Wanda and Haller (March 26/11)

[x-scarletwitch.livejournal.com]

A drunken phone call ends up with Wanda and Haller at a bizarre little diner in the middle of the night.




Wanda had always been a light sleeper. There was something about having to potentially wake up in the middle of the night and flee the camp site because one of your cousins got caught with a local man's daughter, his wallet or both that discouraged one from being a heavy sleeper. And with her current lot in life, waking up at the smallest thing was not always a bad thing, either. That was why one arm was already flailing around above the covers when her phone was only half-way through the second ring; she smacked around on top of the nightstand for a moment, almost upsetting the glass of water, before she located it with a grunt of triumph.

Yanking it back under the covers, she muttered something into the phone only to realize a moment too late that she hadn't been speaking in English.

After a long pause on the other end of the line a male and similarly confused voice said, ". . . hello?"

Under the covers, Wanda blinked and pulled the phone back long enough to glance at the caller I.D. Groaning, brought it back to her face. "Cyndi has a horrible sense of humor," she said in reply, voice still thick with sleep that was starting to fade.

"A . . . pparently." Jim sounded only slightly less baffled than Wanda, though it was clearing quickly. He'd let Cyndi be out after this evening's therapy session in the city, and had generally left her to her own devices barring as long as she refrained from trying to set anything on fire or got arrested. Unfortunately, she had apparently decided to celebrate last call with a prank call to Wanda.

"Then again," he said aloud, "How many times have you called us drunk at this hour? And I'm a responsible . . . something." He paused, considering the general fuzziness of his thoughts. "I may be drunk right now."
Deciding that her relationship with sleep that night was to be short lived for the moment, Wanda pushed the comforter away from her face and rolled over to stare up at the ceiling. "Mm, revenge drunk calling. Yes, that certainly was Cyndi's doing." She grinned in the dark. "You sound slightly uncertain regarding the state of your drunkenness, so I'm left to assume that Cyndi is entirely to blame?"

"I've been letting her blow off steam. But she does it with more alcohol than I do. Because, telepathy." Jim rubbed his eyes and was minorly relieved to see the nails hadn't been painted any offensive color. "I can't quite remember where I left my car, but that's good because I don't remember how much we drank, either."
"Do you at least know where you are?" she asks, stretching as she wakes up second by second, her brain playing catch up with the rest of her body. Wanda reflected that it, unsurprisingly, was a sentence that she had said before upon waking up with the phone blaring in her ear. "And if she left you with no indication of how much you had to drink, you are better off not finding your car just yet."

"Yes. My thoughts exactly. I'm, um . . ." Jim wandered to the nearest intersection and read off the street names. He was not familiar with them, but since there were a few clubs nearby he suspected Wanda would be.

Sitting up, she glanced at the clock and ruefully shook her head. "I know exactly where you are at. Your car, not so much. But you ..." Swinging her legs out of bed, Wanda flicked the lights on in her room. "I seem to recall there being a Waffle House of ill-repute near you. You could go there, check out the sights, get whatever drink is in your system out and try and remember where you put your car. And if you ask nicely, I might even come by and keep you company."

"It would be nice to have company that's not me. I'm a bad influence." Jim stared vacantly into space for a moment, then added, "Okay. Can you text the address? Because I think Cyndi did shots."

* * *

The telepath was very still until the waitress had departed. Then, and only then, did he speak.

"Wanda," he said, very quietly, "Wanda. I'm scared. I think drinking gave me the power to see distortion in the human soul."

A pair of frightened eyes peered at him from over top the plastic menu that Wanda was currently hiding behind. "Unless you are bleeding over," she responded, "than I do not think it is the drink. There was something not ... right that we just witnessed. Are my waffles going to be a gateway to another dimension?"

"I don't know. You're the one who wanted to come here. If they serve us doomwaffles it's on you." The telepath tilted his head to the side to compensate for the way the room was sliding. "I think we're mostly David when I'm drunk. David's the one who says things like 'doomwaffles'. Also, I think the guy in the corner has a nail in his head. Out of the gauze."

"Do you want me to call you David while you're drunk or just stick to Jim / Haller / Hey, you?" Wanda asked curiously before she glanced at the reflection in the window. She flinched slightly at the sight. Not because there was a man with a nail sticking out of his head but because it looked kind of like he was talking to it. "If an elder god walks in, I am leaving through the window."


"But you'll be wearing clothes this time, right? And not making anyone's pants explode. Because no one sells pants right now and I don't want to see anyone in here without them." Jim very carefully freed his silverware from its napkin. It took the focus away from the tilting room. "You can call me . . . I think you could call me Travis right now and we'd answer."

"Travis? Hmm, Travis ..." She made a face at him as she finally put down the menu. "You look like you could be many names, which is appropriate, but a Travis - no, I think not. And for your information, I can make pants explode without an Elder God running the show." Wanda carefully glanced around at the current other occupants of the restaurant and shuddered. "Just. Not here."


