AN: Since this is the fixed version, I'd like to take a moment to thank ALL my reviewers, since my previous witty comments are being purged by FFN's stupid policy of not being able to edit chapters once they're installed. Curse them! NFN lets you edit chapters ANYTIME! Go to Nutfiction(dot)net!

Dark-Raven354 - sorry I kinda shredded your fic I was trying to be constructive, though. And thanks for every single one of your comments. Shall we leap from a great height onto the next person to use "Misfits" as a title, together?

Ash - Thanks for supporting NFN... and boggling my mind as to why FFN would edit out its own name...

stupidx - I LOVE pointless reviews. I adore them :)

trojjer - Yayz for the adverts. Tell all your fanficcing friends. Leave advert-reviews in poorly-formatted fics... and then we shall TAKE OVER THE WORLD! (narf)

Red Jeannie - Sorry about the confuzzlement, but it should all be fixed, now. It ought to make quite a lot more sense now that it's complete...

Raliena - I adore Pratchett and quite a few others Glad you're enjoying the ficcitude.

"Sweet of you... but that ain't quite necessary. He ain't around enough to give us real trouble. Always on some mission or other. But y'know... if we do wind up needin' a place we'll look you up."
She cares about me! Todd's heart squealed in the meantime.
"So..." Fred shifted. "I guess maybe you oughta know who the X- geeks are. Watch out for that one," he said, looking over at a red- headed senior seated at the X-men's table. "She'll pretend to be your friend and stuff... but man can she bite."
Todd followed Freddy's gaze and nearly rolled his eyes. Sheesh, not the Jean rant again. Granted, she was a class A preppie and a player, and sent Matthews after him whenever the 'hood annoyed her, but... she wasn't... all that...? Okay, he was going to shut up and let Freddy rant for a bit.
"Who Miss Perfect? Don't worry, I've got her figured. Mom unfortunately think's she's golden."
"No kidding?" Fred and Sara got busy discussing the evils of one Miss Grey.
Todd listened for about a minute. Then he shifted on the bench, not liking the way the conversation was steering and liking even less the fact that Freddy and Sara had something to bond over.
"Ahem," he tried for the third time and got their attention again.
"My apologies," Sara was blushing faintly and the Boston accent had returned. God she was cute when she did that. Todd could scarce believe he'd just admitted that so easily. "Pray continue?"
"Er... well, not that Jean isn't a bee with an itch, but lunch is almost over and I gotta tell you some more stuff." Todd didn't mean to sound as peeved as he was that Sara's attention had strayed. His tone apparently fired off some sort of message because the girl's eyebrow raised and Fred looked sheepish and rather like he was being squished.
"Such as?"
Such as? his mind echoed, just as expectantly. Crap, yo. Ummm...
"Erm... contact. In case things go screwy, you need to know where you can go. You know where the Brotherhood Boarding house is, right?"
"I've driven past it on Eileen once or twice. So yes."
Todd looked at her oddly. "Who?"
"My bike." Fred nodded; apparently he'd seen this Eileen beforehand. Todd felt peeved at that too, but he hid it better this time.
"Okay," he mumbled. "And maybe it would be coo' if we knew whereabout you lived? Or a number or email? Just in case we need to contact you."
Sara gave the address as well as a phone number that was specifically to her room to avoid her mother screening her calls. Todd scrawled it on a paper napkin along with her email address.
There was something else bugging him that he needed to tell her and he was hating himself for it. He knew Fred would too... but here went nothing.
"As whacked as the X-geeks are," Todd said, "If yo ever in a real pickle... one we can't help you out with... you should go to them." God that was painful to say. Todd glanced at Freddy and got the shock of his life. Freddy looked relieved.
"Yeah," the giant said, just as begrudging as Todd, though his voice was also full of concern. "Should you need more than us... Xavier will help. Just don't sign no contracts or nothin'."
"He'll want you to fight if you stay on as a boarder. For his little army. And he'll want you to get along with the mundane. Y'know, turn the other cheek and all that crap." Todd couldn't help sounding just a tad bitter. If Mathtews was beatin' on any of his kids, Xavier would wax the mansion floors with his ass. But Matthews is smart, yo, so he beats on the stragglers.
"Dealing with the mundanes isn't all that difficult, is it?" Sara said. "Technically speaking, I was a mundane and Freddy and I got on fine."
For someone in Remedial Ed., she was pretty sharp. "Do I have to abandon all my friends just because of what I've become?"
"It's complicated," sighed Todd. He'd never had any real friends since moving to Bayville, and generally kept his company amongst his fellow mutants. All of the Brotherhood were transplants to Bayville. He'd never thought what it would be like to have lived there for a long time, to have connections, and only have them disrupted by manifestation. "I guess you can keep yo' friends an' all... just - be careful? If yo' secret gets out... y'know... life can get real nasty. Th' army might wanna take yo' apart so they can make invisible soldiers, y'know?"
"Yes," Sara said. "I can just imagine..." she winced and scratched at her back. "Ack! Pardon me... urgh... ow... ooooohhh..." She sighed. "Ever had one of those itches that drove you simply mad? This one's been prickling at me since third period. Neef."
Todd found himself laughing even though he also knew the feeling. Once a month, in fact, when he got a new skin all in one go(1). "Hey, yo. Mebbe yo' shedding yo' skin."
"Ha ha," she deadpanned. "I'm still warm-blooded, aren't I? Just because I can do what I can do doesn't mean I'm turning into a reptile(2)."
"Jus' sayin'," Todd managed. Inwardly, he was kicking himself. "Y'know. Lighten th' moment?" He cringed.
"Sorry," she said, blushing. "New to mutant humour." The bell rang, summoning everyone to class. "See you after school?"
She still wants to see me! "Sure thing, yo."
Sara skipped as she withdrew.

