentist and he can't pay Lindy's tuition if he bails on a bunch of root canals, and if anyone is going to hold Mom's hand while she comes out of anesthesia it's going to be Peter or it's going to be Lindy (or both, Mom has two hands) because surgery is scary. Peter knows because after the whole Apocalypse thing he had to have surgery on his leg because it was pulverized. Then it healed too fast and even with Hank's help the doctors didn't really know how to compensate for Peter's mutation when they treated him, so there was a lot of really uncomfortable guesswork involving sedatives that didn't sedate and painkillers that made him think the walls were melting... and pins. Peter has metal pins and plates in his leg. Hank and the doctors were worried (rightly so) that Peter would use his powers during the healing process and a cast wouldn't be enough to hold the bones together. It's going suck if he ever has to go through screening at the airport, which he probably won't because a) commercial air travel is waaaay too slow and b) there's a jet in the basement. So the point is that surgery sucks and being sick sucks and he's not going to leave his mom to go through that alone.
“You have to call Lindy. She'll want to be there, too, or I can tell her if you want.”
“Oh, baby, I'll tell her. It's okay,” she says, like he's the one who should be scared.
“Sure.”
Mom sounds a little steadier when she says, “If you want to be there, I have a pre-op appointment on Friday. The doctor is going to explain the surgery, the risks, and the recovery process. Apparently the recovery period can be pretty long and not very fun.”
“But they can get it all, right?”
“That's what they hope.”
“Okay. Do you want me to call Lindy?” he asks again.
“No, no, baby. I'm so sorry to burden you with this. I wish I didn't have to.”
“No, are you kidding? This is not a burden, at all, so don't think that. I'll be there, okay?”
“Okay,” She sighs. There are tears in her voice. There doesn't seem to be anything else to say. Gossiping about his mom's neighbors or talking about Lindy's college courses seems inappropriate. Mom says, “Well, I don't want to tie up the line...”
“I'll talk to the professor, and I'll make sure to give you a call before I leave.”
“Thank you, Peter.”
Peter feels like time has sped up around him. He sees a kid rush past with a basketball tucked under one arm, which he isn't supposed to have in the house. A couple of teenage girls are standing at the end of the hall, clutching their notebooks to their chests, talking with their hands. Doors slam and music plays. It's all white noise to him.
He says, “I love you, Mom. It's going to be okay.”
“I love you too, baby.”
When he sets the phone back in the cradle he's aware that the girls at the end of the hall are watching him. He drifts down the stairs feeling like a log caught in a current, like his body and his mind have forgotten how to talk to each other. He sees Hank in the foyer and asks him if he's seen the professor anywhere.
“Yeah, he's still downstairs. He's talking to Scott.” He's frowning. “Is something wrong?” he asks.
Peter tells them that he just got off the phone with his mom and that she's going in for surgery and how it's probably a good idea if he's there.
“Oh,” Hank says. “What kind of surgery?” He's not nosy, just interested.
Peter's actually not sure so he tells Hank, “For cancer, uh, pancreatic cancer, she said.”
There's a spark of understanding in Hank's eyes, and he probably knows something about the subject because he's Hank and Hank knows something about everything. He looks very empathetic and says, “Wait, I'll go with you.”
“No, I got it. It's fine,” Peter says, and he walks away before Hank can say anything else.
Like Hank said, the professor is still downstairs. Peter can hear their voices in the danger room as soon as he steps off the elevator, all tinny and echo-y, and it sounds like Raven is in there with them. Peter knows he's not supposed to hear their conversation and he's not trying to eavesdrop, but he hears Raven say, “Some members of your team are going to need a longer leash than others.”
The thing about the professor's telepathy is that he tries not to use it, or at least he tries to pretend he's not using it so that people don't get all weirded out that he knows their deepest darkest secrets, except in Peter's case, where the professor has to glean his deepest darkest secrets from other people because Peter's thoughts are too fast and too erratic. Jean fessed up one day that she can usually make more sense out of what's going on in Peter's skull than the professor can, although Xavier is the first to know about it if Peter stubs his toe or if he's got something really important on his mind, so when Peter eases himself into their line of sight and the professor abruptly breaks off his conversation with Scott and Raven to wheel toward Peter he knows he must be projecting pretty loudly.
