Peter leaves Cairo in shock, not because he's surprised that the incredible clusterfuck of a rescue operation cooked up by Raven and Hank and the rest of team Prevent World Destruction actually sort of worked, but because he's actually in shock, like, he's shaking and sweaty and pale. You know: shock, because you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs and you can't save the world without someone getting their knee completely shattered by a bald blue demi-god and hey, it could be worse. He could be the paraplegic bald guy in the hideous lilac sweater who's strapped to a backboard on the other side of the medevac helicopter. That guy looks awful, all dusty and sweaty and bruised up with the sort of look in his eyes that Peter's mom used to have after she got off a twelve hour shift at the hospital and still had to make dinner and pay bills and talk to the cops about twelve cases of Ding-Dongs that went missing off a delivery truck in Tuckahoe. Peter thinks he can be forgiven for not recognizing Lilac Sweater as Professor Charles Xavier, as in 'Charles Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters', as in the drunken hippie who helped convince Peter to break Magneto out of the Pentagon ten years ago because, well, it was ten years ago and also, you know, the shock, which Peter really misses when the pain of his pulverized knee starts to filter through.
Peter only recognizes Xavier at all because once the chopper lands at a hospital in a slightly less decimated part of the world (with a bone-jarring thud that rips a noise like a dying animal out of Peter's throat) Magneto is already there on the helipad, still in his magenta super suit, and he falls into step beside Lilac Sweater's stretcher as he's off-loaded and calls him Charles. One word, that's all he says. Magneto's eyes are all bloodshot and glassy and he looks like he's dead on the inside, or at least so broken that all the king's horses and all the kings men don't have enough crazy glue to keep his bald head from cracking open at the slightest tap but Xavier holds up a hand, which Magneto reluctantly clasps, and Xavier calls him, “My friend,” which Peter thinks is a better way of greeting someone than the punch in the face the the professor gave him at the Pentagon. But where Magneto had shrugged off the punch, those two little words put a crack in his shell that Peter watches crumble in slow motion until the hospital staff carry Xavier into the building and out of sight.
After that Peter gets sort of lost in all of the confusion and chaos of, well, the Apocalypse but he tries really hard not to mind because hey, things could be worse, and, Peter learns soon enough, are for a lot of people.
Peter goes through triage and gets a fun little tag that says he's probably not going to die, which is good news, but which also means he gets to wait on a gurney in a hallway lined with gurneys, which is not good news. He's actually pretty grateful to be forgotten for a while because at least it means his body (and by extension, his leg) is still (unless someone bumps his gurney) and he can lie back and make as many pained grunts and whimpering noises as he wants because that's what everyone else around him is doing so he fits right in. He's in some part of the world where English is not the primary language, so right now he can't even ask for a glass of water. All he can do is wait.
He waits a loooooong time. Injured people keep coming but they don't seem to leave and pretty soon the hospital isn't just out of beds. It's out of gurneys and wheelchairs. Doctors are carrying stretchers past Peter to take wounded men, women, and children into the operating rooms, wearing bloodied scrubs because they're run out of clean ones, getting more tired and more frantic as the hours pass. The guy on the gurney across the hall from Peter dies and it takes twenty minutes for someone to notice and pull a sheet over his face and another twenty for them to wheel him away. Peter's leg is a steady, throbbing pain that occasionally shoots hot spikes up his leg to his hip and into the rest of his body. After a while he stops being curious about the comings and goings of the hospital staff and settles into a kind of bored stupor which turns into a very shallow sort of sleep. It's too noisy and he's in too much pain for actual sleep. This is the most physically miserable that Peter has ever been, but in a crazy way he's kind of happy to suffer right alongside everybody else, because Magneto did this. Sure, he did it with En Sabah Nur's help, or under his influence or whatever, but Magneto did the heavy lifting. Magneto, who is Peter's father.
