Born out of stress, a St. John obsession, and insomnia – expanded from a much shorter version with the same title. The St. John in here is the same one written in Only Human; his character history was influenced by Jenn and is a mix of movie-verse and the comics. Highly cynical.

First attempt at X-Men fanfic. Read & review, please ...


"You're special." That's what he told you when you first came to the school, you were special, you were unique, you were the next step of evolution. You were abnormal, but you somehow weren't.

Different. But not-different.

You didn't answer at first. You just held on tight to your lighter and tried to think about anything but the smell of burning flesh. You had to wonder if he'd ever been punched by norms for three hours straight or been dumped into a foreign country while his parents took off on the quickest flight out of the hemisphere, all because his genes had had one twisted sense of humor and chosen to manifest over summer vacation. You even thought about asking him if he'd ever known what it was like to be hungry and starving and eating out of the garbage because there was nowhere else to get any food.

You'd been thirteen six months before and you knew what it felt like to have fire warm against your skin and your back slammed up against a wall while people screamed at you that you were a freak. And you knew, damnit, knew what it felt like to have a hand around your throat suddenly let go as you convulsively flicked your lighter in an attempt to produce flame and then finally get a spark and let fire go straight for that guy's throat. And maybe that guy'd spent a week in the hospital with third-degree burns, but you really could have cared less because his buddies had found you long before the police could. And when they finally found you, they knew enough then to be scared of you just like all the other normals were and get that lighter out of your mutie hand before beating the crap out of you.

But he was old and you were young and he had to know better, right? And he watched you with those blue eyes and that heartbreaking amount of trust and he smiled and gave you his platitudes about how life would be better now and mutants and humans could live together in tandem with each other. You didn't have to be alone anymore, he said, and you speculated about those other mutants he thought were the same. The boy he'd assigned as your roommate with his cryokinesis and the kids who'd looked at you when he had brought you in the door of his school. They were clean and young and they smiled at you with their straight white teeth and they didn't know anything about blood and pain and being scared to death and running for so long ... they didn't know anything. Not a thing in the world.

So he told you you were special. And you looked at him with his bald head and pale skin and his confident smile and wheelchair. You wondered about him and how he could know so much and so little all at the same time and your fingers snapped the cap of your lighter on and off and on and off and on again in neat arcs of wariness and remembered pain. But he had that light of utter belief in his eyes, so you didn't do anything but nod and smile.

"Sure. Special."