A/N : For you, Petra! Hope this makes you feel better after I broke your poor heart...

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1.

For about the 75th time that day, Scott wondered why he had been sent on this particular mission with possibly the least quiet, most uncontrollable, most distractible member of the team. They could have sent anyone – Kurt, Jubilation, even Hank if he could have spared the time – but for some reason Professor Xavier had chosen to send Peter along.

It wasn't that they didn't get on. Scott had grown to like the speedster, respect his unique skill set and not find him quite so annoying once he'd seen through the façade of cool-as-heck to the vulnerable boy underneath. He still wasn't always fun to work with though, not when the job in question involved retrieving a small, delicate piece of machinery from a lab that would need to be infiltrated subtly and above all, quietly. He'd already stopped the kid running into motion-sensing lasers three times that day, irritated when Peter had just said

"I can outrun a laser, who cares?"

"I can't, and it'll trigger an alarm" Scott had told him firmly, "Now try and stay with me, Maximoff, this won't take long"

"I could have just run in and got it you know" he said, slightly peevish, "It wouldn't have taken a second. Nobody would even have seen me and by the time the alarms rang, I'd be long gone"

"Do you even know what we're here for?"

"Sure! It's a… micro-thingy. A chip. Do you have any Doritos? Suddenly I really want Doritos"

"And that's exactly why you're not doing this alone," Scott told him, "You'd probably forget what you were doing halfway through and go raid a vending machine"

"I would object to that, but you have no idea how much I want Doritos right now"

Scott clenched his jaw in frustration at his teammate. He did know that the boy had to keep eating or he'd wipe out, but sometimes his random cravings did get a little much.

"Eat a bar, you'll feel better" he told him "*quietly*"

Finally emerging into the main lab, Scott had immediately checked for traps and turned to motion Peter over finding it safe. He wasn't where Scott had left him safely in the doorway, and he looked around and sighed heavily as he saw Peter zipping around between the benches, thoroughly overexcited.

"Dude this is a real Mad Scientist lab!" he whispered delightedly, "Just LOOK at all this cool stuff!"

"Don't touch anything," Scott hissed back, "We get the chip, we leave, we go home. Okay?"

"Oh-kaaaay" Peter said, huffed and stood still for about two seconds before his eyes had lit on something else he wanted to investigate.

"Got it!" Scott called quietly, gently tucked the chip away in the little storage container he'd been given, looked around for his team-mate, "Maximoff! What did I say about not touching?!"

He'd caught Peter almost in the act of pressing a very tempting bright blue button on a large panel. He drew his finger back as if it had been burned, in front of Scott in a blink looking very irritable

"I'm not a child, Summers!" he hissed. Scott tried to warn him not to lean on what he was about to – a small podium that contained a sleek black console, one of the buttons of which Peter was just about to put his hand on. Later Scott would say he could never have reacted in time, that nobody could have, and it was probably true. There was a blinding white flash that dazzled Scott momentarily, instinctively turning to shade his eyes from the glare, and when he looked back, Peter was gone again. Panic ran through Scott like a sword in his gut.

He had stared around the deserted lab for several minutes, thought about calling for his team-mate, before he jumped at a movement from behind the podium. Peered behind it to see the legs of Peter's uniform dragging behind a small, toddling creature holding its arms out for balance. The rest of the uniform swathed its little body, sleeves flapping behind it, neckline hanging around its tiny shoulders. Caught up to the little creature just before it tripped over the dragging clothing and scooped it up, holding it up under the arms and seeing the familiar brown eyes looking back at him.

"Oh helI" Scott whispered to himself, "Your father's going to kill me".