Family values
"Twins?" Erik echoed, staring down with horror at the two squirming, wailing bundles that had been shoved into his arms. "What do you mean, twins? Where did they come from?"
The young man on the doorstep smirked. "Well if you don't know that, I sure ain't gonna tell ya," he said cheekily, and had Erik been in his right mind he might have taken exception, but as it was, he was too busy freaking out. "Their mother died, no next of kin, you were listed on the birth certificate. It's up to you what happens to them, now."
"Erik," Charles said, with the kind of calm that screamed 'eye of the storm', "you never told me you had children."
"I didn't know!" Erik protested.
"You didn't know?" Charles said, quickly escalating into hystrionic DANGER! territory. "You had children and you didn't even know?"
"Their mother never told me! And I was distracted hunting Shaw! And it was before I even knew you!" Erik said defensively. Charles scowled at him, still exuding waves of displeasure over a core of rather hypocritical jealousy. Erik wasn't the one who got drunk at pubs and flirted with everything that moved, after all. He'd show Charles what a 'groovy mutation' looked like, honestly.
"Well," Charles said finally, sighing, "I suppose we'll just have to figure something out. Pass me Wanda, you clearly can't hold both of them comfortably yet."
Wordlessly Erik handed over what he thought was the girl, although they both just looked like screaming red-faced gnomes to him. He was beginning to panic; he could just about handle teenaged mutants, but babies were another thing entirely. And what did Charles mean, we? Surely he wasn't suggesting they try to raise Erik's children here in the mansion, was he?
'Well, what else do you propose we do? I certainly hope you're not suggesting we give them up and letting them fend for themselves, Erik. They're your CHILDREN,' he chastised, not bothering to hide how appalled he was at the very suggestion. He paused, looking thoughtful. 'Very probably mutant children, at that.'
And of course Erik was never intending on abandoning them, but the prospect of actually raising them was so very daunting he didn't even know where to begin.
"We'll work something out," he agreed weakly, and it was one of the last times he would ever agree to one of Charles's plans, because Charles's plans were terrible.
Eleven years later, Pietro and Wanda met for the first time in their living memory at a mutant camp in the English countryside, confusingly far away Pietro's home in Paris and even further from Wanda's home in Westchester, so it was perhaps unsurprising that they were both a little on edge.
Alright, that was an excuse; they hated each other on sight.
"I'm not going in a group with that goody two shoes Xavier kid, no way!" Pietro declared, crossing his arms and scowling. Wanda stomped her foot.
"At least my daddy's not evil like yours!" she shrieked, and Pietro yelled, "Shut up, you X-twerps don't know nothing about my dad-"
"CHILDREN, CHILDREN," the camp leader shouted. "Calm down or I'll put you both in solitary, together!"
Which was an effective enough threat to shut them up in the moment, but not the next day, or the day after that - "What kind of a lame power is super speed? So you can run real fast, so what?" "At least it's actually useful unlike your dumb party trick!" "My power is not a party trick, take that back!" - so eventually the nominally responsible adults threw in the towel and chucked them in a room together for the rest of the trip.
Surprisingly enough, this actually resulted in an uneasy truce, rather than World War III.
"Who's that," Pietro said grudgingly, when he saw Wanda setting down photo frames on her side of the dresser, pointing at a woman in the frame. "'sat your mum?"
"Nope, I don't have a mum," Wanda said, not sounding overly bothered by the fact. "That's my Aunt Mystique. She's blue," Wanda added smugly, "and she can shapechange into anything."
"Well my Uncle Azazel is red," Pietro retorted. "And he can teleport! So there!"
Wanda sniffed, and there was silence for a moment until she tentatively offered, "It's pretty cool that he can teleport."
"Yeah, well," Pietro mumbled, shrugging awkwardly. "You're aunt's pretty cool too. And he's not my uncle, really. I just call him that."
Wanda nodded wisely. "My dad's not really my dad either," she confided. "He and my real dad split up when I was a baby, so he's taken care of me ever since. But he's just as good as any dad. Better, even."
"Really? Me too!" Pietro said, excited. "Only, my dad is my real dad. But I had another dad, when I was a baby, and they split up, so all I've got is this old ripped photo."
Wanda bolted upright, eyes wide. "Me too! I have an old photo of my other dad too! And it's ripped too!"
Pietro stared. "Seriously? This is too freaky."
"Okay," Wanda said, "okay, do you have your photo here, because I totally do."
Pietro grabbed for his bag and dug out a grubby, well-loved scrap of paper without saying a word. "Let's show each other on three," he suggested, and Wanda nodded.
"One... two..."
"OH MY GOD THAT'S MY DAD. YOU'VE GOT A PHOTO OF MY DAD," Pietro yelled, not waiting for three, and Wanda swiped both scraps of photo from him so she could stare at them in disbelief.
"They fit together!" she shrieked back. "Look, look, they fit together! Your dad is my dad! My dad is your dad! AAAAAAAH."
"AAAAAAAAAAAAH," Pietro agreed, whizzing around the small room so fast that paper flew everywhere and the curtains tangled in the air until Wanda yelled, "Stop, STOP!"
"We're like, siblings!" he said, a little hysterically. "We're like siblings and Dad totally lied to me! My sister is an X-Man! My other Dad is Professor X! My whole life is a lie!"
Wanda rolled her eyes, equilibrium slightly restored by Pietro's freak out. "Don't be so melodramatic," she said. "So they lied, big deal. Adults do that stuff all the time. Shut up for a moment and just listen, okay? I've got an awesome idea about how we could both find out more about our other dads and what happened."
"Yeah? I'm listening," Pietro said suspiciously.
"Why don't I use my power to swap us so you can go home with Dad and I can go home with Mag-- our other dad?" she said. "It would be awesome! And then eventually they'd have to meet again to swap us back, right?"
Pietro looked at her with new respect. "I'm sorry I called your power a party trick," he said, only a little grudgingly, and Wanda preened. "But if you can do that, how come you can't just put everything back the way it was before the broke up? And how do you know Professor X won't be able to tell, anyways?"
Wanda shrugged. "I don't know if I'm strong enough to mess with things that much yet. Besides, until we find out how they got together and what went wrong, it's too dangerous to mess with. Who knows what could happen? And you've had some training against mind-readers, right? It's worth a try, anyway."
"Okay," Pietro said slowly, and then started to grin. "Sure, it's worth a try. Let's do this thing!"