A/N: This story is dedicated to my best friend, Grade. A. Gen, for being the one sitting next to me in a dark theater and squealing in unison with me when Cumberbatch's face came onscreen. And just being generally awesome. :)

This is just the introductory chapter. Things will pick up after this.

I hope y'all enjoy!

One

Every side of a story is different.

When I was a child, things used to be so black and white. You were either in the wrong or you weren't. You were in trouble or you weren't. You were a good kid or you weren't. There were distinct lines carved into everything I did and, over time, those lines blurred.

They called us traitors because of that. And of this crime, perhaps I am guilty. But then again, perhaps not. I leave it up to you, my reader, to decide.

I was dying when they came to me. I pretended to listen to a long bedside speech by their representative, some man in civilian clothes, and when they held a paper next to my bed for me to sign, I was only just barely still conscious and they had to guide my hand to squiggle a few wavering letters before my hand went lax and I found I simply didn't care anymore.

And, to be quite honest, I thought that they had just preached me a sermon on funeral rates and I was signing an agreement for the price of my coffin. Because I was aware that I was going to die. There was a price tag on my life and I had become too expensive to waste any more effort on.

You see, I was sick. It was some exotic disease from outer space that no one could really pronounce the name of and exceedingly rare and, by the time it had been discovered, I had only a few weeks to live. And then, suddenly, quite suddenly, my life didn't matter anymore. Not my perfect grades, not my advanced schooling, not my considerable brain power. I was suddenly worthless because I had something growing inside me that had been discovered too late to be taken out.

So you see - assuming that the last words I heard were a final attempt to swindle me out of whatever little money I or my parents had left was really not that illogical. And I did not know that I would wake up again.

Needless to say, when I did wake up again, I was beyond shocked.

It felt as though something had sucked me of whatever strength I'd had left and then replaced it with an energizer or a taser shock. The result left me shaky and breathless, but able to do so much more than I ever had before. And I was left somewhere in a hospital bed to "recuperate" until they could figure out what to do with me next because, damn it all, I was a living miracle and I was too "important" to be "tampered with."

Bullshit.

I had been an experiment. They had perfected a rejuvenation serum on able-bodied and healthy humans, but they had never gotten a sick person to respond to the treatment and, as such, they were all extremely excited.

"They" were the lab rats. I never did learn their names. They were hardly important and I never really met them. I was stuck in a regulation hospital bed with monitors hooked up to me and every so often, one of them would come in to check my levels and say how very exciting this all was. That's hardly something you're supposed to tell someone you won't let out of a hospital bed, but it hardly stopped them.

Getting a second chance at life was really rather anti-climatic. You think that you're never going to be ready for death, but you start to understand that death is coming to you anyway and you succumb - and then, suddenly, it isn't there anymore. You're still alive. And you're left wondering what else there is to do because you've just been confronted with your own worthlessness and your inevitable death - and then you're supposed to just keep on living normally with so much power running through your veins where there was once weakness and sickness and idiocy?

They never understood us.

Because, of course, I found out eventually that there were more of us than just me. The Federation hadn't realized at that point that too much of a good thing is really a bad thing after all and they just kept making more. I met my "brothers" and my "sisters" on the day that I was released from my room and taken down to the mess hall.

I had of course been informed by a balding man in a white coat that I was part of something they called The Program - which was really quite an original name for it - but it hadn't sunk in.

Until I saw them all, that is. And then when I did see them all sitting in front of me, wearing identical blue jumpsuits and eating obediently from their mess trays like a herd of munching, docile cows, it suddenly all became real.

That was when there were only about twenty-five of us. At that time, all of the others had joined voluntarily to be part of a revolutionary scientific experiment that "could change the course of the universe forever!" as our balding doctor was so fond of saying.

So I became one of them. Not only in clothing and strength, but also in communication. At first, I was the newcomer. But gradually, after a few weeks, I was accepted into their midst.

But there was one of us that was first, that was slightly different. He managed to stand apart and, eventually, he gained our unending loyalty.

Because this isn't a story about how I lost myself and was forced to become part of the crowd. This is a story of how I met, fell in love with, and defended the man that would someday become infamous for being cruel, harsh, vindictive, stone-like.

This is a story of how I found myself.