I'm surprised at the response that this story has received; it's more than I'd expected, that's for sure, and I'm eternally grateful for it. As I mentioned previously, chapters will be far between (and school isn't helping the case much) but I'll never drop this story. I have big, big plans for it.

I just wanted to touch on a small pet peeve here for a moment. When writing what I refer to as "Lil Jack" ("Big Jack" is in this chapter) I looked into how I should write his speech pattern; some research was done. What I found was highly interesting.

Everyone has read stories before where a young character uses a different speech pattern than adults, given their age. Here's a fact on it: all of those kids using "w"s instead of the "r" sound? Yeah, they must have speech impediments, because in a case of normal development children learn the "r" sound before "w." That means that if they're saying "Oh, weally?" or the like, then they need a speech therapist, desperately. Also, kids speak in at least small phrases by age two, but not full, advanced, compound, complex sentences. The worse case I've ever seen is a supposed fsix year old speaking like this ("w"s instead of "r"s and complicated, compound sentences) while he explains to his divorcing parents that they can alternate custody of him – yes, I'm serious. That's the most blatant case I've found of someone who needs to go hang out with little kids before writing them.

But what I'm getting at here is (and I haven't had any comments about this as of yet, but I like to be paranoid and preemptive), if you think Jack's speech pattern as a kid is too advanced or too simple, you can tell me, but give me actual facts to back it up. Look things up first; don't just rely on bad fanfiction you've been reading. That's all I wanted to say; sorry for wasting your time, people! ;D

By the way, this chapter, the start of the "present," begins well after the events of Watchmen and after the first X-Men movie (and, consequently, X-Men Origins: Wolverine). It could be said that this starts as an alternate beginning to X-Men 2, because I don't plan to follow canon after the first movie ('cause I don't really care about Jean Grey, as you'll see). Also, Jack accidentally seems to come off extra-emo this chapter - that's not his normal personality, he's just being paranoid and a bit of a jerk due to stress and a lack of human interaction of late. Just so you know (I hate it when people write their "totally awesome kickass emo OC").

Disclaimer: I do not own X-Men or Watchmen or any of their characters – they belong to their respective owners. I do own Jack and the situations used here.

Jack Blake was running for his life.

He wasn't a stranger to this, to running. He had been running for quite some time now. Running from social services, from the police, from his school, from his past. From himself. He was an expert on running away from things.

But running for his life was a new one.

Frankly, he had no idea who – or what – he was running from. He had been sitting in a diner this morning when this had all started. As he had sipped at his coffee, a customer had entered the establishment. At first he hadn't thought anything of it; what was another person to him? But the person had walked in and frozen upon spotting Jack. The teen had felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand at alert, and he barely repressed a shiver. He hated being watched when he couldn't watch back.

Jack had ignored the sensation and the man; he could recognize the gender from the heavy sound of boots on the floor. When the man took a seat next to him at the counter, he continued ignoring him in favor of picking at his waffles. He did love whipped cream on his waffles.

The man ordered coffee and the house special, whatever that was. Jack would have checked the menu, but that would have made an awkward situation. How did you explain to people that you weren't blind if they shut up? Not very easily, that was for sure. And with everyone's new fear – well, he was content to remain hidden behind the large, thick black sunglasses he constantly wore and let them do all the talking.

Jack had been on the road for over a year by now, living off of what Eddie had left him. It wasn't easy, being fifteen and alone in the world, but he liked to think that he pulled it off quite nicely. As long as he acted like he belonged, he could get away with acting as an eighteen-year old because his glasses hid most of his face. Being fifteen in actuality made things a little harder for him. Fifteen and a half, he reminded himself in a sing-song voice.

Yes, fifteen and a half, and he had spent his last year running from absolutely nothing. He was doing a damned good job of it, if he did say so himself. Until the man had showed up.

He had continued ignoring the man, keeping up the pretense that he couldn't see him, and in his defense he couldn't: the diner was a pretty noisy place. So he was surprised when the man spoke.

"You look familiar, kid."

The voice was gruff and harsh, and it had just the slightest bit of a rasp that indicated a smoker of some sort, if his finely tuned sense of hearing wasn't off – and it never was. It was almost vaguely familiar, but he wasn't going to give the man that satisfaction. Just because someone seemed like he had a familiar voice didn't mean Jack wasn't remembering someone he would rather forget. For all he knew, this was an enemy.

