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Peter receives the call at ten p.m., which is exactly when most of the kids are asleep, the teenagers are at least pretending to prepare for bed, and the staff of the Jean Grey School for Gifted Youngsters are settled in Hank’s office for their weekly poker night.
He’s the closest to the telephone when it rings, and picks it up as Ororo starts dealing the cards. “Hello?”
“Peter,” his dad greets. “Just the person I wanted to talk to.”
Peter holds up a hand. “Dad,” he says, and everyone stops to look at him. His dad rarely calls, and Charles prefers writing to telephoning. “Hi. How’s everything?”
His dad clears his throat. “Everything’s good, actually,” he says. “More than great.” Peter tries his best to communicate with his eyebrows to everyone that everything’s fine. Hank, surprisingly not the most patient of people, is beginning to twitch. “I wanted to let you know that Charles and I are planning on getting married.”
“You and Charles are getting married!” Peter says. His eyebrows must look fucking crazy right about now. “That’s good news! Have you guys decided on a date?”
“That’s the thing,” his dad says. “We’re planning on doing it tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Peter yelps.
“Tomorrow?” Hank all but shouts.
-
Peter, who’s approaching the age where men consider cheating on their wives with hot young secretaries, has lived the sort of life others only hear about in the papers. Petty crime? Check. Major crime? Check. Super major crime, like breaking your sperm donor out of the Pentagon?
Check, check, check.
With that sort of childhood and youth, he’d kind of expected it to continue well into adulthood. Instead, he’s roped into helping run a school while simultaneously being conned into getting his high school diploma and being a bona-fide superhero. He didn’t mind at the time — despite the fact that he was in very real danger of dying, seriously, the older he gets, the more he wonders what Charles was thinking — because it was fun and a much better extracurricular than band or science club or track (lame, lame, so lame, in that order).
Then, he gets into NYU, which makes his mother cry because she’d resigned herself to Peter being the disappointment of the family. And Peter loves his mom. He wants her to be happy. Getting a degree she can display on her living room wall will keep the sighing and tutting at bay for thirty years, he estimates.
What he doesn’t expect is the offer of a full-time teaching position with the school once he graduates, which — to his surprise — he accepts. Charles has a way about him, even without his telepathy, and Peter’s pretty sure that if he turned the job down, his mom and dad would’ve stopped carefully ignoring each other in favor of brokering some unholy peace treaty to rain their disappointment down on him.
Plus, his dad would’ve used it as an excuse to visit the school, and everyone knows how that turned out the last time.
Teaching is better than what Peter expects. The kids — when they’re not being brats — are smart and genuinely entertaining, and it’s always a great feeling when he bonds with them over the same kind of shit he went through and helps them not fuck up where he did. There’s something to be said about imparting wisdom to the next generation, and all. The unfun part mostly lies in grading, cleaning up after someone’s had an accident — the ones who produce goo are no joke — and speaking to parents about why their kid is acting up. Un-fucking-fortunately, it’s rarely about their mutation or academic performance, and always because Brian-who-can-talk-to-dogs likes Sam from Professor Beast’s class better than he does Joey.
Field trip days are another sort of battle. Children misbehave as a rule, and things are more difficult without Charles around to smooth things over when something inevitably happens.
However, Genosha is wildly different from the Museum of Natural History, and there’s only so much trouble the kids can get up to. He thinks. He hopes. Oh, please don’t let them find new and exciting ways to cause a scene. The locals hate visitors as it is — tolerate, a voice in his head that sounds like Charles corrects — but even so, weddings should kind of be an exception to the rule.
-
Having an entire cohort of screaming mutant children on their island might change the Genoshans’ stance on that, though.
-
Ten year-olds are difficult enough. Ten year-old mutants are a different story altogether. Peter tries not to sigh. Maybe if he closes his eyes, he can pretend they aren’t there?
There’s a shriek, then a wet, slapping sound followed by a nasally-sounding exclamation of, “Gross!”
