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“Wendy,” Charles calls out, stopping the girl in the hallway. She freezes and turns around slowly. “Have you seen Peter around?”
Wendy flinches almost imperceptibly before stretching a plastic smile over her face, a little too wide to be careless. “Nope. No clue.”
Charles narrows his eyes. Wendy always knows where Peter is, it’s some kind of twin telepathy, not to mention how all three Maximoff siblings are partners in crime. And Peter being unaccounted for never leads to good things. “When was the last time you saw him?”
Wendy doesn’t let anything slip, except for the complicity she fakes. “The last time I saw him?” She ponders. “Definitely the time I saw him last.” She hurries away without another word.
He’s definitely stealing something.
-
The Maximoff children are menaces, and this makes complete sense, considering who fathered them.
They are regularly shaving years off of Charles’ life.
“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH,” the twins are shrieking as they literally zip through the mansion. Wendy is being piggy-backed by Peter, who is running as fast as he can, only Wendy is also opening portals for Peter to run through, and Lorna has a water gun that she’s using to try to get them both, and the entire living room is soaked.
Erik looks at Charles incredulously, as if he can’t believe how much destruction three teenagers can cause, and how Charles is letting it go on—how he’s so utterly defeated by it. Charles wants to snap that it’s all his fault—how he couldn’t keep it in his pants, but no, he can’t say that, he can’t tell him because the children don’t want him to know, and it’s killing him but it’s not his place.
“VIVE LA RÉVOLUTION,” Lorna yells, and then charges at the blurry figure coming out of a random portal. She tackles all three of them into the TV, crashing it onto the floor and breaking it.
The Maximoffs look at each other, and then look at Charles and Erik, who they had not noticed were standing there the entire time. They blink simultaneously. Then, “SCATTER,” Peter yells, and all three of them are running in opposite directions.
“Don’t you dare judge me,” Charles seethes at Erik. “You of all people are not allowed to judge me. This is all your fault.” Even if he doesn’t know why.
Erik looks affronted at the blame.
(All three Maximoffs try to fix the TV in their own ways. Wendy discreetly comes back at night to fix it with her magic. Lorna leaves a note that says: Very sorry, but you’ll actually find that it was not our fault at all, Jean did it and made you think it was us. Never mind that Charles is also a telepath.)
(And there’s also a brand new, stolen TV sitting by the couch the next morning, too.)
-
“Peter, are you sure no one’s going to find out?”
“Trust me, Wends. It’ll be fine.”
Charles has never wheeled himself somewhere faster ever before in his life.
-
For once in his life, Charles is having a rather pleasant day in the common room with Erik, where Lorna is curled up on a loveseat, reading a book.
And then Peter comes in with a blanket draped across his arms like a cape.
“What are you doing?” Lorna asks slowly. Peter only stares at her in intense silence. Erik watches, quizzical.
Peter raises his arms like a crucifixion. And then he jumps on Lorna.
Lorna yelps, but she’s crushed under the weight of her much larger brother. “Get off of me!” She yells, struggling underneath him, but she’s effectively pinned.
Peter stays on top of her, silent, unyielding, until Lorna finally stops writhing, giving up, resigning to her fate. And then he picks himself off of the loveseat and walks away without another word, leaving the blanket wrapped around her.
Lorna flips him off behind his back, but curls into the blanket more.
Charles doesn’t think he’ll ever understand the Maximoffs.
-
It’s dinner time when Wendy and Lorna suddenly start chanting.
“Ooga-chaka ooga-ooga ooga-chaka ooga ooga—” They pound their fists onto the table, chanting like maniacs, yelling at the top of their lungs.
And then Peter stands up on his chair.
“I CAN’T STOP THIS FEELING. DEEP INSIDE OF ME.”
“This is all your fault,” Charles hisses to Erik again. “All yours.”
Erik doesn’t understand.
-
“Hey, who’s up for a game of Knife Monopoly?”
Knife Monopoly is immediately banned from the mansion (and the Maximoffs are deemed as bad influences on the other children.)
-
They can’t go a single day without the Maximoffs causing some sort of fire.
“I can totally eat a raw egg,” Wendy squawks indignantly.
“Oh yeah?” Peter challenges. “Prove it.”
Wendy narrows her eyes at him. “Nice try. I’m not doing it for free.”
Peter smirks and leans closer to Lorna. “Sounds like someone’s a fucking coward.”
“Whatever, Peter. I bet I’d finish it faster than you.”
(They have a race to see who can eat it quickest, shell and all. All three of them take different approaches.)
(Listening to them gag on raw eggs at 7 am in the morning is not how any of the rest of the sane household members thought they’d start their day, but it is what happened.)
“Charles,” Erik says, exasperated and incredulous and fascinated in a disgusted and disturbed kind of way. “Charles. Why do they do this to themselves?”
Charles massages his temple. He can’t look at Peter throwing up in the sink because Wendy lost the egg competition and pettily bet him two bucks that he couldn’t drink an entire glass of hot sauce.
“That was awful,” Peter groans, wiping his mouth. “You guys should definitely not do that.”
