Okay, as anyone who's read this already has probably already determined, yes, this was originally part of a much longer oneshot, and there were two other oneshots that I had written that were in the same continuity as this. However, as was rightly pointed out to me by Macceh, that doesn't really work well for inter-connected stories on a site where you can't put separate stories that are connected by the same storyline into a subfolder on your account (And just how deeply AO3 has spoiled me becomes embarrassingly apparent). So here's the deal. What was once to be a long string of oneshots has become a multi-chapter slice-of-life story with chapters of varying length (and with a possible side-story or two), and the first oneshot, As You Were, has been cut up into three chapters because it would have been disproportionately long compared to everything else.

I messed around with some of the comic details to explain how Peter (and presumably Wanda, since I refuse to believe that she doesn't exist in the movie continuity) ended up with the Maximoffs.

Also, in real life, the Paris Peace Accords occurred in late January of 1973. However, I have messed around with the dates a bit on that. The presence of mutants on both sides changed things, and the Paris Peace Accords did not occur until around August instead. Of course, in real life, it wasn't like the signing of the Paris Peace Accords actually stopped the fighting in Vietnam.

Chapter summary: Erik tracks Peter down to his home in Alexandria, Virginia.

I own nothing.

"They told me you control metal. You know, my mom once knew a guy who could do that."

Beyond a bit of a double-take, Erik hadn't paid much attention to the rapid-fire words out of the boy's mouth at the time. He was too busy reeling at his sudden freedom after ten years of imprisonment, too busy trying not to lose the contents of his stomach from going at speeds he never wished to occupy again. At any rate, everything Peter said, he said so quickly that the words started to bleed together in his mind.

So Peter's mother had known a man who could control metal. All that meant was that she'd once known a mutant who could control metal. Erik couldn't possibly be the only mutant in the world who could do that.

And his surname was Maximoff. Well, the name was certainly familiar to Erik, but the Maximoff family he had known couldn't possibly be the only Maximoff family in the world. Even if Peter was from that Maximoff family, that didn't mean anything.

And Peter was a mutant.

It was a coincidence. Surely it was a coincidence.

But the more Erik thought about it, when he finally had an opportunity to think about it, the more he realized that the details were just a little too coincidental to be coincidence. Peter was a mutant, a member of a family called Maximoff, and his mother had known a man who could control metal. If only one of the details was present, Erik could have discounted it. Even two, he could have chalked up to chance. But all three…

That couldn't possibly be a coincidence.

During the trip from the Pentagon to the airport, Peter had been more than happy to offer up personal details of his life (At least, details that, in a similar situation, Erik would never have volunteered even under pains of death). Erik had been trying not to listen, instead staring holes into the back of Charles's head, almost daring him to turn around and look at him—and when Charles didn't look at him for the entire ride, didn't speak to him or acknowledge his presence in any way, Erik was in no way, shape or form hurt about this, just like he was in no way, shape or form hurt about the fact that Charles had waited ten years to get him out and had never even attempted to contact him in all that time. Anyways…

Anyways, while Erik had been trying not to listen to Peter, he ended up hearing a lot of what the boy said regardless; they were sitting next to one another in the car. He chattered about how slow the car was going, about how he could definitely get to the airport faster than this car ("Could get there faster than a jet!"). This boasting Erik forgave, as the boy had certainly gotten him out of his prison fast enough and he was the last person in the world who would tell a mutant anything that might hint that he shouldn't be proud of his powers. Besides, every person in the car with them was a mutant; what harm could it do?

Peter talked about his life growing up, talked about his little sister, a girl of six named Lorna whom he called "Munchkin" and clearly adored, if the comment that she was the only one he'd sit still for was any indication—Peter fidgeted in his seat the whole ride. He talked about his mom and how she wasn't a mutant, but was "cool, but really super strict", which, reading between the lines, Erik could only suppose meant that the woman was at her wit's end dealing with Peter. To be fair, if Erik was having to raise Peter and he had no way to keep up with the boy, figuratively or literally, he'd probably be at his wit's end with him too. At least she hadn't thrown him out on discovering that her son was a mutant.

