AUTHOR's NOTE:

Hi everyone! I just wanted to give you all a heads up that I decided to fix up and repost this story. Everything is pretty much like how it was before, but I just really wanted to add a few things that I felt would make the story feel a little more "whole". Not to mention, some of my misspellings and such were really bothering me..

-Nirvannah

DISCLAIMER: I do not own anything X-men.

CHAPTER 1 - Expected tragedy

It was past midnight when I got the call telling me Lydia was dead due to an intentional overdose. All I remember feeling was disorientation and total numbness. It finally happened.

I couldn't even shed a tear. She had been gone for so long, it felt as though she already was dead and the fact that she killed herself, it wasn't surprising at all. She had been at Belle Brook Asylum for 2 years. Lydia was my foster mother. She had adopted me when I was 10, I was tossed around foster care since I was two..but Lydia finally adopted me, she was the only person I could identify as a sort-of parental figure. She had just lost her husband, a wealthy banker, she was lonely and desperately wanted a kid…about a year later that's how she came to adopt me.

Things were-sort-of good at first, but when I had just turned fifteen when she started losing it, she had been facing depression for the longest time, but only then did it get really bad. I had come home from school only to discover her passed out on the kitchen floor with an empty bottle of wine and an empty bottle of pills. I was able to call 911 in time they saved her..I thought it would be a one time thing, but a year later it became a constant game of trying to save her life..the hospital had eventually declared her clinically insane and given me the decision to admit her to Belle Brook. I did. It killed me to watch her continuously descend into weakness, it killed me that she didn't care about me..by trying to kill herself, she was willing to abandon me like everyone else had. So when she was taken away, I never once went to see her. Even with her gone, I lived comfortably in the Victorian townhouse, my expenses were covered by my trust fund set up by Lydia when she was still relatively sane.

I went to the same prep school I had been going to since I was 10. With Lydia gone, I was safer..safer from being discovered…if I had a bad headache, she wouldn't be sucked into a whirl wind of chaos, since she was gone. No one ever suspected a thing, I was good with secrets, and I guarded mine with my life. Although I did use it for personal gain, I made sure never to have it draw attention to me. My powers, my mutation..that was a secret I had been keeping from an anti-mutant world. What are my powers? Well, I had been gifted with three particular talents. Since I was 8 had been able to sense people's emotion in regard to their thoughts..it wasn't telepathy since I could never actually read someone's mind, but it gave me a good idea. Then I was also able to disillusion people, create alternate visual scenarios in their heads. And lastly, I was gifted with invisibility, although I could only do it temporarily and for brief periods of time, it was quite handy for sneaking around.

It was all useful tools, but terrifying at first, especially as an 8 year old, yet I managed to control it and most importantly, never tell a soul. Even that young I knew that the world wouldn't take to kindly to my abilities. Even Lydia.

The only slip I have ever had was when I was nine, a year after my discovery…I had a horrible headache at the social worker's office, I was with one social worker at the time…unitentionally, I affected her vision, she started seeing images, I couldn't even understand most of them…but what I did make out from a few of them were memories of my younger years..the different foster parents, social workers, teachers, acquaintances..and random faces I could never name. When the incident finally passed she was in hysterics, she was disoriented and confused..then pointed at me and called me a "demon child". I never saw her again, a new social worker was put in charge of feeling of loneliness plagued me nearly every single day..i tried to distract myself by creating visualizations of a life where I had a family, a life where I had parents, grandparents, siblings and cousins..basically, a life. A life I knew I would never have in the real world…I never knew what family was..

I often tried to remember what my life was before the foster care..Afterall, I had been 2. I had spent 2 whole years with someone who may have actually loved and cared for me. What happened to change that?

A year ago I went back to the foster care center to inquire about my documents, maybe find some relatives. They told me that I was found outside a burning house, there were no survivors but me. The foster care center attempted to contact any living relatives, but because no one knew who exactly lived in the house, and any documentation there was of who inhabited it was burned along with it..it was basically impossible to figure out who I was. The only thing I had with me was a silver bracelet with the name "Avery Erika" engraved onto it, so that was the name the foster care center gave me when they started rebuilding documents for me.