Again, I'm just trying to tie this bit of plot up so that we can move on to more fun slash and Kitty bashing. That's the reason this is a bit lengthy, and quite possibly a bit dull!

Oh, and obviously, I'm not very good at science. Um... Erik's dastardly schemes probably don't make any scientific sense, so I do apologise. Really I do!

--

If he wasn't so utterly exhausted and drugged up, Pietro would have sulked. No sooner had he got his sister back than the excitement was over, he'd been forced to go home to bed. His body had rebelled and had a stupid seizure in the car, meaning that he was in Constant Medical Supervision a.k.a. prison. Of course, there were perks to this such as having an amazingly gorgeous guardian answering to his every whim.

'Doctor Lance,' he slurred happily, unsteadily reaching out to stroke the boy's face. Lance frowned.

'Don't tire yourself out, Piet. You've got to rest now. I know today's been super-crazy but Wanda will still be here in the morning and who knows, your Dad might have discovered a cure by then.' He tucked a loose strand of silver hair behind Pietro's ear to see his face better. No matter how much Pietro complained about the bloating from the drugs and the scratches and pallor, it was still easily the most beautiful face he had ever seen. Would ever see.

'I can't believe Wanda's here,' Pietro said sleepily. 'I always kind of knew she wasn't... dead, but I never dreamed she'd come back.'

'I gotta tell you,' Lance began, realising that even the drugs couldn't stop Pietro's mind from whirring. 'When I first met Wanda, she was... like some wild animal or something. She was crazy, I was scared of her. '

Crap, Pietro thought, Lance is more observant than I thought. Here comes the dreaded question.

'What happened to Wanda, Pietro? Why didn't you tell me you had a twin?'

Pietro yawned massively, hoping to avoid the question with tiredness. Some doctor this was, pestering the patients – and not in a good way, either. Doctor Lance should give bedbaths with extra slippery soap and massages and... mmm...

'Pietro?'

Double crap.

'Lance, I couldn't tell you about Wanda. I couldn't tell anybody, neither could Dad. It's too... screwed up and you wouldn't understand.'

Too screwed up? Who can resist secrets like that? Immediately Lance forgot about his tired little patient, and he was hungry for the juicy truth. 'Aw, come on Pietro,' he coaxed. 'You shouldn't keep secrets from me – now Wanda's here, I deserve to know, right?'

Pietro looked shiftily out of the corner of his eye. 'I don't know, Lance... It's a very very bad thing. I don't want you to think... you won't understand...'

'Try me,' Lance pleaded, and Pietro wanted to fall into his honey coloured eyes. He felt safe there.The awful truth had been such a burden, like carrying an invisible-Fred around with him for all those years. Lance did deserve to know, however he might react. And Pietro was so drowsy that he didn't really care for anything theatrical right now, which for the speedy showman was definitely saying something.

He raised himself up on an elbow to look straight into those deep, warm eyes. 'Please don't hate me, Lance.'

A small smile curled the corners of Lance's mouth. 'I could never hate you, Pietro. You're crazy and irritating as hell and yes, a touch fruity, but I could never hate you.'

Pietro grinned. 'Thanks, Lance. And if we're talking about fruity, don't you think that long hair is a little... eighties porn?'

'Fuck you,' Lance chuckled, before vanity got the better of him and he surreptiously brushed his hair back. 'Anyway, out with it, Piet. No more secrets,' he added, his eyes turning serious .

'Okay,' Pietro sighed, puffing out his cheeks at the difficulty of his task. Where to begin? And where to stop, come to think of it. Better to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and then he would sleep through the night for the first time in years.

He cleared his throat.

'When Wanda and I were kids, Dad was very strict. Since he was raising us on his own, he was scared to let anybody near us. He just wanted us to be safe – he was terrified of the world, Lance. My Dad... he's seen some bad things in his life. All he wanted to do was make us strong, he just wanted to protect us but,' he fought back a sob, almost angry that he was justifying his father's reasons, 'he went too far. We were six when he first took us into the lab. He pushed us hard, injected us with all kinds of shit – he wanted us to be super-mutants. The result? Our powers came out before they were ready... He was making me run on a treadmill when I found that I just couldn't stop, couldn't stop running. He thought that was the most amazing thing ever, even though it almost killed me.'

Pietro turned his face away from Lance, never liking the next part of the story. 'Wanda's powers came through later than mine. First she got weird - she was always a quiet kid before, but she started to get freaked out by everything. Then she started blowing things up when she got mad. It was fucking scary sometimes, like we never knew how far she would go. Her powers were crazy and destructive, we had to walk on tiptoe around her in case we pissed her off. Anyway,' he swallowed, wishing he was telling somebody else's secret. 'Wanda's powers got worse and worse, 'til she just couldn't control them anymore. She'd wake up sometimes with holes burnt in the ceiling, or she'd sneeze and smash every glass in the house... Dad used to say that it couldn't go on, but I didn't understand what he meant. He tried everything, he got in tree-huggers to counsel Wanda, he got a witch to put her in a trance, he even called Baldy. But nobody could help... fuck,' he whispered, as tears began to sear his cheeks.

'One day, this kid at school was really picking on her, calling her weird and stuff. She just lost it and hit him with her powers, then she lashed out at a teacher. They locked me in a classroom in case she tried to kill me – I was terrified. Next thing I knew my Dad was there, and he was crying, and Wanda was crying too. The kid she hit...' Pietro choked with the pain of his confession. Lance stroked his shoulder, urging him on, refusing to judge.