"I doubt it," he replied softly, keeping his gaze firmly downward. He probably couldn't see through the haze of the diner anyway, but if he attempted the man would know he could see something, and he wasn't so sure he wanted this man to know more information about himself.

The man chuckled lightly as if he was amused by Jack's behavior. The teen did his best to keep from stiffening in anger. It was best to remain calm and collected, like nothing this stranger did could affect him.

"No, I'm pretty sure I recognize you. You look a lot like someone I saw once in a photo."

Jack seriously doubted this. He wasn't in any recent photographs that he could remember, and there weren't many of him as a kid, not that anyone would likely recognize him from one. Eddie and Walter weren't big on them, which was why the only picture he had of Eddie was from his old Minutemen days, when he was in the full original Comedian costume, and Walter – the only unmasked photos he had of his oldest brother came from his prison files.

Wade had been the one who took photographs, and his were lost with him somewhere in the jungles of the vast Earth. The military would never tell him exactly where his middle brother had been when he had disappeared. The only picture Jack had of him was from the front page of his military file. It wasn't much better than Walter's.

The man continued, oblivious to Jack's inner turmoil. "You see, I was at this academy recently."

"Fantastic," he interjected in a bored tone, but the man carried on.

"And at this academy, there were a few 'class pictures' in the front hall. Now, the school doesn't have too many students, so after being there for a while I learned most of their names, or at least knew their faces. I was looking at last year's picture, and there was this kid with black hair who I had never seen before. I asked around, and apparently he was some runt who had went running off in the dead of night, and nobody had seen or heard from him since. Now, imagine my surprise when I come up here on a completely unrelated trip and happen across a guy in a diner who looks just like the kid I saw in the picture. The kid's name was Jonathan Blake. Sound familiar?"

Jack gripped his coffee mug so tightly he thought it might crack. "I'm not a runt," he hissed to himself at a level too low for human ears to pick up on. Only Eddie ever called him a runt, and this man was definitely not Eddie. He may have had the same overly confident, gruff tone and given off the same scent of cigars, but this was not his adoptive father.

"Don't like being called a runt, Jack?"

He jolted and his control slipped in surprise. The sounds of the diner hit him in a harsh tidal wave, like someone had clapped a pair of giant cymbals around his head.

In the kitchen the cook was shouting for more hash browns but his assistant was on his phone with his girlfriend, trying to make her believe that he didn't cheat on her; in his frustration the cook banged two pans together, the noise like a two-by-four to the head. A trucker on the other side of the diner was eating noisily, his fork and knife clicking together against the porcelain plate in an incessant ring and ding, each soft sound drawing a wince from the teenager.

The worst was the young family near the door. He had heard them tell their waitress that they were from Ontario, and were heading to Vancouver. Their infant son was screeching his hunger to his mother, who was desperately trying to calm him down, and thus ignoring her four-year old daughter who was wailing on and on about not wanting to sit in the car anymore while her husband argued with his secretary on his cell phone about if she had booked them the proper hotel suite.

The entire thing made Jack want to scream. Instead, he shut his eyes and gritted his teeth, doing his best to regain his control. If he opened his eyes, all he would see would be a writing mass of color bouncing across his vision like a kaleidoscope on steroids. Not even the close-by lenses of his sunglasses would be visible.

"You okay, kid?" asked the man next to him.

Jack flinched. Was he okay? He had thought he was, at least until he had let his control slip. But was he okay? That question had so many facets. Monetarily, yes, he was fine, and his physical health was golden on a long-term basis that ignored his current migraine and vision loss. Socially, he was lonely and unable to admit it due to his stubborn streak that he had somehow gained from Eddie. Mentally he wondered if he was a bit unstable like the doctors had started saying about Wade when he was in the military, like those accusations that had flown after his "disappearance" that had been more than a little suspicious. Emotionally he was a flaming train wreck with no survivors that was hit by a jumbo jet full of school children; not such a good place to be.

So was he okay? No, probably not in the least. But he wasn't going to tell some stranger that.

"Fine," he said through gritted teeth. "I'm just fine."

