𝐒𝐖𝐈𝐅𝐓 (X-Men ~ Peter Maximoff)

The Road to Recovery

Peter had been a hundred percent right about the letter, and he only had to wait until the next morning to notice the effects. The girl who had been wearing the same dirty pair of pyjamas for the past week had finally emerged from her room on her own accord, the bags under her eyes still visible but not quite as dark as before.

The letter didn't clear things up in any way whatsoever, but it held a message, one Jennifer promised to never forget. Her mother loved her and had no doubt that she was doing something good, having the time of her life and making her proud. Currently though, Jennifer was doing no such thing, having wept for the entirety of the last week, but she was determined to not let her mum down, and so, with proper motivation, she had more to do than just survive.

Weaving between the stolen television sets and junk food that covered the basement floor, no one questioned her as she had made her own breakfast, nor when she slid on her shoes and headed out of the front door. They did, however, exchange confused glances at her sudden change of mood, though no one seemed too worried about where she was going, trusting her not to get hit by a truck on her journey. In a silent consensus, the Maximoff's best guess was that Jennifer was heading to the park, which seemed logically considering how quiet and peaceful it was there.

They were wrong.

To say Will was surprised when Jennifer walked through the double door twenty minutes before opening time would be the understatement of the century, in fact, his eyebrows were nearly pushed off the top his face as his jaw dropped to the ground. When he had woken up that morning he had been prepared to smile at customers and make the money he needed to survive, not for his best employee to strut through the doors like she hadn't left two months ago to start a new life.

It wasn't just that though. It didn't take him long to realise that she looked a little worse for wear since he had seen her last, her skin clinging to her bones a bit more and her eyes dull and shallow, but Will supposed that that was what living in New York did to a person.

Opposite him, Jennifer was noticing the same sort of deterioration in the interior of the shop, the paint on the walls and ceiling cracking and peeling away, and the shelves were in disarray, cassettes squint and unorganised. In other words, the place was far from its glory days.

"I guess you didn't find an extra pair of hands then, huh?," she concluded, returning her gaze to Will who glanced at the state of his shop quickly before shrugging with a sigh.

"Nope. I suppose I was right when I said the shop would fall apart without you."

Jennifer frowned ever so slightly, not quite believing that her role in the shop was quite as big, but she didn't hesitate as she moved over to one of the shelves and began sorting through the cassettes that sat on it , reordering and removing certain plastic cases without even having to put too much thought into it, her muscle memory taking control of the processes in mere seconds.

Will joined her, deciding to make the most of the time he had left before customers would come in and inevitably judge the current state of the place. "So, what happened with the big city?," he queried, pulling some new cassettes out of a cardboard box, fixing them neatly on the shelf.

"It wasn't the right choice. Turns out there's more important things here than there will ever be there."

Quick to learn, Jennifer knew that the only way to avoid sympathy and pitying looks was to not give a reason to deserve them, and so she didn't. But she didn't lie either. Scotland only held memories that could never be revived while Maryland held a future that could go in thousands of different directions.

Will gladly welcomed Jennifer back into employment, and she couldn't help but be proud of herself. All the suffering and anguish just to end up where she started, in a place she understood and felt at home in. It was probably good that she had gotten her job back when she did, the house only radiating her sorrow, and she couldn't bear to leach off the family forever, so with money as her goal, Jennifer strived further with the hopes that maybe one day she would be able to have her own place.