ώάήȡά (scarlets) wrote in valloic, @ 2021-03-01 15:52:00 |
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Erik wasn’t too picky, when it came to food - it was just one of those things that ranked low on the totem pole for him throughout his life. Oh, he knew how to make certain things - it hadn’t always been fighting, clawing for rights and for freedom - and he had a handful of recipes stashed away in the corridors of his mind, that he’d pull from in order to use for cooking for the family. But in the mornings, sometimes he liked to start the day off with a bagel sandwich from the minotaur’s cart. He’d spent some time in New York and knew that a good bagel was crispy on the outside but chewy on the inside, with tiny air pockets that gave it a sort of lightness. It also had to be well-sized. The multigrain bagel with egg and cheese was his go-to; he also liked that bagel with the onion and chive spread but it wasn’t always great to get on with the day having horrendous breath (if he gave in, he always remembered to pop a mint afterward). It was all so mundane (when monster-induced chaos wasn’t running rampant, that is) and honestly, he didn’t mind it - he had Anka Irene with him, planning to pick up something to eat before dropping her off at preschool. One hand was holding hers, and her opposite hand clutched one of her mermaid dolls - he wasn’t sure which character it was supposed to be exactly (just - mermaid doll?) but it was currently one of her favorites, along with the set of animals made from metal that he’d crafted for her. Her attention was diverted in line. “You look like my mermaid doll!” she announced to the woman behind them, holding up the aforementioned toy as confirmation. Well, at least it was a compliment. Or at least, Erik hoped it would be taken as such. “I’m sure she appreciates you telling her, maleńka,” he said, chuckling softly. “Sorry about that.” This was life then, here in Vallo - bagels served by a minotaur, flutters of pixie wings, the sight of intimidating tusks on an orc directing traffic. Their existence didn’t surprise Wanda, no. How the diversity was embraced, integral to everyday society was what raised a curious brow. It was a concept their Earth could never grasp, would most likely never be grasped. If she happened to be stuck here forever she wouldn’t be upset about it. There was nothing to go back to. She felt more inclined to start fresh here - learn this world and its inner workings instead of catching up on the five years she missed thanks to the snap of Thanos’ fingers, to be reminded of all the loss. Some of those losses were here, safe and found. One was not. Wanda struggled with it. There were days that were easier than the rest. Sometimes she felt as if she could handle it (occupying herself with the Sanctum, learning the in and outs and oddities), and others - well, being one with a mattress was preferable than facing the day. Today she was up. Today, she was going to get some kind of morning nourishment and immerse herself into this Vallo culture and breathe in some fresh, magic-imbued air. And today she was also going to be compared to a doll. It was not a bad compliment to receive. Just - surprised her? “Oh,” Wanda blinked down, meeting the eyes of an enthusiastic little girl who was not the least bit timid in speaking to a stranger. “I - thank you. That is very high praise.” Her attention snapped to the man - father, she presumed? - with the little one. Wanda’s smile was genuine, as small as it was. “It’s fine. It was sweet. My self-esteem has been charged this morning thanks to her.” Children at this age were known for their bluntness - they hadn’t yet developed the same filters as adults, unable to comprehend a world in which those were necessary; Erik remembered this stage with Nina, and her various observations about other people in their village - some embarrassing, some that caused a laugh for everyone in involved. Anka Irene was especially blunt, given her various abilities - it was difficult to rein in a child who was telepathic and still learning proper social graces in that regard. “Oh, good,” he smiled a little, relieved that she hadn’t taken offense. “I’m glad - “ “Daddy, she’s sad,” Anka Irene spoke up then, as if she expected her papa to fix this grievous error - clearly a demonstration of her abilities, even a small one, and while normally Erik would have been proud (he still was, a little) right now he didn’t really want to bother a stranger. They were next in line so he scooped up his daughter, balancing her on his hip for the time being. “You remember what your mother and I told you about saying things like that,” he reminded, then placed the order. “Egg and cheese and - “ He glanced at the almost-mermaid near them, “...whatever you’d like?” It was the least he could