𝐒𝐖𝐈𝐅𝐓 (X-Men ~ Peter Maximoff)

The Past vs The Future

Jennifer lurched forward in the bed, the back of her pyjama top stuck to her back in sweat as she came into a sitting position. In the darkness of the room, the only sound was her heavy breathing, staggered and uneven as she desperately tried to get oxygen into her lungs. With her eyes crazed and the size of the moon, she almost resembled a wild animal, and with her hair messy from the friction against the pillow, it wouldn't be surprising if someone mistook her for one.

Unable to sit still, she swung her feet over the side of the bed, standing up and beginning to pace. Things had been getting better over the past week, not drastically, but enough for her to present a better mood, but even Peter's comforting touch couldn't protect her from her latest dream. Dream was perhaps the wrong word though.

Prophecy was in no way Jennifer's gift, and as it turned out, connecting dots wasn't either. The clues had been right there in plain sight and she had simply overlooked them, deeming them unimportant to the case. Now, however, they were ramming themselves down her throat, forcing her to face the bitter truth.

When Jennifer had first found out she was in 1971, isolated from everything and everyone she knew, all she had wanted to do was find out why it had happened and figure out to reverse it – safe to say she didn't get very far. Maybe it was utter confusion that prevented her from working it out initially, or perhaps the fact that she had gone through at least three mental breakdowns in the span of a week upon arrival.

How? was the question that had swarmed her mind for almost a year. How did it happen? How was time travel suddenly possible? How was she so unlucky to wake up in a different decade? How was she going to get home? They were all great questions, but they were also all unanswerable. Any scientist, no matter how amateur, knew that the first stage to solving a problem was to state what you knew, giving a foundation to build conclusions from, and Jennifer had completely bypassed it, causing her months of questioning that she really could've done without.

Her mother had told her to move on, leave the past behind her, but this was something that had changed the very course of her life, and there wasn't a chance in hell that she was going to let it go. Even with her confusion and grief, Jennifer couldn't comprehend just how she hadn't realised the truth earlier, and so her fury at her ignorance only added to the fire growing within her eyes.

With her hands raking through her hair, possibly pulling some strands out in the process, Jennifer was oblivious to the figure shifting in the bed adjacent to where she was treading up and down the floorboards. It was all too much at once in terms of information, information that she should've known from the get-go, and that was half the issue as Jennifer continued to kick herself for being so slow.

The bedside lamp flicked on in the corner of the room, and a moment later a hand reached out in attempt to catch Jennifer's arm, but the contact only lasted a second before she brushed it off, unable to stop her brain from dragging her body in an endless, hopeless spiral. She knew that Peter was saying something from the edge of the bed, but she couldn't hear it over the repeating sentence that was somehow pulling apart all of her nerve endings in shock and anger. Tunnel visioned from staring straight ahead for who knows how long, Jennifer was blind to her surroundings as she continued to pace, trying, and failing, to regulate her heart rate.

She couldn't see the expression plastered on Peter's face that would undoubtably send her into tears if she was aware that she had been the one to put it there – with his brown eyes hooded from lack of sleep though still wide as he took in the frenzied state of Jennifer.

"Jenny, please talk to me," he pleaded, his voice laced with exhaustion and worry. This time Jennifer heard him, stopping dead in her tracks as she realised how frightened Peter must be, waking up to see her in such a trance. "What's wrong?"