A/N: Please read and review!

Steve was still holding me as I looked at my wrapped hand, but I was not really aware of what was happening around me. The Brotherhood disappeared, leaving their cured leader, Magneto, behind. At first glance, one would've thought it fitting that the man who preached Mutant superiority was ditched by his followers. At first glance. Magneto was smart and a great leader. He knew that S.H.I.E.L.D.'s focus would only be on him, which would allow the Brotherhood to get away. He cared about his followers.

Magneto was not seen as a threat because he lost his powers from the cure as well, and he was only seen as an older man who easily surrendered when his followers abandoned him. Imprisoning him would've been easier at that point in time.

Dr. McCoy checked my burned wrist, and Steve only had an arm around my shoulders as some kind of support for me.

"It'll scar," Dr. McCoy told me, rewrapping my wrist. He placed some kind of poultice on it that really relieved my pain. "And, you'll need to be very careful when it starts to heal."

I gave a deadened shrug. "Okay. . ."

Dr. McCoy gave me a close look, but he could not really say anything to me for a short period of time. S.H.I.E.L.D. started to get involved during the clean-up, taking statements about what had happened and trying to figure out where the Brotherhood disappeared to.

I could hear the people around me, pitying me and mocking Magneto, saying over over that the cure completely took away my powers. It made me snap a little on the inside. They acted like they knew everything about the cure and mutation.

It pissed me off.

No matter what people would tell me, I refused to believe them, and I wasn't going to stand to the side and mope about my life. That's when I sat up straighter.

Steve looked at me, noticing my sudden change. "Are you okay?'

"I am now," I told him, and he gave me a strange look. He probably thought I meant about not being a Mutant anymore. "I realized something just now."

"What?" Steve asked me, and he could see that I was becoming very stubborn, something that should have went against my shy and quiet personality.

"The cure's total B.S.," I told him. "You can't change what makes someone who they are. You can't cure blue eyes or being a ginger. You can cover it and hide it to the world, but you can't completely change it."

Steve gave me a close look, and he started to wear a small smile and shook his head at what I had told him. I think he was starting to see my true iron will. Tell me one thing, and I will do anything to prove the contrary.

"I can see why you'd be happy about that," he commented.

I gave him a small smile and a smaller laugh. "Yeah."

Chase wasn't sure what he could say to me when he learned I lost my powers from the cure. He chose his words carefully when did talk to me, and that didn't really help me. Back at home, my closest friends I needed their support, but they never really had any experience with something like that before.

"How are you so strong about this?" Janet asked me when she found me at home, moments after I was back at home.

"It's only temporary," I told her.

Fury and Steve were talking, and Steve was trying his best to defuse the situation about my brother being a part of the Brotherhood. Janet gave me a strange look. Unlike Steve, she didn't really see what I was telling her right away.

"It's a cure. . ." She drew that out to get me to understand her.

I laughed at that, probably showing her I was crazy or something or probably hit my head the wrong way.

"Genetics," I told her, becoming serious again. "If you can cure anything with genetics, some horrible things would already be gone long before mutation."

Janet shook her head. She would always be by my side, but she didn't really want me to get my hopes up only for them to be crushed in a horribly spectacular way. She was looked out for me in her own way.

Dr. McCoy gave me the rest of the poultice that he had made for me to place on my arm every day in the morning and in the night. It was supposed to keep my arm relieved and keep the pain down. He rested a hand on my shoulder.

"Before all of this happened," he explained to me. "I was taken to the labs where the cure had been developed. There was a boy. . .when you're around him, your mutation dampens, but when you're far enough away from him, your mutation wouldn't be dampened anymore."

"It came from him?" I asked, feeling pretty horrible at that idea and what that would've meant.

He nodded, not liking that as much as me. "Yes."

I nodded. "I can see that."

I spent the rest of that time working to make my powers come back. It was going to take me a long time, that much I knew, and I had no idea how I was going to make that happen. But, I was willing to work and wait, no matter how long it would take.

S.H.I.E.L.D. didn't come to that realization, so Magneto was placed in a cell that had metal bars. No on was afraid of him anymore. I didn't know if that's incredibly brave of them or very stupid. Time would only tell.

Summer was cooler and wetter that year. It's weird. I felt cold for the first time in years, and sometimes I would sit on the lifeguard stand or outside the house, feeling the coolness and trying to control the fire I used to possess.

Nothing. Always nothing.

But, I wasn't going to give up on that any time soon. I needed to be very patient. Actually. . .I needed to learn how to be very patient.

My brother was still at home, and no one wanted to talk about his actions with the Brotherhood. More and more people from our generation were becoming jaded enough to believe that the Brotherhood was right. No one would really blame him, and he never harmed a person, even if they would've deserved it.

He was impressed at what I had said about the cure. I don't think he believed it, but he was pretty impressed I wasn't going to give up on that hope. He was working on a complex project with Bobby that they started after Tony Stark sought their help when on the run from "the Mandarin." Something about their work sparked an interest in designing robots and making sure they weren't obviously robotic.

Basically, they could make robots that could pass for human if you're not looking for it.

"Why are you so interested in this?" Billy asked me when I was asking far too many questions about their little project, more surprised than suspicious. I never cared about that sort of thing before.

"They could be useful," I told him. I gave him a brief explanation of what they could be used for, a "hypothetical" explanation, and agreed with me, understanding what I really meant. He was pretty surprised I came up with something like that.

I spent more time with Steve that summer. He wasn't really teaching me how to fight as much as before, and there's something about it that really made me mad.

"What's going on?" I asked him when everything became too much for me to not talk about it. I was irritated.

He acted like he had no idea what I was talking about, but he did know. "What?"

I pursed my lips and narrowed my eyes at him. "You changed. . .like you won't even try to teach me how to fight. . .I mean. . .defend myself. . ."

"I don't want you to feel like you need to be involved," Steve told me. He gently held my hand, and he was looking at my healing burn on my wrist.

I pulled my hand back. "You can't make that decision for me."

"To protect you. . ." He was trying to say, but I wouldn't let him finish that thought.

"It's my choice," I told him. "I can decide what's too dangerous for me or not, and. . .you know what? I don't need my powers. . ."

"Really?" He asked me, and he helped me to my feet and had me get ready to spar with him. "Prove it."

I stopped thinking and placed myself in a certain type of mindset. It's a mindset many people in my dad's family would get into when they realized they needed to protect their family or themselves, and my dad always wondered if we had gotten it from great-grandma and her Viking blood. This mindset was more instinctual than really anything.

We started to fight each other. Steve was pulling his punches, to keep himself from hurting my, and he wasn't using this as a way to teach me or to allow me to practice. It's more of a way to give me as much of a real world scenario for a fight as much as possible.

I was still in that instinctual mindset, and I didn't really pay too much attention to what was going on around us, only focusing on our fighting. Many moments passed, and something pulled me back into reality. Steve was on the ground, looking up at me, and I took a step back from him, feeling the exhaustion that started to seep in around me. He was back on his feet and was able to catch me before I collapsed to the ground from that exhaustion.

It became black, then.