A short something sappy I cut out of 'Friday Night' because it could never fit it into the pace and style of that fic. But even so still leave a review even if it's just a single sentence. :)

Monsters & Freaks

"Isn't space amazing, Leonardo?" Karai stared at the few stars that shone through the city's polluted air. It was nothing like the black starry sky back home in Japan but Karai learned to appreciate it nevertheless. Especially the strong little stars that managed to break through the wall of the orange haze.

Leo looked at the girl leaning on the concrete fence that surrounded the bare rooftop they stood on and fought minutes ago. Her oval face was illuminated in the artificial light that shone up from the street below. His gaze was stuck on her, far from the night sky she was staring at. There was something in the way she spoke that always caught him off guard. Or was it what she always said.

"Why do you call me by my full name so much? What's wrong with Leo?"

"Nothing." Karai shrugged. "I just like Leonardo better." She glanced at Leo from the corner of her eye only to see the boy quietly looking away. – "Your namesake was a great man who had a mind superior to even ours today," she spoke up happily and forced Leo to stare once more. "His ideas and inventions were so out of this world and crazy back then … but today we couldn't imagine a life without them," she talked with never before seen passion radiating from her. Her eyes suddenly shone like the stars above them and kindled like the warmest fire. Leo knew he could never grow bored of them. Even under all the exotic makeup and the shape of her cunning glares just the irises were holding enough to keep him lost in the interlacement of warm colors.

"He was a man who was born way before his time. An ununderstood and underappreciated outsider," she continued –"Kinda like you," and brought him out of his mesmerized state.

'Kinda like me?'

"Who knows," Karai continued with a new lungful of breath, after none of them broke the moment of silence, "maybe in the distant future, when we'll be all gone, mutants will live among humans like regular civilians. Monster and freaks with the real monsters and freaks."

At that Leo forced himself to pull his gaze away from her. He wondered who Karai thought as the real monsters and freaks. Neither of the answers were satisfying. The world isn't as dark and ugly as Karai likes to make it seem. It couldn't be. It shouldn't be. He looked at the stars; the universe; the infinity. Yet all he could imagine before him was the hatred in people's eyes at the look of him and his brothers, or any of their mutant friends for that matter. Even April looked at them like they were monsters the first time she laid eyes on them. It wasn't until they saved her – they've proven to her they were good that she allowed them closer. How could they prove that to the whole world?

"… I doubt that."

Karai was taken back by Leo's answer. She didn't expect him to say that. Not him. He was a wide-eyed, naïve, dorky leader who always saw the good in everything and everyone. –He even saw good in her. And if he could find that little that was kind in her blackened soul, then why couldn't he see it in the rest of the world?

Thick silence stretched across the rooftop like overly sweet honey and none of the two knew how to break it.

FIN