"...can't get into my shoes... because my shoes refuse... to ever grow weeea-ry..."
"Singing, Sara?" Janine smirked at her. "What happened to make you so happy?"
"Oh, nothing much," she returned, knowing that if she told, it would be all over the school in nothing flat. "I might be making a friend."
"A booooyyyy friend?" Janine grinned wider. "I saw you flirting with Freddy Dukes..."
Sara rolled her eyes. "I believe I was sharing lunch with him, Janine."
"Ooooh! You deny it!" Janine squealed. "It's gotta be true."
"As true as your own lesbian tendancies," said Sara in a low mutter. "Do you mind? They might be covering something new in English today."
The English class, carefully calibrated for students with problems, had been going over the proper placements of nouns and verbs, with some explorations into punctuation - for well over a month.
"Fine," said Janine. "If you won't tell the truth, I'll just have to draw my own conclusions..." she waggled her eyebrows suggestively.
Nothing had ever stopped her so far. "Whatever." Sara concentrated on keeping her skin its accustomed colour.

(1) I LOVE that theory! Let's run with it.
(2) She'll get irony later.

Todd was so elated he nearly forgot about the money on the table. Fred was looking at it dolefully. Todd sat back down and waited for Fred to get over it and pick it all up.
Fred sighed and continued to study it.
"Oh come on, yo, she gave it to us!" Todd burst out. The cafeteria was already thinning out.
"Yeah, I know, but... it don't feel right. I should give it back to her next period."
Todd fidgeted and decided to bite. "Why don't it feel right?"
"'Cause... she earned it, not us. And sometimes her mom cuts her off. Ain't right for us to take it."
"Unless," the smaller boy added after some thought, "We earn it, right?"
Fred looked at him. "Uh... I guess? What are you thinkin'?"
"Well, we're helping her, right?" Todd lowered his voice. "With the whole mutant thing."
The larger boy scowled. "So you wanna charge by the hour or somethin?"
"No!" It was an idea, but not one Sara wouldn't see through in about five seconds flat. Todd felt a twinge of dismay at the rising dilemma - he cared about what she thought of him and he liked her, but goddammit, they needed the cash. He was going to have to choose carefully and he was probably gonna fuck it all up anyway. "I'm just sayin' we should take what she freely gives. She wants us to have it, we need it, someday somehow we'll pay her back."
Fred considered it. "I guess that makes sense."
"Great, good. Keep the money, make sure it don't fall into Pietro's hands or Tabby's." Todd watched Fred scoop up the change and deposit it in his overall pocket. Good, a high and safe place. Nobody was going to shake Fred Dukes down for anything.
Now he'd better skedaddle before he got a detention for real this time.