Peter talked about his twin, Wanda, who was apparently also a mutant, in a quieter voice, and Erik tried very hard not to notice that every time Peter brought up Wanda, he spoke about her in the past tense.

Come to think about it, Peter had been the only one doing a whole lot of talking in that car. It could have been that he was just cutting everyone else off, but Erik wondered, with some discomfort, if maybe there was a reason Peter had been talking quite so much.

Erik had gleaned enough from Peter's incessant chatter (even if he hadn't been trying to listen) to get a good idea of where the boy lived. His hometown was Alexandria, just south of D.C. Truthfully, Alexandria was not some small town where everyone knew everyone else—far from it. But bizarrely, everyone seemed to know exactly where Peter Maximoff lived, bizarrely enough that with some of the things Erik had been hearing lately in regards to mutants, he found it worrisome.

He had been attempting to make contact with old acquaintances, those who, for whatever reason, be it that they had families they didn't want to endanger (frustrating but understandable) or that the only mutant abilities they possessed didn't really bring anything to the table on a "combat" front or in fact made them unsuitable for combat (understandable and slightly less frustrating) or for other reasons (that varied on the scales of frustration and understandability), had never taken up the fight but still supported him in quieter ways. He'd only gotten through to about a quarter of them. Some, it turned out, had been drafted into Vietnam, and, unfortunately, they had likely ended up on Trask's lab tables. Some of them had disappeared after Erik had sent the word out over national television, and most of those mutants did not strike Erik as the sort to simply leave their families (if they had any), their jobs (if they had any) and their homes (if they had any) without giving word to someone.

The rest had simply vanished, and no one could say when or how.

These were the people Erik had instructed to lie low if things went wrong in Dallas. Lying low, they could do; they'd been lying low ever since their mutations emerged. For them to just vanish… It concerned him. Better to make sure that Peter hadn't "vanished" too.

But as he neared the house one fine morning, he found himself assailed by thoughts that had nothing to do with various possible nefarious schemes against mutants.

I can't believe I have children.

What is Magda even doing in the U.S.? She could barely speak any English, though I suppose that since it's been nearly twenty years since we last saw each other, that may have changed.

I can't believe I have children.

Why didn't she contact me? When Erik realized why Magda had likely not tried to contact him, he flinched and moved on to a different line of thought. Unfortunately…

I can't believe I have children.

It happened to be a bit redundant.

When his line of thought reached a bemused, almost terrified Should I have bought flowers? Erik decided that maybe Charles had addled his brains the last time he was inside his head, just a little bit. He'd have to have a word with him about that later.

Erik did not hesitate to walk up the front path to the front door. He did not hesitate to knock on the front door. In fact, if he had been moving any more quickly towards the door, he would have been running. He quickly calmed the hammering of his heart and knocked sharply on the door.

He was expecting Peter, or Magda or Wanda or maybe even the little girl Peter had spoken of. Instead, he was greeted by another who, while not being whom Erik had expected, was nonetheless familiar to him.

Marya Maximoff, looking worn and exasperated, drank in the sight of his black suit and matching hat (contrary to popular opinion, Erik knew better than to travel through suburban Virginia wearing armor and a cape—even if he had quite deliberately left the helmet at the White House) before she got a good look at his face. "Peter!" she called into the house, scowling, "the cops are…" She trailed off.

Erik had taken his hat off. When Marya got a good look at his face, she paled. He sucked in a deep breath and said, "Hello, Marya."

"Oh my God," she muttered, somehow managing to pull off a look of simultaneous anger, worry and terror. What Marya did next was to frantically wave him inside, hissing, "Get inside before someone sees you and we get ten kinds of hell falling on us."

Well. Out of all the possible greetings Erik had been expecting, that certainly wasn't one of them.