Dry-mouthed and aching, Peter completely passes out on his gurney sometime in the predawn hours, which is probably like four o'clock in the afternoon East Coast time and wakes up to somebody shining a light in his eyes. It's Raven, disguised as a swarthy middle-aged doctor, and he knows that because her eyes flash yellow for a second and also because she nearly got strangled to death by a big blue demigod and her voice sounds like she's been smoking two packs a day for forty years. “We haven't forgotten about you,” she says. Peter wasn't worried that they had, mostly because he likes to give people the benefit of the doubt but also he's not the kind of guy who has trouble getting from point A to point B, and he figures it won't be much different with a cast on his leg so even if they did leave him behind he thinks he'll be okay, maybe even make it back to the States before the rest of their merry band of mutants. She explains, “We're in Tel Aviv. The hospital staff aren't letting anyone but patients into the building. We'd take you someplace else but every hospital and clinic is as full as this one.”
She starts to catch him up on where everyone is and what they've been doing and Peter does his best to focus past the pain. About half of what she's saying gets through to him. He gets that Xavier's already been discharged. He and the rest of the mutants have been taken to an Israeli military base for questioning. He catches that Moira has been arguing with the CIA, trying to arrange asylum in the states for the mutants who helped defeat En Sabah Nur, which is really asking for something since Magneto's safe passage is part of the deal. “The world is still reeling. We don't want to be in a compromised position once they start pointing fingers, so the sooner we get you patched up, the better. Sit tight. I'm going to find a way to bump you up the list,” she says.
Peter is too relieved to argue and instead just mouths a 'thank you' and then feels kind of guilty for having somebody on his side to pull strings for him. Peter thinks about what Raven said about every hospital being as swamped as this one and how that means that there a hundreds of thousands or millions of people around the word waiting in hospital halls and parking lots. He doesn't suppose En Sabah Nur, (and Magneto by extension) gave much thought to people needing things like hospitals and infrastructure in his glorious new world or maybe he just figured everybody would be cool living in a pile of rubble in the shadow of his super awesome villain lair pyramid. Maybe he was going to let one of the other mutants in his retinue handle all of the rebuilding, running electricity, plumbing, restocking, and re-staffing but Peter kind of doubts that logistics were Glowing Purple Sword Girl's specialty. Peter isn't even sure which part of the world he's in but it seems like it's been hit as hard as Cairo, and if every hospital is like this then Peter might be the first (but not the last) person in the history of modern medicine to die of a broken leg, which, come to think of it, might not strictly be true. There has probably been more than one to jackass out there who climbed a mountain by himself and fell into a ravine and broke his leg and couldn't get out. Peter's mom used to think that would be him one day and maybe she still thinks it but she hasn't said for a long time and he really hopes she's okay and he wants to call her up and make sure and then tell her: 'Look! You were right! I ran off to a remote corner of the world and broke my leg and now I'm going to die for lack of access to proper medical care. You sure do know me! You were right about Dad too,' and she can get in her, 'I told you so's while she jots down his last will and testament.
About ten minutes after Raven disappears into the bustling crowd of doctors and nurses an orderly wheels Peter's gurney into an x-ray room. Transferring onto the table is hellish, holding still for the x-rays is torture, and transferring back onto his gurney makes his arms tremble and his vision swim. Peter hasn't had anything besides water for about a day, and he knows he's only getting away with that because he's been flat on his back for almost that long, but he's going to be in trouble if he has to do any kind of moving around. He has some pretty high caloric needs but it's not like he's diabetic. He can handle a fast, just not a very long one and not if he's active, and he has no desire to stick around this place once his leg is taken care of so he really hopes Raven has a couple granola bars stashed somewhere so that he doesn't faint if he has to give up his gurney and use crutches.
The doctor takes a look at Peter's x-ray and frowns for so long that he has to call another doctor in from the hallway to frown at the x-ray too. The second doctor speaks perfect English with a heavy accent and he asks Peter how long ago he broke his leg and Peter tells him and the doctor thinks he's lying and gets the x-ray and points to Peter's broken knee and shows him how the bones have already started to heal and well, shit, Peter's always been a fast healer but he's never broken anything before so he didn't know this would happen but he probably should have guessed. Now he's stuck admitting to a strange doctor in a foreign country that he's a mutant and that everything he does is fast. He has to swipe both the first doctor's wallet and the second doctor's stethoscope, keys, and ID badge before they believe him. While they're busy processing the information Peter stares at the ceiling and waits for the room to stop spinning. It's probably a mistake to admit that he's a mutant but it's definitely a mistake not to. It's the old rock and a hard place adage. He can't let the doctors treat him like they would a human because somebody might get hurt and that somebody is probably him but he's already hurt and if they try to set his leg without having all of the facts he could accidentally put somebody through a wall. He isn't sure what they'll do to a mutant behind closed doors which, hey, who can blame them? Mutants are the cause of all of their unpaid overtime and Peter specifically is the son of the guy who is responsible for the line of patients snaking down the corridor and out into the parking lot. Not that they know that but still, if the humans feel like exacting a little revenge (or just refusing to treat him out of spite) Peter would rather it were him than some random mutant kid who got beaned by a flying chunk of concrete while walking his bike across the street, but if they do try anything Peter's pretty sure he can at least summon the adrenaline to hop out of here at ninety miles per hour if he absolutely has to. Then again, he's already seeing spots just from his crappy party tricks so maybe not. So he's left crossing his fingers in the hopes that his doctors took the hypocratic oath.
