Disclaimer: I do not own the X-Men.

A/N: I'm sorry it took me so long to update this story. I was dealing with a lot of personal issues and I let them effect my writing. I'm sorry for that. If you'd like more insight on what I was going through, please check out my profile.
Thank you.

Chapter 4

I turned silently to see three people standing in the doorway. My breath came out in short, sharp, rapid bursts. My chest was on fire. "Who –?" I choked, pressing against the mirror behind me. "How –?"

Two of the people looked normal. One was a tall red-haired girl that looked like she was only a few years older than me – eighteen or nineteen, maybe. Old enough to be in college, at least. The other was an older man in a wheelchair. He was bald with dark eyebrows and dressed in a suit and tie. The third was shorter, hulking man – I think – covered in blue fur with dark blue eyes and ears like a cat.
Who were these people?
Suddenly, Chief Wess appeared beside the man in the chair. "Ah, Miss Dawne," he said. "These are the mutant specialists I told you about."
"Yes," the bald man said, wheeling himself towards me. "I apologize for reading your mind without permission, but your thoughts really were too loud to ignore. My name is Professor –"
"You what –?" I gaped at him as he came towards me. "You read my thoughts?"
The man stopped when there was about an arm's length between us. "It's a lot to take in, I know," he smiled at me. "But I can assure you, I'm here to help. My name is Professor Charles Xavier and these are my colleagues."
Colleagues. A professor. They were gonna send me away. Only to a place worse than jail. They were gonna send me to the psych wards.
I flinched away from him sharply as he reached out to me, the burning in my chest growing worse and worse. I reached out to push him away and suddenly, a blue thing – essence – seeped out of my fingers. It moved lightning fast and had no shape. It collided with the man in front of me, pushing him away from me and across the room, knocking him to the floor.
The rest happened in a blur: A pair of men in identical uniforms rushed in the room as the professor's colleagues, as he'd called them, rushed to his side. Wess was shouting, but I couldn't understand him. Wasn't taking the time to listen. All I could focus on was the weapons the cops had drawn. No guns like I had thought. Only nightsticks and Tasers.
As they walked towards me, I couldn't keep from shrinking into a ball in the corner and my only thought was to do something – to protect myself. I didn't know what the blue was. Didn't understand it, but that was twice it had saved me tonight. Maybe if I –
'Camilla, no, you'll only make things worse!'
I turned to look at the professor, open-mouthed, as I heard his voice inside my head. He frowned down at me silently and shook his head.
Then my body surged with pain and white-hot warmth that faded instantly to cold, and I fell to ground. Heavy and alone.

