Chapter 1
October, 1993
The early dawn came with heavy rain, turning the already wet grounds of the woods into a muddy trail that reminded Peter a lot of the deadly quicksand his childhood shows and movies warned him of so insistently. Squelching through and mucking up his last pair of boots—silver in their previous life—he considered what life would be like now, had they focused more on zombies.
By the time the trail gave way to underbrush, and Peter’s thoughts were drifting to a zombie filled Lawrence of Arabia, the rain had died down to a light drizzle and then stopped altogether.
“Maybe there?” David hummed, tilting his head towards a particularly overgrown portion of the underbrush. He was speaking not to Peter, of course, but to the tiny green lizard that he’d saved from an extremely irritated bird by their campsite and had been carrying around for the past two hours. He’d sworn up and down that he hadn’t used his powers to save it, but Peter knew birds didn’t just fly away halfway to their prey, and also—the kid was a shit liar.
“No,” David muttered down into his palm. Peter wondered if it could hear and understand him. Knowing Peter’s mutation, it likely could. He'd tried to argue the merits of carrying the thing around in the rain when they already had so much to carry, but given David's newfound stubbornness and the fact that the thing weighed negative zero pounds, Peter had lost the argument almost instantly. He’d been trying to decide on the most appropriate place to set it free for the past half hour, and had been doing it out loud, to Peter’s great misfortune.
“Just leave it somewhere.”
“I can’t just leave it somewhere ,” David said, appalled. The edge and slightly mocking imitation in his tone made Peter raise his eyebrows. This newfound teenage rebellion made Peter partially proud and partially wanting to speed him onto a mountaintop and leave him there. “It has to be protected in case it rains again,” David said.
Of course.
“Yeah,” Peter said. He looked up into the gray sky, slowed his pace and stood, his eyes closed. He slid the straps of his backpack off his sore shoulders and let it drop to the ground, to hell with the fact that he’d be cleaning off mud for a good hour later. He was wearing a sweater; his Rush hoodie, all too tight now on top; and a wind jacket, yet the cold still penetrated into his very bones. He let the remnants of the rain drizzle on his skin for a moment and breathed in the cool air. “So do we,” he sighed. They had to be close to the town. They had to.
“It won’t rain again,” David said, rousing him from his daze. “You don’t have to worry.”
“Yeah?” Peter asked, squinting an eye open, “like it wasn’t going to rain this morning?”
David shifted on his feet in the mud, looked down at the lizard again.
“I was wrong before,” he mumbled. “I’m sure now.”
More like you lied before, and might be lying now.
Peter sighed. They should have stayed at the warehouse until they were sure the storm had ended, it’s not always they were able to find a safe space with the ceiling still intact and absent of the dead and the sentinels.
In the end, David’s stubbornness and his ardent faith in their plan had won out.
“No choice now,” Peter muttered and trudged on. They couldn’t exactly camp in the middle of this muck. David gave a small, triumphant smile and followed. Peter shook his head, feeling his exasperation growing. It wasn’t himself he was worried about, as much as the migraine growing in the back of his head and the ache in his legs begged to differ. The kid may have been keeping a steady pace and a chipper mood well enough, but Peter could still tell from the dark circles under his eyes, the pallor of his skin, and the heavy way he carried his weight the longer they walked that he wasn’t quite all there yet.
Peter couldn’t get the image of him unmoving, fevered and ashen, out of his mind. Two days spent sitting in dread, and coming to the mortifying cognizance that, still, after all these years, there was someone left to lose. Someone to grieve.
A few silent miles later, David stopped abruptly and declared the lizard’s stoppoint. Peter took a sip from his canister, just enough to wet his dry throat, and watched him crouch down on the ground. Gently, he lay the thing under an isolated corner where the underbrush was particularly high and a bright shade of green, and then watched it for some time, a distant look in his eyes.
“I think it’s gonna die,” he said.
“What? Nah man, looks good as new to me.”
David said nothing, just stayed there, crouched with that open, sad look in his eyes and stared at the thing slithering around, weakly.
“Don’t they hibernate or some shit?” Peter tried. “It’ll probably just sleep, man.”
David turned, gazed up at him with his big Xavier blue eyes that always seemed to know too much, either due to his mutation or due to the fact that he had to grow up so fast in his short sixteen years.
“We can take it with,” Peter said, even though he knew David was unlikely to be wrong, “if you want.”
“No,” David said and then stood.
