Disclaimer: I don't have any rights to be doing what I do with any of Marvel's characters. Keep your hands and feet inside at all times and please enjoy the story, thank you.

"Welcome Miss Rynolds to your first staff meeting," Professor Xavier said to me as I walked into his office where the meeting was being held.

It had been two weeks since I had first arrived, and after studying up on the job the Professor had offered me, I had agreed to take it. He wanted me to mostly go to foster homes and orphanages to talk to the kids there, since I had some experience with it myself. I was actually a little excited about it; I had never had a job outside of a bar so it was a completely new experience for me.

"Thank you," I said, sitting down in a chair beside Rouge, whom I had met briefly the day before when she and Bobby had come home from their honeymoon. I had been informed of her mutation earlier on in the week, before they had returned, and had to resist the urge to ask someone to explain how their relationship…worked, because I assumed it was far too personally, and, quite frankly, none of my business.

She did sort of look like me, as Logan had said. We both had very pale skin, dark brown eyes and we were built roughly the same, with the exception that I was a few inches taller. She had dark brown, straight hair, and mine was blonde and curly, but I could see how Logan would have been reminded of me.

She sat, chewing on a piece of gum and scribbling in a notebook during the meeting, taking notes, distracting me from mine every time she would blow a small bubble and pop it.

About midway through, Logan was talking about the kids complaining to the other teachers when he would push them hard in his self-defense class, saying that the kids were too scared to talk to him about it.

"Aw, are they scared of the big, bad wolf?" Rouge said playfully.

I couldn't believe it; she was flitting with my Logan in front of not only me and the rest of the staff, but her new husband as well.

"Wait…" I thought. "Why did I just call him my Logan? He's not mine…but more so than hers. I knew him before her and if it wasn't for my stupid father, she never would have even met him,"

"Actually, wolverines aren't part of the wolf family, they're related to the badger family," I said. Everyone went quiet and when I looked up from my notes, they were all staring at me. "Am I the only one who watches Animal Planet?"

"Apparently," Rouge said, snapping her gum at me.

She didn't like me; she had known me for only a day and didn't like me based solely on our one meeting.

"Animal Planet," Logan snorted.

"Hey, I'm just happy to have cable, okay? Anything that doesn't involve the news is interesting to me right now, so don't get facetious because I'm culturing myself,"

"It's better than 'Oklahoma'," he retorted.

I blushed slightly as I was surprised that he had actually remembered that conversation, which had seemed like so long ago, and I couldn't help but smile a little.

"I like 'Oklahoma,'" I muttered quietly. He let out a small laugh and winked at me, making my blush an even deeper pink.

"Miss Rynolds, if you feel comfortable enough with your job, I would like for you to follow Mr. Drake as he goes to New York City tomorrow. There is a young girl living in an orphanage there and from what I can tell, is quite powerful and having a bit of a problem with the other children. The owners know that you will be coming but they do not know that she is a mutant," the Professor said.

"Yeah, I think that I would feel comfortable with doing that," I said. "What's her name?"

"Laura," he answered.

"How old is she?"

"Why does it matter?" Rouge asked.

"I just want to know a little bit about her before we go busting into her life and turning it around anymore than it already is. She needs someone who's going to go in and understand not only her situation but also what she's going through. Group homes aren't exactly the nicest places in the world, so if you're going to tell someone that you know that they're a mutant, you need to have enough information to tell them that they can have a better life somewhere else; here. You need to be able to relate to them,"

"How do you know?" she asked and I felt all seven of them watch me for my answer. Only Logan and the Professor knew about my past.

"Because I lived in foster care for a few months, then moved into a foster home for seven years and I've moved from home to home for the past six years. My mother was murdered, my father was in prison and my aunt gave me away because I was hurting her 'love life'. If some random person come into the group home that I was living in, wearing some stuffy suit, acting better than me, attempting to tell me that they knew that I was a mutant I would have stopped them right there and made them leave. It's a different situation than just allowing kids to come to school, they've had hard lives and they need to know that they're going to be understood and welcomed here. They need to know that everyone thinks that they're worth all of what they're being offered,"

"Which is why I felt you would do well in this job," Professor Xavier said to me.

"Alright," Rouge said, writing in her notebook. "How old is she?"

"She is fourteen,"

"What can she do?" I asked.