"The dinosaurs in the Triassic era were mostly reptiles and amphibians," Mr. Dronall spoke at the head of the class. "The Triassic era took place during the splitting of Pangea into two continents. The northern continent was known as Laurasia, and was made up of North America, Europe, and Asia. The southern continent..."
Todd stifled a yawn and put his head down on the desk. Biology was interesting and all, but the teacher was as slow as molasses when it came to lecturing - and man did he try to cram every detail possible into the forty-minute time frame. Other than that, Mr. Dronall was nice and the sort of geeky old man whom the jocks verbally debased in gym class, which meant he didn't consider himself above smiling at the boy whenever they met in the halls.
For that reason along with others did Todd sit quietly in Dronall's class and try to learn something instead of throwing spitballs at Wagner in the third row.
"...was named Gondwanaland and was made up of South America, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and India. Great changes occurred during the Mesozoic time period for plant life..."
Maaaan, get back to the amphibians, foo'. You almost had something interestin'.
Todd sighed and did the only thing that would keep him awake. He opened his standardized textbook and flipped to the chapter about amphibians. Compared to this chapter, the rest of the book was immaculate of highlighter marks and dogeared pages. Todd's eyes skimmed over the bits about the life cycle and he shut his eyes squeamishly as he flipped one page over which contained a detailed photo of a dissected toad.
Bored with reading over old facts, Todd was almost about to doodle another picture of Sara when he remembered the book also had a reptile chapter or two. Heh, why not. Mr. Dronall was still going on about petrified forests and ginkophytes. Todd flipped to the chapter and began to read.

