She was running down a dark tunnel, blood flowing out of her knuckles. She suddenly came face to face with an enormous wall. She frantically brushed her palms across the surface creating a scraping noise from the painful claws sticking out of her hands.

She was strapped to a chair, unable to move as the man in the uniform and swastika armband came closer with the razor. She felt it touch her skin and begin embedding the numbers into her forearm. They were branding all of them like a cattle. Now they brought the ink and let it seep into the wound.

She felt the boy's lips go cold and heard him gasp for air. Her eyes flew open and saw the look of fear in his eyes. She pushed him away and screamed for her mother.

Pyro shook the mumbling girl roughly. "Claire! Wake up Claire!" he whispered loudly in her ear.

"No! I didn't mean it." she said desperately, fighting his grip.

"Claire it's me, Pyro!"

"No!"

"Claire it's," he paused for a brief moment. " it's John, Claire."

She finally managed to burst through the barrier between sleep and wakefulness. She gasped for air like she had been holding it for too long, eyes huge with fear as she tried to recognize the face above her.

"John." she whispered. "John." It was all she could get out. Her thoughts came to fast. Thoughts that weren't her own flew at her from the dark reaches of her mind.

"It's ok Claire, it's ok it was just a dream."

Her lip trembled. "It was horrible. It was them. They're still in my head, they won't leave and- and I-" she broke off and gulped back her tears. With the help of John she sat up. She cradled her head in her hands as she tried to explain it to him, tried to make him understand.

"It sounded pretty bad." he told her.

"It's worse than bad. I'm having memories that aren't mine. They float around in my head all day but it's not until I go to sleep that they come alive."

There was a long pause. Pyro wondered if he should say anything. Should he hug her? Should he say he understood? He didn't, and it wouldn't help her.

"The worst part," her voice dropped to a mere breath. "is that I can't tell which one's are really mine. All of them seem so real. The pain, the fear, even the happiness." she took a shaky breath, trying to forget the images. She brushed her lips with her finger tips. She could still feel the cold skin of that boy. What had happened to him?

"What are you doing here?"

"I was in the neighborhood."

"You wanna go for a walk or something?" Pyro offered. "Maybe it'll clear your head." Claire nodded. She slipped on a jacket and shoes and left with him.

The campsite was almost a small town in itself. There had to be several hundred mutants here. All of them had similar stories: rejected by family and people they thought were friends, gone underground or left town in an attempt to start over. Then they found Magneto and agreed with his vision.

There was a lot of anger in these people. The few that Claire had accidentally touched had memories of fighting for their life, loss, suffering. Some were younger than her, others were so weathered it was hard to tell exactly how old they were.

As Claire walked pass silent tents she wondered if the memories that had caused her dreams belonged to any of these people. Normally she didn't like to wonder, she just forgot about the images and tried to move on. Other times though she found herself wondering. What would I see if I touched him? What about her?

She glanced at John. What would happen if she touched him? Secretly she did have a crush on him but would never admit it. He seemed like an okay guy, kind of distant, he had his moodiness but...

She shook herself inwardly. She may have been attracted to him, but only a little. Her feelings were as big as an ant.

Or an atom.

She didn't like him enough to slip off her glove and reach for his hand. She didn't like him enough to trust him. She wouldn't make the same mistakes she had before.

Men are scum. She told herself. He seems nice, but really he's waiting. Waiting for you to open up. To let your guard down. Waiting...

 She told herself. seems

"Claire?" John pulled her back to reality.

"Sorry, I'm zoning out." she apologized.

"Oh, ok." he shrugged it off.

They were on a large rock that let you look over some of the forest. The moon hadn't appeared yet so there wasn't much to see at the moment. The only source of light was from the flame bounding across John's hands. Claire sat mesmerize for a moment and let her thoughts wander.

I love the fire reflecting from his eyes. Look at how he looks back at it, I wish he would look at me like that.

She was mad at herself now. She knew he didn't like her, why did she constantly have to give her hopes up like that? He wasn't going to be any different than any other guy she had ever met.

"Hey Claire?"

"Yes?"

"Can I ask you something?"

There was a pause but only for a split second. "Shoot."

"When did you first discover you were a mutant?"

This pause was longer. Did she want to tell him? She hadn't told anyone, well, besides Professor Xavier but...but that had been different. This was the guy she was crushing on. She couldn't even tell her best friend about it. What if this messed up any chances she had with him? Shouldn't she be able to tell him anything? She had wanted to forget all that stuff but part of her was burning to tell...

"I was thirteen." so she just started talking. What was there to lose. His respect. He might forever see her as some pathetic thing and she did not need his sympathy. "for some reason I felt like something wasn't right. Ever since I was a little girl strange things had happened. But now they were happening more often."

She paused for a second to try to form her thoughts into words but not too long for fear that her mouth would suddenly clamp shut and stay that way forever.

"I blamed it on puberty, 'everyone is going through this', I kept telling myself that but I knew it wasn't true. I had never heard of puberty causing visions... I don't know why it took me so long, all of the anti mutant things were the top stories in the news. Maybe I didn't want to admit it to myself."

"I wanted to be accepted. You know I'm an orphan. Rumors would go around about why I hadn't been adopted by any family yet. They said it wasn't safe for any of my foster families to adopt me, that I was crazy and had killed an entire family in one of my spouts of insanity. So I did what every other girl my age was doing. I got a boyfriend."

"That was supposed to solve my problem, but it only caused more. At first it was fine. And then he held my hand for the first time and I suddenly was having nightmares about him in brutal fights with his siblings, yelling at his parents, pulling dirty pranks on kids. I thought it was just my subconscious freaking out over my first official relationship, you know?"

Could I be wrong about anything else?

Well I kept going out with him and eventually he figured out I was a mutant. The sad part was it was before I had even realized it. He would accuse me of lying to him about it and after a while he got violent about it."

John held his breath for a moment in surprise but Claire kept going. No use in stopping before all of the story was out in the open.

"It went on for a long time. Sometimes I would hit him back. Sometimes it wasn't that bad. I think my friends suspected the bruises were coming from my foster parents. I guess they just couldn't believe that someone they knew would do something like that."

"Then one night he came to my house and he was acting strangely. We were sitting outside and he pulled out a gun. He held it to my head and yelled and screamed about mutants and abominations."

"I thought I was going to die. And as I sat there crying, something inside of me snapped. He pulled the trigger but somehow...it missed."

"My foster parents heard the gunshot and came outside. I told them what had happened. That I was defending myself but I was so scared at what I had done. He was hurt so bad. They believed me and took him to a hospital and I left. I couldn't be there when he told everyone a mutant had done that to him."

"And then you went to Xavier's school." John finished the story for her.

"Yeah. I heard about it and made my way to it. But that wasn't what I thought it was either."

"Yeah, Xavier's delusional if he thinks the homo sapiens will ever accept us."

Claire became quiet. He sounded like Magneto, not like the boy she had been confessing one of her darkest secrets to.

"I think I'll be able to get back to sleep now, thanks." she said and left.

"Your welcome." Pyro called after her, wondering what he said to make her leave so suddenly.

Please Review! Thank you for all of your support and diligence in reading my story, I hope you enjoy it!