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There is no such thing as a perfect day in New York City, when one is a witch. Always trouble presents itself to be handled, and the latest nefarious curse of psychedelic face hugging spirits trying to infect hosts overly given to excess — too much plum pudding, alcohol, and wrapped gifts — require her to work for her supper. Certainly stalking invisible spirits and cutting them free of dazed subjects constitutes a difficult business. For reasons all her own, the brunette witch stumbles out from the intangible dimension occupied largely by the invisible and ephemeral constructs of existence. Ectoplasm drips off her hands and her wrists, adorning her knives. It would be a frightening sight except, well, there's nothing to see without the Sight.
That she looks like a Christmas goth is another matter altogether. Black on black is par for the course, but even her coat is black and there is nothing for something eager to eat 'excesses' to latch onto. Never mind she unwinds a kerchief from her head, mopping her face…
… And finds herself back to wall with a building in East Village that was not here in the spiritual spectrum. Why is it? Why is she here? And oh God, all the people in uniforms on the street who don't see her… What fun.
*
Lorna shifted the heavy load of books from her arms, a muffled curse escaping her as she left the library behind and the door was shut nearly in her face from a fellow student. Irritation flared, but that was all, as she dodged around the door and stepped outside. The chill from the winter air bit through her jacket and she groaned, ducking her head to avoid the breeze that lifted her hair this way and that into her face.
"Just once I'd like to not have a research paper due at the end of the week. Just once." She muttered, but finals were coming up and there would be no relief in sight for the young woman until vacation started.
*
The cold air shines and causes her breath to condense, clouds of steam that could be used to track Wanda. Daydreamer she is not, and standing around idle in a place she is not familiar seems a fool's errand. Shoving her knife back in her boot, the other back under her coat, she soon enough starts walking over the grass. It's unlikely that anyone is going to loiter nearby to a wall, and she passes the bushes, probably glad for her black leggings. The easy, smooth stride carries her directly up the path and—bam.
There's her damn… someone related to someone.
Lorna's presence slows the brunette witch, and she raises her chin slightly. There might be a chance to slink away; more than one. However, there are questions. She orbits Lorna once and heads in, her steps quick and light. "Afternoon." The only warning will be too late to scurry off without cheating. "I have a question. When did my brother bite you?"
*
Lorna jumped, distracted as she was with her books, avoiding crashing into the various bodies of the campus and with the cold. A yelp followed as she scrambled to not drop the books in her arms, a flush crossing her cheeks and painting them rosy as she spotted Wanda finally. Lips pursed together and she exhaled a huff, adjusting her grip on the books once more and pushing her hair back from her face.
"Geeze don't do that to people.." She muttered, and then made a face, her nose wrinkling up.
"Your brother bit me back around Halloween. He acted all nice and then bit me suddenly! It was freaky! I threw him away from me and ran for the cops 'cause I was /bleeding/. I had to go to the hospital."
*
What, walk up a path? There is no smile on her lips, no hint of a smirk. Wanda inclines her head, the nearest she'll get to acknowledging the request. It's been a long week, and someone dressed totally in black with skin as warm as hers tends to start looking like an exotic Spanish duchess out to change the world.
"Halloween." A flicker of interest passes over her honey-brown eyes. They're completely normal, just as her green hair is not at all visible. "I am sorry. Did you have a bad injury? Or did they sew this bite together?" Her eyebrows divot slightly, thought heavy on her face.
*
A look of annoyance, mild, but there follows and Lorna pulls down the collar of her shirt to expose the faint scars there. "They said they were puncture wounds and that they went deep but weren't exactly wide enough to merit stitches. They were worried some crazy person had /stabbed/ me with a rusted fork or something and that I might've got something. So they kept me over night." She groused, shifting her books to under her arm.
"It put off the blood testing I needed to have so that I could know whether or not Erik Lensherr was my father. I had to wait weeks to make sure I wasn't going to contract something. Yeah, fun story there. I dunno what that magic-y stuff was that you pulled yesterday, but he's my father and it's been proven via science.." She pursed her lips together, eyeing Wanda again, as if looking for something familial about the woman.