"You don't look fine to me."

"Yeah, well you don't know me. This is my happy face."

"Well damn, kid, now I wanna know what your pained face is."

Jack paused and his eyes narrowed behind his sunglasses. "That mean you gonna experiment?"

The man looked at him like he was insane, not that Jack could see because he was still refusing to turn his head. "I don't know who you've been hanging out with, bub, but that's not my style."

The teen relaxed, but barely. "You never know. When you're all you've got, you can't be too careful."

The other nodded, and the pair was silent. When the waitress next came around, Jack asked for his bill and paid with a credit card – he couldn't very well pull out his cash and start counting out bills, now could he? He could've lied and said that there were raised parts or something of the sort on the bills, but Jack was feeling lazy and this new guy was creeping him out.

"You leaving?" the man asked. Jack nodded sharply, intent on ignoring him as he jammed his recently returned credit card into his pocket. Oh, how he loved that nobody questioned a fifteen-year old with a credit card anymore. Maybe it was because of his clever disguise, or maybe it was just because society was filled with a bunch of spoiled brats. He was betting on the latter.

To Jack's dismay the man followed him out of the diner, slapping down a wad of cash on the counter and gulping down his scalding coffee in one go. He sped up his walking, keeping his head down with his chin tucked into the collar of his sweater as he shoved his hands in his jacket pockets. It was frigid for early fall. Great, one more reason to hate the season.

The man clapped a hand on his shoulder, drawing a flinch from Jack. "I never introduced myself. I'm Logan." He thrust a hand into Jack's view. After a moment with no reply, the man – Logan – chuckled to himself.

"I know you can see it, kid. You're not blind. Your steps are too sure to be blind, especially seeing that you don't have a cane or a dog to help you."

Slowly, Jack's head moved upwards. "You're wrong."

Well, a little, but actually he was right. Jack wasn't blind, not in the traditional sense. He could see perfectly fine – it was just that what he saw wasn't the same as what filled most people's vision, and his own personal sights tended to block out the real world. And when you couldn't see the world everyone else saw, you might as well be blind.

Logan cocked his head to the side, though Jack still refused to look at him and had no chance of seeing it, though in the calm of nature his vision had cleared somewhat, only bombarded with the violent, jumping lines of color from the nearby road when the occasional vehicle drove down it.

"No, I don't think I am. You can see, but something's getting in your way. Something to do with why you froze up in there."

"What're you saying?" If that man was even implying what he thought he was, Jack would be out of there like a shot. He wasn't getting his ass handed into the government now, registration be damned.

"You know what I'm saying. You're a mutant." There was more to Logan's statement, a certain "like me" that would have made the whole following situation null and void, but Jack, true to his self-promise, was off running before Logan could finish.

Logan shook his head. Chuck better thank him for this – he was out here on his own soul-searching (or some other crap like that) trip; bringing back the kid would be his present to Chuck, if anything. He wasn't obligated to do anything, but damn it, the kid was definitely the runaway from the mansion, and he smelled so familiar. Something about the woods came off of him, and it wasn't just because that had been where the kid was hiding. It was scent-deep, blood-deep, and it was strikingly familiar in a way Logan would rather forget.

With a sigh and a muttered curse, he ran after the kid. His bike, or rather the motorcycle he had commandeered from One-Eye, had better be in that parking lot when he got back.

Jack snapped his fingers, watching a set of short purple waves float up through the mass of green, red, and blue forest sounds, returning to him quicker than usual. Deftly he jumped over the log set in front of him and continued on, snapping his fingers periodically and watching their shape and return to keep from tripping.

But he was so busy staring at the ground, trying not to lose his step that he didn't realize he was running head-first into a large maple tree that had grown in the center of his chosen path until it was too late. He fell backwards with a yelp of pain and a grunted curse, just barely catching himself on his forearms before he hit his head on another nearby tree.

The young mutant groaned as his arm muscles absorbed most of the shock from the fall. He struggled to pull himself to a sitting position, desperate to continue on, to get away from this person who threatened his current sense of "normal."

It seemed that it was not to be. As soon as Jack forced himself to a stand, wincing at the pain in his head and the vertigo that his already-skewed view of the world was experiencing, a hand clapped down on his shoulder with a vice-like grip.