It was probably for the best too, Peter decided. David’s habit of rescuing strays never quite boded well. The first animal he’d acquired by himself had been a literal freaking snake and, for Peter, it had been a once in a lifetime opportunity to see Professor Charles Xavier’s dignified face turn ashen as his nine year old son had proudly presented his new found pet, smiling his big tooth-missing smile. Then there’d been a yellow canary that had gently sat on David’s shoulder wherever he had gone, like he was Snow freaking White in the flesh, followed by a fat yellow cat that had held a disturbing amount of hate in its heart for Peter, for no particular reason at all.
He couldn’t exactly blame him for his affinity for animals either, since it was a monster of Peter’s own creation, really. When the kid had turned eight and the constant bombardment of other people’s thoughts and the even more worryingly growing bombardment of the voices in his head had amped up to a zillion, Peter had gifted him a puppy with the simple intent of cheering him up. It had worked all too well, given the fact that he had refused to speak to anyone but the puppy for over a week, who was quieter and didn’t think bad thoughts. David had gotten attached to Pete—named after Peter himself, to everyone’s great amusement—and to everyone’s great misfortune, Pete had gotten equally attached to David to the point of getting in between him and a horde of the dead. When they’d noticed the tiny bite on her little leg, Peter had watched his dad take the solemn duty on his shoulders like he did every morally difficult task as though it was always his cross to bear, even if it did leave him shaken and a little more empty in the eyes afterwards. Peter had given David the usual farm-heaven bullshit speech that his mom had given him and his sister when their lab had been hit by a car, but lying to a telepathic kid—who may or may not be the most powerful mutant in the world—was like kicking a beehive with your bare foot.
Even after they’d wiped the tears and cleaned the broken furniture and glass, (and mended a bleeding eardrum or two), David had had the guts to send Magneto himself death glares for taking his dog away, for a full month.
It was an hour later when the town finally came into view—neat suburban houses lining the wide, open streets, except now the American-Dream, white picket fences had long since been wrecked and decaying, the houses left abandoned.
“Anything?” Peter asked.
David shook his head. “It’s clean, there’s no one here,” he said. When Peter gave him a questioning look he added, “No dead, either.”
Peter nodded, but the words didn’t fill him with the relief that they would have a month ago. The last time they had been ambushed, David had said the same thing, and he’d been wrong. And David had almost died.
The thought was sneaking to the front of Peter’s mind again, as hard as he tried to suppress it, making the air in his lungs more sparse: something was changing.
Was the virus mutating? Was David’s immunity fading?
“Can we just choose a place already?” David asked, a steel annoyance in his voice that told Peter that his thoughts had turned just a little too loud.
“Yeah, okay,” Peter said. “Why don’t you do the honors?” he tried, his voice light, “Just please don’t choose a Victorian, definitely- haunted, old-lady house again, I’m begging you.”
A few years ago this would have been enough. A few years ago, David would have beamed up at Peter and raced him to the nearest house, and that would have been the end of it. But David wasn’t a kid anymore. David was sixteen and had seen a world ravaged before he’d turned eight.
The house they ended up choosing was a small and especially broken down one, but it had a small basement, which promised extra security from drones and an added sense of painful nostalgia for Peter. Before they could settle in the cramped space, they rummaged through their neighbors’ for anything edible. Halfway down the stairs of a house with insultingly empty cupboards, it started pouring again. Peter glared at David, who shrugged, innocently, and said, “I said it wouldn’t rain until we got here, not that it wouldn’t at all,” which was a damn sneaky, old lie. Peter shoved him lightly and said, “pull your damn hood on, squirt.”
An hour passed with no results and the rain turned into a storm. When Peter noticed David eyeing the skies ponderingly, the wind ruffling his wet hair through the gray hood of his jacket, he warned, “don’t mess with it.”
He said it in his cool, no-bullshit voice that, in truth, hadn’t worked since the kid had turned fourteen.
David blinked, squinted his eyes up at the sky again. His hood fell and he didn’t bother fixing it. His hair (when had it gotten so long anyway?) was now soaked and plastered on his forehead, dripping water into his eyes. He shivered slightly, but still, he fixed Peter with a look that said: I’m about to give you a real hard time about this. “There’s no dead around. I’d be fine.”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“Yes we do!” David exclaimed. “Just cus I got it wrong the one time doesn’t mean I can’t sense them anymore!”
“I’m not saying you can’t,” Peter said, “but you’re still sick, it’s better you don’t. Not to mention there may be drones around! What if we get detected?” The latter was unlikely, but it did get the reaction out of him that Peter expected. He didn’t say sentinels , but David still visibly stiffened, a slight hesitation clear on his face.
“I’m fine,” David finally said, and he was practically sulking. Were he a normal teenager and not a mutant in a post apocalyptic, empty suburb rummaging for food, he would be stomping his feet, going to his room and slamming the door in Peter’s face.