do. He wasn’t certain if she was new or not, an Outlander or not, but bagels often helped with sadness. “This is Anka Irene,” he introduced her, since he may as well at this point. “I’m Erik.” Sad, said the little girl. That was strangely perceptive, even for a child - it wasn’t as if her eyes were blotchy, cheeks stained with tears and mascara running down her face to outwardly show she was, indeed, a mess. Wanda could at least seem as if she was keeping it together. She was quite proud of herself for having brushed hair and adding color to her lips, thank you. Though now she felt awkwardly called out (so says others of her age), and was not sure on how to proceed. “Wanda,” she replied, tucking stray strands behind an ear. “It is nice to meet you but you don’t - it’s fine, all I’m getting is something plain with cream cheese.” How adventurous of her, but she wasn’t particularly in the mood for much else - food at the moment was simply a necessity, not an indulgence. Baby steps. “She is very intuitive.” Was it merely a moment where a child blurted out something impulsively? Wanda didn’t know. She wasn’t ruling out the alternative. “Plain with cream cheese,” Erik added to his order, and he didn’t mind paying. “It’s no trouble.” As for Anka Irene’s intuition, well, that was a whole other story. He swapped cash for the bagels, handing Wanda hers and having to set his daughter down so he could grasp his breakfast sandwich - that was fine with the little girl, she sometimes liked to be carried and then sometimes didn’t, whenever she felt like exerting her independence. She could also teleport places which tended to make Erik a little frazzled but generally only stuck to doing that at home so she didn’t have to run back and forth in between rooms. “She’s intuitive, yes, but also...gifted,” he said, unwrinkling the paper that his bagel was wrapped in. Most were very accepting of ‘different’ people here in Vallo - mutants weren’t being hunted to death, for example - but his aim was still to protect Anka Irene at any cost. “Wanda, you said your name was?” He remembered seeing her first post on the network and her conversation with Anna. The whole situation with Peter being her brother in another universe was confusing at best, but now that they’d run into each other he felt it was important to try to suss it out. “I’m - Peter Maximoff is my son,” he shared. “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind talking to me? There’s a bench over there.” Anka Irene could also chase pigeons to her hearts content, while still in eyeshot and earshot. Wanda didn’t need further clarification on what gifted meant, and the more Erik spoke the more she was confident in her assessment - among other things. This Peter Maximoff wasn’t someone she had the chance to encounter yet (but she wanted to see, to know this echo of her twin so badly), and if his abilities were known and if this was his father, well. Some assumptions could be safely made. This was not an encounter she expected to have but that was simply the theme of this place, wasn’t it - finding the unexpected with these different versions of people and their own stories. The bagel was warm in her hands, toasted to what she was certain was perfection. Her fingers fiddled with the wrapping as she considered his offer. “Not like I have any urgent matters to attend, so -” Wanda sucked in a deep breath and nodded. “Yes. We can talk.” There was a knot of nerves stubbornly anchored at the pit of her stomach. She didn’t know why. She claimed a spot on the bench, shoulders somewhat raised and tense. More fiddling with the wrapper occurred. Eventually, she’d eat. “Peter,” she started, the name rolling off her tongue funny - part of her wanted to say Pietro instead. “Has the same last name as I do. Do you?” “My last name is Lehnsherr,” Erik replied, also not quite eating yet - he had the breakfast sandwich in hand, feeling the toasty warmth of it seep in. Anka Irene liked to feed the pigeons birdseed so he let her do that while making sure she didn’t go too far from the bench. “I didn’t know Peter was my son until he arrived here. We came across each other back home, of course, but - his mother and I weren’t together and she never told me about him.” Didn’t really have a way to reach him at all, especially not when Erik had been in solitary confinement - she was scared of him, of the terrorist Magneto, and he supposed he couldn’t blame her for that. Peter had a sister too, that he knew of - but not a twin. And his sister had a different father from what Erik understood - he’d been young when he met Peter’s mother and a lot more careless, shall we say. She didn’t seem to offer many details about Peter’s father either, not to her own son - it was a sticky situation but seemed to turn out alright here now that all