Chapter Text
"I let you in like a bullet to my brain / I let you stay”
wakey wakey – take it like a man
i.
Your birth certificate says that you have been born in February, nineteen fifty-five, Poland. Your mother’s maiden name is Magda Eisenhardt, your father’s name is altogether unknown.
What the piece of paper doesn’t say, is that your sister is only three minutes older than you, and that your mother makes it to America just to put you both in the hands and care of a woman named Marya Maximoff. Your mother makes it to America only to die: slowly and alone.
It does not say that you can easily run around the district twice, within half an hour, at age two, and it does not mention that when your sister is hungry or tired she sets thing on fire or makes them disappear.
At the right edge of the paper there is a black and white picture. Its lack of color conceals the fact that your hair has always been gray, like an old man’s.
The certificate is a piece of a junk; a lie, and that’s what you hate the most – it’s a piece of normality in a life that is far from ordinary.
ii.
You love Marya; and so for her and Wanda’s sake you bear through the sluggish pace of high-school. You barely finish Junior year in your fifth school, but your grades are nice. Still, both groups -peers and teachers- are terrible: they hate you, and the feeling is indeed, mutual.
Nothing new under the sun.
All reviews and remarks are the same: too arrogant, too spoiled, too impatient – and you smile and snarl. You have won this race a long time ago and they have not even realized that it is one.
Still, you try to please, to adjust. You’ve even went so far to change your name: Pietro is apparently too hard for your generally degenerate classmates, so you are Peter for them, for Marya and her husband. You are Peter for Marya’s little child, Susan. For everyone but Wanda.
Nothing new under the sun.
(it will be always like this, but you don’t know it yet: Everyone, but Wanda.)
iii.
For the first time, everything is happening too fast, even for you.
Your break in and out of Pentagon and watch the world burn as they find a name for the likes of you and Wanda.
Mutants.
You can feel that Marya practically burns holes in your head with her gaze, and yet all you think of is,
How will I explain this to Wanda?
and,
Great job Pietro. You let loose a mass-murderer mutant maniac.
and also,
That helmet is fucking ridiculous.
Wanda comes back from her school trip which you very shrewdly skipped, and is not angry but sad as you confess.
Which adds to the guilt. You can bear it though: it’s a feeling that grew with you.
In a way, guilt is the sinew of your existence.
iv.
Marya tries to protect you from the news, to create a vast but thick layer of shield around you both; you cannot go anywhere alone and you cannot watch TV, unless she is there. But you cannot escape hate and mass-hysteria easily.
There are protests and new clubs and nasty, vulgar graffities all around the world just to cherish the very existence of mutanthood. In the last week of August, your sister smuggles home a poster one day; which says,
JOIN MUTANT CONTROL AGENCY, BE A PURIFIER!
The background is horrid, all vivid red and loud yellow, it makes both of you sick at the stomach and you say,
Burn it, Wanda.
She blinks. The paper catches fire.
v.
It happens like this. In September, you both start Senior year.
In September, TV announces that they are searching for a girl named Lorna Dane, who tore apart a plane with a flicker of her mind, with her dangerous, unpredictable and unpermitted mutant powers.
At least, that is what Henry Gyrich, the assholest of all with the most money says, live on TV. He also kindly orders Lorna Dane to give up herself in the name of social justice.
Fucker.
What you find even more suprising, but not unpleasantly so, is that Charles Xavier (luckily well-washed, shaven and drug-free, with a better fashion sense and no sunglasses), Doctor of Genetics, head and representative of the Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters has a whole retortion speech ready and fired, on the very next day, and he also calls Gyrich a liar. Subtly, as he would.
You are a bit suspicious of this new Xavier, but Wanda is into it.
The third day, there is a fee on Lorna Dane’s head, the "THOUSAND DOLLARS IF ALIVE" under her photograph is big and atrocious.
She is thirteen years old, five years younger than them.
Wanda cries for the first time in years and you start dreaming of not being able to run.
vi.
”Pietro!”
Someone is running down the stairs.
You sleep there nowadays, but this time, fatigue found you sudden, next to the couch, so you are stretched out on the floor.
When you open your eyes, Marya already has her arms around your shoulders, half-shaking, half-embrancing them.
You will remember her words for the rest of your lives.
”My love, you have to run.” her words are very soft, but she is crying.
”Mum, I…” Glasses shatter and someone swears.
Running comes to you as a reflex. You are out of the house with Wanda in your arms way before the MCA begins to search the house.
(You have won this race too, but your heels and eyes are strangely burning.)
It will take a year to sink that Marya called you Pietro.