Peter pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs as loudly and pointedly as he can. It’s been a long day, made longer by having to hurry his brats into packing for the most impromptu of field trips and then minding them on the Magic School Bus-ified Mega Blackbird. “Look, kids—”
“We know, Mr. Maximoff,” they chorus. Is that a hint of annoyance he hears? How dare they. He opens an eye and squints at them.
Harriet-who-oozes-goo, almost definitely the cause of the wet slap he just heard, looks up at him innocently. She’s still slightly gooey as she says, “Don’t touch anything we can’t fix, don’t destroy stuff, don’t hurt people, don’t hurt ourselves. If there’s military personnel, just shout loudly in our heads for the Professor and he’ll get Mr. Magneto to deal with it.”
It would be more horrifying how they had protocols for children to deal with military threats if Peter allows himself to dwell on it, so he pointedly does not. In the meantime, the kids at the back of the group have progressed past fidgeting into straight-up wandering off. Peter knows he’s lost.
“Fine, go,” he says, but before he can finish, the children have already dispersed. You’d think they were the ones with super speed, not him.
He watches the childrens’ backs grimly, then grabs his stuff and makes for his dad’s house.
-
Erik Lehnsherr is a reformed domestic terrorist, a great cook when he bothers, and a loving father and partner, but he’s also used to living life with very little. While he had done his best to transform an uninhabited Genosha into a somewhat liveable place, his best was also the sort of shipping-container-for-homes, off-grid commune most commonly associated with cults and anti-technology hippies.
Unfortunately — or fortunately — for him, he also chose to marry rich, and even if Charles was the sort who didn’t mind (and he does, though he likes to pretend otherwise), Peter’s dad also tends to go a bit overboard in his guilt.
Peter has a fat trust that pays him more in monthly stipends than he needs and a brownstone in Brooklyn. Charles arrived on Genoshan soil to a moderately accessible island and a modest two-bedroom cottage with proper plumbing (the first of its kind in Genosha, unheard of before Erik went to seek him out in Paris). After four months of charming rustic living, a bored Charles, much too fond of modern conveniences, quickly got over his complex about making things worse when he intervened and started on setting up proper public services.
The sewer and plumbing systems were built around the time proper medical care facilities were established; his dad spent two weeks in Manhattan mapping out the tunnels and researching waste treatment methods, and he and Peter had a few nice nights out in town. City Hall came later, and the library after that.
Unfortunately, none of Genosha’s currently standing buildings have the capacity to host all the islanders and the wedding guests, hence the need for improvisation.
Peter screeches to a stop in front of the half-finished rec center, right beside the metal sculpture in the shape of Genosha.
“What is this,” he says.
“It’s for the wedding,” Logan, trapped in place by the frankly terrifying number of balloons surrounding him, replies.
“They’re only going to recite their vows,” Peter says slowly. “Then we’ll have dinner and cake before we fly back. Why are there balloons?”
“It’s a wedding!” he hears someone shout from the balloon-blowing group they’ve got to the side. The voice sounds suspiciously like Bobby’s.
“So?” Peter shouts back.
Logan’s sigh is long-suffering. “That’s what I said.”
“Yet here you are,” Peter says, gesturing to the balloons. In the distance, he sees a production line involving no less than half his class, dutifully punching heart-shaped confetti from a mountain of pink crepe paper. “My god. Where’s Hank? Why isn’t he stopping this?”
“Chuck grabbed him as he got off the plane and said he was too tense,” Logan says. “So he…” he raises his fingers to his temple and waggles them, “mind-whammied him into going to the spa.”
Peter blinks. “There’s a spa?”
Logan grimaces. “Apparently.” He tips his chin towards the balloons. “You wanna help?”
“Nope,” Peter says, eyeing the balloons one last time. “Lunch with Mr. Magneto calls.”
-
“You know, you’re welcome to visit more often,” Peter’s dad tells him as they eat, in that stilted way of his.