cats had been let out of their respective bags. He picked at a piece of egg on the edge of his sandwich, thinking. “Your brother. He was also very fast?” “Pietro was,” Wanda replied with the ghost of a smile, at peace tracking Anka Irene as she frolicked amongst the birds. She tried to picture this Peter, tried to imagine what he was like but all she could see was Pietro’s face - the sarcastic little smirk, pale hair. “I would not say we are gifted. Our abilities - they are side effects? We were not born with them but we volunteered ourselves for experimentation. They were not painless ones.” Certainly not humane ones, as everyone else had grueling deaths except for them. That need for vengeance, perhaps, kept them going. She lifted her hand and moved her fingers, like she was tickling the air - and then came that crimson energy, erratic wisps that danced along her hands. “Our home was bombed when we were children, our parents killed in it. We wanted revenge and allowed ourselves to be changed. Then he was killed helping others.” That energy - or magic, as Stephen referred it as - vanished. Her voice had been flat, words spoken as if she’d been reading a grocery list. Finally, she began to unwrap her bagel. “It’s good to know there’s a version of him here, though. And safe.” He used to speak in the same tone, about Nina and Magda - when he even spoke of them at all. It had taken awhile for Erik to get to that point, however - being vulnerable, exposing those raw and open wounds, wasn’t easy and not something he wanted to do. Hearing people tell him how sorry they were - he got sick of it after some time. Tired of feeling like he was in a rickety boat tossed about in the sea with no oars - that was grief. “He’s a good person,” Erik spoke quietly about his son. “He plays hockey, with the Outlander team here.” Peter was trying to fit in, that much Erik knew, and he was great with Anka Irene - a fantastic big brother. A piece of the sandwich was taken too, since he didn’t want it to get cold. “I had a wife - and a daughter,” he spoke up again. “During a point in my life when I was running from the person I was. I wanted to live in peace but the world wouldn’t let me. They were killed and - well, I understand the desire for vengeance all too well. It doesn’t help, getting vengeance. But it’s not like we want to face that at the time.” It was easy to become laser-focused on that idea instead - sometimes it was even better than drowning in all various ways loss hurt. He glanced at Wanda. “And you, do you help others too?” he asked. That crackling red energy -it didn’t feel similar, but that was interesting knowing her brother had the same abilities as Peter yet experiments unlocked those gifts rather than genetics. Wanda’s need for vengeance had quelled, yes - in the end all it did was contribute to the lives lost in Sokovia, paving a smoother path to Ultron’s plan of human annihilation. It hadn’t succeeded but the damage had certainly been done. None of it was reversible, though she could learn to be better. She definitely tried even if she had caused more problems in the end. The Avengers had taken her in, and she formed this semblance of a found family and then - And then. She felt for Erik. The words to soothe that kind of pain didn’t exist. My condolences was meaningless, so was sorry for your loss and all those sentiments that had been thrown at her as she kept losing those she loved. All she could do was understand, and hoped that when her gaze finally switched over to him and their eyes met, he’d just know. “I try,” Wanda shrugged. “I don’t always do well. My abilities - they are destruction. Manipulation and fear.” They had a habit of amplifying during bouts of rage, grief. Something told her she hadn’t even peaked with them quite yet. “I think people are afraid of what I am capable of. It doesn’t make me a very good Avenger.” She broke a piece of bagel to, at last, take a bite out of. “Anyway - I take it you have your own enhancements? Gifts, if that is what you call them.” “People are always afraid of something,” Erik observed. His fingers plucked at a coin, pulling it from his pocket. Usually he had little things like this on hand anyway, just to fidget with if he needed to (sometimes it was comforting to turn a coin around and around, out of sight) - but also to use as a weapon if necessary as well. They were surrounded by metal, the city built of it from the ground up, and he worked in a smithy as well - but he had cultivated too much of a sense of preparedness (paranoia, maybe?) to really be one-hundred percent unarmed. “You try, and I try - that’s all we can do. My abilities have been...quite destructive, in the past.” To demonstrate, the coin lifted from his hand without him touching it. There, it hovered in midair before twisting