'The kid she hit was dead, and the teacher went into a coma. I didn't understand that my Dad wasn't crying because of that... You see, the school had called the police, and they told him to lock Wanda away so that she couldn't hurt anybody else. He didn't know what to do – he was so cut up that he had brought this on himself that he couldn't deal with it... Anyway, next thing I know, he's telling me Wanda's got to go away somewhere. Wouldn't tell me where, or for how long. And he told me not to tell her, in case she got scared. I kept quiet 'cause I thought she would hurt me... Pathetic, huh?'

He took a deep, shaky breath.

' So we got in the car, and Wanda thought we were going home, but when Dad starting driving in the wrong direction she freaked out. I held her hand and sang dumb kids songs 'cause we were too little to know what was really going on. We pulled up at this huge building, and Dad took us out of the car. He held on to my hand so tight, as if he thought I would run away. And then, these men...' Pietro buried his face in his hands, trapped in the terrible memory he had pushed out of his mind for years.

'These men in white coats came running out to us, and they basically snatched Wanda away. I could see her screaming as they carried her inside, she was calling my name and I could do nothing 'cause Dad was gripping me so hard. I didn't need to ask him what was going on 'cause I knew. They put my sister in a crazy house, Lance,' he finished, unable to continue for the sobs that were shaking his body.

It was worse than he remembered, and the part that hurt the most was the hopelessness of it all. What could they have done to save a little girl from destroying everything and everyone in her path? But why did she have to suffer like that, while he and his father tried to carry on as normal? He hated to think of his sister alone and cold, remembering over and over again how the kid screamed in agony, how she had killed somebody and that was why she could never be normal ever again.

Through his tortured thoughts, he could hear Lance saying something. His voice floated through the painful memory, and his warm hands soothed Pietro's trembling skin. 'It's not your fault,' he was saying. 'It's not your fault.'

And then he kissed Pietro's eyes, wincing at the salty taste. 'It's not your fault,' he kept murmuring, curling himself around the boy and wrapping him in his arms.

'You'll sleep easy now,' Lance said, and Pietro closed his eyes.

...

After giving Pietro his medicine, Erik wondered if he might need a little dose himself after the day's events. To learn that Wanda was alive was scary enough – but to actually see her again and hold her in his arms was insane. He had tried so hard to forget her, but every time he closed his eyes she was there. If they ever met again, he had been terrified that she would kill him for what he did. For he knew that it was all his fault – if had he left her alone, she would never have become a monster. That little boy would have lived.

And now he realised the full impact of his careless science: Pietro was dying and Wanda was a shadow of the girl she had been.

What could he do? What could he do?

What really tore him up was how Wanda just gave in after everything he did to her. She had every right to hate him and want him out of her life, but she didn't. By no means did he deserve their reunion, and he didn't expect to be forgiven. Most of all, he'd never expected her to reach out to him and need his love. And he needed her just as much, if not more.

This was the most amazing luck. Opposite him, in his favourite armchair, wrapped in a midnight blue Morroccan throw, his long-lost daughter was asleep. He had been too overwhelmed to really see her in the first few moments, but now he drank in her appearance. Even though she was gaunt and slightly dirty, his heart swelled at her fragile beauty. Sleep honed the rough edges, making her look so young and innocent that Erik almost cried. It was as if she was six again, finally sleeping after Erik had read almost the whole of the newspaper to her. She was a strange child, with a taste for the obituaries and shipping forecast. As he read, she would watch him intently with her blue eyes sparkling under dark, dark lashes, so serious for a little girl. She didn't have a teddy bear like other children, but insisted on sleeping with a rag Erik used to clean his shoes. He had never loved her more than when was curled up asleep with black shoe-polish smudges all over her hands and nose. That was Wanda all over: undeniably different. He felt strangely blessed to be in her presence, afraid to move in case he woke her. She looked like she hadn't slept well for years, and he felt honoured to give her peace.

He was lucky beyond his wildest dreams. Wanda returning provided the key to the difficult mystery he had been trying to solve, and now he truly believed that he could save Pietro. It was all a matter of science – the same unforgiveable science that had corrupted his children could now be applied to stop their suffering. As soon as he got to the lab, he knew exactly what to do. It would be painful, but he would open that dusty file at the back of the cabinet and retrieve those frightening test-tubes from the freezer. And as soon as he had acquainted himself that awful method, he would have to operate on his children and reverse the disgusting mistake he had made years ago.

For only he knew the truth about the process. He was glad, extremely glad that Wanda slept on while he recalled that stupid experiment which had drastically backfired. Because, one night in the lab, he had noticed that Pietro's body was twice as responsive as Wanda's. He noted that this might be a speed mutation, which was a bloody fantastic stroke of luck because he could use it to help Wanda's powers emerge at the same time. His endless research had allowed him to develop a failproof solution which nurtured mutations before their time. Suppose he injected another dose of it into Pietro, along with some of Wanda's DNA, allowing Wanda's mutation to grow more quickly! He knew that he was skilled enough to separate Wanda's mutation from Pietro's when it was fully grown and feed it back into her without harming their individual powers. His mind buzzed with excitement at the idea, stopping him from thinking rationally about it. Within three months, it was done, and it appeared to have worked.

He had paid dearly for his arrogance and stupidity. Wanda's body had eventually rejected the mutation that was, perhaps, never fully hers. Part of her mutation must have remained in Pietro, to start growing again when it died elsewhere. What he had unveiled was horrible – he was like Doctor Frankenstein, playing with nature and creating monsters.

That was why he did not deserve the love of his children. But now it was time to put on his gloves and return to the cold, stark light of the laboratory. There was a chance that he could perform a similar operation by extracting Wanda's mutation from Pietro and restoring it to her for good. But it might not work, and Pietro's health was not sure to improve if the operation was a success. There were so many doubts about reversing the process, but he knew that he had to try. It felt like the right thing to do after doing everything so horribly wrong in the past.

This was what he owed to them.