Marya shut the door behind him with a firm slam and a twist of the lock and the deadbolt. She wasn't trying to keep him in, Erik realized; she was trying to keep anyone else who might come in out. Oh no, that wasn't worrisome at all. "Marya, I—"

"I saw your… performance on television," she muttered, going around and making sure that all of the windows were locked, before drawing the curtains shut. "Figures; you drop off the face of the earth for nineteen years after scaring the living daylights out of my cousin, and the first time we hear from you again, you scare the living daylights out of my daughter. It was all Peter and I could do to calm her down once the shock wore off. You have to admit—" There was a sharp, almost feral quality to her smile, but there was misery lurking behind the surface of her eyes, and a question there too, though Erik wasn't sure what it was "—there's a certain amount of symmetry to it."

There weren't a whole lot of people who could talk to Erik like that, and without provocation to boot, and not expect to be seriously injured soon after, but this was a special case. He knew also that it was difficult to appear intimidating to a woman whose clearest image of him was likely that of a gawky, malnourished twelve-year-old whose voice broke on high notes and who stared at her favorite cousin like she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Especially considering that the last time they'd laid eyes on each other, he was a gawky, only slightly better-nourished eighteen-year-old, newly married to her favorite cousin and still staring at her like she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. That tended not to leave an impression of dignity in the minds of others. As much as it irked him that his appeal to mutantkind had been reduced to a 'performance' by Marya's description.

Marya was pausing at the last of the living room windows, her hands poised over the curtains. She looked back at him, standing in the foyer and convinced that he had never felt so awkward and out-of-place as he did now, out of the corner of her eye, half-obscured by long blonde hair. Erik remembered when it had still been short; she'd been eighteen the last time he saw her, when she and her father had relocated to New York. "Why… are you here?" There was the undercurrent of fear, a tone Erik had heard many take when speaking to him.

"…Peter…" The fact that, for the life of him, he couldn't think of what to say, well that was absolutely unacceptable. He knew exactly what he wanted to ask, but when he tried, he found himself tongue-tied. Perhaps… Perhaps that was because it was a question he was almost certain he already knew the answer to.

"What about him?" The fear was still there, in her now-strained voice.

"Is… He's my son, isn't he?" By contrast, Erik's voice was flat, detached. He could almost pretend that he didn't suddenly feel like the world was hinging on Marya's answer.

She turned about to face him. "Yes, he is."

"And Wanda?"

"Well, she and Peter are twins, so I don't see how she could possibly be anyone else's kid."

Erik let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding.

"And… Is Magda here?" The words were more painful than they should have been. "I would like to speak with her."

It had been years since he'd fumbled over his words like this. In prison, he'd always had a ready answer for every last barb and jibe and bored question his guards had thrown at him. But then, this was not a normal situation at all.

Marya shook her head choppily. "No." Her mouth formed a thin, twitching line. "She died when the twins were about three. She… She didn't like to talk about why the two of you separated, but she told me what happened." Marya's shoulders sagged. "I'm sorry, Erik."

"Save your sympathy." The answer was rote and brittle, the way he had always rehearsed it in his head if he happened to run into someone who knew "what happened." "Are Peter and Wanda here?"

At this, Marya rolled her eyes. "Peter's in the basement. Try to ignore the stolen goods; ignoring them is about the only way I can have a conversation with him anymore that doesn't involve 'why aren't you afraid of going to prison?!' And don't even ask me how he got that arcade machine home!"

Erik snorted. He'd noticed Peter's sticky fingers during their car ride from the Pentagon to the airport. He did, however, also notice that Marya said not a word about Wanda, whom he hadn't even seen. "What about Wanda?" And Erik couldn't remember the last time he had heard himself sound so… earnest. Eager, even. "Is she here?"

Marya's face fell. "No," she muttered, looking away. "She ran away about a year ago." The woman practically radiated shame. She cut Erik off before he could reply. "But like I said, Peter's in the basement. Go talk with him, if you can get him to listen."

-0-0-0-

It was so much worse than Erik had thought.

The basement was filled with things—Twinkies, Ding Dongs, televisions and other appliances—that Peter had obviously stolen. Erik had no idea why there would be so many microwaves in the basement otherwise, and what does he even want with so many microwaves? And the arcade machine… Erik had thought Marya was exaggerating, or even out-and-out joking. But no, there was one here, and somehow Erik doubted that Peter had acquired it by legitimate means. How had he gotten it home?