Scott looks annoyed at the interruption. Raven looks from Peter to the professor and switches to standby mode. Peter feels like he's about to suffocate, and by then Xavier's close enough to reach out and place a reassuring hand on Peter's forearm. The professor says, in a voice that's probably but not definitely too low for Scott and Raven to hear, “It's alright. Go to her. But please don't leave tonight. Get some rest first, do you understand?”
Peter nods. He can't look at the professor's shiny eyes.
“Peter,” Xavier says. “Do call when you arrive. Let us know how things go.”
“Sure.”
Peter wants to say something about not wanting to disappoint the team or leave them in the lurch but he's sure the professor already knows everything he might want to say, so Peter just says, “Thanks.”
And those are the last words he says to the professor in person for a very long time.
Peter is famous at the mansion for his ability to fall asleep anywhere, anytime at the drop of a hat. As long as there's a semi-horizontal surface on hand, he can be out like a light in seconds, but the night before he leaves the mansion he doesn't sleep at all. Around five-thirty Peter gives it up as a lost cause and shambles downstairs with his mind foggy and his nerves abuzz. Aside from the cooks, Hank and Kurt are the only ones up at that hour. They're drinking coffee at the island in the kitchen, or really, Hank is drinking coffee, which is leaving rings all over a set of blueprints that are spread out on the island. Kurt is perched on a kitchen stool like a gargoyle, looking over Hank's shoulder. His tail is switching back and forth in slow, steady sweeps kind of like a cat's. Once you get past the surface there's definitely more cat than gargoyle about Kurt, right down to his tendency to knock things off shelves, although that's unintentional and has to do with there being far too many things on shelves around the mansion and the fact that Kurt's tail seems to have a mind of its own.
Kurt's wrist is taped and Peter remembers how he hurt it yesterday during the simulation. He can't believe that was only yesterday. Peter's focus has shifted so much that it feels like a year ago.
Hank greets him when Peter appears in the kitchen and drops his duffel bag onto a chair. “Hey, how'd you sleep?”
He wouldn't be asking if the answer wasn't obvious. Peter shrugs, “Not bad.”
“Are you going to stick around for breakfast?” Hank asks. “I doubt you're taking a bus and it's a long way.”
Peter finds that he is, for the first time in his life, not hungry.
“Yeah, maybe some toast.”
Peter said he would call before he left. Mom's always been an early riser but he figures he'll give her until at least six-thirty so she can get some rest, unless she's like Peter and she never went to sleep, but she'd sounded so tired on the phone...
“Are you going somewhere?” Kurt asks.
“Home for a few days. Maybe longer.” He tells Kurt about the surgery and Kurt's not the type to interrupt with questions so he listens until Peter runs out of words and then he says, “I will say a prayer for your mother.”
And he means right now.
It's pretty surprising that the one mutant Peter knows that looks the like some kind of demon straight out of an illustrated edition of Dante's Inferno is the most devout person he's ever met. Peter's never been the religious type and to be totally honest he's not sure he even believes that God exists or which one it is or if it's a bunch of different gods. He just doesn't know. After all, that Apocalypse guy thought he was a god and look how that turned out. Anyway, Kurt's pretty convinced that God exists and that He listens to the prayers of humans and mutants alike so Peter bows his head and lets Kurt clasp his hands and listens to a prayer in German that he doesn't understand and then says “Amen” when he thinks it's appropriate. Hank says it too, because Hank's a respectful guy, even though he's probably not sure about God either. And because Hank's a respectful guy he asks what Peter wants him to tell the students and teachers if they ask where he went.
“The truth, I guess. I mean, I shouldn't be gone for too long. Hopefully everything goes well and she bounces back and stuff, but uh... Anyway, I'll try to come back as soon as I can, you know. Just don't let Scott give my suit away, okay?”
“I will hide it from him,” Kurt says, and he's probably serious.
Hank looks troubled. He asks, “Peter, I don't want to alarm you but I don't want you to be blindsided either. Pancreatic cancer can be very serious.”
