pietro & tommy | a child for a home
@kidquicksilver | new son of magneto
The office is busy.
They’ve put him - Tommy - in a room that reminds Pietro too terribly, too powerfully, of a police interrogation room, and he frowns as he hovers in the doorway. He watches the boy fidget and try to stay sat where he is, and...
Mmm.
Pietro opens the door, closes it behind him, and throws open the blinds of the nasty, grey little room, throws open the windows, and then he sits on the table they’ve put him at. He does this all at his own speed, and he searches for any hint of surprise, or relief.
He’s so... SMALL. Luna is of a similar age, but she’s an Inhuman, and things are different for her - or maybe it’s because of his speed. Who knows?
Pietro had seen the photographs of the accident, of Frank and Mary Shepherd each sprawled out in the ripped-out pieces of their nasty little car, drunk after returning home from a soirée... And how the idea of their child, alone at home, had apparently meant so little to them.
The boy already knows, of course - he’s waiting for a particular social worker. But Pietro got here first.
”Good morning, Tommy. My name is Pietro Maximoff.
I don’t know if anyone’s told you this before, Tommy, but you have something in your DNA called an X-Gene - you’re a mutant.
This mutation manifests in several ways. A heightened speed of perception, a heightened speed of movement - resistance of friction, a 95% calorific digestion, a heightened body temperature--”
He realizes he has lapsed into unnecessarily technical speech, and he stops himself. The boy looks like him. Perhaps that’s why Isaiah, a social worker, had called Pietro when he realized the boy was a speedster. Pietro and Isaiah do not know each other well, and it makes sense he might assume Pietro to be some illegitimate father of the boy. Why would one assume something different?
“In short, child, you run at superspeed. Your mutation, I would imagine, activated quite recently? Came in short bursts, and then was there, all at once?”
Pietro gives him a small, closed-mouth smile, soft and almost melancholy.
“I know, because I’m a speedster too.”
He pauses a single beat, and then says,
“I might point out the clock behind us. In all that I’ve said, not even three seconds have passed.”
He nods behind him: the clock is an ugly, beige thing, and to Pietro it seems as if the hands stand completely still. On Pietro’s wrist is an electric watch of his own, with his own method of measuring time filtering by through the milliseconds.
“Thoughts?”