"Her powers and not completely clear to me at the moment, but I believe they involve fire, not unlike Pyro,"

"Who's Pyro?" I asked.

"He was a student of mine named John, he attended the school while Bobby and Rouge were still students,"

"Where is he now?"

"He's one of Magneto's goons," Logan said.

I stifled a laugh, trying to be serious about the subject, but hearing anyone say 'goons', especially 'manly' Logan, was enough to make me crack up.

"Oh, what could he do?" I managed to say without so much as a smile.

I never felt stupid about asked questions, it never embarrassed me because I was doing it to learn something and for some reason, I had always been a very curious person. So it didn't bother me too badly when Rouge let out a heavy sigh, obviously bored with the conversation.

"He could manipulate fire, allowing it to grow and swell with his powers, and I believe that this is what Laura's powers are,"

I took some short hand notes before the Professor changed the subject, bringing up the topic of having more vegetarian food options for the kids, since there were quite a few vegetarians there. Logan said something sarcastic, amusing himself highly and managing to annoy Scott. The meeting only last about thirty more minutes and then we were all dismissed.

I gathered my things together, stuffing my notebook and pen into my bag haphazardly, trying to get out of there as quick as possible while Rouge was talking to Logan.

I stood up, slinging the bag onto my shoulder and heading for the door. However, in my haste I caught my foot on one of the legs of the chair next to mine, tripping over it and falling face first into the floor. As I was going down, I looked over and I swear that she was laughing at me.

"Are you alright?" Logan asked, coming over to my side and bending down beside me.

I pushed myself up from the floor, rolled over and sat up. "Yeah, I'm fine," I said, doing my best to force a fake smile.

"Your chin's bleedin'," he said.

I reached up and felt the blood dripping from my chin. "I'll stop," I said, trying to deflect how bad the fall was.

He grabbed my arm and looked at my elbow where I had a nice, lovely, little raspberry from where I had tried to break my fall.

"You might need this checked out," he said.

"I'm a big girl, I think I can put my own Band-Aids on," I said, looking at him and smiling.

He smiled back. "Good to know," he said, standing, and then holding out his hand. I grabbed it and he pulled me up from the floor.

"Thanks," I said, straightening out my clothes, which had been twisted during the fall.

"I thought you would have learned to walk by now, kid," he said and I saw Rouge look a little upset behind him. I had heard him call her 'kid' when she got home and found it amusing that she was mad at him for called me the same name that he called her, even though he had called me by it first.

I smiled at him. "Shut up, I can't help it that I'm clumsy,"

"Maybe if you would watch where you're goin' instead of running outta' here like you got somewhere to be, you might not trip,"

"Maybe I do have somewhere to be," I teased.

He quirked an eyebrow at me. "Like where?"

"Like…I'm going out with someone," I said. Though it wasn't the reason why I had rushed from the room, I was supposed to be going out that night.

"With who?"

"You don't know them,"

"Where did you meet them?"

"At work," Okay, so I was actually going out to eat with Leah and Kayti, but he didn't need to know that.

"Where are you goin'?"

"Out to eat. Why, are you jealous?"

"No," he said quickly.

I laughed. "Aw, Logan's jealous that I've got other friends besides him," He gave me a stern look from underneath his eyebrows. "You didn't use to be so serious, you know?"

"That must have been before you got friends," he said with a smirk.

"You are such a jerk," I said with a smirk of my own.

"Maybe, but I ain't jealous,"

"Are you sure about that?"

"Yeah, go and have fun, darlin'," he said, but he wasn't convincing me.

He was protective of me, even still. I thought that after that long he wouldn't be, but the look on his face was proof enough. He was worried about me. For the two weeks that I had been there, he had been keeping his eye on me, making sure that I didn't try to run away. He had showed me around the school until I had finally gotten the hang of it on my own, had helped me work on my truck in the school's garage, he pretty much didn't leave my side from the time I woke up until I went to bed, and when he did, he would watch my very closely. I guess old habits do die-hard.

"So you're working at this boarding school and living there?" Kayti said that said as we were eating at a Mexican restaurant not too far from Tayrn's bar so that they could go straight over after we were done, to work.

"Yeah, it's actually really nice," I said.

"Are you allowed to teach, I thought you had to have a degree for that?" asked Leah.