The doctors look at him and then the x-rays and then each other and then at him again and they both look too tired for this shit and Peter is right there with them, man, one hundred percent. After exchanging a few words in Arabic or Hebrew or Klingon or whatever the second doctor approaches Peter with the x-ray and points out where things are connected that shouldn't be and then tells him that they will need to re-break his leg, which Peter had already thought might need to happen but it had been an abstract concept at the time and now it's concrete and he imagines them holding him down and smashing his leg with a hammer but this isn't the eighteen hundreds and they want to take him to surgery and cut him open and saw his bones neatly apart and then put them back together with pins and maybe a metal bar or two and oh God, he's not sure that's actually better but they're the doctors and he's the guy with the broken leg and the chattering teeth. He's covered in sweat and he feels like someone set the thermostat at at fifty degrees even though he knows that the air conditioning in this building conked out about five hours ago.
A couple of nurses come and prep him for surgery, which means stripping him out of his flight suit and disinfecting the area where the surgeon intends to cut. Peter fights the orderlies to no effect when they try to take his goggles. He's already lost his Walkman and his jacket and his awesome silver Nikes and it took him a long time to find a set of goggles that he really liked, but then one of the nurses' eyes flash yellow and he stops making such a big hairy deal about it. After that they start an IV but if he's supposed to feel sleepy or numb or anything he doesn't. His leg maybe hurts less but that could be because he hasn't tried to move around. After a while they up his dosage. He waits some more. They up it again and again until he starts to feel a little tired but every time he thinks his eyes are going to close he thinks about saws and pins and his eyes spring back open. Eventually they wheel him down the busy hallway and through a set of double doors into an operating room. Somebody slips a mask over his face and asks him to count down from one hundred. He makes it all the way down to the twenties before he loses his place and never finds it again.
Peter's body is like a furnace, not in the sense that he runs hot. He doesn't. He's perfectly comfortable in jeans and sneakers and a jacket when it's eighty-five and sunny out. No, he's like a furnace in that he burns through everything: food, alcohol, medication, oxygen, and what have you about a million times quicker than everyone else on the planet, which is a really inconvenient when he's supposed to be sedated for surgery, so he has to admire his surgical team's dedication to keeping him drugged out of his gourd because he feels exactly jack shit during the surgery. Afterward, now, that's a different story. When Peter starts to come out from under the anesthesia he knows three things right away: it's daytime, he's on an airplane, and he hates life. He feels like somebody scooped his brains out of his head and replaced them with a skein of yarn and then stuffed his mouth full of cotton balls and tissues. His stretcher is laid out across the backs of several seats that have been broken forward, sandwiching him between the fuselage and another row of seats. There's a window at about face-height and he can kind of see out of if he lifts his head. Everything outside is blue sky and white clouds but when the plane makes a coordinated turn the sky floats away and Peter sees mounds and craters, cracked and crumbling buildings, roads that used to run straight that are now crooked as lighting, and it all goes as far as he can see, forever and ever. The plane rights itself and it's all sunny skies again and a voice next to him says, “Thank you,” and Peter turns toward it and it's the professor, who's all fuzzy because Peter's eyes refuse to focus, but Peter can see he's ditched the lilac sweater for a white button-up. He's still bald as an egg.
“Thank you for what?” Peter croaks because he's still groggy and he doesn't understand why he's being thanked. For waking up? Keeping his urge to vomit under control? Pummeling En Sabah Nur to absolutely no effect? Having his leg snapped like a twig? You're welcome?