I never would have let him steal all of this. There are better things for a mutant to be doing with his time and powers than divesting grocery stores of their snack goods.

Well, the answer is simple, came the sounding of a voice in the back of his head, that bitter voice that Erik usually only heard from when he'd had more than was advisable to drink. Marya isn't one of us; she has no way of keeping up with Peter and no other way of leveling the playing field. She's tried as best she can, but ultimately, how can she be expected to effectively deal with Peter? Now you, on the other hand, you likely could have effected a change in his behavior, if you'd been here. There was, on the whole, likely a reason Erik usually only heard from this voice when he was drunk.

It didn't take Peter long to spot him; the boy appeared to just be finishing up with a magazine of some kind. Peter waved languidly (or what was probably languid by his standards, anyways; his hand was only nearly a blur), before zipping out of his chair and coming to stand entirely too close to Erik for his liking. "You know, I didn't break you out of the Pentagon just so you could try and kill yet another president." There was none of the laughter in his voice that Erik had heard in the Pentagon, genuine, mocking or otherwise. "I mean, yeah, it's Nixon and all, and he's kind of an asshole—course, how would you know that; you were still in prison when that thing with Ellsberg blew up—but still…"

Before Erik could back up or tell Peter to back away, the boy was gone in a grayish blur. The next thing he knew, Peter was back on that chair of his, munching on a Twinkie and looking at him with the distinct air of someone who felt that he was owed an explanation.

Erik found himself staring at Peter rather than immediately giving any explanation (And the idea that he owed anyone any explanation for anything…). He'd not really gotten a good look at him in the Pentagon, one, because he hadn't realized who the boy was at the time, and two, Peter was just moving too quickly for anyone to get a good look at him. Peter didn't really look a whole lot like him—come to think of it, he didn't look a whole lot like Magda, either, and even if Peter had resembled either of his parents, the gray hair probably would have drawn the eye away. The jaw was his. Maybe. If you squinted.

At least no one's made him disappear either.

Then…

I wonder what he looked like when he was little.

Okay, obviously Erik needed to focus better.

Peter seemed to think so, too. He shot a slightly nonplussed look at Erik, just as he finished up his third Twinkie. "You… just gonna stare at me all day?" he asked, almost as slowly as that second delivery of 'whiiiplaaaash' in the Pentagon.

"If I could clarify my 'involvement' in the Kennedy assassination—"

"I saw that one on the tube too! That's crazy! What is it with you and the president, anyways? You got a grudge against the office or something?"

"I was trying to save him," Erik told him shortly.

The only response he got was a set of raised eyebrows and what Erik was sure must have been the thought Sure you were.

"He was one of us," Erik explained (And was amazed at himself immediately afterwards; there were only a few people alive whom he could name who he would actually even think of explaining his actions to). "Kennedy's actual assassin had gotten wind of this and was set on killing him."

"Your aim must suck, then," Peter told him frankly. The skeptical look was gone from his face, but Erik suspected that the thought that had replaced it was Damn, no one would admit to screwing up that badly unless they really had.

"I was the only one who could save him."

"You've got an ego on you, don'tcha?"

Said or thought practically everyone Erik had interacted with in the past month. And that included Charles.

The two stared at one another for another protracted moment, Peter pausing even from devouring his ill-gotten Twinkies. Erik watched as the boy brushed the crumbs off of his shirt and wiped the rest from his hands. "Soooo… To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?" Peter asked, miming an English accent—he sounded almost disturbingly like Charles when he did that, and it honestly made Erik wish Charles was here. After a moment, he told himself that he wished Charles was here so he wouldn't have to do this by himself. "And in normal clothes, no less." There was, much like Marya, something quite feral in that grin of his, but Erik could see from one look at Peter's eyes that he had no idea what he was doing here—what he was to him.