"C'mon kid, I don't plan on hurting you, but I don't wanna have to chase you down again. Could you at least make things a little easier on me and just stay put this time?"

Jack winced but stopped his struggling, and instead cocked his head to the side, both to get a better feel for Logan's location and in thought. "How did you find me so easily? Was I really that loud and obvious?"

Logan laughed. "Nope, but you've got a fairly distinct smell. Sorta familiar; I probably recognized it from Chuck's place."

"Chuck? You mean Professor Xavier?" Jack turned around, shoulder still captive to Logan's grip.

"'Course I do. What, you didn't figure it out yet that I've been to the mansion?"

"Uh, no, I guessed that, but I've just never heard anyone call the professor that before."

"Well, I thrive on originality. Anyways, how about we sit down here and you tell me exactly why you freaked out on me back there."

Jack stiffened at the idea of a tell-all with a gruff stranger, and began scrambling for escape again. He didn't expect Logan to be so strong, though.

The man watched Jack in amusement as the teen twisted and writhed, trying in vain to pull his shoulder from the other's grip.

"I can do this all day, bub. Ready to settle down yet?"

The boy continued to struggle until Logan got bored and sat down on a rock, dragging the flailing boy down with him. "Sit," he commanded as one would a dog, and to his surprise the boy finally complied.

"So," Logan said after a long moment of silence. "What's your story, runt?"

"Long and uneventful. And I'm not a runt." It was much too familiar, much too similar to Eddie for Jack to be comfortable.

"Hmm, beg to differ on both accounts. But mostly, I think your little tale is at least somewhat interesting, right? I mean, kids don't just go running off from Xavier's everyday."

"I had my reasons," the teen muttered.

"Yeah, well how about you start telling me about that, huh?"

Jack shrugged Logan's hand off of his shoulder, and Logan, now sure that the boy wouldn't run away, let him. The teen brought his knees to his chest and crossed his arms over them, taking care to remove his sunglasses and tuck them into his jacket pocket before he pressed his forehead to the well-worn denim of his jeans. He inhaled slowly and shut his eyes, blocking out the heinous colors that forever danced merrily across his vision, and exhaled heavily as the sounds around him sharpened like a razorblade.

Idly, he wondered if other mutants had such problems with their own powers, and in Jack's mind it wasn't a matter of control. Anyone could learn to control their powers, with enough patience and training. Hell, he could better control his powers if he tried, but he happened to know for a fact that it was all in vain; he could sharpen his use of his powers, making it easier to utilize them for fighting or some sort of practical use, but he could never fully remove the mental strain his abilities produced. This stress, this pain and frustration that his powers put him through – he wondered if others had to deal with that.

Unbidden, other mutants he had met at the School came to his mind, which then categorized them all to see if they could possibly indeed face the same struggles as he did.

There was his old best friend St. John Allerdyce, a pyrokinetic. He'd had some big problems with his powers. But Johnny, as Jack had ever-so-annoyingly called him, had those age-old problems with control, or a lack thereof. The only injuries John's power brought were to people who got in his way when he was throwing a temper tantrum and the guilt John later felt over not being able to restrain himself better. Yet that wasn't like Jack; not even his best friend could fully understand just how much his own power could pain him.

Who else had he associated with at Xavier's School for Gifted Children? Not many, that was for certain. When he had come to the school he had been placed in a room with John, and the then-attention-starved boy had latched onto Jack, claiming the dark-haired boy as his best friend and daring any other to come between the two.

Jack, for his part, hadn't much minded. Other than his brothers, he'd never had any real friends, and the change was welcomed. He didn't need too many people in his life; he wouldn't know what to do with them all. One really good friend sufficed for him, and he hadn't interacted with many of the other students out of a classroom setting.

He'd talked with the teachers – dork, his mind called out at him. But really, he hadn't had enough contact with others to know how their powers affected them, and those he knew on a fair enough basis seemed to have no true problems other than a lack of control.

Ms. Munroe had never seemed to have any sort of problems, control or otherwise. Jack had always admired her for her always calm and collected demeanor, never losing her cool in any situation. She was the epitome of control, and he wished he could have been like her.