The professor puts a warm hand on Peter's bare shoulder. “Thank you for my students,” he says, and oh, okay. Peter does remember something about an exploding school but, wow, that seems like it happened a hundred years ago. “Oh, that. No, I was just there and I wasn't not going to do something. I mean, come on.”
Xavier looks at him, all sad, watery eyes. He doesn't seem, like, a ton better than he did on the medevac helicopter, but it looks like he's at least seen the inside of a shower stall and gotten ahold of a change of clothes, unlike Peter who has silt in every crease on his knuckles and under his fingernails and a billion other unmentionable places and is, yup, totally naked under his sheet and blanket, except for the cast, which only covers him from his ankle to almost his hip on one side, so just anybody could come by and check if the carpet matches the drapes, which it does, thank you. You can't get this color from a bottle.
The professor says, “I cannot tell you how grateful I am that you arrived when you did. You're quite the hero.”
Peter frowns, feeling sick. “I was there and I could do it so I did. I'm not a hero, I'm just not a monster,” and he can't help thinking about Magneto when he says it. Magneto, with his dead eyes, floating in his magnetic field that's too strong for Peter to penetrate, tearing buildings apart like he's pulling weeds and Peter and Raven trapped outside and the corpse in the hospital hall that Peter stared at for twenty minutes, the pitted landscape below and the sound his leg made when it broke, a wet snap like a branch. His face feels hot and his chest feels tight and he wants to throw up even though there's nothing in him and all he can do is swallow and breathe hard and wait for the feeling to pass. A few rows up or back or to the side someone is making gross, wet gagging noises and Scott is saying, “Jean, oh my God!” and that makes Peter gag too, and all he can do is roll his head to the side so that he doesn't spit bile on himself, then the professor puts two fingers on Peter's temple and the urge to turn himself inside out fades to a background roar like the noise from the jet engines.
“Better?” Xavier asks.
“Yeah,” Peter pants. “Tell Jean sorry.”
“It's alright. She's still a bit raw from her experiences in Cairo. I think it's safe to say that we all are. Eventually she will learn to wall out thoughts and feelings that are not her own. It takes a great deal of practice, I'm afraid. It took me years.”
“So you're, you know... ” Peter makes vague waving motions at his head.
The professor sighs. “That is my gift,” he says, “And my curse, I suppose,” and from Jean's point of view Peter could totally see how it would be a curse right now, and Xavier's too. The guy looks like how Peter feels but without the excuse of a broken leg and post-anesthesia funk and it gets worse the longer Peter watches him until Peter realizes that it's not all physical, like, he's got Something to Say and it's not something he thinks Peter is going to want to hear, but before he can come out with 'I know why you came to the mansion' or 'Are you really Erik Lehnsherr's son or just a pathetic idiot who's fixated on him because you think you share some kind of connection?' or 'Quadrophenia was a decent effort, but I'm really more a fan of Townsend's later work' Peter cuts him off with, “I'm starving,” and he means that literally. The professor's magic fingers brought him out from under the anesthesia enough that he knows he can keep something down and he doesn't care what it is. At all. This is the longest he's gone without food in years. He can feel his body eating his muscles and he knows he's going to be in for it if he doesn't get something in him soon but he also hates that he can't just help himself. Well, he could, but he's pretty worried he might faint if he gets up right now and then he'd be passed out, naked, on a gross airplane floor or, best-case scenario, passed out with a sheet on top of him and neither of those outcomes is preferable to just asking for a bag of peanuts.
The professor must do something with his mind because about a minute later Hank shows up with an armload of MREs and instantly becomes Peter's favorite person in the whole world. Peter can't tell if the entrees are chicken or beef or soylent green, all he knows is that it's food and he's hungry and when he sits up to eat, his blanket slides down his chest and he can count his ribs. It takes Peter two seconds to inhale everything that Hank brings him and lick the trays clean and it's all he can do to stop short of eating the plastic packaging. When Peter is finished he feels about a thousand times better. His leg hurts like a bastard and Hank breaks the news that he can't give Peter anything for the pain because he doesn't want to damage Peter's liver and also he doesn't think that whoever loaded this plane packed the EMK with enough analgesics to make a dent anyway, and Peter accepts that because he sees the logic even if it does sort of make him want to cry and throw things. Instead he looks at the pile of empty MRE packages stacked on the seat next to him and says, “Sorry, I'm not a cheap date.”
