𝐒𝐖𝐈𝐅𝐓 (X-Men ~ Peter Maximoff)

Houston, We are Problem Free

Months prior the basement of the Maximoff house had been a place to seek refuge from the weather, a safe haven so to speak – now, however, it was like a second home, and by chance it just so happened to save her from loneliness and boredom. On the coffee table that had only just resurfaced from under hundreds of magazines and rubbish sat a single sheet of paper with a few lines of black ink drying upon the top and the pen seemed to have disappeared sometime in the last half hour since Jennifer had busied herself with something else.

The letter wasn't easy to write because quite frankly, Jennifer had no clue what to say to her mother. So much had happened that didn't really make much sense and it seemed stupid to waste so much paper and ink on things that she could explain in person at a later date. That made life harder for Jennifer, as she didn't know how to announce that she wasn't lost forever, that she was indeed alive and kicking. Already, four pages had been crumpled up and thrown to the side in anger. It shouldn't've been that difficult, yet after an hour she only had a semi decent opening and no further ideas, leading her over to the couch in temporary defeat.

Resting her head delicately against Peter's chest, Jennifer flicked through the pages of a book about space and the universe that she had picked up from the library a week or so ago. Each page was filled with stunning illustrations and diagrams, along with detailed information on subjects that schools didn't dare to teach in fear of making physics fun. Planets, stars and meteors were scattered around formulas and statistics, some relationships familiar while others looked alien.

About three quarters of the way through the hardcover book Jennifer stumbled onto a page that she simply couldn't wrap her head around. Advanced theories often didn't make sense to her, still young in the scheme of things, but what she was seeing was not a theory. Her second guess was that it was a simulation but there was simply too much information, so much in fact, that it covered the expanse of five pages, back and front. As her brain went into overload trying to process the information her breathing quickened, panicking as she flipped between pages. Finally she found an explanation on the final page of the subject that summarised everything, and when the text finally registered in her mind, her confusion quickly turned into an excited anger.

Peter had been watching the tv sitting across the coffee table for going on two hours now, the square screen showing an animated series about teenagers solving mysteries – a show Jennifer rather quite enjoyed, having seen a couple of episodes of it the previous morning. Now however, as Jennifer shifted off of his arm and knelt on the cushions he turned his attention to her, wondering why she had suddenly decided to move from the comfy position.

"Why did no one tell me we went to the moon?!"

At first Peter didn't understand the question, but after a moment of thought he realised what she was talking about. The ground breaking event had occurred three years ago, in the summer of 1969, and as Jennifer had completely bypassed the sixties it wasn't unreasonable for her to not have heard of the event. Still, Peter didn't understand her enthusiasm. "I didn't think it was that big a deal."

Leaping from her seat, Jennifer's eyes widened at the boy's comment. "No big deal? It's amazing! We went to the moon! As in people got in a rocket and physically stepped on the moon, planted a flag and everything! How is that not the news headlines every day?"

Peter chuckled at her excitement over the matter, watching as her eyes told all the emotions her whirring body was unable to cover.

"God, I always dreamed of going there, seeing Earth from the surface, and people did! Like, imagine being able to say that you were on that mission, that you personally experienced weightlessness in space, or moved on a different celestial body, with a different gravitational field strength and, wow, it would be so quiet with no one else there – no cities or cars on the horizon, just endless rock." The world's largest smile graced her face as she paced back and forth across the floor, waving her hands dramatically with each step. "The very concept of space travel has been redefined! We made a rocket that managed to make it out of the Earth's atmosphere, we survived in uncharted space. We could go to Mars, look for new forms of life, be pioneers of the new age!"