But he wasn’t a regular teenager.
“Ororo would tell you the same,” Peter said. This one was a lower blow, even by Peter’s standards, but it was for David’s own good.
Of all the mutations David could mimic, aside from his own telepathy and telekinesis, Storm’s had been the closest. Peter wasn’t sure if it was due to some weird, unapparent closeness between their specific mutations, or simply because she had spent the most time helping him hone her craft.
“Well Storm’s not here, is she?” David said.
A few years ago, Peter would have taken this in stride, would have brushed it off and tried to explain, in kinder words, his worries and intentions. But David wasn’t the only one changed—Peter wasn’t the sixteen year old kid he once was. Peter felt the moment when his patience wavered and then snapped, when the short fused anger and bitterness that had buried itself deep in his bones and festered there over the years reared its ugly head until he was practically shaking with it. “My back’s still fucking sore from carrying you a week ago,” he said, his hand a little too firm on David’s shoulder, “you go down again, I’m leaving you here. You understand me?”
For a short, horrible moment, Peter felt a sense of satisfaction at the flinch in David’s gaze, at the way his eyes went wide with shock. But then reality set and Peter snatched his hand back, burned. Even in the rain, he could see David’s eyes well up with tears.
“Okay,” David said, almost meekly, his big, doe eyes boring into him.
I’m an asshole , Peter thought, watching David make his way towards the entrance of the next house. And he was, really. These days, Peter thought, he’d win the fucking gold metal of assholery, the Pulitzer price of absolute jerks.
As quickly as the rage inside him had burst out, it simmered out in an instant just the same, leaving nothing behind but bone deep exhaustion. A reminder that this was where he operated now, this small lining between emptiness and anger.
Rage and Serenity , he thought and he heard the words in his father’s voice, felt just how very far he’d delved from them.
If Erik Lehnsherr stood before him now, Peter knew he would not blame him, nor would he be angry. Instead, he would turn his sad, broken gaze down at him and internalize every one of Peter’s mistakes as his own personal faults, a result of his own shortcomings. If Peter closed his eyes, he could almost picture it —could feel his big, calloused hand gentle on his shoulder so clearly that it could make him cry.
But Peter didn’t close his eyes. His father was dead and the world was dying.
Five houses down the street from their new, temporary home, lived someone who had, most apparently, been a grade A paranoid. Three months worth of food filled his old, now exposed and battered basement, cupboards full of canned and packaged goods that could set them up for a good long while, (longer if Peter ate less than his metabolism begged for, though that came with its own risks) all in all—a goldmine. A goldmine that would go abandoned because Peter knew, deep down, that he’d never be able to convince David to stay.
While said paranoid had been correct in his apocalyptic predictions, Peter’s pretty sure his expectations of the end of the world had been more of the red invasion variety and less of the brain-eating zombies kind. (Did they even have a preference for brains? Over a decade and Peter still wasn’t sure).
Said paranoid had also run out of luck, most likely about a year prior to their arrival, if the level of his body’s (whatever was left of it) decay was anything to go by. Had he been a human too stubborn to be evacuated after the virus had ravaged his neighborhood? Too poor and unimportant for the safe communities in the mountains? Or was he a mutant who’d chosen death over capture? They’d never know now.
David stood by the corpse, watched it for a moment, then silently lifted the blue scarf tied around his neck—worn for these particular occasions— and covered his mouth and nose against the smell. Peter followed suit. A few years ago, they would have carried him down to the backyard and buried him, maybe said a few words. If Kurt was here, he’d say a quiet prayer.
Peter took the shotgun lying next to him and bagged it.
They gathered up as much food and supplies as they could fit into their backpacks. At one point, Peter eyed a whole stack of chocolate pudding and almost wept at having to leave it behind. More than once, Peter considered using his speed and saving them time, but on the off chance that there really were drones flying above, his powers would be detected. Besides, after the speech he’d given David, it was hardly an option.
If they liked, they could come back for several more rounds, Peter considered. He looked at David, damp strands of clumped hair falling over his eyes and hiding his face completely. But David avoided his gaze, filling his bag in silence and probably doing his best to block out Peter’s mind, and his presence in general.
At several points throughout the day—while they gathered their supplies; while they made their slow, agonizing way back to the house; while they set up the basement—Peter considered apologizing. Later, when it was too late and all his chances were obsolete, Peter would think back to this day and wonder why he hadn’t. Now, he kept his mouth shut and his mind on the task.
