Author's Note: Thanks so much for the reviews! I really enjoy reading them and am mostly glad someone's reading this other than me. As an in-advance apology that this chapter is all backstory (TW: violence, sort-of suicide), I'll post a second chapter today to get us out of the dark.

Chapter 8: The night

They would say that my mother died on accident—that she must have lost her balance and fallen over the railing just the wrong way, smacking her head against the floor at just the wrong angle to survive. The police report would indicate that my father shot himself minutes afterward, presumably overcome with emotion.

I know better. I heard the screaming.

"CELIA!"

It was in fear. Not for herself, but for me, as though I were in danger even though I was just walking in the front door at the time. It was the way you scream your kid's name when they're being chased by an axe murderer, not when you yourself are falling off a staircase.

It makes me wonder sometimes (just for a moment, and then the nausea twists in my insides and I have to stop) whether that's what he made her see to make her run.

All I know is that when I rounded the corner into the living room, groceries abandoned, sprinting from the door, I saw her only moments before. Her eyes were glazed over in the frosted, unnatural way they were when she was in one of his illusions, but her stride was sure and determined. And then she crashed over the railing, mid-stride in her pursuit of whatever danger she was picturing me in, and she hit with a crack.

Damian just stood there. His luggage and briefcase were still on the floor, just in from another trip, starting his "fun" without missing a beat this time.

He just stood there, staring at her, emotionless, though all of the blood drained from his face. He was my father, but I hadn't called him that in years. She was my mother and he was Damian. He spent most days away from home, "travelling for work", terrorizing other lives with other illusions, becoming a household name in fear. She spent most of hers at the hospital, helping save lives, or with me, trying her best to help me have one.

Even after I'd started showing signs of powers that escaped my mother's best attempts to hide them from him, he'd treated me always with a mixture of fascination and loathing. I was the byproduct of his relationship with this human woman, a piece but not a player in the game he'd built with his power. His way of making others "see" what he wanted them to see. His favorite pastime.

It never worked on me. I didn't know why. I saw things just as they were. The only person in the horror movie doomed to see the disaster coming every time.

Always the final girl, never the pride.

It worked on everyone else though, which is probably why it took him a moment to register that I was still standing there. When he did, he stared with that mean, broken grin. I remember that I couldn't feel my legs and my knees were shaking so bad I thought I wouldn't be able to run if I needed to. I had never seen him this rattled. We had never reached this stage of his game before. I had always saved her, always found a way, always gotten there in time.

I tried to push the fear away as though it were a blanket. Maybe if he couldn't smell it on me, he would never come closer.

"I've done it now," he said, that unhinged smile perched on his face, but his eyes the closest I'd ever seen them to sad, so that for just a moment I wondered if there had been a more human, humane man once that Mom could have fallen in love with. I wondered if some part of him mourned his wife even after the years he'd spent trying idly to kill her.

"There's no going back from the edge once you find it," he said, his voice calm. He assessed me in a detached way, as though even he was surprised to find this day had come. He didn't sound altogether like himself. I might have been scared of him for most of my life, but I knew his voice.

Like he'd remembered something, he strode to his briefcase in the kitchen, pulled out a gun. I still couldn't move.

He stared at the dark metal, hand on it almost thoughtfully, and then glanced up at me. My entire body had gone cold but I was more alert than I had been in weeks. It was impossible to look away as he walked towards me. Impossible to move because even though I knew that she was dead, I could never have left her there alone with him.

"Celia, the world is different now. You have to understand," he began. I felt another cold brush of panic. He only said my name when trouble was coming. "Everything is different when you have so much power. You'll understand—I'm sure of it. She didn't want you to know but now you will. It will be becoming who you were born to be."

There wasn't anything to say. I hadn't been born to be anyone, and both of us knew it. This was his monologue. I was no one in this scene, barely in this story. I stared back, body shaking, wishing I'd packed better lunches for my mother, who'd somehow, simply by virtue of who she was, kept him at bay for so long.

"She just…didn't understand," he said. "She was only a human."

Only a human.

I tried to ignore my mother's body on the floor but it felt like the world hadn't quite righted itself yet, and my throat already felt like it would be sore forever. I kept picturing her sure stride, crashing to the floor. My fiercest defender even and especially against the thing she couldn't control.

Damian reached a hand forward in a daze as though to touch me and then retracted it just as quickly as though touching a scalding hot pan.

"Interesting," he said, his voice wrong, off balance.

This time when he looked at me I thought I almost saw uncertainty in those cold, almost-sad eyes. I glared back, shaking so much I could barely move, nothing but "only a human" echoing in my brain while my whole body trembled with grief. For an instant, his expression reminded me that he used to play with me as a child, that he sat with me while I built houses from wooden blocks and drew pictures of forests on scrap construction paper. He'd been almost adoring when I was small, stroking my hair quietly as I drew, pretending to be fascinated by the trees or the windchimes or the maps that I took to drawing, somewhat obsessively, at the age of seven. Later I would wonder if it was only because even then, I hadn't been under his illusions. Even then, he was only fixated on what part I would play in his games.

That was before he'd been sucked away, somewhere deep into the intersection of his "work" and his power, and before Mom started encouraging me to hide from him at every opportunity, to keep out of sight and out of mind.

We stared at each other in silence for a moment. I thought that maybe I was holding my breath—it had become impossible for me to keep a grasp on reality. I was acutely aware of my mother's body on the floor. I felt like I would never be able to look directly at it but at the same time felt the urgent need to make sure that it was really her, really unmoving in blood on our carpet.

I kept picturing it. Over and over again. The screams, the fall, the blood. Her face at the hospital, looking in on the family of children left without a parent, filing the forms to give them over to family members who could help. Leading me to the door like it was me who needed comfort, hands at my shoulders, smile on her face.

