Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters from this story except for my own O/C (Halley/ Andie/ Comet), I'm not making any money off this story, and it's just for fun (mine, and hopefully, yours!).
Rating T, I'll change it if I need to. At the moment the story is pretty mild, but may later venture into more mature themes and/or intimate moments between characters.
A note on the setting: This story is set after the end of X-Men Evolution. Obviously, there is still some tension between the X-Men and the Brotherhood, as well as between Mystique and Magneto etc., but after bonding over taking down Apocalypse, no one is really at each other's throats. The main issue facing the mutants is what the public thinks of them, and as usual, learning about their own powers.
"No, I'll serve, you just eat your pie", said Daniel, his eyes never leaving the pretty brunette who had just walked into the bakery. Daniel ran to the counter, Halley just shrugged, and continued chowing into her lunch as she rolled her eyes. Soon after, a heard of new customers strolled through the plastic door strips, and towards the pie warmer. Halley franticly wiped pastry flakes off her face before walking swiftly to take her place behind the counter, the look of professional-pleasantness never leaving her face, even as she served an infuriating couple. As the customers left the shop, Halley slumped against the counter, vowing never again to recount the entire list of available pies to a customer. It had been a long day.
"See ya later", said Daniel as he turned into his street. She waved goodbye to him, and kept walking towards her house, her shift at the bakery finally over. Despite an overwhelming sense of tiredness, coupled with aching arms from carrying home her own body-weight in bread, she was becoming increasingly anxious. Her eyes flitted around the street, scouting for other walkers, or even open windows on houses. Anyone who might see.
Is this the moment? Should I do it now?, she contemplated. No, she decided. It wouldn't make her trip home easier, only faster. No, I'm doing the right thing, she thought. I have to try to live normally. To be human. I need to ration my powers, I don't want to rely on them.
No one had ever noticed when she used her mutation, and no one, even in her own family, knew she was a mutant. And because of this, it had occurred to her that maybe everyone on Earth had the same power as her, but that nobody talked about it.
But it seemed so unlikely… it was so powerful, that if anyone knew, there would be laws against it.
Once she had locked the front door of her house, she ran upstairs and turned on the shower. She stepped into the hot jet of water, and felt the pulse of time running through her mind. She closed her eyes and focused on it, thinning out the stream of blue time energy until it became a mere trickle. She opened her eyes and stared in awe at the suspended droplets of water that had previously been gushing in a blur from the shower head, now very slowly making their way towards the tiled floor of the shower. With great effort to mover her stuck limbs, she swiped her hand through the droplets, sending them spinning towards the shower curtain. She once again reached into the blue stream of energy inside her mind and cut it off completely, making time stand still.
She opened her heavy eyelids, and with a huge surge of effort, forced herself to move out of the shower and towards her clothes. Whenever she stopped or even slowed time, she found that it became much harder to move, at least until she had built up some momentum. This was because not only did stopping time stop the movements of everyone and everything around her, but froze her own as well. She could save herself from injury by stopping time, and moving herself out of harm's way. Some anomalies she had discovered in her experience with stopping time included that she didn't get tired when moving whilst time was paused, and that she didn't need to eat or drink either. She also assumed that she didn't age whilst time was paused, as she didn't look any older than 17, although she had spent many more years on Earth than her birth certificate suggested. She reasoned that she had probably, over the course of her life, spent an extra 6 years in a time-paused state, catching up on work, and travelling.
Yes, travelling was something she did a lot of while time was paused. She simply ran wherever she wanted to go as she never tired, even overseas, as oceans didn't swallow her up whilst they couldn't move. Of course, she occasionally used her powers to exact revenge, undoing buttons and zippers, cutting bag straps and tying shoelaces together to cause chaos when she restarted time, or simply to give herself extra time to work on assignments, or even to give herself an extra thirty minutes mid-exam.
She didn't remember the exact moment when she had first realised her powers could be pushed further. The first moment in which instead of stopping the flow of time, she kept it open, and pushed against it, watching in horror as the world began to move backwards, moving back through time. The first time she tried it, she had reversed almost an entire week of her life. After that point, she had never reversed more than a few hours at a time, usually to reverse saying something particularly stupid, or to take a test again, or simply to have another chance to make a first impression. Because of her power to undo her mistakes, Halley often acted recklessly for no reason, but she was quite scared of that power, the power to undo history. She had also tried skipping forward through time, but fast-forwarding through life didn't have quite the same appeal as reversing it. She supposed she could see far back into history, or far forward into the future if she wanted too, but she was extremely terrified of being stuck there, or changing the future accidentally.
She had seen an advert for Xavier's School in a small newspaper called 'The Right Times', a paper that encouraged stories from all walks of life. She had researched the school, and although there was very little about it on the internet, she suspected it was a school for mutants. Her home was a lonely place, her mother and brother were unaware she was a mutant, because she had good control over when she used her power. As long as she was standing in the same place before she paused time, and after she started it up again, no one was any the wiser about what had just taken place. Halley's brother often abused her and her mother, and Halley hadn't attended school in 3 months due to chronic depression. Because of this, she wasn't scared of leaving her life behind and moving on to live in the world of mutants. She was so tired of living in fear of her own powers. Maybe, with the school's help, she could do some good with her mutation.
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