“If we set out before sunrise, we can get there in less than a day,” David said, hugging his arms around his torso for heat, his yellow beanie looking bright even in the darkness. He wore the blue, fur-lined winter jacket that had passed down to him from Peter a few years ago but had only started to fit him properly a few months ago. Peter had felt like a middle aged dad when he’d noticed and had had to turn away to clear his throat, though the mind reading bastard had laughed and not let it go the whole day. Now, though, David looked almost lost in the many layers of clothes he wore. Peter wore the army jacket he had found during their grocery trip, along with a bunch of thick, albeit uncomfortable, sweaters, and as much as they still shivered in the cold, he sent a quiet thanks to their deceased neighbor for his generosity.
“What do you think?” David asked. Peter raised an eyebrow and David rolled his eyes. “You always tell me to stay out of your head, so I am.” Right, things were definitely still dicey between them.
“I was actually thinking,” Peter said, though he was about ninety percent sure David already knew, “maybe we could stay here a few days.”
David frowned.
They were huddled on the floor of the basement, eating cold canned beans and potato chips. Whatever ungodly sorts of preservatives they’d laced them with had kept them tasting mouth wateringly good. Or maybe it was because Peter was perpetually hungry these days and the fact that his standards of good food had plummeted to the under-worldly levels about six years into the apocalypse. That someone with his metabolism was still alive, given the circumstances, was a miracle in and of itself. Peter looked at the six empty cans of beans and Peas around him. “Only a few days,” he said, going for a light tone.
David looked daggers at him and shook his head.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said.
“Yeah, I’m annoyingly aware of that.”
“I don’t mean—” David stopped, took the thick beanie off his head and ran his fingers through his hair, like he wanted to tear them out. “I know you want to convince me to change my mind, and I don’t have to read your mind to know that you don’t think this is gonna work—”
“I never said it wouldn’t—”
“And that’s fine!” David cut in, “you don’t have to, I can believe for both of us,” he said, and there was a sort of desperation in his voice. He hugged his arms around his knees, fiddled with the beanie in his hands. “You don’t have to come if you don't want to. I just—” he looked down at the half eaten can of beans in front of him, “I just don’t want to do this alone.” The last bit came out rushed, almost a whisper. Peter sighed, put his palms over his eyes and took deep breaths, considered his words carefully.
“David,” he said, and when David wouldn’t look up, he nudged him gently with a booted foot. “Hey.”
“What?” David said, a child-like edge to his tone.
“You’re not alone, okay?”
“I know.”
“Jesus, you really think I’d just let you go alone?”
David shrugged and then finally looked up, met Peter’s eyes. Peter tried hard to keep his mind open, his thoughts on display. This was the one thing he didn’t feel a need to keep private and hidden and he needed David to know.
“No,” David said, “you wouldn’t.” He moved the beans around with his fork but didn’t lift any to his mouth. “But I know you don’t believe it anymore.”
The truth was that Peter had lost the last remaining shrivel of hope he had left for this plan the moment he watched Logan take his last breath. You didn’t have to be a telepath to know that. “I’m sorry,” he said.
David shrugged but then gave a little shake of the head like he was shoring himself up before a big game. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll just have to prove you wrong.”
The first inklings of ‘the plan’ had come into being about six years ago, when a mutant by the name of Kitty Pryde had discovered that her phasing abilities went beyond that of becoming intangible through physical states but extended to that of time and space. On the run and hunted by both the dead and the living, their merry band of surviving mutants had lessened in numbers by the day. In a last, desperate ditch effort, Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, having long put their animosity aside, had decided that their only salvation lay not in winning the fight, but in preventing it. And Peter had believed, had counted down the days to its fruition. What had come hadn’t been a salvation, but an ambush that left most of them dead, including Kitty Pryde and the masterminds behind the plan. Depressingly poetic, Peter thought, that it was their own sons left with its afterlife. Surrounded by zombies ridding him of any remnants of his power, Peter had been able to save no one, had only had time to grab David by the hand and be whisked away by Logan like some damsel in distress.
And Peter had made his peace with it, had killed any last remaining naive hope he’d held onto, and focused on surviving. That is, until the day David had said, “maybe it’s not too late.”
“We can’t do this without Logan, David,” Peter said.
The secondary plan had been for David to channel Kitty Pryde’s abilities and send Logan’s consciousness back in time. And even then Peter had had a semblance of hope. That is, until a year ago when they’d watched Logan, laying in a bloody trampede of headless zombies, holding his own heart in his hands and looking shocked at his own mortality. “Well, shit,” he’d said, “sorry bubs,” and then he’d fallen dead. Any attempts of transferring Peter’s consciousness had not only failed but come close to killing him.