Lorna’s eyes casually slide ominously over to the remaining hot sauce. Wendy looks contemplative.
Charles forces himself to take deep breaths. This is all Erik’s fault.
-
“Are you ready?” Lorna shouts from somewhere in the hallway.
“YEEHAW MOTHERFUCKERS.”
There is a series of increasingly louder thuds, one after another after another, and then a final crash, followed by a small groan.
Charles finds Peter sprawled on the floor beneath the staircase, a baking tray in his hand that he’d clearly tried to use to slide down the stairs. “Ow,” Peter mutters.
Wendy is at the top holding another one. “That was great!” She yells down, gleeful. “My turn!”
-
They wake up half the household with kazoos at four am in the morning.
Charles is so tired.
-
“The rook says fuck you and stabs itself in the foot, causing confusion to the enemy pawn and making them also stab themselves in the foot, too.”
“That’s not how it works,” Erik says, almost pleadingly. “That’s not how any of this works.”
Lorna grabs her bishop and moves it straight across the board, jumping over several other pieces. “Your king is in an unhappy, loveless marriage. My pointy girl seduces him with her feminine wiles and convinces him to divorce his wife. This is psychological warfare.”
Peter grabs his queen and knocks the king over. “Little did your home-wrecker know, this was actually a queendom all along. The queen causes an uprising and plans a coup, killing her ex-husband and taking all of the power for herself. Long live the girl boss.”
“This is not how you play chess,” Erik insists, distressed.
Wendy, from where she was observing the game from the side of the board, places an m&m on to a square. “This is a cat.” They all nod thoughtfully.
Lorna moves her knight next to the chocolate. “I pet the cat.”
Peter moves his pawn forwards, too. “I also pet the cat.”
Lorna looks at Peter. “I am touched that you pet the cat. I realize that we are not so different after all.”
Peter nods grimly. “I offer you a truce. I hold the cat out to you.”
“I accept,” Lorna says, shaking his hand. “The war is over. Innocents may stop dying for a lost cause.”
Erik looks devastated.
Wendy picks up the chocolate. “I eat the cat.” She eats it.
Peter and Lorna gasp. “NOO!”
-
“Charles,” Erik whispers, face pale enough that Charles worries he’s going to faint. “Oh my God.”
Not that he could blame him, of course. It’s… a lot, to find out one has three children out of nowhere.
The Maximoffs don’t even notice, so engrossed as they are. They’re too busy squishing into each other, trying to hide behind a wall, intently staring at Scott’s shoelaces. The metal tips are floating in midair, tying into each other as a knot.
Charles is kind of pissed. He’s been so careful about keeping Lorna’s powers a secret, and respecting their wishes, and then everything is unravelled because the siblings couldn’t help themselves from pranking Scott.
Scott wipes out when he tries to take a step forward. The Maximoffs burst out laughing. Scott turns around to yell at them, and then sees Charles and Erik—which is of course when the siblings notice them, too.
Erik is staring at them like a ghost.
“Ah, fuck,” Peter mutters. “You didn’t happen to see that, did you?”
“Peter…” Charles starts, trying to steer this in—some kind of direction.
Peter looks panickedly at his sisters, before turning back to them with an almost-schooled expression. “So, you’ve found out the secret. Lorna’s special powers. She controls… shoelaces.”
Lorna gives a serious nod. “It’s true. I do.”
Wendy stares at them blankly with wide eyes.
“Charles,” Erik whispers again, horrified.
-
(Charles doesn’t feel too much sympathy for him. He’s been dealing with the Maximoff children alone for far too long.)
-
Charles doesn’t know when he became roped into the official Maximoff-Lehnsherr babysitter, but all four of the family are out in town and he’s accompanying them, and he’s never felt so tired in his life.
Peter, Wendy, and Lorna are off doing God knows what after they insisted on getting milkshakes (which Erik had to pay for, of course, because how would they even have any money, they're just children, they reasoned while smiling angelically,) and Charles hopes Erik suffers a little bit because he’s been suffering their mayhem all this time and he just wants someone else to feel the pain, too.
He doesn’t have to wait long.
Suddenly, the three of them are sprinting back towards Charles and Erik out of nowhere, a matching panicked expression on all of their faces. They reach Erik and immediately shove him forwards, hiding behind him like little ducklings.
“What—?” Erik begins, puzzled. The siblings are exchanging frantic looks.
“Before anything happens,” Peter says, glancing around like something’s out to get them, “I just want to say that none of us have ever done anything wrong in our lives, ever, and we’re all perfect, and you owe us for all of the birthday presents you’ve missed over the years.”
A very angry cop is storming towards them, sticky and dripping strawberry milkshake. The three cringe back, shrinking to hide further behind Erik.
Charles’ head hurts worse than when he uses Cerebro for too long. “This is your fault,” he reminds Erik, and God, it feels good to say that out loud and have him know what he means. “Your children, your genes. I have nothing to do with this.”
Erik looks like he’s a step away from dying (but Charles doesn’t miss the way he holds back onto his children, clinging onto the back of his shirt.)