Chapter 1: The Photograph

Pietro "Peter" Maximoff knew he should keep still whenever he was waiting in a public place with his family, but sometimes Peter "Quicksilver" Maximoff also didn't like to listen to his own thoughts. Much less his adoptive mother's. Said woman was currently leveling her frustrated brown eyes on him, and trying to convey her annoyance through a vague hand motion.

Peter adjusted the cheap, black headphones around his neck, and shifted from foot to foot as they finally reached the checkout counter they had been waiting ages in. At least it felt like ages to the young speedster. He was used to moving, and moving with a quickness and agility that belied his "slow and dimwitted" look he usually wore upon his countenance. He hated lines, and he hated waiting. He wanted to go, go, go from the very moment he was born. At least he assumed he was like this from the beginning. He obviously couldn't recall his birth. Or his biological parents for that matter. He just figured that was how he always was. Ready to go.

"Peter." The woman he had come to know as his mother admonished him with a shake of her head. She ran a hand through her dark blond hair, and sighed laboriously. When she caught the eye of the cashier, she cast him her best put-upon smile, and shook her head. "Teenagers."

At their shared laughter, Peter rolled his eyes, but physically rooted himself to the spot as if suddenly frozen into a statue. His sister, whom he was also not blood related to, giggled at his obvious attempt to be a smartass. He grinned, and ruffled her hair, before resuming his side-to-side foot shifting. The constant need to move was like a tickling tendril of unconscious thought in the back of his overactive mind, and in the deepest marrow of his bones.

A kernel of an idea popped and blossomed in the impulsive teen's mind as he watched his mother finally pay for her purchases. She clutched the plastic bags in her thin hands, as if afraid a certain someone was going to swipe them from under her nose, and hurriedly shuffled towards the parking lot with her weight in items. His sister hummed a melodic tune as she skipped ahead of the two, and Peter couldn't hide his grin as he dutifully trotted behind.

When they reached the car, his mother unlocked the trunk and was in the process of loading it up when she cast a weary look towards her son. "What's going on in that mind of yours now, Peter?"

He purposely schooled his face into one of surprise at her question, and responded with nothing more than a bemused "Hmm?" The smirk playing at his lips did nothing to dissuade her initial train of thought: he was up to something. Again.

She narrowed her eyes at him, demanded they get in the car, and managed to start the engine before she realized that Peter hadn't followed her orders. Shocker, she mentally sighed. The silver-haired teen bent at the waist, and playfully tapped a beat on her window until she finally rolled it down. His grin didn't abate as he said, "Race ya home." He pulled the headphones down over his ears, pulled the goggles he kept in his back pocket out and over his eyes, before he pressed play on his Walkman.

"P-" she didn't get the rest of his name out before he took off in a blur of movement. Her blond hair whipped up, and tickled her face. She sat, annoyed, and ignored the stifled giggles in the backseat. She simply rolled the window up, and eased the car from their parking spot. This was, after all, not the first time Peter had suggested they raced each other home.

Peter arrived on the blackened welcome mat at the front of his home with the smell of burning rubber grazing his nose. He removed his goggles, and replaced the headphones around his neck, before mockingly wiping the soles of his melting sneakers on the mat. He then burst into movement again, flying inside the home and into the kitchen. He was halfway through nursing a generic brand of soda, flicking through the TV channels, and resting his sock-clad feet within the next few seconds when the sound of grandfather clock in the hallway chimed in the new hour.

He disinterestedly noted the time, before he realized what the time meant. It meant the punctual mailman would currently be sidling towards his front lawn, and looking around before cautiously placing the mail inside the infamous Maximoff family's mailbox.

Peter smiled fully. He loved when the mailman came.

He put on and laced his sneakers, finished his soda, turned off the TV and yanked the mail from the terrified postman's hand before the poor man could even fully remove it from his carrying bag. The teen was already flicking through the plethora of bills, letters and spam (tossing anything uninteresting to the side) and settling on a magazine with a skimpily-dressed woman on the cover before the mailman could even realize that he had been duped again.