Peter knows. It's not like he missed how scared his mom sounded on the phone. Of course it's serious, but Peter's mom is one tough lady. She raised Peter, and she had him back in the days when premarital sex was taboo (not that that stopped anyone) and it was pretty common for girls who had babies out of wedlock to just 'go away' for a while and then come back without a baby like nothing had happened. Peter's mom didn't exactly 'go away' but she did drop out of nursing school and move back in with Grandma, who was still alive at the time, and then she had Peter at one-thirty in the morning in a hospital in Richmond where the nurses were really mean and wouldn't give her anything for the pain until she was screaming and they made comments about how 'maybe this would teach her to keep her knees together', but she had Peter anyway and he was born breathing like a heavy smoker, scrawny and wrinkled like an old man complete with a full head of silver hair and the doctor had looked at him and said he had genetic defects and wouldn't live long and if he did it would be in an institution, and Mom, who had fully intended to give him up for adoption because that was the norm at the time, said she felt so horrible that she took Peter home so at least he would be near family when he died, but the joke was on them because Peter didn't die, not even close. He ate like a champ and slept all the time so Mom got lots of rest and Peter was such a good baby that even Grandma didn't mind looking after him and when Grandma got sick Mom got her Puerto Rican neighbor who had, like, eleven kids, to watch Peter and Mom was able to go back and finish nursing school and get a good job and meet Frank and get married and have Lindy, and when she did she ended up right back there at the same hospital with a different doctor but the same nurses, except the nurses this time were nice and brought her ice chips and fresh pillows and called her 'Mrs. Maximoff' instead of 'Little Missy'. Then Peter and Frank were allowed in to see Mom and the little pink bundle and Peter tore off his baseball cap out of respect and bounced on his heals and said, “Can I hold her? Can I hold her? Can I? Can I?” and the nurses stared and Mom said, “You remember my son...” and the nurses got all quiet and then tried to act like they were glad to see Peter, which Peter didn't care about at all because he had a sister now, which meant he had someone to play with. So the point is that Peter's mom is a tough lady, a fighter, but even knowing that there's a cold little finger of dread poking Peter in the sternum, like there's some part of him that's already sped to the end of the maze and back and just knows.
“Like, how serious?” Peter asks, even though he doesn't want to.
“Well, it depends on how quickly the doctors catch it, but it can spread pretty quickly. I'm sure the doctor will explain more about it but... does she have family nearby?”
“She has me, and she has my sister. Lindy's in college.”
“Your, uh, dad's not around?”
Peter's pretty sure that Hank already knows the answer to that question. It's not like that mutant holding tank at Alkali Lake was very big. Hank and Moira would have had to be pretty distracted not to have overheard him when he told Raven that Erik was his dad, but he's going to let that slide for now. “No, I have a step-dad, well, ex-step-dad but he's off with his family and he and Mom have been divorced for, like, a million years, so he's not exactly the guy she calls when the the battery in her car dies, let alone... you know.”
“Okay... just... you'll call if you need anything, right?”
Hank is just flat out scaring him with all the innuendo. He probably not trying to, which actually makes it worse. “Sure. I will. Promise.”
Peter's suddenly feeling a little claustrophobic, so he asks Hank and Kurt to pass along his farewells and gives them each and handshake. Then Peter picks up his duffel and speeds out of the house, having forgotten all about his toast.
Peter's not inconsiderate. He did promise to call before he showed up at his mom's house, so he stops at a payphone in the village. He counts seven rings before mom picks up, and tries to listen for hints of weakness or illness in her voice, but she just sounds like his mom, and he can hear the coffee perking in the background and he knows that he'll be there in time to sit down and have a cup with her.
Peter runs full-tilt most of the way there but slows to a walk a few doors down because a few of his mom's neighbors are out. Peter sees Mr. Oberman lying under his Camaro, changing the oil. Mr. Oberman used to have a son, Roy, who was a few years older than Peter, and Roy would pretend not to know Peter while they were at school unless he needed to bum a cigarette. Roy died in Vietnam. Mr. Oberman has another son and a daughter who are both off working in New York, and he has his Camaro, which he uses as an excuse to avoid his wife.
Old Mrs. Szewc is out watering her lawn in her slippers and a quilted, button-up housecoat and the same perma-frown she's been wearing since Peter was nine and she caught him climbing the trees in her back yard to steal cherries.
Peter waves to her and shouts 'hello' with his hands cupped around his mouth because she's, like, eighty and can't see very far and can't hear at all and she just keeps frowning and watering.
Mom's lived in the same house and had the same neighbors since she married Frank. The fact that Peter's a mutant is sort of an open secret in the neighborhood. Everybody knows but nobody talks about it, like the two retired schoolteachers on the corner who have been 'roommates' for twenty-five years.
