~ 𝐏𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐫 ~
"Peter? Is that you?"
The sound of his mom's voice when he opened the door made him curse. "Yeah."
"Could you take out the trash for me?"
"Yeah."
He sped down to his room once he was done, hoping she'd completely forget about him and do her own thing.
The newest addition to his growing collection of stolen arcade items was also his newfound favourite to play, the Heavy Metal Meltdown pinball machine. Unlike every arcade game known to man, pinball didn't have a pattern. It wasn't predictable and didn't have the same outcome every time. It made it a lot harder for him to lose interest in the game, even though his reflexes were still more than capable of keeping up with the random movements.
His high score was wicked good, too. He played with the same ball for almost an hour when he got it and only had to step away because Lorna asked him for help on one of her science projects.
Using the same quarter he always did, Peter booted up the game and sat down, preparing his mind to be numb for the next three hours. It was how he wanted it to be.
The sound of his mom's footsteps only ten minutes later made him groan. He didn't feel like talking.
"You've been lying to me."
Peter rolled his eyes and kept playing his game. There were a lot of things he'd been lying to her about.
"When was the last time you visited the X-Mansion?" she asked.
"Last week," he answered, reaching into his pocket to pull out a smoke.
"Really?" Her tone was accusatory, but he didn't flinch. He'd been on this side of an argument too many times to be worried. "So, it hasn't been six months?"
He shook his head. "Nope. Went last week. Talked about controlling emotions."
"Then why did Charles call to ask me why he hasn't seen you?"
He shrugged. "Must've been a different Charles."
"I'm being serious," she scoffed. "It'll do you some good to act that way, too."
Sure it would, but he couldn't be bothered enough to give it a try.
"You're lucky he's so concerned about you, Peter. He could have given up on you a long time ago. You need to respect him, and respect the time he takes to help you."
"All he does is tell me about how shit I am, Mom," Peter argued, letting the pinball fall and swivelling around to face her. "He doesn't help anything. He just asks how I'm doing, gets upset with me for not changing, and the conversation's over. I don't want to see or talk to him."
"Well, maybe if you got a job-"
He didn't care how over-exaggerated his groan was. "How many places do you want me to apply to? Even if I apply to every store in this fucking town, no one wants to hire a speedster kleptomaniac."
"There are more options than retail work, Peter! The diner-"
"Absolutely not."
"The bakery!"
"I will eat all of their food. Guaranteed."
"The post office! What can you steal from there?"
"The fucking mail, Mom, it's like goddamn Christmas morning!"
"You can cut grass! That's a job!"
"Yeah, and the machines they use to-"
"What about the X-Mansion?"
"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.
Angrily, Peter threw off his jacket, no longer needing an excuse to get out of his room. He slumped down on the seat in front of the pinball machine again and turned up his Walkman as loud as it would go, allowing his fingers to move for hours, hitting the same two buttons on either side of the machine and his points climbing higher and higher. He played until his hands couldn't take it anymore and his ass hurt like hell.
It was dark when he glanced out the window. His shower only took a minute and he was back on his bed, numbing every thought he had with his music. Mindlessly, he played with the ring on his pinkie and closed his eyes. What a waste of a day. What should've been sad was that he didn't care, but the thing was... he didn't care. Not anymore.
The bed dipped and a hand gently pressed against his shoulder, coaxing his eyes open. It wasn't surprising that he didn't hear anyone come down the stairs, but it slightly startled him nonetheless. Lorna's worried frown and creased eyebrows stared back at him.
Peter pulled off his headphones as she placed a bowl of something steaming on his nightstand. "Mom said you didn't eat today," she muttered. "She made chilli for dinner."
He nodded but didn't reach for the bowl. "Thanks."
Lorna stayed with him for a few minutes, the both of them sitting in a comfortable silence. Peter tried to keep his arguments with his Mom and Wanda out of Lorna's radar as much as he could. Just because he couldn't get along with them anymore didn't mean she couldn't, and he did want anyone to think anyone was picking sides. Lorna was only fifteen; she didn't need any of his shit on her.
"You know," Lorna whispered after a minute, effectively grabbing his attention. "I remember the day that you came home for the first time after living the summer in the X-Mansion."
Peter rolled his eyes and instantly glared at the door, already knowing why Lorna was down there. While Peter didn't like to bring Lorna into his shit, their mom sure as hell did. She tried to get Lorna to talk to him all the time, and he could always tell.
"Mom didn't tell me to do anything," Lorna said just as he stood up, and he rolled his eyes.
"Yeah, right." He continued his way to the stairs. He could never understand how someone could be so cheap and make the teenager do the dirty work. It made no sense.
"It's the truth."
