☑ THE SHADOW | Peter Maximoff

e i g h t e e n

~ 𝐀𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐚 ~

When Amara woke up, she frowned as she realized that Peter's poncho was covering her body, and she turned around. Her heart lurched. Peter was gone.

Where'd he go?!

In a panicked frenzy, Amara scrambled out of the hole and looked around frantically, her hand in her hair and her power ignited. There were trees and forest and leaves and logs and nothing else and now she was alone with no one but her idiotic mutation to talk to, all because that fucking asshole got his mutation back and left her-

The flash of silver from behind a tree made the heavy breathing in her chest halt. Peter was sitting on a log not too far from Amara, his back turned to her and his posture hunched over. She swallowed down any and all of the emotions she was feeling, good and bad, relief and anger, and grabbed the poncho.

Internally, Amara yelled at herself. Peter was decent enough to not leave without her. Right? If he got his mutation, he would tell her, right? He wouldn't play another one of his idiotic pranks with her?

Peter turned around when she approached, and the corners of his lips turned up.

"Hey," he said, waving around a branch. "Look what I found."

Her expression was blank when she sat down on the log next to him, ignoring It and instead eyeing the berries hanging from the branch with caution.

"Don't worry," he reassured, giving her another smile. "They aren't poisonous. I've had a whole bunch of 'em and I feel fine."

Amara blinked and carefully reached forward to pick one off the branch. The berry was small and purple, and she rolled it around in her fingers tentatively. It looked harmless, but that didn't mean she trusted it. Peter, on the other hand...

Kahuna, he didn't leave us. I think that's a pretty good start.

She was still weary. He wouldn't do something like that, would he?

"How-" she cleared her throat as it cracked, and hesitantly looked up at Peter, who plopped three into his mouth. "How did you know they weren't poisonous?"

When nothing happened to him, she frowned at the miniscule fruit, then tempted fate. Amara put the berry into her mouth.

It was sour, and her tongue wasn't used to the taste of sour, so it made her entire face contort. She cringed at the sting, but eventually, the sour turned sweet, and she was able to swallow the berry down.

Peter laughed lightly, probably at the face she made.

"Jean bored us - well, me - with these facts when she was waiting for her turn in Frogger at the arcade," he chuckled, leaning his head back as he recalled the day. "I didn't think I was listening, but... yellow, green, and white berries are bad. These are neither. They don't have a pink stalk, their leaves didn't come in threes so there wasn't any poison ivy, and I did that thing where you squirt some on your hand to see if you have a reaction. Same thing by taste testing it and not actually swallowing."

Amara's eyes widened as she took another. "Wow."

"We had to eat at some point," he murmured with a small shrug.

Her head nodded as she took another berry. She was hungry.

"But the bush was kind of far away, so I broke off a branch and came back in case you woke up and-"

Amara waited for Peter to finish his sentence, but when it never came, she furrowed her eyebrows and looked up at him.

"Nevermind."