See, Peter appreciates the gesture, but Genosha is small. And boring. He’s more chill now than when he was a teenager, but he still gets antsy sometimes, and running around the perimeter takes him two seconds on average. It also kicks up way too much dust, which kinda annoys Emile, and that’s a guy whose bad side Peter doesn’t really wanna get on.
“It’s okay, dad,” he says. “That’s sweet of you, but there’s not much to do here.” Not like Westchester, where there were always problems waiting to be solved. He pauses for a moment before he continues. “And, uh, the psionic shielding in your house doesn’t. Um. Exist.”
His dad immediately turns a shade of puce to match his old costume. Peter knows this because he started a lame-ass Magneto scrapbook before his dad started becoming more present in his life, encouraged by Charles, who said it would help Peter sort his feelings out. He also helped Peter by procuring a suspiciously well-kept stack of newspaper clippings documenting his dad’s past as a megalomaniacal domestic terrorist. (Not Peter’s words, he’s just quoting what Charles said.)
Charles still borrows the scrapbook on occasion for show-and-tell, because he might have forgiven Peter’s dad for literal murder, but he has no qualms about weaponizing the cutting derision of a teenager against Peter’s dad when he’s feeling petty.
From the other end of the island, where he’s minding something in his shiny new office, Charles sends Peter the mental equivalent of a rap to the knuckles. Peter can tell he doesn’t mind, because it’s tinged with a hint of amusement and that sort of petty satisfaction you only get when you’re being a right bastard.
“Uh.” Peter’s dad tries. He drags his hand down his face, and gets that faraway look that means he’s talking to Charles.
Why don’t you help Scott and Logan? After you’re done, you can invite them to go kayaking before the ceremony, Charles says, and sends along an image of them in an intense argument about flower arrangements.
Oh god, Peter thinks, then Yes, sir! and with an exasperated sigh from his dad and a dismissive flick of his wrist, Peter’s off.
-
The psionic shielding issue came up at the same time the no-Peter’s-dad-at-school decree was enacted. If Peter had to set the scene, it would go something like this:
Once upon a time, there was a guy who recently reconnected with his dad, and even though his dad had been cleared of all the crimes he did and some he did not do (like causing the death of JFK), he was still kind of in exile. If you define exile as ‘living on a piece of land donated to the mutant cause by the American government in the hopes that mutants will make themselves scarce and step onto American soil as rarely as possible, hopefully never’.
However, that guy also had a bit of trouble sitting still, and sometimes stole stuff for fun. This was unforgivable, as the teacher whose mansion-castle he lived in frowned upon theft, and as a result wrote to the guy’s dad to invite him for a chat about his son’s kinda-sorta kleptomania. The guy’s dad accepted as he wanted to see his son, but he and the teacher also used to be good friends and were working on mending their friendship. An in-person visit would allow him to do both, and visit he did.
So the guy’s dad rocked up, but unbeknownst to all except the teacher’s little minion Hank and the teacher’s sister Raven, there was a chance the chat might start as a chat, but wouldn’t end as one.
As Raven and Hank had rightfully feared, the chat went well. Really well. So well, in fact, that everyone in a two-mile vicinity except Raven and Hank — because they knew better, and had gone into the city on an ‘errand’ — knew and felt what was happening.
Peter had sworn off casual theft after that.
-
Other guys his age might feel weird having a room at their parents’ home, but Peter appreciates the gesture, aware as he is that he’s in even more danger of knowing what a child should never know about their parent.
Yuck.
-
Peter finds Scott at the rec center, exactly where Charles said he would be. Peter makes his way past the balloons crowding every square inch of wall, gingerly steps over the kids — now tasked with cutting out construction paper hearts — and hides Ororo’s pen, which he knows will seriously annoy her.
He stops abruptly when he finally finds Scott and Logan, unable to do anything but stare at the floral monstrosities bursting forth from the two vases beside them.
“You’re here,” Scott says when he sees Peter, relieved.
“I thought you were better than this,” Peter says to Logan, accusingly.
Logan, because he enjoys casual violence a little too much for Peter’s taste, lets his claws slowly pierce the surface of his skin.