"Stop it. It's better this way. You'll see," Damian was saying, backing away from me slowly, nodding to himself and at me, as impossible to understand as he'd ever been to me.

My brain felt stuck and insistent—body on ground, blood on carpet, screaming, falling, tucking me behind some clothes in the closet on a dangerous day, following me, shaking, away from a wall she thought was made of flames, screaming, falling, terrified, manipulated, sure and practiced hands at work on a patient, helping Bea with her homework, screaming, falling. Chocolate. Warmth. Fear. Falling.

Grief twisted in my stomach like something that had already lived there a long time. Angry and cold.

Damian screamed at me but my mind could only scream one image.

"STOP IT!" He shrieked, but he was terrified and terrifying and there was nothing I would do even if I could because my body wouldn't move and my mind did not care to.

Blue eyes stared into a hospital room, talking about unwanted mutant kids. A hand on my shoulder as she guided a young me to hide in the bathroom on one of the stormy nights that were his favorites. Legs shaking beneath her as an older—barely older—me guided her away from an open flame she thought was water, from broken glass she thought was grass, from knives she thought were lotion.

Too many lives. Too many deaths. Too many secrets. Now he'd taken her and she had been the only thing I had, the only line I couldn't let be crossed, the only real thing in my carefully compartmentalized life.

He would take no more things.

Damian turned to look at my mother on the ground like he didn't have a choice, something falling away and locking in his face. I was aware of his mind in a way I'd never been before. Not that I could see into it, but I could feel the edges, the container overflowing, the flood of images pouring from my mind to his.

Then he looked at me again. He had for so many years avoided doing so, and I had for so many years avoided him. His stare was somehow equally in shock, resigned, proud, and terrified. Not at what he had done, I realized even then, but at me.

"Oh, I could have made you great," he said, finally, eyes slightly glazed.

And then he had the gun to his head and was pulling the trigger and I stopped being able to look, to see, to try to understand.

I don't know how long I stood there.

I remember that when the police came, I hadn't moved, and that there was a moment in which I was afraid they would turn against me, think that it was me who had killed both of my parents. Damian had installed a camera recently, like he'd felt us living a little too freely while he was on the road, and I half-wondered if it was on, and what it would even look like to anyone watching. As the men stood around the bodies, calling a crime lab to examine the scene, I stayed backed into a corner, my heart racing so fast in my ears that I wondered whether I would vomit first or die of a heart attack.

And then I remembered that they didn't know I was a mutant.

"Alright, sweetheart," a middle-aged male officer said to me (I winced at the way he said it—it felt off in a way that mixed poorly with the situation). "We need to take you down to the station just to take a quick statement."

I was led from the house into a car as day was breaking, and then into a station through the blinking sunlight. I remember very little in between but the blur of my hands in my lap and how fast my heart was racing with my head to catch up. I sat in the front seat; not a mutant, not a suspect.

What happened after seemed surreal in a blurry way that at the time, I didn't particularly care to question. After interviewing me, the police seemed to decide that it was more or less an accident followed by apparent suicide. They would fill in the details of the "how" and "why" later. They weren't jumping to fill in the blanks with mutants, and I wasn't jumping to do much of anything.

Rather than being placed into child services, I was informed that I would be "returning to school" and led out of the station to a woman in a red dress.

That was the night I met Jean. Though we weren't particularly close in my time at Xavier's, I would always be grateful for the merciful straightforwardness of her introduction.

"Ms. Esmond, my name is Dr. Jean Grey. I work at the Institute for Gifted Youngsters in upstate New York."

"Is that where I'm going?"

"If you accept a spot there, then yes," she had answered.

"When you say 'gifted', you mean…"

"People with powers, like yourself," she said politely into my head.

I nodded once, unfazed. I didn't even know at the time that telepaths had any kind of difficulty seeing into my head, that without me opening a door, speaking to me was all that she could do. It was just that I was so numb, so tired. It was hard to care about anything, telepath stranger danger included. And I was betting she wouldn't bother being so polite if she was anywhere near as terrifying as what I'd just escaped.

At the time, Jean cocked her head at me thoughtfully. There were barely any options to weigh. Satisfied that, at any rate, a school could not be worse than the child protective services I would have to endure until my birthday, I followed her to her car.

On the ride north, we would—with the alarming calm that I appeared predisposed to exhibit under emotional trauma—go over the details of my situation. The headmaster of the school, also a telepath but more powerful, had arranged for my release into Jean's custody. They would then draw up paperwork with my signature, upon arrival, that would show my being enrolled as a student there, recruited for academic purposes, as of before the incident at the house. The story was that I was home for a visit to collect my things.

It was such an easy physical transition in that way, so masterfully handled by the adults that would be left to figure out the remnants of who I was among the greater mess of who all of us mutant kids were. It was in part because of this that I was so tempted to leave those memories—the mind games, the terror, the constant paranoia—in the past.

They made it so easy to start over, to sleep soundly in a clean bed in a picturesque mansion. At least, on the nights my dreams didn't drag me back to those nights, that night, all over again.

I didn't tell anyone the details, those first few months. Not the Professor, despite his prodding. Not Rogue, though she always left the door open. They knew that my parents were dead. That I'd shown up in the middle of the night behind Jean to the shocked faces of most of the faculty. Even John only knew what he'd pieced together, whatever he'd noticed in that way I couldn't seem to hide from.

I couldn't get myself to talk about it out loud.

Most of the faculty, slightly more clued in to my origins, treated me with mild apprehension for the first few weeks, as though trying to determine by sight whether I was a bomb that might detonate.

For a school with so many telepaths on hand, I couldn't help but think they seemed about as good at guessing the next explosion as the rest of us.