around on itself and then flattening into a perfectly smooth sphere. “I manipulate magnetic fields,” he explained. “Metal, in general, does what I want it to do.” He floated the coin over to Anka Irene, who shrieked with delight and used her own matching metal manipulation abilities to twist the sphere into more of an L-shape. No doubt people would be scared of her too, when she came of age. It was something he dreaded but if there was any place that was accepting enough, it was here. “I have an island,” he went on. “It’s called Genosha. Back home it was given to me by the US government - after decades of fighting for mutant rights, they finally clued in on the fact that all I wanted was a safe space for people like me. So they let me have it, and I built it up into a sanctuary for mutants - that’s what we call ourselves. Our rather, I didn’t coin the term but it has to do with genetic mutation. At any rate, the island’s here off the coast of Vallo. It’s always warm and sunny. I could show you sometime?” That was a fascinating sight, seeing the two of them just be bonded like that - similar powers, sharing a comfortable connection out in the open without anyone really blinking an eye in shock. Funny how an equally destructive power such as controlling metal brought delight on a little girl’s face. Wanda couldn’t help the smile Anka Irene’s reaction produced. “Mutant is an ugly word,” she mumbled around a bite of bagel, brows furrowed. ‘Enhanced human’ is what she was used to. It was said to be the politically correct term to avoid offending people - ‘mutant’ sounded so harsh, even worse with what remained of her accent. “Genosha sounds nice. I - suppose there is no harm in going? I could explore more, actually.” Erik was certainly a new presence but there was a connection through Peter, weirdly. A connection she felt she could come to trust once the rubble pieces of her heart settled, if such a thing could even happen. Sometimes it didn’t feel like it would. “This is the most I have been out since I’ve arrived. The bagel was a good reason to explore.” “A bagel’s as good of a reason as any,” Erik replied, with a ghost of a smile. And the ones from this cart were rather well made - he wouldn’t come here everyday, but was glad to make it a once a week sort of event. “Whenever you want to travel to Genosha, contact me. We’ve recently allowed for electricity in at least one building, to charge phones, and there’s running water too. But otherwise it’s fairly raw in terms of technology - off the grid, you could say.” He took care of it even while living in Morningside, and so far no one had gone and tried to do harm to the island - he didn’t think anyone would, but suppose you never knew. Not like Erik was prone to trusting many people. However, this - it was good. Wanda wasn’t this Peter’s sister, but there was still a connection regardless - one he did hope to cultivate. Grief was fresh with her, he could tell - it was a part of her as much as it was him, because while he had Rogue and Anka Irene now he would never be able to replace Magda and Nina; he’d miss them always, and wasn’t looking for replacements anyway. That wasn’t how it worked. But he did learn to love and trust again, and if he could - anyone could. “I should get her to school,” he nodded toward Anka Irene. “I’m glad we ran into each other though.” Off the grid. Wanda liked that. She wished such a place really existed when they had been on the run, officially wanted by the government criminals after the Accords situation but alas. Maybe it’d be good to get away even from this noise for a bit - as welcoming as it seemed to be, anyway. “I will,” she answered, the smile having even stayed - that was something. “Um, thank you. For the bagel? And for listening to my nonsense, I know it was heavy stuff to unload on a stranger.” Erik had confided in her in return, so that at least it wasn’t anything that could make anyone uncomfortable. “I’m sure we will talk soon, Bye, Ms. Anka Irene.” She made sure to wave at the little one as well, that scarlet power she was known for crackling over her fingers for her to see. I have something too, don’t worry. Anka Irene was delighted - she had a few powers that she’d tapped into, but nothing that looked like pretty red sparkles. She waved too, very excited as her father took her other hand to be prepared to walk with her the rest of the way to school - it wasn’t very far from here. “You’re welcome - enjoy the rest of the bagel,” Erik chuckled lightly. As far as the ‘nonsense’ went, he didn’t mind listening to that. It felt good to let it out sometimes, if a bit emotionally draining. But it also helped to show that there were plenty of similarities to discover with others who landed here and perhaps you may even find your ‘people.’ He definitely had. |