Mr. Summers was a different case. Jack had liked him in the way that any child feels about a so-so teacher; he wasn't a favorite, but he most definitely wasn't the worst. He was just sort of...there. Mr. Summers quite obviously had a few issues with his own ability, Jack could concede. Not only was it for the most part uncontrollable, but it hurt his eyes and potentially the others around him, giving him the same guilt complex that Johnny had felt. Maybe Jack could've related to Summers, if he had ever tried, but he'd been too wrapped up in his own inner-turmoil and self-pity to notice, and Mr. Summers, as nice as he tried to be, wasn't the most accessible person.

Well, unless you were one Dr. Jean Grey.

Jack didn't really care for Dr. Grey. Sure she was nice, and definitely pretty; more than once he had to groan as all of the other boys drooled over her and Mr. Summers followed her around like a loyal, abnormally dopey puppy-dog. Yet Jack never really received the impression that her ability pained her. He had heard about all of the extensive training she'd had to go through with the professor to keep from hearing every person's thoughts in the area, and of how annoying and frustrating it was for telepaths to have others minds constantly infringing on their own consciousness. But obviously Dr. Grey had her ability under a very strong control for it to never seem to bother her, and her telekinesis was always perfectly executed.

She was the poster-child for the mutant who came to control their wily powers with diligence, patience, and perseverance, and Jack wanted to beat her over the head for it, out of envy or annoyance, he wasn't sure.

Eddie would have laughed at her, called her stuck-up and commented that she probably had daddy issues that she worked through the same way, too, and then he would have made a joke that the perfect, always in control, enviable people like her were just part of the big joke that was Earth.

Walter would have called her a whore and been done with it.

The teen then thought on the one other person he had truly spoken with at the School: Professor Xavier himself. Most of the students had private sessions with Xavier, whether it be to talk about their lives or to assist with their powers, and many of them were in his classes. Jack, it seemed, had been his "special case" in that he received every form of treatment the paraplegic man offered, and more.

Since his arrival at the School Xavier had felt some odd need to keep tabs on Jack. At first it was because he was afraid that the boy wasn't acclimating well enough, then it was because Jack would only speak to John, who wasn't the best influence in the world, and then it was because he found out that Jack's powers had progressed so far beyond his control that Jack couldn't even see anymore. Whatever the issue, though, Jack was a daily visitor to the professor's office, much to his own dislike and chagrin.

If Ororo Munroe was the epitome of control, then Professor Charles Xavier was the ruling Grandmaster and Supreme Overlord Dictator. It seemed as if nothing fazed the man; nothing upset him, nothing surprised him, he just reacted to everything with that same easy confidence, control, and precision.

Coming from a life of temperamental, risk-taking, brash, sometimes-lunatic apparent-vigilantes, Jack was not at all prepared for Professor Xavier and his take on life. The dark-haired boy had a hard time connecting with the peaceful man on any sort of level, because he was not used to such a calm presence in his life, and frankly after all of the cheerful chaos that had been his childhood the professor's personal brand of tranquility did more to unnerve than soothe the young mutant.

In fact, his entire time at the School had been unnerving. Everything was so structured and organized. Even his unconventional friendship with John seemed to be preset and preapproved by the sleeping arrangements set up by the School's staff. Nothing about the place held that same spontaneous energy, that insane spark of life that he had known all of his life. The School wasn't comedic, or at least not in the way that he had come to know the term, and the entire life there seemed almost bland to the young boy. The people were nice, but nobody was quite the way he wished they were.

After all, nobody at the School got excited about enchiladas and Bea Arthur.

So in the end, Jack thought as he tried to bring his mind back from its foray into Wade's roundabout way of thinking, he had met nobody at the School with problems like his other than Mr. Summers, and the idea of having similarities with that man wasn't necessarily comforting. Yet Jack had never met a mutant outside of the School, so he had nobody to compare to in that aspect-

Actually, he did know somebody outside of the School. But he – well, he didn't ever seem to have the slightest problems with his powers, Jack would leave it at that. He tried to avoid thinking of that particular person as much as was possible.

"Kid?"

Jack jolted as Logan nudged his side. He had forgotten that the other was there. It wasn't often that he had company, and he seemed to have inherited Wade's nasty habit of disappearing into his own world – the only difference was, Wade brought his own world to the real world.