"Listen, my Tata lost all his family 'cause of the Nazis, alright? So he's more than a little sensitive about family. He lost everyone. It's just him and me. Okay? And he didn't even /know/ about me 'till our powers went wonky around each other. Cause they're the same." She exhaled a huff of a breath, looking very put upon that she was unloading all of this information. It wasn't like her father told her to keep it secret or anything after all.
*
The abrupt baring of her neck requires a pause from the witch. Her eyes narrow a fraction upon the shape built up in pink around the cream skin, proof enough of some damage done. Bitemarks are plain enough, especially when educated as Wanda is; she knows what she looks for, and no one will be likely to mistake them for anything other than what they are. "Shot for illness. The one that makes it hard to open your mouth. This you had?"
Lorna's indignities are not lost upon her, and then she inclines her head slightly. Blood testing? Her eyes narrow in their leonine splendour, and Wanda plants her hands squarely in her pockets. "Science can do such things." A statement, rhetorical; it comes from her lips easily enough. "This man is your father. It would sound you did not know him so well? I wish a happy meeting upon you with your family." That, surprisingly perhaps, sounds like a genuine wish, firm but not unkind.
Her breath escapes in another chilly cloud, silver as a belching boiler, andfades away. "The Nazis killed most of my country. I know this pain he has."
*
Lorna swallowed a lump in her throat and grimaced, letting the collar of her shirt fall back into place. "Yeah, I guess so? I dunno medical things. Just that they were concerned for it and it /sucked/. I hate getting shots." She wrinkled up her nose and sighed heavily.
"But yeah, I don't know him so well at all. Considering I've only known he was my dad for.. I dunno the past two.. three months?" She arched a brow, and lifted up her hand, counting on her fingers as she tried to remember when she'd finally had confirmation.
Finally, she broke off at Wanda's words, her expression pinched. "I'm sorry."
*
Tiny, her shrug lifts her shoulders and drops them again beneath her claret-hued coat, a buttery spill of armour that reaches clear to her knees. Wanda's tone is somewhat matter-of-fact, though her emotions bubble away below it. "Europe took many wounds in the war. Always someone knows a loss. One day, maybe, it will go. He is then from Europe, really?"
Call it a case of curiosity, and sympathy chafed out of mutual experience, the horrors of the battlefields and wastelands left behind. Hard not to be, when they have probably seen their equal share of the consequences after. "Such a surprise. He had you as a grown child!"
*
Lorna fidgeted beneath Wanda's gaze and a mirrored shrug follows as she moves to adjust her grip on her books as they weighed down one arm too long. "Yeah, from Poland…" She mumbled, "It's why I call him 'tata' instead of Dad. I already had a dad, my adoptive dad. So, I asked to call him what he called his dad instead." She bit her lower lip.
"He didn't exactly know he had me." A grimace followed that, "And he doesn't.. exactly know who my mother was either.. But after the war.. uhm.. er.. well, I was apparently born and given up for adoption. I ended up here in the states."
*
Nodding to that, Wanda keeps her hands deep in her pockets so that her fingertips would be much warmer than that. Her expression shows none of the saccharine impressions that would normally follow bad news or sad admissions, suggesting a much more disciplined approach to her feelings. Silence gives Lorna at least some honour and dignity in storytelling; needless interruptions are kept to a minimum.
"You do not know your mother? Or is she someone you mean to find?" Her gaze flickers towards the door of the school, at least this particular building. Another student goes gunning down the path away from them in the opposite direction, lucky that when she slips, she doesn't wipe out.
*
A shrug, and Lorna pushes her hair back from her face. "I don't see much of a point in trying.. She gave me up for whatever reason. She didn't want me. And.. well, how would I even know where to start? My Tata doesn't have a clue who she was. And the adoption agency I came from said I'd been left at a church for abandoned or orphan children. But there were too many after the war.. so.. I got shipped over here I guess.."
She wrinkled her nose up at that.
"I only found my tata because he and I have the same powers and someone suggested we might be related.."
*
Wanda gives something of a nod to that, distracted briefly by the student running out of the way. A story shocking to Americans is less so for someone from the Balkans or the Baltic, even. Upheavals after the war were plentiful. Hundreds of thousands of people followed nomadic migration trails millennia old, forced to travel west or east, north or south, wherever food or politics permitted them. Two casualties should happen to meet in New York.
