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.
Within a second of confirmation, Jennifer felt a breeze shift some of her hair, accompanied by the soft fabric of Peter's band varsity jacket brushing against her bare arms.
"You're the guy that did all this?," he asked Charles with a frown, grabbing Jennifer's free hand and squeezing it gently in support as he continued. "You're the guy that brought her here?"
Jennifer knew that some small part of Peter wanted to thank Charles for allowing the two of them to meet, because in some twisted way, she felt the same, but there wasn't a chance in hell she would ever thank him, and it seemed that he wouldn't either. He was standing by her side, helping her through whatever you wanted to call this, reinforcing her confidence. Perhaps, if she wasn't so riled up at that moment, she might've even realised that he was trying to protect her from any more harm.
Charles looked back and forth between the two teenagers, trying to figure out what was going on. When he realised that staring at them wasn't getting him anywhere, he focused back on Jennifer. "What? I don't understand, what's going on? How are you here?"
"Dude! You time travelled her!!!"
There was one person in the room Jennifer didn't recognise, and he decided now to speak up for the first time since she entered the room. "Alright, I'm confused. What the hell is happening here?"
Turning her head, Jennifer glanced at the man and his two hair peaks. He didn't seem to happy to be there, bored even, and apparently he didn't like being left out of the loop either. He was right though – no one had any clue of what the large picture was, and it was all becoming a bit difficult to follow.
Reluctantly, Jennifer took a step back, releasing Charles' shirt but keeping a wary eye on him as he cautiously moved back to the middle of the room. She looked around, reassessing the situation. Hank was there, considerably less blue than the last time she saw him, currently standing off to the side and clearly having watched the scene unfold, but showed no signs of actually understanding what had happened.
"Well its obvious that you didn't have a change of heart and come looking for me, so why are you here?," she asked, constantly shifting her gaze from person to person.
Peter, having let go of her hand, feeling the tension in the room decrease, started tossing a ping pong ball up and down. "Yeah, who are you guys and what do you want?"
"We need your help Peter," the mystery man said, though he didn't really clear anything up. It was like he wanted to seem super ominous but was only succeeding in creating more questions.
"For what?"
"To break into a highly secure facility...and get someone out."
Jennifer frowned, pushing herself off the back of the couch and crossing her arms over her chest. "Prison break? You do realise that's illegal right? The person's probably in there for good reason."
Hank nodded, agreeing with her. "Oh yeah, there's definitely a good reason he's in there. I wouldn't break him out."
Charles and the taller man sent a glare towards Hank, who immediately shrugged in response.
"Who is it?," Jennifer asked, curiosity filling her. The three men didn't seem to like the man they were planning to break out of prison, so real question was why they were trying so hard to get him?
"I'm sorry, who are you?," mystery man asked, annoyance lacing his voice as he rested a hand on his waist.
"Who are you?"
"I asked first."
"And I asked second," she countered once again, making up for her lame argument with a confident stare that could probably make the boldest person rethink their place on the ladder. There was a silence. "So I'll ask again. Who are you and how do you know Pete?"
He chuckled at her attitude, low key impressed at how she didn't care about the weight of the situation. "I'm Logan, and Peter and I, we met...," he squinted as he did some mental maths, "twenty years from now."
"Twenty years for now? Like, future twenty years from now?" He nodded. "Fair enough."
"Fair enough?," Logan repeated, a bit surprised about how unsurprised Jennifer was. He had been expecting some dramatics, some failing to grasp the concept, but no, there was just an immediate acceptance. He looked over to Peter in hopes of receiving at least some acknowledgement of what he had just said, but he seemed too focused on Jennifer to show any signs of listening to the conversation.
Jennifer shrugged. "Yeah, we all have our own relationship with time travel."
"Um, no, we don't," Hank added from the corner, utterly confused, though no one paid any attention to him.
"So what? You're from the future? How come you know me but not Jenny?," Peter asked, worried about what the future meant if his girlfriend wasn't with him anymore. He received no answer, causing him to frown, a dimple appearing above his eyebrow that Jennifer had to fight the urge to poke. "And you want help to do a prison break? Why didn't you just go back before whoever it was was put in jail?"
"It's complicated, alright," Charles stepped in having recovered from his earlier panic, using a pair of sunglasses to pull back the hair that kept falling in his eyes. "Are you going to help us or not?"
Jennifer faced Peter, locking eyes with him. She didn't want to go anywhere his Charles, not ever, but she knew that Hank wouldn't be there unless there was a good reason for it, after all, he wasn't the type to break the law without cause. And Logan, well, he looked tired, like he had seen things he didn't want to, and if he was from the future then he must've came back to stop something terrible from happening.
She had said that it wasn't her place to safe the world, not after everything she had lost the first time around, but if they wanted Peter then there wasn't a chance in hell she was going to let him go alone. They were a couple, and that meant she was going to let Peter risk himself without her there to help the best she could, and she knew he felt the same.
"How do we know we can trust you?," he asked.
"Yeah," Jennifer added, turning to Charles. "How do we know you wouldn't stab us in the back?"
"Because," Logan started, tucking his sunglasses away in his pocket. "We're just like you."
He knew that wasn't what Jennifer meant. She knew that at least two of them were mutants, but it wouldn't be the first time mutants had gone head to head. She needed to know that they weren't going to be left high and dry when their job was done. She wasn't going to get that reassurance though, and Charles seemed more interested in convincing Peter than trying to understand how much he had hurt Jennifer.
"Show him," he encouraged Logan, purposely avoiding Jennifer's eyes that were burning holes in the side of his head.
Logan raised his right hand in a fist, clenching the muscles briefly before three bony claws pierced the skin between his muscles and extended until they were about twenty centimetres in length.
The two teenagers grimaced, Jennifer scrunching up her nose at the thought of the claws being broken, and Peter's upper lip curled up, slightly nauseous at the sight. "That's cool but it's disgusting."
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