That gets a smile out of Hank but the professor is still looking at Peter like he doesn't know how to tell him that his pet turtle just died. “Peter,” the professor starts, and Peter just doesn't want any part of this conversation right now, not when both of them are wiped out and not really at their best and might say the wrong thing and he thinks that Xavier gets that because he says, “I understand,” which, maybe he thinks he does but he doesn't. He can't, but he gives Peter a reassuring pat on the shoulder and either Peter is more tired than he realized or the professor is using his powers or something because Peter just nods off mid-thought like somebody's hundred and one-year-old grandpa.
Peter wakes up, still on the plane, but this time he isn't as groggy and he's only kind of starving and Xavier is gone, off somewhere, maybe sleeping. It seems like it's a big plane. There might be bunks somewhere. Raven is sitting across the aisle, blue and scaly and wearing some kind of navy jumpsuit thing that may or may not be part of her skin.
“Hey,” she says, tossing an MRE onto his stomach. “So you don't waste away.”
“Thanks,” Peter says, ripping it open with his teeth. By now Peter's feeling, well, he's feeling like shit but that's mostly his leg talking. This is probably the most coherent he's felt since leaving Egypt on a backboard, coherent enough to actually care where he's going and what will happen to him once he gets there.
“Langley,” Raven says. It doesn't sound like she's looking forward to it. “That's where it all started, more or less.”
Part of the deal that Moira worked out was that everyone, and she means everyone, will stop in and have a chat with the CIA. Peter asks her if 'everyone' is on this plane.
“Yes.”
Oh. Alright. Peter feels his chest tightening.
“I didn't tell him,” she says. “If that's what you're worried about. I figured I'd let you do the honors.”
Peter looks away.
She doesn't miss a beat. “You're not going to tell him.”
Peter blows out a breath, “I saw what I needed to see, up close and personal. Now I know.” He shakes his head, “And I don't think it's for me.”
A pause. “So that's it? You went to an awful lot of trouble just to quit.”
There's no answer that's going to make her happy right now so he doesn't even try.
“Is it even true?” she asks him, and he knows she's doubting whether or not Magneto is actually his father.
“Wish it weren't,” he says. He doesn't know what that guy needs but it's not a fully grown son who doesn't even have his life figured out yet. Peter's not even sure what he needs, but he knows he's been looking for it for a long time and whatever it is, Magneto doesn't have it.
Raven is nodding like she understands but oh, she doesn't at all, and boy, is she disappointed. “Yeah, well, I'm sure everything seemed a lot easier when you were watching it on television and you didn't have to live through it, but some of us did, and that made us who we are, just like hiding out in your mother's basement made you who you are. If you can't live with that then maybe you should go home, Peter.”
That's harsh, but also not true, so Peter's not intimidated by her 'if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen' act. Maybe Peter would have been if he were still a teenager, but probably not because he was a top notch asshole then. So he's kind of irritated at her for thinking that she's got him pegged when she's known him for like, three days and he's had years to think about what he'd do if he ever met his dad again and sure, it hadn't played out like any scenario he'd ever imagined, but telling Peter that his reaction to having a mass murderer for a father, after he'd just witness the guy at his absolute worst, is inappropriate, well, that's not fair. Also, he can't go back to his mom's basement. Well, he can, but he can't go back to being who he was. He can't un-see what he's seen, can't put the genie back in the bottle. He feels like the world is a different place and he has to be a different person, and he doesn't want to hide anymore.
“I'm just going to see where the road takes me,” he tells her.
“I think you're making a mistake,” she says. Peter gets it. She and Magneto are old pals from back in the day (even though she did, like, shoot him in the neck once, jeez) and she wants to help, but telling the guy that he has an adult son who is basically a total stranger is not the way to do that, and the fact that she hasn't told Magneto Peter's secret so far means she probably does agree with him, or at least it means that she respects that it's Peter's decision and not hers.
“Better than saying something that I can't take back.”
Raven walks away from him up the aisle, about six seconds later she comes stomping back and tosses his goggles onto his belly. Peter snatches them up like a lifeline and slides them onto his forehead, immediately feeling less naked.