"My brother did not mean to bite you. He was not in a good place, his mind was…. 'messed up', you say." She tests out the unfamiliar slang, wedging it into her statement. "Now he is better. I will make sure he does not again unless you ask him to."
*
That last part had Lorna making a face, her nose wrinkling up violently and she made a 'gagging' sound at the back of her throat. "Ew! No! Gross!" She nearly dropped her books in her sharp retort.
"I mean.. like, yeah I get that he was messed up but /geeeze/! He was a /vampire/! It was scary! I didn't know they were /real/ before that! Like it was seriously freaky. And like, ew. I don't ever want to be bitten by anyone like that ever! Why would you suggest that?"
She shook her head, green eyes lifting to narrow faintly at Wanda.
*
"He is not a vampire now. He will not be a vampire again." Facts as simple as 1 plus 1 equals 2, not seven point eight. Wanda raises her shoulders a little and let them drop again, as her default position. Far be it from her to instruct this sheltered thing about the world.
"I know from the phone and the spirits: never think something is impossible. You think maybe it is impossible to meet a man who is your father. But you did, three months ago. Maybe it is necessary to be bitten to break out from a dream," she says simply enough. It's plausible, in Wandaland.
*
Lorna hefted her books back into her arms in front of her, shooting Wanda a dry look. "Yeah well, vampires shouldn't exist in the first place. So maybe he'll turn back again if he sneezes wrong or something. Maybe it's really like a bad cold. Huh?" It was a dumb idea and Lorna knew it as soon as it left her mouth. She rather clapped a hand over her lips and flushed, and looked down at her shoes.
"Sorry. But.. uhm.. no. I don't think I want to know the woman that gave me up for adoption anyways. If she's even still /alive/.." She shrugged and her brows knit together, "Besides I've got a mom if I really want one, and she picked me out of all the other kids out there.. so there's that too."
*
Narrowed eyes gain a more enhanced almond shape and flash, dangerously bright in a face of hammered gold. That mask carries so few emotions save those restless few trickling through her guard, and Wanda curtly nods. "They should not. Those that do, I kill." Might as well be out and out about it, trustbuilding exercises executed on the doorstep of an estate. "He does, too. He is human, Lorna daughter of that man. Every test will show this to you. Nothing in him is undead. Were it undead, I would have struck his head from his shoulders, ripped out his heart, and burnt his body to ashes. Those would be carried in six directions on the wind. There would be no Pietro to hunt man or woman."
This is met with a quiet pause, and she adds almost a minute later, "And that is my twin."
*
A blink, followed by another and Lorna pursed her lips together, as if trying to follow Wanda's logic and finding it hard to follow. "Err.." She rubbed the bridge of her nose, shifting her weight on her feet.
"Okay.." She bit her lower lip and then scooted closer toward the red clad woman, eyeing her features rather closely.
"So your magic really thinks we're supposed to be related somehow, riiight?"
*
At least Lorna accepts the magic, which earns her another nod, softer than the curt variety that goes with the young woman's nature. "I looked. I looked many times. Perhaps there is some error. Perhaps he came from a village my people did." These are guesses and they feel like it to the ears, shaped in a sound of an open question towards the end.
Her hands pulled from her pockets, she rubs them over her hair as though to smooth the slightly curling tresses massed up like a shadowy lion's mane in sepia. "Your father. He does not look old. Do you know how many years he has?"
*
Lorna 'hmmms' in thought, leaning back now to give Wanda her proper personal space once again. A finger lifts to tap at her chin as she tilts her head to the side in consideration. "Maybe?I dunno exactly where he came from before the war. He didn't.. doesn't talk about it really." That was an understatement.
"He's in his thirties I guess. He was younger than me I think when the war ended and .. well, tata isn't proud of how he acted.. but when I did research he certainly wasn't the only one from accounts I could find in the library."
*
For a moment, Wanda is speechless. Thoughts turn over, the slow grind of gears following. Her lips part, then shut, and open again some seconds later. "There are books about the… the…. what followed the War?"
Forcing out those words through a thick tongue and rough backspin of her mental speed takes an effort she cannot begin to explain. "People write about our shame? This… I don't…"
*
A blink, and then another. "Well mostly I found some survivor's tales. Lots of memoirs and what people went through. Like diaries and journals, and stuff.." She arched a brow, "I wanted to know what tata went through. I wasn't going to ask him, and no one would /tell/ me details otherwise."