"Peter—"

"If it's to recruit me to your brand-new terrorist group, thanks but no thanks. I mean—" Peter pointed to himself with both hands and smiled, slightly more softly than last time "—thanks for the invite, breaking you out of lock-up was fun and all, but I'm not in it to hurt people."

Amazingly, Erik found that he wasn't annoyed with being constantly interrupted. He was almost grateful to have the real reason he was here put off over and over again. "It's not a terrorist group, and I'm not here to recruit you to it." That was also fairly amazing, as Erik realized that, in all the time he'd had between realizing that Peter might well be his son and the present, he'd not once considered recruiting him to the Brotherhood. "Your…" Erik prayed that his voice would sound gentle instead of just raw "…you said that your mother had known a man who could control metal, didn't you?"

Peter nodded, silent. He stared Erik up and down, and for the life of him, Erik couldn't tell if Peter knew where he was going with this or not.

He had to broach the subject gently. That was what he had been telling himself the entire journey to this house in suburban Alexandria, if it did indeed turn out that Peter was his son, that Wanda was his daughter, that he had children, living children. Erik had enough emotional awareness, even after ten years of solitary confinement, to know that rushing headlong into this was likely not going to end well. And he had managed to broach the subject gently, so far.

"I'm your father."

But eventually, he was bound to screw up.

Peter gaped at him. This was probably the most surprising thing that had happened so far—Peter had up to now always had a witty remark ready to fire; Erik didn't think he would ever see him slack-jawed. But then, this was his son, whom he had known, in accumulated time, for probably three hours, at the most. He didn't really know much anything about him.

"No…" Peter faltered, looking almost stricken. "No way."

"Go ask Marya," Erik said quietly. He had expected skepticism. "She'll tell you who I am."

Though he likely had to wait no longer than a minute for Peter to return, the waiting was unbearable. Was this what it felt like for Peter, every hour and every minute of the day? As Erik stood in the middle of the basement, staring down at the bare concrete floor, searching with his senses for every metal object in the house just to pass the time, the air seemed to grow uncomfortably warm and still.

When Peter sped back down the stairs, he stopped to, once again, gape open-mouthed at Erik. "So…"

"So…" Erik felt his head begin to pound.

"So why now?" Peter's eyes were very wide; he would have to be about eighteen by now, but suddenly, he looked to Erik's eyes much younger. "If Mom says you're my dad, I believe her. But why show up after all this time?"

"I didn't even know you existed until the day we met," Erik pointed out, exasperation flavoring his words for the first time, though he wasn't sure if he was exasperated with Peter so much as he was exasperated with this whole situation. And himself. "You or Wanda. And even if by chance I had found out before then, as you will recall, I just spent the last decade in prison. I wasn't allowed visitors; I wasn't allowed phone calls, or letters. There wasn't a great deal I could have done about it in there."

Peter nodded swiftly. He looked away, a remarkably hard expression—and suddenly, Erik saw a bit of himself in the boy where he hadn't seen any before—flitting over his face before vanishing. "Okay, yeah, that makes sense," he muttered, and whether it actually made sense, Erik didn't know.

Erik decided to try a different tack. "Marya told me your sister ran away."

This earned him another nod, much swifter than the last and looking more like the spasm of someone having convulsions than anything else. "Yeah," Peter said shortly, still not looking Erik in the eye. "It was… Well, it was hard." But then, his head snapped up and he was staring at Erik so hard that he expected to feel his skin start to burn. "You wanna go look for her?"

"What?" Erik had meant to ask why Wanda had run away in the first place, but all memory of the question was knocked out of his head by this abrupt twist the conversation had taken.

Suddenly, Peter was grinning. "I've been meaning to go look for her once I finished up school, but let's face it, school's boring and Wanda's way more important than school anyways." His eyes narrowed. "Come on, man; you came this—" he held his thumb and his forefinger about a millimeter apart "—close to CIA central just to see me, and you don't even want to recruit me to your terrorist group. You can't tell me you don't want to see Wanda, too."

Erik raised an eyebrow. "Do you even have any idea where she is?" he protested. "The world's a bigger place than you seem to think it is." But he already knew he had lost. If mutants were disappearing again, he didn't want Wanda to be one of them. Even if he had never met her.