When I woke up, I was lying down on my back on a cold, hard bunk made of stainless steel. The air was icy cold and I pulled the thin cotton blanket that was covering me closer. For a moment, my head was pleasantly empty and I thought maybe I was back at home. Then it all came rushing back to me, crushing me like a ton of bricks.
The break in. The way I'd lost control with my powers. The blue. The things I had told the police. The professor in the wheelchair.
Mama was gonna kill me.
"You'll need to forgive me again for intruding, Camilla, but you really must learn to think more quietly. Especially around telepathes, though I suppose you couldn't help it."
I sat up silently. I was back in the jail cell, surrounded on three sides five inch thick metal bars with a wall of concrete behind me. Two police officers were stationed like guards in front of the cell at opposite ends. They stood facing away from me and in between them was the professor.
I pulled the blanket closer to my body and hugged my knees to my chest. "What're you still doing here?"
The professor smiled at me. "Do you remember who I am?" he asked me.
I looked away from him. "I wish I didn't," I said, resting my chin on my knees.
The professor frowned. "My name, please, Camilla," he prompted me.
I sighed, rolling my eyes. I wanted to ignore him, but knew that I couldn't. How the heck was someone supposed to ignore a mind reader? "Professor Charles Xavier." I looked up at him as realization dawned on me. "Hey, I've heard of you. You were in the newspapers months ago."
"Yes, I know," Professor Xavier said, his smile returning. "I suppose you were too excited to remember that while we were in the interrogation room, though."
I scoffed. "I wouldn't call what happened back there excitement – I felt like I was losing my damn mind."
The professor furrowed his brow. "What I meant," he said, "is that you were having an anxiety attack and understandably so. You've been through a lot tonight."
An anxiety attack. So that's what that was. Great. On top of everything else, I was having anxiety attacks. Maybe I deserved to be in a psych ward.
I looked at him, frowning. "What do you know about what I've been through? Only what the police told you, right – and they can't be trusted."
The professor frowned at me, and all traces of a smile were now gone. He looked like he was trying hard not to say something. "Camilla," he sighed, "I want to help you."
"Help me, how? I ain't going away to no psych ward."
"No one wants to put you in one," Professor Xavier said. "Why are you so convinced that no one here wants to help you?"
I glared at him. He was trying to trick me just like the police had, but there was no way I was gonna say another bad thing about Mama. She loved me and she had always been there to look me after me. That's all that mattered. "You're a mind reader," I spat at him. "You tell me."
He shook his head. "Camilla," he said, "as a telepath, I try very hard to keep from invading the thoughts of others without permission. Your thoughts, though, last night were the thoughts of a frail, panicked child who has been a through a series of very traumatizing events in a very short amount of time. I'm surprised you were able to recover after just three short years –"
I looked up at him and our eyes locked. "What are you talking about?" My voice was weak and shaky. No longer sarcastic and hostile.
"I can help you find Danny," the professor said simply.
"Excuse me?"
I looked up to see a tall woman with a messy blond bun standing outside the cell with a plastic cup and a ring of keys. It was the cop from the night before – Officer Simons. "I'm here to collect Camilla," she told the professor. "We need to get started on her drug test."
"Ah, yes," Professor Xavier said, nodding. "Yes, of course. I'll go and find the others." Then he left.
Officer Simons dismissed the two male officers that had been guarding me, and unlocked the door of the cell. "I've been instructed to take you to officers' quarters," she said, walking over to me. She pulled a pair of handcuffs off her belt. "So we don't get slapped for child pornography."
I stared at her silently for a moment, my thoughts still full of what Xavier had said. There was no way he was telling the truth. He was still trying to trick me. Then I dropped the blanket and got to my feet.
Wasn't he?
Simons grabbed my wrist and spun me around. Then she locked the cuffs around my wrists. "Personally, I think these are unnecessary," she said, "but Wess thinks otherwise after what happened last night with the professor. You seemed to be doing okay with him just now, though."
I nodded silently, unsure of what to say. Why the hell was this woman talking to me?
Simons led me by the elbow out of the cell and down a hallway. We went down a short flight of stairs that led into an open room full of unorganized desks and cops. We walked through the room silently and went through a side door that led to another flight of stairs in a narrow hallway. We went down the stairs.
The room we entered was large and rectangular, dimly lit filled with row after row of perfectly made bunk-beds. There were a few cops in uniform asleep on the beds, and in the back of the room was a little rec area. There was a long row of counters with a sink and microwave next to a refrigerator. Beside the fridge were two vending machines. One for drinks and one for snacks. A coffee maker and some plain white mugs stood a long brown table, and finally there were two doors that led to restrooms.
Simons led to me the door with a girl on it and unlocked the cuffs. She handed me the plastic cup and held the door open. The room was a single stall with a toilet, sink, and a paper towel dispenser.
I took the cup from Simons and went inside.
Simons followed after me.
This couldn't be for real, right?
I looked from Simons to the cup and back again, waiting for her to leave. She didn't. Then after a moment, she groaned loudly. "For Christ's sake, Camilla, you pee in it. Haven't you ever been to the doctors?"
Guess it was for real.

"You should go with him, by the way," Simons said as she closed the door and locked the door of the cell. "Xavier, I mean. You should go with him to his school. You'd be better off there than in the system."
The system - she must meant the foster system. Is that what would happen if I didn't go with him, and if so wasn't really that bad? All those stories people told about it - in movies and on TV - those were just stories. They were just made up stories for the movies and TV. Right?
And Xavier was from a school?
That was right. There had been an article printed months ago in one of the newspapers about a mutant school in New York. The owner was a man called Xavier that was suing the Times for the printing the names and identities of the mutants that attended his school. Mama had lit the newspaper on fire when she found out about it. She had burned it over the garbage can with a cigarette lighter.
I turned to see Simons, walking down the hallway away from me. "Hey!" I called out to her. She turned to face me silently. "Tell Wess I want to talk to Xavier."