“I told you,” David said, “this time, I can—”
“Open a portal, I know,” Peter said. A combination of Kitty’s time altering mutation, Blink’s teleportation, and Peter’s speed, David was convinced, was the key to fulfilling their fathers’ mission.
“Let’s say you can, and it doesn’t kill you in the process. What then?”
“Then we go back in time,” David said, simple as that, and it was in moments like this when Peter was awfully aware of his age. “With our speed, we can.”
“You can’t match my speed, and don’t give me that look, you know it's true. Not to mention my speed isn’t half of what it used to be.” Spending three years as a lab rat would do that to you. “What happens when we’re not fast enough?”
“We’ll practice,” David muttered.
Peter rubbed his temple with a finger and tried again, “David, this is dangerous. We don’t even know how you’ll react to ceribro.”
“They’d want us to try—”
“Fuck what they’d want! They’re dead!”
Whatever David was going to say next, was forgotten. He stood and walked towards the old yellowing mattress by the wall. “You’re an ass,” he muttered, and lay down facing away from Peter.
That’s right, Peter thought, it’s about time you realize.
The storm outside still waged on, no end in sight and when most of the main house was in shambles, it didn’t much matter that they were in a basement. The rain battered against the ceiling severely, leaking through in places and dripping onto the basement floor. It pounded against the small window at the top of the stairs like a heavy heartbeat, the old pipes rattling like the house breathed with it, like it was haunted. Or maybe it was Peter that was haunted.
No. It was this place. This abandoned little town, this shitty house, and this suffocating fucking basement. Peter ran his hands over his face, rubbed at his eyes until he was seeing stars.
This wasn’t the first basement he’d been in since home, it wasn’t the second or the tenth. Basements were a fugitive mutant’s best friend in the apocalypse, his bread and butter—a salvation from both the living and the dead. And yet, every time, without exception, Peter could feel his heart beat out of his chest, his hands get clammy and his jaw clench at the sight of it, feel the walls closing in and the past seeping its way into the present.
It wasn’t fair, Peter thought, that his family had to die in the basement, sharing the space with everything else that he held dear. The two sets of dated height charts carved into the wall by the stairs that wouldn’t get any taller, the slight dent he’d made in the wall before he knew his speed, the crayon stick figures that Lorna had scribbled of the three of them on the pinpong table, the first bike he rode, his records, his stupid arcade games and everything he’d plundered out of the stores. Everything neatly wrapped in a nice little bow—gone.
It was a ridiculous notion, Peter knew, to think that if his mother and sister were killed in the living room instead of the basement, they’d be any less dead. But at least he’d have one portion of his memories not tainted by it, one small space not haunted by them.
Peter opened his eyes and tried not to see the blood dripping on the floor. David shifted on the mattress, not quite turning to him but clearly aware of Peter’s state. Stay the hell out of my head! He wanted to scream. He sped out of the room instead.
The sky was pitch black and the raindrops pierced his skin as he ran and ran. His last pair of goggles had broken a few months ago and Peter hadn’t bothered to find a replacement, in part because he rarely used his powers these days and in part because, in the long run—what the hell did it matter if he hurt his eyes.
The wind ruffled his hair, blasted his face with the welcomed cold, fresh air of a rainy night and Peter realized just how much he’d missed this, how enormous a part of him this had been, and how much its absence had stolen from him. The relief of it almost made him collapse. Any moment, a drone could fly by, equipped with Bolivar Trask’s dandy little mutant detection device and Peter would be gone—shot dead with a high dose of the virus in the best case and captured back in the worst.
He kept running, the memory of Mystique shooting Trask dead was a warm lul in his mind that he replayed over and over. He pictured himself doing it a few times. His father would frown at this train of thought, his brows would furrow in worry and he’d look at Peter with those heavy eyes, his mind filled with— have I passed down my poison to my son?
By the time Peter had come to the grand realization, Erik had been dead, but if Peter had had the chance, he’d tell him— the poison isn’t in you, it’s seeped into the fabric of the world, and you can’t protect me from it.
It was only when he was fifty blocks away from the house that he realized the moisture on his face blurring his vision wasn’t just the rain and that the heavy heaving noise was coming from him. Peter stood, his hand on his knees and tried not to think about the fact that before his bout in the Trask labs, he would have made three times the distance in the same amount of time. Hell, he felt like he was getting slower every day.
He wiped his eyes and looked around himself—an empty highway framed by an array of trees and unkept traffic signs; an old beat up abandoned truck with the corpse of its previous owner hanging out, (or what the dead had left of him). The body looked fresh—fresh enough that if Peter had sped up here a bit earlier he’d look a lot like the man hanging out of the driver's seat now. He still had his speed, though, which meant that whatever horde of zombies had feasted on the poor bastard were gone now, off to their next meal. He wondered for a moment what it would be like to just stop, sit in the middle of this highway with his legs crossed and wait like a teenage girl on prom night, to see which would get him first—the Sentinels or the zombies? Either way, it would be over.
