𝐒𝐖𝐈𝐅𝐓 (X-Men ~ Peter Maximoff)

Farewell Tour

Mary Howard had never intended for Jennifer to grow up without a father, and being a single mother had been a challenge, especially when she was forced to take up the responsibility of caring and nurturing while she was still grieving for her late husband. Richard Jones had died protecting his country but as a result had been forced to leave his family defenceless against the world. Without his presence money was often tight for Mary, and even though she received funds from her parents and in-laws, it was still difficult to afford to stay off work.

Despite this Jennifer grew up with the same amount of class as everyone else and never let anything petty or irrelevant stand in her way – if she wanted something chances are she would find a way to get it. Succumbing to fear, jealously, or anger went against what her mother had taught her, and she knew that in order to life in peace, arguments should be resolved and moved on from as quickly as possible – which made sense, in theory.

Jennifer didn't care about living in peace anymore though, because quite frankly, the past seven months of her life had been a train wreck. Anger wasn't an emotion that she felt too often, even when she had been stranded in 1972 she hadn't felt it, but now, now she was fuming. For four days in a row her fists had been clenched, ready to strike anything that acted marginally different to how she wanted it to. The reason for this? The recent events that had unfolded at the Maximoff house.

The fight repeated in Jennifer's head all day every day, like a record that refused to stop spinning. Every time a certain sentence echoed in her head she felt a surge of pain through her chest, and with each iteration it became clearer whose fault it all was.

None of this was ever supposed to go on for such a long time, and it sure as hell wasn't supposed to become so complex and complicated. With every lie she told a more intricate web formed around her until she was cocooned away from the world, living without consequence. But all it took was one single cut, a slip of the mind, for it all to come falling down. It was beyond ironic that the person she trusted most was the one to find out, albeit through questionable means.

It was only going to be a matter of time before someone found out about her secret, and without a trace of a doubt it had been Jennifer's careless actions that had drove the worried teenager to do something she knew he regretted. There had been plenty of opportunities for her to explain her situation to Peter, to remove the wall of lies between them, but she never took the chance. Peter wasn't cruel, nor was he judgemental, so chances were that if she had come clean by herself he would've understood, and they would be sitting watching another cheesy movie on the television. But no, she had hid for too long, and despite what she had said in their shouting match, the majority of this was in fact, down to her own cowardness.

In all honesty she didn't really care that he had essentially stalked her home because as Peter had stated so clearly, he was worried about her. Sure, there were easier and more acceptable ways for him to ease his mind, but that was the one he had gone with and neither of them could change that now.

Knowing that Peter had been hiding his mutation whilst accusing her of hiding things gave Jennifer the world's most useless bargaining chip. No matter how mad she was it was impossible for her to judge him on that ground – not when mutants were being slaughtered in their own homes, not when the kindest people could turn on you for having a different genetic make-up, not when Jennifer was harbouring the very same secret. They were lucky that they didn't wear their mutations on the outside for the world to see, but not lucky enough to quite fit in to society. Jennifer had done better than most people, but her friends knew that there was something slightly weird about her, whether it be the way she always sat up straight or how ten years of information was missing from her brain, for example, the fact that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated, and even now she didn't know much on the subject.