Scott ignores them — or doesn’t notice, because he’s fucking Scott — and gestures to the examples of probable sentient plant life between him and Logan. “Which is nicer?”
“I can’t tell the difference,” Peter says blandly, because he has excellent self-preservation instincts. “Ask one of the girls.” Good job, Peter. He gives himself a quick pat on the back. Scott and Logan don’t even notice. Faster than a hummingbird’s wings, baby.
“They’re at the beach,” Logan grunts. “Marie and Kitty are having a water ski race right now. Storm’s helping.”
Peter blinks. “I didn’t know we had water skis.” Then, he realizes what Charles told him before he zoomed over, too worried about mutating wedding decorations amidst Scott and Logan’s weird rivalry. Currently, it’s in its flower arrangement incarnation; last month, they’d competed to see who could make the best pancakes.
I didn’t realize we had kayaks either, Peter thinks at Charles loudly.
There’s no need to shout, Charles thinks back at him. Besides, we didn’t. They were a recent acquisition.
“What’s Chuck planning now?” Logan says.
Peter shrugs. “Beats me.” But, hey! They had kayaks now, which meant there was one more thing to do. “Whatever it is, Dad might not like it, though.”
Outside the rec center, as if on cue, the metal sculpture crumples dramatically.
“Whatever it is, I think he just found out,” Scott, who loves pointing out the obvious, points out. Peter turns back to Logan and their bouquets — terrible, really, neither of them have an eye for decoration — as Scott asks, “Do you guys think the wedding’s still on?”
-
The news coverage about Genosha’s marriage laws had dominated the news for the past week, activist after activist arguing against anti-homosexual, anti-mutant conservatives. People opined about how mutants were another sign of the world going to ruin, because of course it would be mutantkind championing hedonism, never mind that the laws in question had been carefully-worded to safeguard the interest of Genosha and its mutants, who didn’t do things the way humans did sometimes.
Like, what would happen if half of a married couple died and the grieving spouse wasn’t entitled to jackshit because they were a different gender at the time of death and the law rendered the marriage null just because? If Charles and Peter’s dad could do something about it, of course they would. It’s literally what they’ve been doing their entire lives. The only difference is that they have more power now, and are capable of effecting immediate change in Genosha.
(The whole gay marriage debacle was definitely planned for, though. One thing people don’t realise about Charles Xavier is that he’s a gigantic fucking asshole. Like, he’s better at playing nice with other people, but nobody but an asshole of equal proportions would look at his dad and go, there’s the guy I want to spend the rest of my life with. But they do channel that assholery into good, and if they can do all their rights for mutants stuff and piss off every other -phobe, well, they probably had a list they were happily checking off.)
-
“We are NOT—” Peter hears his dad yelling as they walk up to Charles’s office, and wow, that’s quite the set of lungs for an old man, “—turning Genosha into a glorified mutant… Cabo, for, for Gott-damned human tourists—”
Charles snipes back in that crisp tone he always employs when he gets seriously annoyed about something, his accent growing more pronounced. “Have you ever considered that most humans will not even want to come here,” he starts primly, “and that our people more than welcome an excuse to fight off any mutant fetishists who even bother trying? Erik, I understand your hesitation about human visitors, but can you really deny a human couple the right to bring their visibly-mutant children somewhere on vacation where they needn’t worry?“
“They don’t sound like they’re going to kill each other,” Peter says, turning to Scott. “You can stop worrying now.”
Scott looks at him distrustfully. Peter makes the same face back at him. Asshole. His dad might have not been there for him as a kid, but he’s been in Peter’s life for the better part of the past decade, so Peter does know him better than most. And the argument happening beyond the door to Charles’s office was not anything remotely approaching relationship-ending.
His dad launches into another diatribe about all he’s Done For Genosha, How Dare Charles Undermine Him, which Peter immediately tunes out. It would be worrying if not for the horrifying truth of it being a form of extended foreplay, instead of them being truthful about old hurts.
