kairos : peter maximoff/quicksilver

PROLOGUE [part 1]

Though Mr and Mrs Shin didn't start to suspect their only daughter to be one of the mutants until she was about ten, they both separately came to the conclusion that, while their child may not be odd, odd things certainly happened around her.

It was little things.

Like how, right from the moment they brought their little bundle of joy home from the hospital, the clocks in their house didn't work quite right. But not in ways that someone would immediately notice; it was just that none of them ever told the same time.
Especially the one hanging in the nursery.

Sometimes Mrs Shin would look up at the wall clock in there, perhaps after feeding Roxanne, changing her diaper, and putting her to bed in the crib, and it would tell her that only a few minutes had passed when she had been certain at least an hour had gone by.

Mr Shin purchased three different wrist watches before Roxy's first birthday. It wasn't that they were breaking exactly, but they always ran too fast or too slow making him late to several meetings and much too early to far more. But when he brought each watch to have it repaired, it was always a confusing ordeal.

"Well it seems to be working fine right now, sir." They'd say hesitantly.

"Yes, but it runs too slowly sometimes." Mr Shin would reply patiently. "Yesterday I gave my daughter a bath, put her to bed for a nap, cleaned the kitchen, and made lunch for when my wife got home, and when I looked down this watch was barely moving. It said it was the same time as when I had started."

Then Mr Shin and the poor repair person would both stare down at the wrist watch, now happily ticking along (just to spite him perhaps), daring it to misbehave until the former either gave in and purchased a new wrist watch or went home begrudgingly.

As Roxy began crawling and then walking, an entirely new obstacle arose.
One that her parents couldn't really talk about in front of other people without sounding like negligent parents. Because saying, "We constantly lose track of our toddler" isn't exactly a great conversation starter.

One second, little Roxanne would be crawling across the living room carpet and the next, even if her mom or dad only had their head turned for a fraction of an instant, she had disappeared from the room altogether.

This always caused a moment of intense panic for her parents but then they'd hear her babbling over in the play room or notice her playing with a toy fifteen feet away from where she just was.

It wasn't as if their child could have ran there... so how did she get over there so quickly?

These things could all be reluctantly contributed to coincidence or simply the Shin's possibly poor observation skills.

But that all changed one hot afternoon when Roxanne had just turned ten.

Roxy was Mr and Mrs Shin's pride and joy. She was clever and confident, but still kind and down-to-earth, and full to the brim with curiosity that only sometimes got her into mischief. She did very well in school, made friends easily, and was rarely seen without a giant toothy grin on her lovely face.

After a few years, however, her parents noticed that her eyes, once black as ink like theirs, were becoming lighter. Shinier almost. They glinted brightly in the sunlight and shone as their daughter laughed. Eyes gradually changing hue as a child gets older is not a strange phenomenon - it's incredibly common in fact - but they were getting a bit lighter everyday it seemed.
Her eyes didn't stop at the deep mahogany they became when she was four or the soft chocolate brown they were by her fifth birthday or the unnatural looking cool toned beige of seven years old or the sky blue she had at eight or even the glacial ice irises Roxy had by the next year at nine.

Because by ten, their daughter's eyes were a startling silver color.
Not like how some people with light blue eyes call them grey, but silver, metallic and unsettling to strangers.

Mr and Mrs Shin weren't worried. The strange eyes were such a small detail, and their daughter was still the same. They briefly fretted over other children bullying little Roxy, but what she lacked in height and a typical appearance, she tried to compensate for in charisma.

...Then there was also the twitches.
Well they weren't twitches exactly.. But describing them as glitches would be crossing the line into accepting that Roxanne wasn't normal.
Whenever their daughter got excited or nervous or angry or any burst of emotion, if you looked at the girl closely, you'd notice glitching. It was like when you tried to play a scratched record or listen to the radio with bad signal: there were little skips and jumps.

One moment Roxanne would be giggling, jumping up into the air trying to high-five her dad's outstretched hand, and the next she had sort of just appeared a few inches above the ground, just high enough to reach. Mr Shin hadn't even seen seen bend her legs to jump. She had just... glitched up into the air. As if she had moved too fast for his eye to catch...

Once, while the Shin family was playing hide-and-seek in their home, Mrs Shin spotted Roxy facing away from her, crouched behind their sofa. Her mother had grinned and playfully leapt towards her with a whispered, "Boo!" But her hand, stretched out to tag Roxy's shoulder, met only air because suddenly her daughter was three feet to the left.

"I'm faster than you, Mamí!" Roxanne had giggled, grinning her gap-toothed smile and clapping her hands together a bit too fast to appear quite normal. "You can't catch meeeee!"

(Perhaps they had already begun to realize there was something different about her at this point.)

Some of the kids at her school had began to call her "Tick", and when Roxy told her parents about this (though she didn't seem bothered by this nickname; she appeared almost pleased, in fact), they knew it wasn't just them who had noticed their daughter's little twitches and glitches or ticks.

But still Mr and Mrs Shin didn't really worry. Roxanne was such a happy girl, always bursting with energy, her mind as sharp and quick as her tongue. What was there to truly fret over?

That fateful afternoon, the family was out for a walk in the neighborhood with Roxy's new dog, Tock (named for a character from her favorite book: a "watchdog", whose body was a pocket watch, of course), an energetic terrier.
The sun was shining, there was a slight breeze, music was drifting out of the radio that was sitting in their little red wagon, and the Shins were happy as people could be.

Without warning a pickup truck flew around the corner like the devil was closing in. And at that same moment, Tock, upon catching a glimpse of a squirrel on the opposite side of the street, pulled his leash out of Roxy's grip and bolted into the truck's path.

And without a second of hesitation, Roxanne Shin sprinted into the street after him, right into the place where the car would be.

~~~
A/N: this ended up being super long so I split it into 2 parts :)