"Well, I'm not teaching, I'm interviewing the kids who had potential to go to the school there, but I could sub if they needed me to, you only need a high-school diploma for that,"

"So what about that guy?" Kayti asked, taking a bite of her food.

"What guy?"

"The one that came back in looking for you after you left,"

"Oh, Logan, what about him?"

"Are the two of you going out?"

I laughed. "No…oh my word no, ew, gross,"

"What do you mean 'ew, gross', he was totally hot!"

"Yeah, he's a very attractive man but I knew him when I was like, fifteen, he doesn't think of me like that, and I don't either, that would just be creepy,"

"Oh come on, if he wanted to go out with you, you would say 'No, you knew me when I was younger'? Are you serious?"

"First of all, Logan doesn't 'go out' with anyone, so if he were to say that he wanted to go out with me, then I would freak out because something would be wrong with him,"

"You are so hopeless," she said.

"Why is that?"

"Because it's completely obvious that you're in love with him,"

"I beg your pardon? I am not in love with him; he's too…Logan,"

"So?"

"So? So he's a foul mouthed, arrogant, whiskey drinking, cocky, redneck Canadian jerk,"

"He still sounds better than your other boyfriends," Leah said.

"Maybe, but he's like-"

"A brother? Don't even," Kayti said, cutting me off mid-sentence.

"I was going to say second cousin twice removed, actually," I said sarcastically, rolling my eyes.

"You know that sarcasm is the lowest form of humor, right?" Leah said.

"But it's still considered humor," I pointed out.

"I just think that you need to keep an open mind about it, he may really be into you," Kayti told me.

"Yeah, I'll try to do that,"

"It really sucks that Tayrn fired you," Leach said, changing the subject.

"Yeah," I said.

"Why did she fire you?" Kayti asked. The both stared at me, waiting for my answer.

"She didn't tell you?" I asked.

"No," answered Kayti.

"Oh, uh, some personal stuff, not a big deal, though,"

"Oh!" Leah said. "I just remembered; someone said that Josh is in the hospital!"

"What happened, I mean, why is he in there?" I asked, trying to act as if it were a surprise.

"I don't know really, his friend Daniel came in talking about it, saying something about him falling down the stairs, or something? I don't know, but anyway, he's got like, six cracked ribs, both of his legs are broken and he's fractured his pelvis, I think,"

Fell down the stairs, ha. He tried to kill me and was introduced to Wolverine who, from the sound of it, gave him a fairly good beating. At least good enough not to admit that some He-Man had done it after he knocked me out.

I tried to hide my smile buy I couldn't.

"You are so sadistic," Kayti said.

"Hey, excuse me if I pause to enjoy someone else's bad karma for a second, but I think I lived with him for long enough to deserve a moment at his expense,"

"Weren't you talking about getting married?" Leah asked.

"He was talking about getting married. I'm twenty-two, why would I want to get married right now. I don't want to merry someone just because they're talking about it,"

"But I thought you guys were so good together," she said.

"Things change,"

The next day I took my time to carefully pick out what I was going to wear to meet Laura, the girl the Professor wanted Bobby and me to interview. I decided on my long sleeved blue shirt, because blue is a calming color and makes the person you're meeting feel relaxed. So, I went with it, a pair of blue jeans and these amazing pair of blue, pointy-toed flats that I had gotten in New York City from a street vender when I had gone shopping for work clothes with Kayti and Leah a few months before. I wasn't the pointy-toed type usually, but they were ten dollars, in my size, and the prettiest color blue I had ever seen.

I pulled my hair back into a ponytail because I had read somewhere that when your hair is pulled back away from your face that more people are likely to trust you, which is what I really needed.

As I road with Bobby he told me that I would be the one talking to her. I kept going over my mental checklist of what I needed to do; smile, shake hands with a good grip and be polite. People make up their minds about whether they're going to like you or not within the first three seconds of meeting you, and for the most part, it never changes. I needed to try to relate, without talking too much about myself or being falsely and over the top nice. She needed to see that I was young, too, but most importantly, I needed to try to remember to casually drop in the word 'because' as much as I could while making my point. I had read a study somewhere that said the word 'because' had a lot of power behind it. The study showed that while using it in a sentence ninety percent of people were more likely to do what you were asking them to do, because it made it sound valid. After reading it, I once asked a woman in a very long bathroom line if I could go in front of her 'because I have to go really bad,' it worked.