“You owe him something.”
He truly can't imagine what the hell that would be, so he just stares.
Raven elaborates, “You bled like a watercolor in a rainstorm. Hospitals don't bank mutant blood, so you had to have a transfusion. Erik and Jean were the only two mutants whose blood type matched yours, so they both donated. After your surgery you got a pint from Jean and two from Erik.”
“Oh.” It doesn't change... He sighs. “Tell him, 'thanks'.”
“Tell him yourself.”
When she walks away she doesn't say if she's going to get Erik or if she's going to say anything or if she's just going to open a hatch and leap paratrooper-style out of the plane into the tattered war zone that the rest of the world has become, but Peter's heart is in his throat for a good thirty minutes before he feels the reverberation of footsteps coming up the aisle toward him, and Erik Lehnsherr shambles into view.
Magneto looks stark white, gaunt, like he hasn't shaved or bathed or eaten or slept since Cairo and that was, what? Three days ago? More? Peter's got no idea. He's been unconscious and they've probably flown through three or four time zones by now. Magneto's eyes are empty and lost and he looks just, like, hopeless, like somebody killed his best friend which Peter knows isn't true, strictly speaking, because he was there for his touching reunion with Charles Xavier on the helipad and if the guy who organized his jail break isn't Magneto's best friend, then nobody is. But the point is that as bad as this guy looks, as wretched as Peter's sure he feels for everything that he did and everything that was done to him when his eyes fall on Peter he asks, “How is your leg?” The words are hollow-sounding, almost echo-y, like Magneto is talking to him from the bottom of some pit from which there is no escape and Peter reflects that Magneto is easier to hate from a distance, when he's not checking the state of Peter's health in the face of the fact that his wife and daughter were brutally murdered in front of him less than a week ago.
Peter takes him in, this murderer, this psychopath, this man who made him, whose blood is flowing through his veins -literally- and instead of answering Magneto's question he says, “Take a load off. You look like shit.”
Magneto looks at him, and then slowly, like all of his joints are rusted, folds himself into a seat nearby, sighing like he hasn't rested in forever. “Metal,” he says.
“'S'cuse me?”
“There's metal in your leg: steel plates, pinned to the bone.”
Oh. Well. That's...
Peter lies back and shuts his eyes, suddenly light-headed, leg aching. After a shaky breath he says, “Thanks for the, uh, you know... ” he waves his hand vaguely, then taps the inside of his elbow with his opposite hand.
Magneto cocks his head. “I could hardly refuse,” he states. Then he looks away, like their conversation is over and he's about to move off.
“Yeah, well, you gotta start somewhere, right?” Peter tries.
Magneto freezes and Peter silently prepares for the plane to start bucking or rolling the metal on the armrests to peel up but instead Magneto takes a deep breath and his shoulders drop down and back and he looks past Peter, like he's found something out there to attach his hopes to. He says, “Yes, I suppose we all have to start somewhere.”
Peter asks, “So where are you headed after this?” reasoning that he just traveled half the globe to find his dad, it seems like a waste to lose track of him right away.
For a minute it seems like Peter's lost Erik to his thoughts, but then he startles Peter by saying, in an eerily calm voice, “Charles has asked me to come to Westchester. He seems to think my skills will be quite useful in the weeks to come, rebuilding what was lost.” Then he turns to Peter and fixes him with a penetrating stare. “And you?”
Peter's face feels hot, trapped like he is in his dad's gaze, almost forgetting the question. “The house was pretty wrecked...” he begins. “The professor will probably need as many hands as he can get.” He hadn't given it any thought before now, but if he's going to move on with his life, he's going to have to start somewhere, just like Magneto. “My leg might be busted but there's nothing wrong with the rest of me and I heal fast so I figure that I'll be out of this thing in a week, tops. Once the school's rebuilt... I don't know. I've never been big into planning. I'll just see what comes up. So... I guess for now we're headed in the same direction.”
He waits a moment for a response, and when he doesn't get one he looks over at his dad and finds that Magneto's body has gone slack. His chin is dipping toward his chest and he's fast asleep: relaxed and vulnerable.
Peter watches the steady rise and fall of his dad's chest, mesmerized... and disappointed. Still, he thinks, it's a start, and he's got to start somewhere.
The End
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