Hours passed and I finally got enough focus to get the color in my skin and hair back. Then, finally, a cop appeared outside the cell and unlocked the door. He put me in handcuffs again and led me back to the room I had been in the night before. The hallway outside the room was crowded. There was a cop standing next to the door, and Wess was there and so were Xavier's two colleagues.
Wess held open the door of the room for me, glaring. "You remember," he said, "I'm gonna be right on the other side of this door."
Inside the room, Xavier sat silently at the metal table in his wheelchair. He looked up at me. "I trust you thought more about what I said."
I sat down in the chair opposite from his that had already been pulled out for me. "How did you find me?" I asked him. My voice was empty. Blank. I was too tired to be angry. Too nervous about the blue to be suspicious. Too sick of caring.
I just wanted answers.
"There is a machine," Xavier said, "that I use to trace the manifestations of mutant powers back to their origins. That is how I found you."
"And that's how you'll find him?" I asked.
"Yes," Xavier said, nodding,"but it will take time and I will need your help."
My help? Was he kidding me?
I shook my head. "Can't help. He was gone before his powers fully developed."
"You can help, Camilla," Xavier said. "You can help more than you know."
I frowned and looked down at the table. "Can you use that machine to find Mama, too?"
Xavier sighed. "I'm afraid not. That is a job for the police to take care of."
'Course not. Could do everything else, though.
I nodded. "What will happen if they find her?"
"I don't know," Xavier admitted.
I nodded again. They'd probably just let her go. They had to. Mama hadn't ever done anything wrong, and after everything that had happened tonight, she was a victim just like me. Victims weren't punished. I looked back up at Xavier. "You said your machine traces manifestations of mutant powers back to their origins. What does that mean?"
I wanted to know about the blue. I wanted to know what it was. I wanted to know everything about it, even if there was nothing to know. Even if Xavier lied straight to my face about it, I needed some sort of answers. It was driving me crazy not knowing.
Xavier smiled. "It means you don't know as much about your powers as you think do, I'm afraid," he told me. "The signal we picked up from you last night was that of a powerful psychic mutant –"
I raised my eyebrows at him. "A psychic?" I said. "What you are talking about – I'm ain't a psychic. I ain't like you – I can't read minds. I just change."
"You don't just change, Camilla," Xavier corrected me. "You aren't a changeling, even if you believe you are one."
I stared at him. I felt lost. He wasn't making any sense. For as long as I could remember, I'd always been able to change and always been able to control it. Mostly. I'd been a changeling my whole life. Now, he was saying I wasn't. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"You are a psychic, Camilla," Xavier told me. "An illusionist, to be more precise. The blue shields you created last night were made of energy – psychic energy. A construct, if you will."
A psychic. An illusionist. None of this made sense.
"A construct?" I repeated.
Xavier nodded. "Yes, something you created in an attempt to protect yourself. It is a sort of defense mechanism, but with the proper training, you could potentially learn to create anything you wanted."
"Why now?" The words fell out of my mouth before I even thought about what I was really saying. "Why last night – I learned to change when I was a kid, but last night was the first time I was ever able to make a-a construct. Why is that?"
Xavier frowned. "Camilla," he said, "mutant powers usually manifest at some point in time during puberty. However, it is not unusual for them to manifest earlier than that if the mutant in question is extremely powerful or distressed in some way. We believe that your powers – both of your powers – manifested because you felt threatened."
Because I had felt threatened, but I'd been so young. Back then it had just been me, Mama, and Danny.
"Camilla," Professor Xavier continued. "If you come with me to my school, my colleagues and I can teach you to nurture your abilities. Help you learn to understand them better."
"And find Danny," I added.
Xavier nodded. "Yes, that will take time, though."
I nodded and stared down at the steely gray table. "What happens if I don't go with you?"
I was already pretty sure about the answer to that, but I just wanted to make sure. If two adults said it - if even one of them was a cop - then there was a better chance of it being true.
"You would be placed in a foster home or a group home with strangers until your mother was found," Professor Xavier sighed. "After that, anything could happen: You could stay in the system or go back to your mother."
"What happens if," I said, taking a deep breath, "I go with you and the cops find Mama – could I see her again?"
This I didn't know the answer to. Would she want to see me?
"Of course you could see her again," Xavier said. "You might even return to living with her, but that's really not up to me to decide."
I nodded.
The room was flooded with light from the hall and I looked up to see Wess standing in the doorway. "You two have had long enough," he said. "Miss Dawne needs to get back to her cell."
"Yes, that is probably for the best," Xavier said, nodding. "Give her some time to rest and think over everything we discussed. Good night, Camilla," he added as he started to leave.
"'Night, professor."
The cop who had brought me to the room wandered back in and led me back to the cell. I followed silently. My head hurt. It felt too full and nothing it was full of made much sense. I still didn't understand how I could be a psychic illusionist and one that could create energy constructs, no less. It didn't make sense. It just didn't.
Did Xavier know – was he lying? Could I really trust him?
I didn't know, but he'd said he could find Danny and maybe he really could. He had found me, after all, and I knew his school existed. I'd read about it myself in that article. So that much I knew was true.
And Mama still hadn't been found. I wasn't sure I wanted her found. I knew she loved me, but if she found out I'd been talking to Xavier – or worse to the cops – she would never speak to me again. Or maybe she would. Maybe there was a chance she wouldn't treat me like she did Danny. Maybe she didn't hate all mutants and maybe she could accept me.
I was her daughter, after all, and she was my mama. We had a special relationship, and maybe if I went with Xavier, I could find Danny and fix things. Make things better. Bring our family back.
I sat down on the bottom bunk in the cell as the door clanged shut noisily. I rubbed my wrists, which were red from where the cuffs had been too tight. Then I lay down as the guards took up their positions again outside the cell.
Maybe I could make this happen, but I needed answers first.