I was a little bit nervous when we first got there, I didn't want to screw up my first day on the job. We didn't have to wait too long before a woman who worked there showed me to a small room that had a classroom setting. There was a young girl sitting at one of the desks by herself and I realized that my life, even at its worst, was never as bad as hers was. Professor Xavier had given me a file on her that morning, so that I could read up on her. Both of her parents had been lawyers, a very well of and rich family. She had attended an all girls private school, which she attended with the children of her parent's co-workers. She was on the swim-team, played tennis and road in competitive horse back riding. It, apparently, all seemed very family portrait-esque, and everyone assumed that they were one big happy family. That is until the day when the man whom her mother was having an affair with killed them both as he was robbing their house while he thought they were away on vacation. After he killed them, he took Laura and sold her to another man in exchange for drug money. There were a series of me selling her, one to the next until the eighth man attempted to sell her to an undercover cop. From there she was sent to the orphanage at the age of eleven, where she wasn't allowed to be adopted until she finished a twelve-month long therapy course. However, by that time that she had finished, she was past the typical age of adoption and had been there for three years.

She was small, unusually pale, had strawberry blonde hair that was long and straight. The woman that had taken me to the room introduced me to her.

"Laura, this is Miss Rynolds, she's from a school in Westchester and would like to talk to you,"

She didn't say anything; she just looked up at me with her bright blue eyes that looked so empty and hopeless. Suddenly it hit me that I wasn't doing a job; I was dealing with actual kids and not all of the studies that I had read about human behavior growing up counted, because they weren't normal people. They were disturbed, destroyed, adolescent lives, who also happened to be mutants.

I stood there, waiting for one of them to say something else. Tick, tick, tick. My three seconds were up and she had gotten her first impression of me.

"Alright, thank you," I said with a smile as she walked away. She looked back and gave me a supportive smile before walking out and closing the door behind her.

"Hi, I'm Chloe, it's nice to meet you," I said, reaching out my hand to shake hers, but she just continued to look at me. There went my strong handshake; at least I was being polite, though. "Do you mind if I sit?" I asked. She didn't answer so I sat anyway. "Look, I know that this is hard for you, but I'm not a therapist, I'm not a social worker, I'm not a lawyer, I'm just here to talk to you, but if you don't want to talk then just tell me and I'll leave, but I think I've got something that you might want to hear,"

She looked at me, blinking her big eyes. "What?"

I took a deep breath and let it out. "I work at a school owned by a friend of mine named Professor Charles Xavier. It's a school for the gifted and he's heard about you and wants you to give a very good consideration to living and studying there,"

"I'm not gifted," she deadpanned. "So how could he have heard about me?"

"But you are gifted. You have a very strong gift, one that you might be slight afraid for other people to know about,"

She shot me a look. "I don't know what you're talking about,"

"Are you sure?"

"Why would he want someone like me at his school?"

"I told you; it's a school for the gifted, just like you,"

"How does he know about me, no one knows,"

"He is gifted as well. That's why he wants to reach out to as many kids as he can,"

"Why would he care, though?"

"Because he understands what you're going through," I said, curing myself for it as soon as the words left my mouth. I didn't want to say that simply because it wasn't very true. He understood the mutant part, and I may have understood some of what she was going through, but neither of us, nor any of the teachers, had gone through what she had.

"That's what everyone says, prove it,"

"I can't prove it for him, but I can for me,"

"How?"

"By the time I was your age my mother had been killed and I was discovering…my gift," I said, feeling cheesy. "Alright, look, I'm not going to sit here and try to compare my life with yours, I'm sure that they've both suck in their own ways, but this conversation is about giving you some control over you life. It's about what you're going to do with the situations you've been handed, because now it's time to start dealing with it. He wants you to come live at his school because if he or I don't understand you, another student will. This school is full of opportunities for you to build back what you've lost over these past unfortunate years of your life. It's sad that you've had to go through so much at such a young age; you've gone through more than anyone ever should and you're just fourteen. But he wants to help, I want to help, the other teachers want to help, because no matter what you've gone through we've all got something in common,"

"What?"