She pursed her lips together and folded her arms around her books, adjusting her grip on the weight.
"I wanted to know what other people did to handle it, I guess." A shrug followed that.
*
Barbarians meandering through the war-stricken lands, looting, pillaging, and plundering Europe, left an indelible mark on their people. Mongols roamed through to the Balkans, and Vikings pillaged and plundered their way through the North. It's not a spoonful of sugar to help the other awful crimes go down, after the Third Reich fell and the Red Army wandered past.
The most radioactive material has a half life. Twenty years is not nearly sufficient for the brunette to swallow that down easily.
"Yes. Many…" Her breath pulled in, Wanda says flatly, "Many were not right, afterwards. He was young."
*
A shrug, Lorna didn't understand exactly what shadows marred Wanda's train of thought. She'd only studied in the environment of the printed page and ink. There was a distance that couldn't be crossed and while she tried to understand, she would never be able to fully comprehend the visions of terror that had occurred, that had shaped the year of her birth; much less shaped how her father had sired her.
"Yeah, he said that. He apologized too, for the fact he wasn't around." Another shrug, "But from what he said, I dunno why he was in denial so much over being possibly related. I mean, like.. I /could/ have siblings out there, right? I mean, it's not like he knew about me before..?"
*
She is a Pole. This is her heritage, though it is removed in the Republic, the arsenal of democracy. No fault of her own makes her ignorant to her own history. Wanda walks over ot the wall and leans back against the cold bricks, her arms crossed over her chest under the swell of her bust. The causal direction of her movements belies the simmering irritation at having to conform a difficult period of history into such simple words as English allows, at least her level of it.
"Germany turned Poland into a wasteland. Germans there were treated as princes. Everyone else was meant to be a slave," she explains. "Like they see Africans in the south. Not human, not human enough. Russians, Poles, Slavs, they were given little food and no medicine. They could be shot. The Jews and the Roma, those people hated by the Nazis, were taken into very small and dirty parts of the cities. They lived with nothing, sickened and died in their own filth. Only if they were lucky. The unlucky in the country went to the internment camps. The old they killed. Right away, into the gas. The rest went into smelly bunks, full of ghosts, and did not come out. The Third Reich wanted to kill them all. It used them to fight the war and bled them into their homeland's soil because they were not desired.
She continues, her voice dull and distant, "The Nazis worked them to death. Starve, ill with many sicknesses that took all strength and will, and dig holes. Make roads, walls, the bullets that would be used to shoot your own people. If you were lucky. You are too sick to carry rocks? Shot. You are too weak to walk miles in the camp? Gassed. You look wrong at the Nazi guard? Hung. You speak out of turn? Shot. Your tongue ripped out. The women, the pretty ones, were raped. Raped until they died, raped so they might get a little bread to feed their dying skeleton children. A child would see it. He would work. He would fight for trash to eat, he would eat the rats and the bodies if there were any flesh on them maybe. He would turn into a monster to ease his belly. The nightmares never go. After the Germans came the Soviets. The Red Army, 'liberatore'. They killed the Germans. They hurt them and anyone who helped the Germans. Then they showed they were better by hurting the Slavs, too. No one wins. His people still bleed under the red star."
*
Lorna shivered, wrapping her arms tighter around her books from the library as she listened to Wanda's tale of horror and terror that was the Holocaust. It was one thing to read and research survivor's tales in hopes that she might better understand her father. Yet it was quite another thing to hear it so plainly told in such a blunt manner that did not allow her to turn the page and move on.
The brunette blanched, her lips parting before she moved to stand along side the leather clad woman. Her shoulder brushed against Wanda's in a silent show of support as she let silence hang between them for several long moments. Only the chatter of other students going to class interrupted the two's moment of peace in the winter-chilled air.
"Did you survive all of that?" Her brows furrowed as she looked up at Wanda with a pinched brow, her voice small and soft. Barely above a whisper, as if to speak louder might invite some horror from memory to lunge out at them.