Mom's seen him coming and by the time he's at the end of the driveway the front door is open and she's leaning against the jamb with her arms wrapped around herself. Peter only saw her a few months ago and she doesn't really look any different, maybe a little thinner, maybe a little more tired around the eyes, but otherwise she's the same. Same Mom. Same smile.
“Peter,” she says, and pulls him into a hug for the whole neighborhood to see, and he doesn't mind at all.
Mom invites him in and pours him coffee and tells him that she called Lindy and Frank. Lindy got her professors' permission to miss class for a couple of days, so she'll be home on Sunday. Frank wants to know how the surgery went as soon as it's done. After Mom shares all of that there's a quiet time while Peter gathers up the courage to ask, “So, how bad is it? Does the doctor know? Is there anything you should be doing?”
She shakes her head for an interminable amount of time and squeezes his hand. The answer to all of his questions is, “I don't know.”
Mom's “I don't know,” is echoed by the doctor who will be doing her surgery when Peter and his Mom sit across from him in his office on Friday morning. The surgeon is is bald, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a firm handshake. There are about eight hundred framed certificates and diplomas on the wall behind him and it strikes Peter as funny that even this guy, who has a diploma for every Twinkie that Peter's eaten in his lifetime, still does not have a solid answer. Peter doesn't laugh, though, because what this guy does know is enough to make his stomach turn over. What he does know is that the cancer has spread beyond Mom's pancreas. What he doesn't know is how far it's spread. He thinks that it's likely he'll have to remove the entire pancreas and likely some nearby tissue. After a few days in the hospital she can go home, but the doctor says her recovery will take several weeks and she'll need someone there to look after her and Peter just nods, because he's in this for good, whatever it takes, even though he feels like his blood has turned into ice water and his teeth sort of want to chatter so he has to keep his jaw clenched. The doctor isn't done with them, though. Mom will need follow-up tests to see if they got everything, and if they did then she will still need to be on insulin for the rest of her life, but she should have a pretty normal life. If they don't get it all... well, the doctor says, they'll talk about other options. Somehow he makes 'other options' sound both promising and ominous at the same time, like he's whispering 'everything will be fine' as he smothers Peter with a pillow.
It feels so surreal to walk out of that office afterward and get in the car and hear Phil Collins sing You Can't Hurry Love and then get stuck in traffic because there's an accident on the interstate, and Peter feels like someone pulled the rug out from under him (and he imagines it as one of those crazy Persian rugs that the professor has all over the mansion to keep out the chill because those floors can get cold) and Peter's lying on his back staring at a crack in the ceiling that's probably been there for a while but he's never noticed it before and everyone is rushing by him with places to be and stupid, inconsequential bullshit to deal with and they're all, “huh, guy on the floor, alright then” and they go about their business, even though there's a big fucking crack in the ceiling and the roof is about to come down on Peter's head and if Peter feels like this he can only imagine how his mom feels. She's not crying or anything that Peter can see, but her body is all tense, like she's holding something so tight that she's afraid if she lets go she'll never see it again, and he figures out what it is when they pull into the driveway and Peter shuts off the car and Mom lets out a sob that sounds like it has been under pressure. She starts to make a high, keening sound and she puts a shaky hand to her mouth. Peter allows himself an instant of wide-eyed holy-shit-Mom-is-crying terror before he gathers her into his arms and holds her close and rubs circles on her back.
“I'm sorry,” she says. “I'm so sorry. I'm just scared.”
“Hey, it's okay. You know what? That guy? Your doctor? He seems to really now his stuff. We're going to do everything we can to get you better. I promise.”
Mom gasps in a breath and says, “I'm scared. I don't want to leave you.”
Peter thinks about telling her that she doesn't need to worry about him, but he says instead, “You're not going anywhere,” and he repeats it, like that will make it more true, “You're not going anywhere, not for a long time.”
For three days Peter and his mom return to a living situation that is almost normal, almost what they had when Peter was living with her, except that he makes her breakfast everyday instead of the other way around, even though she doesn't have much of an appetite.