And David would be left alone. Alone in that ramshackled, tiny basement with an unattainable, naive dream and the voices in his head.
“Ughhh,” Peter groaned. “Asshole.”
Dramatic soap opera tantrum over, Peter weighed the less dangerous option of trying the car and maybe sort of equally dangerous but also way more fun option of speeding the whole way back and risking detection. The image of the kid huddled up on that dirty, old mattress wondering if he’s been abandoned made up his mind for him. By the time he made it back, his legs were shaky and his breath shallow.
All around cringeworthy performance, Peter Maximoff.
He found David sitting on the mattress, staring at a wall.
“You’re a pain in my ass, you know that?” Peter said.
David shrugged, (it’s all he seemed to do these days, what was with that? Was Peter this dramatic when he was sixteen? Definitely more).
“Scoot,” he said, and lay down on his back, his hands behind his head. “Is the wall that riveting, man?” he joked, but he hoped the kid wasn’t actually seeing anything there.
David gave him a side eye and crossed his arms. Shit. Had he heard? “You look like you’re watching Pink Floyd live,” he said and then tried to hum “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” in his mind to drown out his thoughts.
“You’re a hypocrite,” David said.
“Yeah.” Peter knew he was soaking the mattress even with his jacket off but couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it.
“We can speed the rest of the way to Westchester,” David said, his arms crossed.
“You know we can’t,” Peter said. Even if they managed to not attract the dead, it was the living they had to fear. A small town long since forgotten and evacuated of its inhabitants with those that remained killed or infected was one thing, but Westchester county was still alive , for a lack of better words. Peter still wasn’t sure how they were going to forgo the checkpoints where the sentinels would be close enough to detect them without them having to use their powers. And that was only if they didn’t notice the ‘M’ branded into their skin. In fact, trying to avoid them was why it was taking them forever to get to their destination.
And still, a part of Peter was still hoping to convince David to turn back.
Up until a year ago, they’d had contact with a refuge of surviving mutants near Derby Line. Communication had ceased about a month after Logan had died and yet a long dead positive part of Peter’s brain was hoping it wasn’t because they’d been discovered, or dead and that if they could manage to cross the Canadian border, maybe they’d find some chance of survival.
“Why can’t that positive side believe the plan might work, then?” David demanded.
Peter shoved him with his foot lightly. “Thought you were staying out of my head.”
“Well, you’re being loud.”
Peter groaned and stared at the ceiling. David sat with his arms wrapped around his legs and pouted. He’d been doing a lot of that too, lately.
“You should sleep,” Peter said.
“You sleep.”
“I was scared,” Peter said, the words blurting out of him before he knew it. David didn’t answer but turned his eyes towards him, his head leaning on his arms. “I’d never seen you like that, I thought you were gonna die like an asshole and leave me in this shitshow by myself.”
“I know,” David whispered. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not asking for an apology,” Peter said, frustration growing. I need you to spare me this heartbreak! He didn’t say it, but then speaking wasn’t a necessity when it came to being around a telepath and Peter wasn’t sure if that frustrated him even more or saved him the embarrassment of the verbal admittal.
David had saved their asses, really. They’d sped for days on end with rare stops in between, lulled by their past success in flying under the radar, until they’d found themselves in a suburban town not unlike this one. David, who’d developed the ability to sense the zombies in the vicinity about a year into the outbreak, and was the only mutant that they knew of whose abilities weren’t tampered by their presence had, for the first time, been taken by surprise. They’d been ambushed by a large horde, swarming into the backyard of a large condo until they were backed into a corner. If you had asked a sixteen year old Peter, high off of zombie flicks, what he thought of going out in a blaze of glory fighting the animated dead, he’d have said, sounds sweet, dude. I’m in. Over a decade on, though, it had just felt like one huge bummer. A weak, last flicker of light dying out—boring and meaningless.
Peter could only remember the draining sensation of the last of his speed leaving him, his ears filling with the sound of gunshots and lifeless snarling. He’d laid there on the ground, reloading his gun and shooting as many as he could aim at in the scurry, in the hope that David would find an escape.