Sara rubbed her back on the back of her chair and did her level best not to grunt. That itch was driving her positively berzerk...
The bell rang, delivering her from English Basics and sending her straight to Elementry Science. It used to be with Dr McCoy, but since he disappeared, Mr Hinkley had been filling in.
It wasn't nearly as much fun without Dr McCoy, despite the fact that she got to stare at her schoolgirl crush for an hour. Dr McCoy - Sara once enquired and found out he held two doctorates: one medical and one scientific - put on a show that made the learning interesting. Even though Sara was learning it again. He'd put up with Sara not opening their books to page whatever.
But Mr Hinkley... he demonstrated the principle if he had to, and usually made sure that observations were with litmus paper and thermometers. He quantified things until the eyelids flickered and drooped. He read directly from the textbook and demanded the class follow with him.
And, to add insult to injury, Mr Hinkley - the teacher she still loved in a way - believed with all his heart that Sara was Adrian Essel... and that Adrian was gay.
Not that Sara had anything against anyone being homosexual. She could see the logic. One knew the gender intimately, for example. It's just that she wanted to be recognized as a female.
Mr Hinkley was writing on the board. A simple reaction between acid and alkali. Sara copied it out in full before it was done and turned to her back pages.
Now there, if anyone cared to look, were pages that DaVinci would have envied. Equations danced between tiny doodles of machinery, circuits, and studies of insects. There was a miniature copy of Hokusai's The Wave in ones and zeroes. There were attempts to write as small as the micro-writing on money.
Somewhere amongst this, Sara found a blank space and doodled. She drew a phenominally tall princess and a tiny, tiny frog with a little crown. In her miniature hand, she wrote the frog saying, I'll figure somethin' out, yo.
"Mister Essel!"
It was pointless trying to teach him her name. Sara looked up at the board. He'd left a place blank for answers. "Sodium chloride, commonly known as salt."
"That's... correct." He stepped up to her desk and gently re-opened her notebook to the correct working page. "I'd appreciate it if you at least appeared to be paying attention, Mister Essel. Not creating little artworks in the back of your workbook."
"If you insist, I'll have to draw in the margins, sir."
That earned her a death glare. "I'd rather you didn't draw at all, thankyou."
Ugh.
Sara found a way to prop herself up so that she appeared to be paying attention and took her mind away. It was a nifty little trick she'd learned from multiple readings of The Princess Bride. By taking her mind away, she could be anywhere and anywhen, so long as some small part of her remained to go through the motions.
Mr Hinkley never noticed she was gone.
Freddy did. He tapped her shoulder and asked if she was okay at the end of the class.
Sara came back for his concern. "Just took a one-head holiday," she explained. "I was bored."
"Really? I kinda had trouble with the last bit."
"Freddy... it's just a journey from unstable to stable. You pick the most stable chemicals out of the reactants and that's it."
"You're in a bad mood," he said. "Is it Mr Hinkley?"
"I'm - dealing... with Mr Hinkley," she said. "It's today. My back itches like nothing else and I know there's no chemical that can get through cotton without some observable side-effects..."
Freddy just nodded. "I get it. It's the change. I used to get cramps all over everywhere an' I just kinda bloated... Not that I was ever skinny like you."
"Freddy dear," said Sara. "I would gladly take a few of your pounds - strategically placed, of course - if I could. Alas, voluntary body mass transfer is but a dream."
Freddy laughed. "I didn't understand that, but it was funny."
"Tomorrow, Freddy. And scour the dictionary. You'll work it out and I expect you to tell me."
"Will do."
Ack. She was late for music.
It was the only class she ran for. Time with a harp - even if it was Vlad - was time in peace. Time to be the music. Perfect notes, written and appreciated by experts. No-one cared what the harpist looked like. They just listened to the notes that were played.
Most harps in Sara's experience were little old ladies. Her leased practice instrument at home was mass-produced, so it was a trailer trash grandma... young for the title, but old in terms of generations. Sara called that one Billie-Jo.
Sara took her seat and double-checked that Vlad's pegs were rammed home. One of those popping out meant a vicious whip of piano wire at high speed.
Vlad only ever worked if he was strung with piano wire. This generally cut the fingers, so generations of high school harpists used special tape to protect their fingers. Vlad would tolerate fishing line in the higher notes, the exact line of demarcation, B flat above high C, was sacrosanct. Any attempts to go lower were met with breaking cord and bloodshed appropriate to his nickname.
Vlad didn't like kids, and only tolerated classical music. He could, Sara had noted, be bribed with a mothball pushed into his base. She did that now before Mr Larnblatt(1) could notice her.
If she was lucky, she'd get through this with only a minor injury.
Vlad had a temper, and since Sara's interaction with him was at the end of the day, just about anything could set him off.
She risked a run up the notes. In tune for a change. Lovely.
Sara made herself sit ready.
"Now class," said Mr Larnblatt. "We will continue our work on Mozart..."

It was later. Pain had happened(2).
The cut was minor, but it was bleeding and it was strategic. Vlad had zapped her right as the bell rang, thus forbidding her from entering the office of the school nurse.
Sara had been obliged to take care of it single-handedly. Literally.
The new mark went from the pad of flesh opposite the thumb on her right hand, down over her pulse-point, to halfway along her forearm. Butterfly sutures would hold it until she took it home, and a roll of gauze would ensure that the librarian wouldn't kick her out for bleeding on the carpet.
Now she scoured the reference racks for chamelionic lifeforms. So far, her lanky arms had encapsulated chameleons themselves, squid, octupi and one treatise on octopus skins that had entered into the library by mistake.
There was nothing more of interest on the shelves, so she returned to a centrally-located table, piled up her books, and waited.
She would be stoic, come laughter or simple abandonment... should it come to that. Sara was experienced in the matter of pranks, of course, but Todd seemed - genuinely genuine.
Her head throbbed, a migrane-esque headache emerging from the cut on her temple and the sweaty bandage it hid under. Her whole back itched like blue fury and the newest cut on her arm decided to join her head in throbbing.
This was not a good day. Well. Maybe apart from the friend she'd made. And it was now, sitting alone in the school library, that she would see if she'd been fooled about that.

(1) You might know him better as the zebra music teacher from Ozy and Millie (www(dot)ozyandmillie(dot)org)
(2) Stolen unashamedly from Terry Pratchett's book Night Watch.