𝐒𝐖𝐈𝐅𝐓 (X-Men ~ Peter Maximoff)

The Storm

Charles Xavier.

He stood mere steps away from Jennifer, eyes wide and mouth agape as he stared up at her, colour drained from his face like he had seen a ghost. His circulation had stopped upon hearing her voice, and yet it wasn't the lack of blood moving around his body that made him stand out in the cluttered basement, but rather the stark contrast in his appearance.

Once upon a time a smart grey blazer and freshly ironed white shirt had hung over Charles' body, giving him a sophisticated look, proving that he had graduated university as a professor. It had made him look smart and trustworthy, and now it was gone, traded in for something far less flattering. Upon his shoulders sat a scruffy flannel shirt that couldn't decide what side it wanted to be and a white vest that clearly hadn't seen a washing machine in months, covered in dirt and various stain, one of them being tomato ketchup. And then there was his hair, the short and controlled cut being replaced by a frizzy, almost shoulder length, unkept mop.

He had become a fragment of himself, and it wasn't the best fragment to keep either.

Jennifer didn't care in the slightest about how Charles looked like he had been repeatedly ran over by a train though. Every cell in her body was fully concentrated, with laser beam precision, on fact that the person that had given her so much hardship was just out of arms reach.

She had promised a month ago not to let the past pave her future, promised not to live in hate, but with her tormentor standing there, looking like a kid lost in an amusement park, she had to wonder if this was her chance to act upon everything she had felt towards him. Why else would he be here, if not for her? She could let it go, head back upstairs and pretend she had never seen him, or she could seize her opportunity here and now.

It didn't take Jennifer long to close the short distance between her and Charles, grabbing the front of his shirt and forcing him backwards, tripping over a few loose objects scattered across the floor as he went, until his back hit the side of the ping pong table. All logical thinking had been tossed in the trunk of the car, her bottled up rage driving her actions without plan or direction.

"Do you have any idea what you did?," she seethed, eyes ablaze with the type of flame that burned bright and unwavering, even in the strongest of storms.

Charles looked down at her with confusion and traces of fear plastered across his face (as did the rest of the room, but they weren't Jennifer's priority, and so she didn't care what anyone else thought of her). 

She scoffed at his silent cluelessness, the temperature of her blood beginning to rise at an alarming rate. "Of course not. It was stupid of me to think you actually gave a damn. You only ever cared about Raven and Erik, not Angel, not Darwin, not Alex or Sean, and definitely not me. We were just pawns to you, weren't we?" With a curt laugh she shook her head in the same way you might see a villain do in a movie. It was an unsettling sight. "You ruined my life, did you know that?"

"I, I don't...," he stammered, a thousand thoughts flying through his head and not a single one making sense. No one had ever seen such anger and hate in someone Jennifer's age, and the daggers being glared at him certainly didn't make Charles' job of working things out any easier. "You were dead."

"Do I look dead to you? Cause trust me, I've sure as hell felt it these days!" She observed his silent, almost verging on guilty look. It wasn't enough. Nothing would be enough, not now. "You ruined my life Charles, you ruined it."

Peter, who had been lost on what was happening after discovering that the three men in his living room weren't cops, had been settled on the couch with a lollipop, watching Jennifer with curiosity as he received strange looks from the two unoccupied adults. When he heard that name, however, he jumped to his feet. "Woah, woah, woah, woah, woah, wait. Hold up. That's Charles?" He pointed to the man in his girlfriends clutch, and everyone in the room nodded, if not a bit apprehensively.