But, of course, David had not tried to get away. The gaping mouth of a corpse had opened and reached for Peter’s arm, and then it had let out one last raspy howl, bursting into smokey ash, and dissipating into thin air. Peter had watched, in awe, as the rest of them had followed, one by one until there was nothing but black ash in the air, and David in the center, halfway gravitating in the air, his blue eyes glowing brighter and his hands outstretched. Peter had felt the wave of all-consuming force emanating off of him and realized that no matter how many times he was reminded of it, Peter couldn’t reconcile the awe inspiring, and simultaneously terrifying reminder that this lanky kid could hold the power of all of them combined. Peter had watched, his mouth agape, and wondered just how much more powerful David would be, had the Sentinels not gotten their hands on him when he was so young—and then David had collapsed, dropped to the ground like a marionette doll with its strings cut.
Because, while David had the luxury of keeping his power around the dead, using them cost him greatly.
“I’m better now.”
“We should sleep,” Peter said, and turned his back to him.
“You’re gonna get a stupid cold if you don’t change out of those.”
“Good, maybe I’ll infect you too. With my germs.” But it really was cold as shit. He felt the moisture freezing on his clothes and penetrating into his skin—breeding ground for hypothermia. For the second time that day, Peter thought— So What? And then he got up and changed into the dead neighbor's thick sweaters and his one other remaining pair of pants and socks.
Peter wasn’t sure how much time passed or what woke him—the lights shining through the cracks of the ceiling and the window near the stairs, or David’s terrified heaving breaths. He was sitting up on the mattress, his face braced between his knees, his hands covering his ears. He could stare down a horde of snarling zombies without blinking, but humans utterly terrified him—tenfold if they were sentinels.
The drone lingered for some time, and Peter considered moving to the corner of the basement where cover was thicker, but decided that movement might trigger the device more. The kid’s breathing was getting shallower by the minute and Peter hoped he wouldn’t start hyperventilating or even worse, react with his powers, like he tended to do when overwhelmed. Where Peter’s abilities were a lighthouse for the devices, David’s was a shrieking fire alarm, or a freaking nuclear blast. Peter lay a hand on David’s shoulder and tried to keep his own breathing calm. He wasn’t sure how long they stayed crouched on the mattress, unmoving, but when the drone detected nothing, Peter heard the whirring of its engines get fainter and the lights disappear into the sky.
“It’s okay,” Peter said, rubbing his hand on David’s shoulder. “They’re gone.”
“I still hear it,” David whispered.
“I promise they’re gone.”
David shook his head, kept his eyes squeezed shut and his forehead on his knees. “They’re here,” he whispered.
Oh. Peter took a deep breath and prepared himself for what this night was going to be. “Okay,” he said. “Where?”
David lifted a shaky hand, pointed to the left, empty corner of the basement but didn’t lift his face.
“Hey,” Peter said. “There’s nobody here, okay? Just you and the coolest guy in all fifty states.”
David didn’t move. “It’s really loud,” he said, and covered his ears with his palms.
“There was a drone, but it’s gone now. Nobody came in, or out.”
David slowly lifted his head, peaked at the left corner. And then his eyes went wide and he scrambled to turn around and face away. “No,” he said and then repeated it a few more times. Peter crouched in front of him, a hand on his arm. “I know you see it, but there’s no one else here.” Peter wasn’t sure who or what David was seeing. There was a whole and ever growing plethora of them; William Stryker, Sentinels, Bolivar Trask, or any monster that his overactive subconscious could muster. Namely something he called The Shadow King. That one never failed to send a shiver down peters back.
Maybe it was the doctors from the Trask labs that Peter himself still had nightmares about, except where Peter’s nightmares were limited to his dreams, David had no such luxury.
None of them had ever been able to figure out what the cause of the voices and the hallucinations were, or whether his mutation was the cause of it, or an exacerbating factor. They’d just appeared one day and not left him. And then there were some days, where it seemed as if David was a different person, altogether. Hank had done test after test and had only managed to find a somewhat vague connection between David’s mental state and his ability to acquire others’ abilities and thoughts. He’d also gone on a tangent about absorbing the consciousness of those deceased, but that was something Peter, or any of them, had tried not to dwell on.
Charles had helped his son the best he could, until David had turned eleven, and with him had grown his powers, far beyond those of even Professor X. An ever present furrow of guilt had taken the professor’s features any day when things had gotten bad. On one particular occasion, after Charles Xavier had long died, David had said, in exasperation— all he’s left me is this crazy in my head.
The medications that Hank had prescribed had helped David in some capacity, but Hank was gone now, and so was everyone else and all Peter could really do was just sit there and say— there, there.
“I ever lie to you?” Peter asked. And, okay, maybe he’d lied in the past but never about this. “Check my thoughts, I don’t see anything here, which means it’s just us.”
David lifted his face, raised unsure hands to Peter’s temple and lay two fingers down. Peter felt the disturbance, the presence of another in his mind and then David’s breathing seemed to even out.