Logan sniffs the air and makes a face, which is all the answer they need. There’s a gentle nudge at Peter’s mind, where Charles sends a brief push of, go along.
They make their way to the beach, where they find Emile with the kayaks. Peter and Scott race Logan — who’s in one by himself — and manage not to capsize, though they lose to him miserably. When they finally make their way back to the rec center, the sculpture has been re-formed into a chess piece.
-
None of them are pre-cogs, so nobody sees this coming, but Charles does eventually mildly regret the kayaks and water skis.
His acquisition of them was born out of a vague, formless idea of running a summer resort for families with mutant children who weren’t comfortable with attending regular holiday resorts. After that first summer, one parent had inevitably spread the word to her Mommies of Mutants (“call us MoM!”) group. Charles, who only wanted to kill time while he waited for Peter’s dad to finish on the expansions to their cottage, saw a flood of requests for a second year, and did they do tour groups too?
Peter’s dad hadn’t been keen — fine, he opposed it vehemently — but after a lengthy discussion, they’d agreed to no resort and landed on the idea of running a summer camp for mutant children who required more experienced handling. Charles had been apprehensive about mentoring or teaching children again, but allowed himself to be talked into it by Peter’s dad, so Genosha now sees a new crop of slightly volatile kiddos every summer.
Peter helps out sometimes. His new bedroom doesn’t have psionic shielding, but the bed is so comfortable he could cry. He makes a point to visit as often as he can, and to their credit, there’s no repeat of The Incident from Charles and his dad.
(Okay, it happened once. But Peter was more than happy to accept a mortified Charles’s offer to blur the memory for him, which kinda counts as it not happening at all.)
-
Peter takes a quick shower after he leaves Scott and Logan with their (still terrible) flower arrangements and is at City Hall exactly at the time he was instructed to be, where he and Hank are ushered into a cramped little room to watch his dad and Charles sign their marriage certificate.
“Thank you both for being here,” Charles says afterwards, his eyes never leaving Peter’s dad. They haven’t stopped looking at each other since they were pronounced husband and husband.
“I’m honored, Charles,” Hank replies. It comes out choked.
“Oh, Hank,” Charles says, turning to look at him. “Even if you and Raven didn’t work out, and even if she hadn’t—” he stops mid-sentence, wiping at his eyes.
“You’re family,” Peter’s dad finishes. He looks at Peter. “You both are.”
Peter tears up. Hank gives in and starts making snuffling noises into his handkerchief. Peter’s dad bends down to kiss Charles, and the photo Peter takes of them is displayed on their bedside table and Charles’s office desk.
-
“So,” Logan says, walking up to Peter at the reception, a beer in each hand. “What do you think of the decorations?”
“Horrific,” Peter says flatly, swiping one of the beers and taking a healthy swig from it. His elbow narrowly misses hitting a balloon pillar. Across from them, his dad and Charles are busy greeting their well-wishers and serving cake from under a humongous flower arch, only dwarfed by the balloon one behind it. “I can’t believe you. How did you manage this?”
Logan shrugs. “Told the kids that they would all get a passing grade in art if they helped out.” He raises his bottle in Ororo’s direction. “Told Storm I would help out with whatever she wanted for the next month if she helped me get them organized.”
Peter looks at him, betrayed. “Dude. How are you this lazy? You literally have the easiest job. You know what I would give to grade finger paintings?”
“You know the amount of effort it takes to get fifty mutants from the ages of five to eighteen to work together?” Logan points out. “That’s hardly the work of a lazy man. Grading finger paintings is much easier.”
Peter continues drinking his beer.
“Actually, it was Chuck’s idea.”
“I knew it,” Peter mutters.
-
“Oh, I didn’t get the children to do it because I was worried about them bothering the Genoshans,” Charles says, when Peter approaches him later. “That was an unexpected outcome. They’re all very lovely and well-behaved, I don’t know why you all constantly worry about them making a ruckus.”
Because they do, Peter thinks at him, sending along a package of thoughts featuring his students’ greatest hits. Charles blithely ignores him as he continues, “In any case, it was very nice of everyone to come together to make the rec center this lovely, don’t you think?”