He was always really good about running errands and taking care of the yard and pretty much keeping the place neat and clean. It wasn't like he was ever too busy to do housework and he sort of considered it part of his rent, not that he didn't pay rent. He did, he just paid it in the form of goods and services. He likes to paint himself as a deadbeat and a loser because he knows how it looks to the outside world that a going-on-twenty-seven-year-old man still lives at home with his mom but he did have a job most of the time, and sometimes two or three, it's just that all of Peter's jobs were of the cash-under-the-table, no-degree-required, I-don't-care-how-it-gets-done-just-do-it variety and they never kept him busy enough to keep him from a round or ten of Space Invaders and if Peter really had to sit down and explain the reasons that he'd stayed in his Mom's basement beyond the natural incubation period for the average American male then he would have to talk about how he'd helped some strangers rescue a potential presidential assassin from the Pentagon and how the guy he'd rescued had turned around and tried to kill another president on national television and then how the presidential assassin (who never really killed any presidents at all, but who has killed a lot of other people) is his long lost father and Peter turns into a little bit of an agoraphobic for a while because a) the Feds are probably after him because it's not like nobody saw the little bastard with the silver hair and jacket at the Pentagon the day of the breakout and b) Peter had, up to that point, been sort of a little shit, flaunting his powers, thinking he was a badass because he swiped TVs from store windows and cases of Hostess Cupcakes from the back of delivery trucks but his dad was an actual, bonafide killer and that realization sort of scares him straight because on the one hand he doesn't want to turn out like his dad and on the other hand he doesn't want to go somewhere that his dad can't find him, which is... okay, it's kind of fucked up. He didn't tell his mom about that right away. He just let her do the overprotective mom thing and bring him breakfast in the basement and he stopped going to school and decided to help out around the house instead. He helped Lindy with her homework and picked her up from school when Mom had to work and looked after the house and eventually started doing odd jobs and waited for his dad to find him and one day Peter looked up from his Pac-Man arcade game and ten years had passed and his dad's face was on TV again.
So really Peter is back to almost exactly where he was a few months ago except Peter cannot stop his brain from thinking about his mom's surgery and his resolve not to run to the library and look up everything he can about pancreatic cancer lasts until about five minutes after the library opens on Saturday morning. He finds two books on the subject and reads them both in ten minutes and then really wishes he hadn't and then he runs home and tries to find something, anything to take his mind off of his mom's illness and ends up detailing her car and reorganizing the garage and replacing the carpet in the den. He's standing in the kitchen wondering whether the tiles on the counter top could use replacing when his mom comes in and calmly pours herself a vodka tonic. She's always been a casual day-drinker. He's rarely seen her drunk, but she's drunk now, loose and relaxed, and after what Peter read he can't say he blames her.
She must notice something disapproving in his body language because she puts her arm around Peter's shoulders. “I wanted to get this out of the way before Lindy gets here. One last hurrah.”
He hugs her back, and instead of re-tiling the kitchen counter or cleaning the rain gutters he and mom collapse together on the sofa and watch horrible midday Saturday TV. It's mostly reruns but Peter hasn't had much time for TV viewing at the mansion, but his brain is so busy digesting ideas like chemotherapy and radiation and palliative care that he can't absorb any of the plots and he just lets T.J. Hooker and The Jeffersons wash over him until Mom falls asleep and he extricates himself from her to start dinner.
Lindy arrives at about four o'clock on Sunday afternoon. Peter and Lindy have always been close. Even when Lindy was a moody pre-teen child of divorce and hated everybody Peter, lucky Peter, had been the exception, and they would hang out in Peter's basement, which was like a private retreat, a cooling-down spot when she was mad at Mom over something stupid. Lindy and Peter would listen to music and talk about movies and he'd let her win at ping-pong and he'd bug her about boys that she liked. Those times probably saved her from becoming a little hooligan like Peter was. That and the fact that she didn't have a super power that let her get away with practically anything. Nah, Lindy's a good kid. Yeah, she smokes cigarettes and cusses to show that she's cool but she's not Peter. She's going places. She's got plenty of friends and she's smart and she works hard. Sure, when he tries to give her a pep talk when she's feeling down she always smacks him and tells him to shut up, but Peter thinks she knows it's true. She can be anything she wants. Anything.
So Lindy comes home and the three of them do their absolute best to pretend that this is just a regular family get-together, but Peter can't decide who is trying to be strong for who because all three of them are tense and jittery and too considerate of one another and even though nobody mentions the surgery it's on all of their minds, the thing they dance around.
It's so strange for Peter to think that they're all adults now. Peter and Lindy aren't just Mom's kids anymore. They're responsible. They're taking care of things, which is more than doing the dishes and watering the lawn. No one is coming to sweep up after them if they mess up, so Peter swears to himself that he's not going to mess up.
To be continued...