“Sorry,” he said, and God did he sound miserable.
“You want the helmet?” Peter asked. David nodded.
Peter rummaged through his bag, felt the heavy metal and lifted it out. The metal was cold under his fingers and Peter took a moment to trace the pattern at the edges, the spiked end in the middle. It was painful to look at–all the ghosts that it carried.
He thought —this belonged to the man who killed my grandmother. What had it felt like for his father to wear it for so many years?
“Here,” Peter said. David grabbed it hurriedly and put it on.
When David’s telepathic powers had gotten overwhelming, Erik had been the one to suggest the helmet, having retired it years prior. Maybe it can be used for something good, for once. Charles had smiled an unspoken thank you and it had worked, had blocked the multitude of thoughts from David’s mind. The helmet had stopped being effective the older David had gotten and the more his abilities had grown, and in reality it had never had any protection from the things that weren’t real. And yet, it still brought some sort of comfort—a placebo of sorts.
Where David’s tiny head had been lost in the metal thing when he was young, it fit him fine now.
They were silent for some time, the sky outside was getting a dark blue hue and they’d spent most of the night awake, but at least the rain had stopped. David still glimpsed to the corner from time to time, but seemed to calm exponentially.
“You’re right,” David said. The silence had gone on for so long that Peter hadn’t expected it and fought not to jump out of his skin.
“About what?”
“Something’s changing,” David said, his voice sad. “I don’t know what it is but—,” he shrugged, pulling the blanket more tightly around his shoulders. “I can’t really sense when the dead are close anymore and it’s harder to use my powers around them. I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting weaker, or because they’re getting stronger.”
Peter didn’t know what to say. His own abilities seemed to be weakening. The thoughts had been running through his mind for months now but he’d refused to acknowledge them.
“And the world’s getting quieter,” David whispered. He meant the real voices, the real thoughts of the people who were living and not the figments of his mind. The virus was on the brink of ending the world as they knew it and survivors were becoming rare. Those who did survive were all in the safety of their shelters—communities where David and Peter would never be welcomed.
It was an effective strategy, really. The outbreak may have been an unexpected side effect of the Sentinels' plans and cost them the lives of millions of humans, but it was finally delivering them with their wanted outcome—the extinction of mutants. All they had to do now was sit in the safety of their walled shelters and watch as the virus ravaged through the remaining mutants and all those who were undesirable in this new world.
“We don’t know what’s happening,” Peter said.
“Whichever it is, we have no other choice. If the virus is mutating, then our chances of survival are less. And If we’re losing our powers, then—” David signed like it was uncomfortable to think about. As much trouble as it brought him, his mutation was important to him. “Then this really is our last chance.”
Peter thought of the last call from Canada, of the prospect of safety among mutants and the humans who accepted him, once again.”
“They’re gone,” David said. “You know they are. And there’s no way forward with the humans. Even if the virus doesn’t get us, they eventually will. They will never let us be.”
Peter chuckled a humorless laugh, “you sound like my dad.”
But then again, there was no place for the professor’s idealism of peace and harmony in this world, was there? Only Magneto’s clear pragmatism.
“They both believed this would work,” David said, quietly. “And your dad as much an idealist, just like mine, he just didn't know it. He would have given up a long time ago, if he wasn’t.” David smiled and added, stoically, “survivors are always idealists.”
Yeah, he was weird like that, David. They’d be close to sleeping in some abandoned warehouse or booking it from a huge horde or talking about where to find food and he'd break out into some wise-ass old man stuff like that, out of the blue.
“Fuck,” Peter said, and then ran his hands through his still damp hair. He was gonna get a bitch of a migraine come morning. “Fine!” Peter exclaimed, exasperation oozing off of him.
“Really?” David asked, like he was ten and Peter had agreed to take him to McDonalds. “You mean it?”
“Yes, you ass, I mean it.” Peter shoved him on the shoulder for emphasis and then said, “not like I could stop you if I wanted. Hell you realize you can just make me go right, with your mind mojo? I’m starting to understand my dad more by the day.”
“I’d never do that!” David said, appalled, and then, “we head out in the morning?”
“Afternoon. I’m getting my beauty sleep if I have to tie you to a pole.” When David’s eyes went wide, and his face broke out in a wide toothy smile, Peter pointed a finger and added, “ and we’re going back for the pudding before we leave!”
“Deal,” David said, the smug bastard.
Later when they lay down on the thin worn out mattress to sleep, Peter felt the hopelessness of their situation, how absurdly doomed this plan was. And yet, a slight portion of the weight he carried in his chest lightened as he drifted to sleep.