The magazine itself was addressed to the old man in the next house down, but Peter figured he could blow through the magazine ten times, and have it in the rightful owner's hands before the postman could even start to open said neighbor's mailbox.

"Peter Maximoff!" His mother's sharp tone of voice cut through the near silence of the house as she slammed open the front door in a poor attempt to juggle her bags and enter the house at the same time. "Get up-" She blinked and looked down at the top of Peter's blue-tinted silver hair, as he suddenly appeared before her in the space of an exacerbated breath. "Here," she finished with a narrowing of her eyes, and a huff of annoyance.

"Hey, ma. Can I put this stuff away for you?" He scratched at his chin with the nail of his thumb. It took his mother a brief second, and the fading sound of a cabinet drawer being closed to realize he had already put everything away before claiming, "I don't mind helpin'."

She pinched the bridge of her nose, and closed her eyes. "You know that you're not supposed to that in public."

He frowned, and looked around the house. "This isn't public."

"You know what I mean, Peter."

He grinned, and stood on his tiptoes to place a kiss on the frustrated wrinkle on her forehead. "If I do my chores now, will that make it up to you?"

She absolutely knew that even if she bothered to form her lips into the shape of the word "Yes" that he would be done straightening up everything he was supposed to. When she opened her eyes, and released her nose from her grip, he was still grinning up at her. This time with a roll of paper towels being rolled and unrolled in his hands.

He disappeared, and reappeared without the paper towels but with what looked like a piece of old paper in his hands. He carefully unfolded it, and she was surprised at how steady his hands were. The paper turned out to be a torn, crease-worn, yellowed photograph of a young woman holding a fair-haired, cherubic-faced baby in her arms.

He held it up to her face. "I found this while I was cleaning. Who are they?"

She plucked it from his fingers, and carefully turned it over. She was afraid it would crumble into ash if she handled it too roughly. In an elegant, possibly female scrawl, the names Magnus, Magda, and Anya were listed on the far right of the photograph. Underneath was the word Vinnytsia. She frowned at the unfamiliarity of it. Maybe it was the location? She turned the photo back over and looked at the woman. She was smiling, and leaning into the side of a man. However, the jagged tear down the picture removed all of the man but his arm that was slung around the woman's shoulders.

She handed the picture back. "It was one of the few things the foster home sent over with you," she said when he looked back up expectantly. "It might be your biological parents." She shrugged, and turned away to start the process of taking everything Peter had just put away out, and putting them back in their rightful place.

"Cool," he murmured as he looked down at the photo. He could barely make out a tattoo on the man's forearm, and raced out of the kitchen without a further word. He scrounged the basement for a magnifying glass, and was hunched over the coffee table with the object pressed as close to his eye as it could physically get as he peered down at the exposed arm in the next second.

He still had trouble making out what it read, but the teen was sure it was a string of numbers. 714787? No, the number that looked like a 7 had a faint strike though it. Were the other "7s" possibly threes? Maybe even twos? 214782?

Peter tossed the magnifying glass off to the side, uncaring of the sharp metallic crack as the handle of the object struck the coffee table on its way down. He held the aged picture up to his dark brown eyes. Did the tattoo truly matter when the young, auburn-haired woman staring straight at him was possibly his biological mother?And what of the toothless, grinning baby with fair hair that was lovingly cradled in the woman's arms? Was that his sister? Was the inked forearm his real father?

Peter sighed, and rubbed at his eyes with the knuckle of his right index finger. He carefully placed the photograph atop the cluttered mess set on the table before him, and kicked his still sneaker-clad feet upon the couch and leaned back with a heavy sigh. He would need to sleep on the myriad of thoughts bombarding him, and hope that the dawn of a new day would bring with it a clarity to his never ending questions.

TBC...

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