"I could be a Travis. I'm already sort of a Jemail and a Cyndi with the I and the Y reversed. You don't know." Jim folded his arms across the tabletop and rested his cheek on one forearm. "Why are women always proud of their pants-exploding skills? Most people are improved by pants. Nail-guy is."

Wordlessly, Wanda reached over and gently raised his head with one hand as she slipped some napkins between his skin and the table before sitting him back down again. "There. Now Jean cannot yell at me that I let you come home with the plague." Napkins. They absorbed everything. "Anyone with a nail sticking out of their head is always one hundred percent improved by wearing pants. And as many other pieces of clothing as we can find. In fact, most of the people here could be better served with "more, not less" adage, I think."

"Jean can't yell. She's the one who suggested drinking. Except I don't think she meant 'alone', so maybe she would." Jim let his head fall back onto his newly cushioned arm, idly watching as the nail-bearing man was joined by another, who compensated for his lack of grievous headwounds with copious tattoos. "I'm glad I called you and not her. I don't think Jean'd tell but I still get embarrassed thinking the professor might know what we do on my off hours. Even though he does."

"If my father was not some megalomaniac wandering about in a purple helmet, I would be horrified that he would even have an idea that I had a social life." It was bad enough that her uncle knew. And generally approved of her life style. "And, honestly, the idea that the Professor knows that I like more than the occasional class of wine with dinner can be intimidating and I am not even related to him! As far as we know."

Wanda caught movement out of the corner of her eye and hissed, "Don't move! The evil one is returning with our beverages!"


The younger man froze as the waitress approached. She was not spectacularly unattractive, nor overweight, or any of the more obvious deformities. In a way, it made the wrongness even more profound.

Their drinks were set and orders taken, all with a strict avoidance of eye contact on the part of the two mutants. Jim suppressed the shudder until she had gone.

"Dead eyes," he muttered. He took a drink of his water, and did not dare inspect the glass it came in. Jim shook it off. "We could be related. Even though your dad hit me with a pipe. But Cain threw me into the ocean, so actually the pipe thing supports it." The telepath's forehead creased. "He always knew who I was. Magneto, I mean. Ima told us. He figured it out when he met me, before I even moved here. That seems . . . not fair. That he knew and I didn't."

The psi turned his eyes to Wanda. The normally brown one had bleached to blue. "Did you grow up knowing?" he asked. "Who your father was, I mean."

"Conversations with you are never boring," she responded dryly. She put down her soda and picked up a napkin instead, turning it over in her hands as she digested his question and sought a better than her normal glib answer. "I grew up knowing pieces," Wanda finally said, brown eyes firmly meeting blue ones. "Even though the other Rom had accepted mother back, they never let her forget, you see? And oh, how she grew to hate him. The fear that he had inspired in her turned into something much blacker as the years went by. Even when they reconnected for a brief time, she never fully trusted him."

The napkin was torn in random pieces and stacked on top of one another. "I grew up knowing he was a scary man, a powerful man. We had little contact with him and the one time that he could have taken us to his side -" She shrugged. "We heard his doctrine and he bought my brother with it." Ten years earlier, Erik Lehnsherr could have purchased his daughter's loyalty for much, much less; even the stories of a nightmare man who could tear and twist metal hadn't completely stopped a young girl from wanting a father. "Did I know of him? Yes, in part. But only through stories told by my family to prevent us from falling into my mother's footsteps."

Wanda's fingers stopped and she gave a bitter smile. "Funny, is it not, how the real man turned out to be so much worse than the one in the shadows?"

Focus seemed to return to the telepath's eyes, the bitterness in her voice sobering him. "I don't know," he said slowly. "I know what he's done, how he tried to use Marie, and Julio, but . . . he also could have killed Nate and I when we met in Derbent. He didn't. He talked to my mother then, too. He sought her out, then left. She couldn't understand why." Jim cradled his chin in one hand, his eyes distant. "She said he was a decent man, once. Now she thinks he's mad. But . . . madness isn't black and white."

Jim exhaled slowly. One hand unconsciously plucked at the napkins stuck to one arm, placing them back against the tabletop. "When I was young I thought the professor was perfect. Brilliant and patient and . . . you know. But then I grew up, and I realized that's just because he was only showing pieces. Not the parts that have made mistakes, or let his judgement be compromised." For a moment the young man was silent. Then he raised his eyes again to Wanda's.
"I don't really know what I'm trying to say," Jim confessed, "but I think even if the reality is worse than you imagined, it's still reality. Nothing is ever all one or all the other, no matter how it looks on the surface. Only shadows are absolute. It's easy to forget that." He took up the glass of water, looking into it as if to find some meaning in the icecubes. "I think that's all anyone starts off knowing of their parents. Shadows."

