Time Runs Short – Here's the deal, folks. I have, at times, been obsessed with Harry Potter. The last HP movie comes out in a couple of weeks. Once I see it, I strongly suspect I am going to become reobsessed with HP and forget about this. I will do my best to make sure this fic is finished by then, but I make no promises. Actually, I make several promises, but none are relevant to the topic at hand.

CanonicityYou can assume that everything that happened in the movie up until they leave the airbase occurred in the world of this fic with the exception of Erik kissing Raven because I felt that was contrived and unlikely.

Auluna – There was an incident a few years ago in which Dick Cheney shot a friend in the face in a hunting accident. The guy wasn't too badly hurt, so it was okay to laugh. That's really the entire joke.


Seventeen is a weird age. You're done with high school, but you're still not legally an adult. One thing I don't get is what you're supposed to call people. Adults call each other by their first names. Kids call adults Mr. or Mrs. Somebody. But there's not a clear cutpoint, an age where you switch from one to the other. So when I met these guys at the aquarium, I wasn't sure whether to call them Mr. Xavier and Mr. Lensherr or Charles and Erik.

My mom said you never go wrong erring on the side of being more polite, so I tried calling the one guy, the short one, Mr. Xavier, but then his sister (who is really hot, by the way) says, "That's Doctor Xavier to you!" at the same time the guy says, "Just Charles, please." So now I really don't know what to do. I try to avoid saying their names. Once Dr. Xavier's sister codenamed him Professor X, I started calling him The Professor in my head, because he really does sound kind of like a teacher, which is weird because he's not like any teachers I've ever met.

The other guy, in my head I call him Mr. Lensherr. I haven't really had much of a reason to talk to him out loud, and I'm fine with that. He's always staring at something and it's kind of creepy. The reality is, I'm kind of a nervous guy. I always want to look before I leap. Actually, I'd rather not leap at all, when you get right down to it. If I'm really honest with myself, I think it's part of why I smoke so much grass. It makes me less anxious.

Hey, here's a question for you. If you put eight people in a room, all ages seventeen to – I don't know, those guys can't be more than like 35, how many do you think have two living parents who they're on speaking terms with? The answer is one, just one.

The Professor and his sister are orphans. Alex grew up in foster care and doesn't have any contact with his birth parents or his foster parents. Angel says she doesn't talk to her family and she wouldn't say anything else about it. I don't really know for sure about Mr. Lensherr – I'm sure as hell not asking him – but Raven told me that he survived the Holocaust, which I guess explains all the staring. Now I kind of feel bad for thinking he was creepy. Darwin's mom thought he was some kind of demon or something and kicked him out. He said he talks to his dad on the phone sometimes, like at Christmas, but that's it. I talked with Hank for a while over lunch about his parents. Hank said that when he was born with his feet all weird, his dad figured that his mom must have cheated so he left them both. I get the feeling Hank's mom wasn't too happy with the situation either, because of the way Hank said stuff. Like, instead of, "I went to college," it was "they sent me off to college." I notice stuff like that.

I notice a lot of things, in fact. People must think that being a stoner makes you blind and deaf or something, because they don't expect me to see what's right in front of my face. I notice that Darwin always keeps his back to the wall. I notice that Hank keeps looking at Raven and scratching his scalp. I notice that Mr. Lensherr pockets sugar packets when he thinks no one's looking.

But then there's me. I have a great family and it's not that I wasn't thankful for them before, but man, I am really thankful for them now when I see how much worse things could be. I mean, I knew stuff like that happened, but I never saw so much of it in one place. I have two parents and an older brother and a younger brother and three younger sisters. My older brother, Tom, is just one year older than me, but we finished high school together because when he was in the ninth grade, he got mono and he missed a ton of school and had to repeat the grade. Anyways, my mom always trained my brothers and me up right. Once we were maybe eleven or twelve, she said that we were becoming men and we had to think about what sort of men we wanted to be. That worked on almost everything. Do we want to be the sort of men who get ahead by cheating? Do we want to be the sort of men who keep their commitments? And so on and so forth.

When I first started breaking glass with my voice, my mom treated it like it was nothing important, like I was just double jointed or something. At first my dad was a little freaked out, but my mom stared at him and after maybe a minute, he said, "I want to be the sort of man who stands by his son." Besides Tom calling me Soprano Sean, nobody in my family has given me any grief about it and Tom's just teasing. Nothing like what the others talk about. I wondered if maybe my mom was a mutant, too, and her power was that she could make people feel guilty by staring at them. I asked the Professor, but he laughed and said, "No, that's just Catholicism."

I think a lot now about what kind of man I want to be. When that demon-looking guy and the man in the helmet – Shaw – showed up, I was very strongly in favor of the hide-under-furniture plan. And then we saw all these guys falling out of the sky. I thought about what my next phone call to my mom would be like: 'So, Sean, are all the CIA agents on the ground where they belong?' 'Well, they're on the ground now...there was a little detour...' Okay, so the conversation probably wouldn't have gone like that but it's really hard to think when people are dying all over the place. I really didn't do much to help in that fight, but I did stay with them. I didn't run away. That's got to count for something. I know the man I want to be isn't a coward.

So now we're staying at the Professor's estate, which is closer to Boston than the CIA place, so I'm thinking maybe I can go home for a visit in a week or two. I like things okay here. I think the person I liked the best was Darwin, but he's dead. So one day I'm in this room (the rooms all have names, but I don't know them) and I'm on my knees and there's Mr. Lensherr in the doorway.

"What are you saying?" he says.

And okay, even though I feel guilty about it now, I'm still kind of creeped out by him, but the man I want to be is brave, so I take a deep breath and I answer him. "I'm praying."

"I guessed that. What are you saying?"

"It's...um...it's the prayer for Saint Michael the Archangel. He was my confirmation saint, so I had to memorize it."

"I see."

"And that teleporting guy, I know the Professor says he's just a mutant like us, but he kind of looks like a demon and the prayer makes me feel less afraid."

"Will you say it aloud, so I can hear you?"

"Um, sure. It's, Saint Michael the Archangel / defend us in ba-a-ttle." I learned it as a song, so even though I'm saying it now, I can't help but stretch the words out the way the song does. "Protect us against the wickedness / and snares of the devil. / Oh may God rebuke him / we hum-bul-ly pray. / And do thou O prince / of the heavenly host / by the power of God / cast into hell Satan / and all the evil spirits / who prowl through the world / seeking the ruin of souls."

Mr. Lensherr doesn't say anything.

I'm not sure if I've pissed him off. Why does he want to hear my prayers?

"I like it," says Mr. Lensherr. Then he turns around and leaves without saying goodbye.

I've never known whether that last part of the prayer meant spirits that ruin souls or spirits that go to, like, soul ruins. Like Stonehenge with souls or something.

I say the prayer again. I'm supposed to try flying today.