Brad Crawford couldn't remember a time when he hadn't seen things.
Later he would come to realise that having his abilities from such a young age was an advantage. Rosenkreuz teachers would complain about the bad habits such precocious cases displayed, and having to 're-learn' how to do things 'properly', but the truth was that anybody who had psychic talent from near birth had to learn control. Those who failed to reach some kind of accommodation with their abilities often went mad, killed themselves, or both.
It wasn't easy to see it that way, though, when that same talent caused other children to avoid him as 'that weird kid', or when it made his own parents slightly uneasy around him.
He was expecting it when two recruiters from Rosenkreuz showed up on his family's doorstep, offering a full scholarship to a private boarding school. His parents were thrilled, as it was far beyond what they could offer him in the way of education. They didn't stop to ask why a European private school would be showing so much interest in their nine-year-old American son. Brad didn't hold it against them; three days after he left, they would die in a mysterious house fire, and although he had looked, he couldn't find any way to prevent it without ultimately making things worse. So he said his goodbyes, and tried not to notice that they also looked relieved.
He knew that Rosenkreuz wasn't the 'wonderful opportunity' the recruiters made it out to be, that he was walking straight into a dangerous situation, but that was one thing foresight had taught him: that sometimes bad things had to be endured in order to reach the desired outcome. So he looked appropriately shocked and grieving when they told him of his parent's deaths, acted grateful for the 'home' they offered him, and set out to become a model student in every sense of the word.
There weren't many younger students at Rosenkreuz, because most talents manifested themselves at puberty, when hormones kicked in and bodies began to change. Brad assumed that already having his gifts would spare him from the difficulties most new arrivals seemed to experience in the wake of all these changes, but when he was eleven, all the careful control that he'd taught himself came apart.
His gift suddenly kicked into high gear, showing him visions almost constantly. Sometimes they were just flashes, brief glimpses of something that made no sense and sometimes, they left little bits of knowledge behind, things he could use. Sometimes it was like watching a movie, one that had started in the middle so that he had to figure out what had already happened. But the strongest visions came with sight and sound and even smells. It was as though one minute he could be sitting in class and the next he'd be in the middle of a fire-fight, with people shooting at him – and he was shooting back. And often, because they were so real, it was hard to distinguish visions from reality.
It was frightening and disorienting, but most of all it was dangerous. Rosenkreuz and their masters had no use for psychics with dysfunctional talents; student whose abilities were 'out of control' tended to disappear. Because his precognition had always seemed so biddable, they didn't watch him as hard as they did some others, but he was quietly desperate to avoid giving himself away. It was imperative that they continue to view him as useful and dependable, but despite his efforts, his grades began to suffer.
When he was held back one day after class, he was filled with dread.
"Bradley, I've noticed you are having some difficulty in class lately," Herr Mueller said, looking at him over the top of his glasses. "I'd like you to take this note, and report to the infirmary."
Brad swallowed and took the paper he was handed.
Herr Mueller smiled. "Don't look so worried. It's just a routine test."
They weren't the kind of words that would put any student at Rosenkreuz at ease, but Brad nodded, wishing fervently that he'd seen this coming.
He considered bolting as he walked through the corridors, heading for the infirmary. But even as he though of it, his mind's eye showed him dozens of probable outcomes for running away: like every time before, they offered death or worse. No, if he were to successfully escape Rosenkreuz and its masters forever, he needed to wait for the people and events he'd seen before. And they lay far ahead in the future, so presumably he would survive that long.
At the infirmary, a nurse took the note, read it, and passed him on to another nurse. She shone a light in his eyes, asked him if he'd been experiencing any headaches, then sat him down and proceeded to test his vision. Not anything to do with his abilities, as he'd feared, but his eyes.
After half an hour she nodded decisively, and opened a drawer, pulling out a pair of glasses. "Put these on, and read this."
He put them on, looked down at the page and blinked. The writing was suddenly clearer, more distinct. He hadn't even noticed, in his worry over other things, that he was starting to have trouble reading because the writing blurred when he looked at it.
"That is better, isn't it?" the nurse asked. "You're just a bit long-sighted; those should make it easier to read. Only wear them for reading, mind you – your eyes work fine the rest of the time."
Relieved, he smiled at her. She smiled back, patted him on the head like he was several years younger, and sent him back to his dormitory.
The next day, he sat in class staring at the teacher with his new reading glasses on. He'd already discovered that while they helped him with reading and writing, objects or people more than a few feet away blurred slightly, clean edges becoming just a bit fuzzy and indistinct. He wasn't sure whether or not they were supposed to do that, but guessed that this was probably why the nurse had cautioned him against wearing them all the time. Constantly taking them off and on during class was annoying, so he settled for slipping them down his nose a little, peering over the top of them to see anything written on the board.
Unfortunately, the current teacher wasn't writing anything on the board, just droning on and on about some historic battle, and repeating everything he'd read in the textbook chapter they'd been assigned the day before. Brad nudged his glasses up with one finger, watching as the portly figure at the front of the class blurred just a little, and thought of other things.
Then the world snapped into sudden focus.
He watched a skinny teenager with outrageous green hair sneer something at him, before turning around to dish out worse to a group of boys whose uniforms bore the banded cuffs of final year students. He watched as they bristled, but he stepped forward to lay a hand on a shoulder (taller, I'm taller, I must be older, there's a band on my cuff, too, and this kid really needs to eat more, he's just skin and bone) and the green-haired kid turned a startled look his way. Brad recognised him, although he'd always had orange hair before.
A blink of his eyes, and he was staring at the front of the class again with its gently blurred lines.
Thoughtfully, he took off his glasses, turned them over in his hands. While the rest of the room was clear enough, the writing in his textbook, open on the desk before him, turned fuzzy. He'd been wearing them in his vision, too, the feel of them a familiar weight across the bridge of his nose. He put them back on, and the rest of the world blurred.
But his vision of the future – something that certainly had nothing to do with his eyes - had been perfectly clear.
Brad smiled. The biggest danger posed by his visions was that he couldn't always distinguish what was real and what was not. This one had been fairly mild, but others were not. Still, as long as he remained aware of what was present and what was possible future, he could hide a lot of his visions from the so-called teachers. He didn't want to share everything he saw – if he did, chances of his own eventual freedom would disappear, especially once they realised just what it was that he was seeing. It was better that they underestimate him and his abilities.
And it seemed that, unknowingly, they had handed him a method of telling visions from reality. All he had to do was hold one simple fact in mind regardless of what he thought was going on around him. It might take a little time to get used to, and he'd need a few more visions to prove his hypothesis, but if he was correct, it should suffice until he once again re-established a greater degree of control over his abilities.
When the class was over, he didn't remove the glasses.