Peter shrugged. "Wanda always talked about wanting to see San Francisco."

"Do you even have a car?"

"Yes."

"That isn't Marya's?"

"Still yes."

Erik sighed. "Alright, then. But if you want to do this, we're going to have to stay off the interstates for most of the trip." He wasn't entirely sure how he'd managed to throw up his hands before Peter could protest, but he would count it as good fortune. "I have been attempting to make contact with some of my old 'acquaintances', only to find that most of them have gone missing. I would like to visit those whom I did manage to contact, and if possible figure out those who have disappeared. I would," he assured Peter, "also like to ensure that Wanda is not among those mutants who have gone missing since the end of the Vietnam War."

Suddenly, Peter was standing at the top of the stairs. "Then what are we waiting for?!"

Even if Peter wasn't his son, Erik would have to admit that he owed the boy a great deal for breaking him out of prison. Erik was not the sort of person who liked being in someone else's debt. But he sighed again, and wondered exactly what he was getting himself into, before following.

-0-0-0-

Marya was strangely accepting of the idea that her nephew and foster-son was going to take off on a cross-country road-trip with the father he'd just found out was his father to find the sister he'd not seen in a year.

"Did you pack your duffel bag?"

"Yeah, Mom!"

"Is there anything other than Twinkies and Ding Dongs in there?"

"Umm, there's a lot of them…"

"Go pack it again."

Peter came back into the living room, and after Marya inspected the contents of his bag, she nodded. "Now go say goodbye to your sister." When Peter zoomed up the stairs to the second floor only to reappear three seconds later, she pointed up the stairs and said, "Properly this time, Peter." He grinned sheepishly and vanished again.

While they waited for Peter to come back down from saying his goodbyes to Lorna, Erik chanced a glance in Marya's direction. She was leaning against the wall, gnawing on her thumbnail the way he remembered her doing as a girl. "I'm surprised you're just letting him go with me," he murmured.

Marya started, as though she'd forgotten he was in the room (Erik felt vaguely insulted, but saved the feeling for later). She brushed stray strands of hair out of her face, and shrugged. "I wanted him to stay in school so long as the government kept sending troops to Vietnam, but now… He nearly failed last year. He's already missed too many days this year, and yes, I know it's only September; the school's been threatening to expel him over his cutting school so much. And…" Marya narrowed her eyes. "…And I have been hearing things. Keeping my ear to the ground. He's… He's safer with you."

Just because he was curious, Erik asked, "What would you have done if someone with ill-intent had come looking for Peter?"

Her smile was not feral. It was absolutely predatory. "Why, Erik, don't you know that's what shotguns are for?" she said, as falsely sugary as saccharin.

Erik decided to let the topic drop.

Finally (after what must have been a long time for him), Peter came back down the stairs. He was very close to vibrating, he seemed so impatient to leave. "Okay, Munchkin knows where I'm heading, I promise I'll call, I promise I'll get Wanda to call when we find her, I love you—" he kissed Marya's cheek so fast that Erik wondered if Marya even felt it "—and I'll see you when I see you. Okay, bye!"

"Hang on, Peter." Marya dug a wad of bills out of her pocket. Peter's eyebrows shot up as she pressed them into his hand. "For gas and food. I don't know how far it will get you, but you—" she smiled, and managed to keep from smiling too bitterly "—have never had much trouble finding food even when you have no money, so… I love you too, please remember to call, and good luck."

Peter squirmed when Marya kissed his cheek and squirmed even harder when she hugged him. Once she let go of him, he practically flew out the front door, duffel bag. Erik followed at a significantly more sedate pace. As he was crossing the threshold outside, Marya had one last thing to say. "Oh, Erik? I just want you to know that, while I'm glad that you're actually taking an interest in your kids, if you get Peter or Wanda involved in any of your terrorist schemes, I don't care how many stadiums you drop on my head—I will find you and I will slit your throat in your sleep."

Erik waved without looking back at her.