*
The Holocaust was, and remains, a scorch mark on the face of Europe, and none who dwell in its sooty shadow can help but be shaped by it in some fashion, even if that shaping is outright denial and avoidance. Wanda goes quiet, her shoulders scraping against the exterior of the school. She'll pick up and worry about the scuff marks on her leather coat, if any, later. Fingers curl along her biceps, inlaid dimples transforming the smooth burgundy skin into an alien landscape of narrow ridges and sinking precipices. "Yes."
Her answer doubles the sin: Pietro is her twin, after all. Two children, indelibly scarred as much as the ink colours Erik's skin.
"It is good America is not the same." A statement as simple as they come.
*
At the simple 'yes', Lorna is moving to gently, slowly, wind her arms around Wanda's shoulders and press her cheek against the other woman's shoulder. "I'm sorry." She whispered, just as softly as before.
Green eyes peer upward at Wanda round wide beneath her eyebrows, white teeth biting her lower lip as she paused to see if Wanda even welcomed the embrace. If not, she'd step back.
Questions about how old she was, or how it was possible that /her/ father was Wanda and Pietro's as well, didn't even yet occur to Lorna. Decidedly, the brunette had just accepted that somehow, she was related to Wanda and that was that.
*
The hug is something that startles her, a wild look forming in the brunette Transian sorceress' eyes. They widen to the point they absolutely dominate her face, the only wash of colour in the paling gold of her skin.
She does not dislike it, she does not have a reaction other than plain shock. Lorna 1, Wanda 7? On the same token, her expression shutters somewhat on that moment of vulnerability. It goes up in ashes and she pats Lorna's arm awkwardly. Hugs are definitely not known things to her.
*
Lorna gives Wanda a faint and gentle squeeze of her arms, before allowing the stunned woman her space once more. A cloud of warm breath floats up in the air between them and Lorna gives a faint smile toward Wanda. "I've been told I give good hugs, sorry if it was a bit of a shock, or if you didn't want one.. but you looked like you could use one." Her smile grew faintly and she gestured to Wanda.
"I know they don't really help, but it always makes me feel better.."
*
"I am not angry. It is merely odd to have a hug." This much Wanda allows herself rather than send the skittish girl running fast as she can for the dorms, and then an angry headmistress will come out and all bets will be off. "Nothing helps the knowledge except the effort not to let it repeat. This I take comfort from. It will not come to pass again. Not if it can be assured, promised."
*
A blink and Lorna wrapped her arms around herself, perhaps she desired a hug just as much as Wanda had looked in need of one. "Oh." A pause, "Okay. You just looked like maybe you could use one.. do you not get hugs?" She tilted her head to the side briefly, before pushing her hair back with a hand as she shifted her books to one arm and adjusted the knitted hat on her head.
"..Do you think it's possible .. that.. that something like that could happen again, here even?" Her brows pinched and she rocked back on her heels.
*
The question having to be asked is important indeed, considering her confounded expression and now the raise of her brows upwards. "No. Not really." Wanda is not a believer in the random giving of hugs, or it simply doesn't exist on her spectrum. Not that she's remotely blaming Lorna, stating a fact like 'wait, your trees can turn red?' It is new in her part of the universe, and a fact to be chewed over later. Her hands go back into her coat pockets, no longer needed to inflect the statement with given force.
"Yes. You have blacks. You have mutants. It takes only the people in power to decide they do not want you, and then they want you to be gone. Someone will draw the line, now that the path has been opened," she says with bleak certainty.
*
Another nod and Lorna sighed, "That's what I was told, by the Brotherhood.. well a member that I think was trying to recruit me I think.. That they'll come after mutants next." The brunette made a face and glanced back to Wanda and away from the clocktower that had just chimed the time for the top of the hour.
"There's also aliens though, and who knows what else out there, Wanda. So.. I dunno, maybe people will be more scared of /that/ than of their fellow man? I dunno. Maybe it's just me being hopeful.." A shrug, "Listen, I gotta go to class. I go to school here so, if you need to find me.."
*
"I will make sure to let you know. Good luck with your class." Wanda nods to that, and then steps back. "You need me, I am around Greenwich Village. We don't stay in one place very long, usually. It's a good idea to ask about. People know what I look like, I think."
Her footsteps on the path will be a light, delicate thing.