"If she wants to tell me something," he muttered, "she can say it to my face. I don't need a messenger."
"I came down here because I found a picture."
Peter's hand paused on the doorknob.
"When you came home that day," she continued, even though he hadn't moved, "I remember thinking how I hadn't... I hadn't seen you that happy in so long. And that was strange to me, because you had always been excited to share whatever the hell came to mind, but this was different."
His head fell to rest against the door, and his hand gripped the doorknob tighter.
"There was a—a light in your eyes. And you'd talk about how amazing everyone was, and how unique all their powers were, and how—how you'd finally felt you found a place where you belonged."
Lorna sniffled, sparking something inside him and telling him to move. He moved back down the steps until he could see Lorna hunched over a picture frame, a gentle tear running down her cheek.
"You didn't mean it in a mean way. You were always going to love us. But this mansion..." She looked up at him. "This mansion was where you could finally just be you."
He shook his head. "Things are different now."
"How?"
"Because..." He sighed, sinking to the ground in front of her. He didn't want to say it was hard to walk down every hall without being reminded of someone that died five years ago, but it was. It was, and the X-Men weren't as much help as they thought they were. Everything about being in that place hurt.
There was only so much he could take, and going back seemed like it would be the tipping point.
But his heart sank as he watched the tears well in Lorna's eyes. He hated it when Lorna cried because of him. She never did it in front of him, but he'd heard her talk to their mom before. He'd heard her say that he was different and she missed him. That she was scared he was never going to be the same.
He'd never had the courage to tell her he didn't think that would be possible.
"Peter," she cried, putting the picture frame in his hands. It was a good photo; just him and the rest of the X-Men, smushed together for a group picture taken a few days after the Apocalypse incident in Cairo. "They're your family, too. They love you, too. I know they hurt you, but so did Mom and Wanda, and I-I just... I just..."
He couldn't take it any longer. He pulled her from the bed and into his lap, where he let her clutch his shoulder and sob into his shirt. Peter hid his own tears in her hair.
"I'm scared," she said. She said she was scared. She said she was scared as her body trembled against his, small and fragile and way too young to need to be thinking about anything like this. No teenager should have to worry about the well-being of their older siblings.
He really was just a fuck up. He could never do anything right.
Her voice was muffled by his shirt as she sniffled and whispered, "I'm scared, Peter. I'm scared that it's not gonna get better and I'm going to lose you, and I don't want to lose you like we lost Dad. I don't want you to hate us and leave us and never come back-"
"Hey, hey—listen to me." His arms pulled her back enough to get her to look into his eyes. He hated letting her see him cry, but he had to let her know he was serious. This wasn't a joke to him. "I'm never going to leave you."
His thumbs wiped the tears on her cheeks as she stared at him, her cheeks flushed and her hair a mess.
"I know the men in this family don't exactly have the best track record. Your dad's an asshole. My dad's a clinically insane asshole." His shoulders relaxed when Lorna choked a laugh through her tears. "But I can promise you that you're going to be the one to leave me. You're going to go off to smart school just like Wanda. And you're gonna do the most amazing things. Grow into the most amazing person anyone has ever seen."
He knew he was right. How could he not be? Lorna was the picture perfect girl. She had the best grades in her class, she was the kindest person he had ever met... her future was brighter than the sun itself.
Peter's eyes slipped closed as he muttered, "And I'm always gonna be your loser brother that's still living in mom's basement."
He chuckled lowly to himself. He was probably going to end up that embarrassment of a sibling that she only sent birthday cards to and tried her best not to mention him to her coworkers and kids. He was dreading the day he was going to lose her because she realized he wasn't worth her time anymore.
Lorna's forehead fell back to his shoulder. "I don't think you're a loser."
And there it was. Lorna could find the best in everyone. Even her poor excuse of an older brother. Peter didn't think even his younger self before Russia had that much optimism.
"Please go to the mansion," she mumbled.
A deep sigh shook his chest. The worst part about all of this was that she knew how much it would hurt him to go. She knew how it was going to feel walking through those halls. She knew he was probably going to end up home faster than he had the last time he left.
Maybe she didn't know exactly what it would feel like. But she had a good imagination.
"If it helps, you're still my favorite X-Men."
Peter chuckled. It was embarrassing to admit that it did. But only a little.
"Please, Peter."
He swallowed thickly. Even he didn't know what the hell he was walking into. "Alright."
Lorna sniffled and huddled further into his embrace. "Thank you."
All Peter could do was nod. He could handle being a disappointment to the entire world.
What he couldn't handle was letting his baby sister down.
*****
w/c: 2665
a/n: thank you guys so much for being so patient!! more to come soon!! i promise!!!! xxxx