AMARA AND PETER | Peter Maximoff

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"I'd rather have the neighbour's dog chew my nuts off."

His mom sighed, and he stood up to grab himself a soda from the mini-fridge.

"I'm sure if you told them you're going to therapy-"

"I'm not going to therapy, Mom." He propped his legs up on his coffee table and stared at the dead TV screen, ready for the next wave of scolding to wash over him. Sitting with a shrink was worse than having your eyes gauged out with spoons, and it took a hundred times longer than it needed to.

Who the hell were they, anyway, to tell him what he needs to do to get better? Were they also kidnapped as a teenager? Did they also watch the person they pictured their future with get murdered without being able to stop it?

He'd gone to see a shrink once, and after she told him to just stop thinking about it as she loudly chewed her apple and scribbled nonsense on her paper (which, by the way, was just scribbles in the shape of the bowl of fruit she had on her desk), he never went to see another one again. Of course, his mother didn't know that. Not until now.

"You're not?" she asked, her voice softer than he'd expected it to be.

He shook his head. "Nope."

He had to admit, the silence was a surprise. She was probably trying to come up with everything she wanted to scream at him without her own head exploding.

It wasn't always like this.

Mom was usually level-headed and strong, and taught them there were other ways to deal with things than anger. It was probably one of the reasons he was so good at brushing everything off. Unfortunately, Peter going missing for three months didn't just affect him; it hurt the entire house, and things never went back to being the same.

He didn't bother to turn his head as his mom placed her hand on his shoulder.

"Peter," she began softly. Don't be fooled by her sudden gentleness, though. She still had everything she wanted to say. "I know that everything with Chantelle was hard-"

"Mom," he scoffed, standing up quickly. Of course. Of course she brought up yet another one of the lowest points of his entire goddamn life. "Just leave me alone."

"I just think that if you talk to someone," she pressed, but Peter didn't let her continue.

"I try to talk to you. You don't listen."

"I do, Peter, I do listen-"

"No," he laughed, "you don't." He yanked his jacket off the top of the couch in the middle of his room and pulled it over his shoulders. "Nobody wants someone that's fucked up in the head, Mom."

His mom's sigh was deep. "There's always someone out there."

"There was," he agreed. And he kept it at that. The sooner she realized he wasn't going to live up to her standards for the rest of their lives, the better. That wasn't him anymore. And it probably never would be again.

There was another beat of silence as he stared at the ground, but his mom clucked her tongue.

"No one said that getting your life together meant being with someone," she said shortly, brushing past him to walk up the stairs. "You're going back to that X-Mansion on Monday. I don't care if it's to work, I don't care if it's to talk to your friends, I don't care if it's to sulk in your room there instead of the one you have here."

"No, I'm not!" he shouted back, but she had already slammed the door at the top of the stairs. He couldn't think of a time that he rolled his eyes harder than he did in that moment. So much for fucking listening.