“Oh my god,” Peter says, the truth dawning on him. “You were using us to organize your party, weren’t you? Dinner and cake my ass. Does this constitute as child labour? Is this even legal?”
Charles tuts. “Don’t be silly, Peter. Of course it’s not. And mind your language, don't forget you're a teacher now.”
-
“I’ve found,” his dad tells him later, after he’s successfully redirected his new husband to help manage the teardown of decorations, “that life with Charles becomes infinitely easier if you’re willing to turn a blind eye to certain things.”
“Trust me,” Peter says. “I know.” He’s already toasted them, but it bears repeating. “Congratulations, dad. I’m happy for you. For the both of you.”
“Thank you,” his dad murmurs, his eyes going soft and wistful. “If it’s any consolation, he’s definitely much better about this whole—” he waves a hand at the decorations that are still up, “—benevolent manipulation than he used to be.”
“I can only imagine.” Peter looks at his dad. He doesn’t look much older than when they first met, but his sharpened edges have been smoothed out, and he’s much more predisposed to smiling than he used to be.
Gentlemen, Charles’s mental voice says, apologies for interrupting your father-son bonding, but as fun as impugning my good character is — Peter and his dad share a look — Oh, do stop pulling those faces and head over to the north side, there are still so many godforsaken balloons and this entire affair will be much faster if you both help.
“And whose fault is that, Charles?” Peter’s dad mutters, and grins at him.
-
“What is this,” Ororo says, looking up at the metal sculpture before the rec center. In its past lives, it was a chess piece, a crumpled heap and the map of Genosha; now, it looks like one of the dioramas Hank has the children making in chemistry class.
Hank looks begrudgingly impressed. “Erbium chloride. Damn, that’s good. I’ll give him that.”
“English for us idiots, please,” Peter says. He turns to his class, who’s following behind him, and holds up a finger. “You’re still not allowed to use the word idiot to insult each other, by the way. I’m allowed because I’m calling myself an idiot.”
The kids, oddly well-behaved — a phenomenon that only happens with Charles in the vicinity — all nod.
“Erbium is ‘Er’ on the periodic table,” Hank says. “Chloride is ‘Cl’. E-R-C-L.”
Peter turns to look at his dad, who only has eyes for Charles, who’s becoming really fucking misty-eyed as he looks at the sculpture, then back at Peter’s dad, then back at the sculpture again.
“So what you’re saying is, it’s the nerdy, artistic interpretation of the joining of Professor X and Magneto,” Peter hisses.
Hank nods.
Meanwhile, Charles’s mouth has turned up at the sides, and his blue eyes have gotten bluer and very, very wet. “Oh, Erik,” he says, as he reaches for Peter’s dad.
“Oh my god,” Peter says, and immediately starts ushering the kids towards where they parked the jet.
“Are they kissing again?” Rusty-who-punches-fire asks.
Peter covers his eyes with a palm. “No,” he says grimly. “What they’re doing is not for children to see.”
-
“No more last-minute weddings,” Hank says, collapsing in a chair after they’ve finally seen everyone to bed. “No more elopements. If anyone wishes to get married, either tell us after you’ve eloped, or commit to a reasonable sixteen-month timeline that gives you enough time to secure locations and coordinate caterers.”
“Twelve,” Kitty corrects him, and when Hank looks at her, adds, “We don’t have to worry about venues. You do realize that everyone we know is going to want to get married here at the school, don’t you?”
“Oh,” Hank says, then, as the reality of what hosting a wedding on school grounds entails dawns on him, his face takes on a haunted cast. “Oh. Oh no.”
-
Kitty and Bobby do have a very nice, well-planned wedding involving children only as guests and flower girls and ring bearers. There are exactly zero breakdowns through the entire planning process and ceremony, which is a miracle unto itself.
Scott and Logan accidentally get married by an Elvis impersonator in Las Vegas. But that’s a story for another day.