I looked at her, leaned in a little closer and dropped my voice. "Because we all know what it's like to be a mutant and trying to hide it from the rest of the world, feeling like an outcast by the simple fact that we're different from everyone. Like it's a sin not to be just like the all of the other people around us and feeling like there's something wrong with us because we have to keep a part of who we are hidden from anyone, because we don't know what'll happen if we tell them. We don't know whom we can trust, so we don't, and it creates something inside of us that we hate, so we start to hate ourselves and we become reclusive and scared. If you chose to go to the school I promise that you will not have to hide anymore, you don't have to be scared about people finding out about your secret, and I have a friend who will teach you personally how to defend yourself so that you won't have to worry about anything else happening to you. You'll live there in a dorm room, which will be less crowded than it is here. You'll go to classes' right there with the other students and you can learn to use your powers and see it as a gift instead of a curse. What has happened to you is terrible, what those people took away from you is something that you can't get back, and I'm not going to sit here and tell you that you can, but you've let them steal your life, you've let other people decide how you live, all for far too long. You don't have to go to school there, but you get the chance to decide, you have the final decision, it's what you want," I said, leaning back in my chair and letting her absorb what I had told her.

"If I don't live here, then how could anyone adopt me?"

"You'll sill be up for adoption and Professor Xavier will set up days for you to visit and interview anyone that shows an interest in you,"

"I can't pay for it,"

"You don't have to," I said, reaching into my bag and pulling out a brochure for the school. It was the one that the Professor gave to the parents who assumed that it was just a preparatory school. "Here, you can look at this, it should tell you about all of the classes and extra curricular activities they have there,"

She took it and flipped through it, pausing to read something that caught her eye every now and then. "You have horses?"

I smiled at her. "I thought you might like that. Yes we do, there's twenty of them and I'm not sure what days are set aside for riding, but it's quite often,"

"You work there but you don't know the schedule?" she asked, looking over at me from the brochure.

"I'm kind of new myself," I said.

She didn't say anything, but I knew she was thinking very hard about it. "Did you tell anyone else…about me?"

"No, the only people where who know are you, my friend who works with me who's here, and me. But he's not going to tell anyone, and neither am I," I told her. "Look, you don't have to make up your mind about this right now, it's a big decision to make so you can take your time with it and do what you want to do and think is best for you. There's a number to the school there but I'm going to give you my cell phone number so that when you decide you can call and tell me, and then I'll tell the Professor and you can come to live with us. Or, if you ever just want to talk to anyone about anything, you can call me, no matter what time it is,"

She looked at me, fighting back tears and losing. "I can't pay him back for it, though,"

Hearing her say the same words that I had uttered only days before suddenly struck me as odd. He didn't want anything; couldn't she see that? How had I not seen it? Looking at her, wanting help and finally seeing a glimmer of hope with only a few of her own obstacles in the way, made me wonder how I had found myself dropped into a job that I had never even thought of before could be so perfect for me. Helping other people was cathartic for me and I couldn't help but sharing it with her and I began to cry as well.

"He doesn't want you to pay him back; you will never own him anything. He wants to give you something that you should have had all along; security, and he didn't send me here from Westchester to tell you that you have to pay a price for being different, because you don't. Everything from the school will be of no cost to you, not because he pities you, I know that that's no what you want, he's giving it to you because you've earned it and deserve it,"

"When do I have to give you my answer?"

"Whenever you want and feel ready,"

She shook her head. "Okay,"

I wiped away the tears that I had unprofessionally let flee my eyes. I took the notepad from my bag and wrote down my name and cell phone number. "I'm going to leave and let you think about this, but you can call me whenever you want, or if you ever need anything," I said, handing her the paper and standing from my seat. "It was nice to meet you and I hope that whatever you chose works out for you, and I truly mean that,"

She looked up at me and her eyes were no longer empty and hopeless, they were full of hope and I had helped to do it. Why had it taken me so long to actually grasp that I wanted to do that job? I should have jumped on it as soon as Xavier offered it to me. I had never done anything so fulfilling in my life and I love it. Not because it made me feel better, but because I saw a small bit of myself in her and if someone had given me hope like the Professor had given her when I was her age, I would have been grateful beyond belief. Then I realized, he was giving me the same hope as her, I had just had a hard time distinguishing between hope and pity. He didn't pity me; none of them did, and with my newfound revelation I was able to interact with the rest of the staff without worrying what the thought about me.