"I'd really rather not talk about it."

"Why? We've got plenty of time; I've got nowhere to be, and you don't exactly seem to be following a schedule."

The dark-haired teen pressed his face further into his knees, feeling his kneecaps dig into his cheeks, a blissful distraction from his own growing discomfort with his situation. "It's personal."

"Ugh, great. That mean you're gonna get all emotional and weepy on me?"

Jack brought his head up sharply and scowled at the man. "I do not cry, and I most certainly do not get 'emotional.'"

Logan only smiled and chuckled. "Sure you don't, kid, sure you don't."

"I don't," Jack insisted in a grumble, as if repeating the statement would make it fact. He rested the side of his head on his knees and watched Logan for what it was worth, catching glimpses of an outline through a haze of ever-jumping, always-moving lines. When he focused on ignoring the little sounds of the forest, enough of the lines faded away for him to make out the man's facial features.

The man, Logan, looked to be in his thirties, probably the later end of them, and he had wild, untamed dark hair and laughable sideburns. His eyes held a strange look, that of a man who seemed totally in control and yet always unsure of himself, like a great piece of him was missing. And yet, Jack could see in those eyes someone who had seen more than any man should ever see, could ever see – and for some reason he was sure that Logan himself wasn't even aware of any of this.

As Jack continued scanning the man's face, trying to figure out if he was indeed as familiar as his voice had earlier suggested or if it was just a fluke of memory, he noticed one thing that had escaped him before: Logan was smirking at him, the kind of smug, shit-eating smirk that Eddie used to wear when he was inordinately proud of himself for something that would make someone (usually a woman) want to slap him.

"What's with the look?" Jack mumbled half-heartedly, trying to pretend that he really didn't care.

Logan simply shook his head at him. "Well first off, you just acknowledged that you can see-"

"It's complicated," Jack interrupted, but Logan continued on, pretending that he hadn't heard the teen.

"-and you've basically proven to me that you do, in fact, want to have a little sharing circle about what's happened with you. You've got that sad-puppy 'ask me about my life' look. No, don't look at me like that, it's true. You want to tell somebody what happened, why you left, but you're afraid 'cause you don't trust anyone. So the way I see it, I gotta stick around till you feel comfortable enough to tell me. It can be my payment to Chuck for helping me out. 'Sides, someone needs to look after you."

Jack was overcome with anger at the sheer presumptuous nerve he was experiencing. "I'm fine! I can handle myself!"

Logan just shook his head. "Humor me, then."

"Uh-huh, yeah. And why should I trust some human, huh? You'll probably just turn me into the feds for some quick cash."

The older man laughed. "Oh really?"

Jack flinched at the sound of metal unsheathing, sharp silver lines slicing his vision before they slowly filtered away through the atmosphere. He cast a nervous look at Logan, half-expecting to find a knife being held to his throat.

Three metal claws protruding from the knuckles of each hand wasn't much more assuring.

"Still think I'm gonna hand you in?" Logan asked.

Jack shook his head nervously, eyes only for the long dagger-like claws. "Yeah, I believe you. And, uh, you can stick around and do whatever the hell you want. Just, could you, ah, put those away?"

Logan only laughed as he sheathed the claws, and Jack frowned indignantly – he hated being mocked, but he wasn't going to let the guy with the claws know that. Then again, he probably already knew.

So that was how Jack Blake, after running away from Xavier's School for Gifted Children and living alone for a year and a half, gained a babysitter. Who would've guessed that one day he would look back on this moment fondly?

Jack scowled at Logan, who took one look at his face, thought of pouting toddlers, and promptly regained that Eddie-like smirk.

So who would have guessed that Jack would remember this moment fondly? Not Jack, that was for sure.

I am purposely (and hopefully, tastefully) not saying exactly what Jack's power is. I'm dropping a lot of hints about it, but purposely doing so from Jack's POV where he already knows what his mutation is so you only get a taste of it; it's something that really can only be understood with a "big picture" explanation, which I want to avoid giving until Lil Jack learns for himself. That means that by the next time there's a "present" chapter, Logan will already have been told what his power is. ;) Evil? Why yes, yes I am.

That's all I can think of that needs to be addressed here, soo...please review!