She started to reply and then stopped for a moment. "You have no idea what you're really saying, do you?" Wanda asked, fondly, though he did make sense. Of a sort. But for this late, or early, in the day at a scary diner, he made plenty of sense. "Well, I suppose each of our father's have a downside. My father's mortal enemy seems to be reason and the basic good nature of humanity. Yours is, well, stairs."


Jim blinked slowly. Then he solemly lifted his water glass. "That is true and hysterical," he said, "and you are now going to hell."

"I even have my own hand basket picked out, too." She grinned into her soda, trying to stifle her giggles. It was going to be forever before she could look Charles in the face without laughing and giving herself away.


"You ruined the poeticalness . . . ess of that thing I said that I don't know what I said. Moment-ruiner." Jim looked wistfully at the man with the headwound and his tattoed companion. "Though it was getting self-indulgent. It's not like we're the only ones with parents who can kill with their thoughts. Plus, at least our mom's not Mystique." He frowned briefly. "Probably."

Wanda stared hard at Jim before making a face at him even as she yanked her foot clear of the giant sticky patch that felt like it had creeped out from under her seat. "I certainly hope that is more than a "probably not"," she said, "or else what I did to Kurt is illegal in every state barring West Virginia." She threw her napkin at his head. "If something comes up, I swear by all that I hold holy - which, granted, is not much - I will make you pay for the rest of your life."


"Why do I pay? I'm not the one whose father hangs out with blue nudists." Jim gathered the napkin with great dignity and smoothed it out on the table before him. He paused, eyes fixed on the tabletop. ". . . do you think Mystique's possessed by an elder god too?"

"I sincerely hope they would have better taste," she snarked and then frantically waved at him to stop moving again.


Their waitress emerged from the shadows, a plate in either hand. These she succeeded in placing before the diners without once looking at the table. Or, apparently, anything else.

Jim gave the plate a stare of trepidation. As the waitress slithered back to the depths from whence she came he leaned closer to Wanda and whispered, "Okay, you first."

Wanda leaned over her own plate and hissed back, "Why me? Why do the pretty ones have to go first?"

"Coming here was your idea. My only crime was being drunk and lost."

"And technically, you can blame that on Cyndi," she huffed and then growled. "Why am I defending you?" Glowering at him, Wanda sat back and picked up her knife and fork. "Fine, then, Mr. Drunk Chicken Little, I will go first."

As carefully as if she were diffusing a bomb, she started in on her breakfast. She'd been surprised to find a 'genuine' full English breakfast on the menu and, from looks alone, it looked like the real deal. Deciding that the vegetables were the least likely thing to do her much harm - either physically, emotionally or mentally - Wanda started with the grilled tomatoes and fried mushrooms. She took a mouthful and her eyes suddenly widened.


Jim, who had taken cover behind a napkin holder in the event of projectile vomiting, peered around the edge. "Is it okay?" he asked. "Do I need to call poison control? . . . or maybe Cammie to dispose of the remains?"

Covering her mouth for a moment to allow herself to chew and swallow, Wanda shook her head. "No!" she said at last. "It - it is good! Very good! Like they went out and picked the mushrooms this morning!"


The telepath eyed her suspiciously, cautious of trickery, then tentatively syruped a waffle.

"Okay," Jim said as he raised a forkful of waffle, "but if you're lying I'm telling the professor what you said about stairs."

In response, she may or may not have muttered something about pushing him down a flight of stairs.

"Three fifths of me heard that." Jim swallowed, then fixed the plate with a perplexed expression. "It . . . it actually is good," he said, genuinely surprised. He glanced at the two men in another booth, who were now in the process of receiving food of their own. "Maybe Zaget's should hire more reviewers into cranial intrusion."

"Do you even know some of the things you say?" Wanda's appetite had always been hearty and as opportunistic as a shady lawyer, so once she registered that the food was not from another dimension (probably) or going to kill her (not likely), she dug in with great glee. She kept a sharp eye on their surroundings, though, as she ate. "Well, this place still seems creepy and sticky, so they are not putting drugs to lull us into a feeling of safety in the food."


"Or that's what they want us to think. At least if they are doomwaffles it's a happy doom." Hoping to combat the alcohol with the power of starch, Jim sent in a battalion of hashbrowns and chewed thoughtfully. "Maybe we were sent to this place for a reason. To learn a lesson."

Wanda quirked an eyebrow at him and stared around. "What lesson, exactly, are we supposed to take away from here?" she asked, sounding as cautious as she one should be when dealing with a still-drunk Haller.


"The important one. That beauty can be found anywhere." Jim lolled his head towards the other two diners. The one with the bandage had eschewed his meal to lay his head in his friend's lap. The tattooed man was giving his arm gentle, reassuring strokes.

"Even if you don't want to think about what it's like when the lights are off."