A/N: Hey folks, long long long long time no see. I am posting this so that followers of this story can know that it has been abandoned. No! Do not fret! Because I have rewritten it entirely from scratch and posted to An Archive Of Our Own (ao3) under the pseudonym Dartxni. The new version is much better, although I haven't finished the last few chapters yet. Sorry, I tried to finish it before school started again, but time got away from me. But it is almost done. Below is the first chapter of the new fic, "The Power of Hidden Emotions." I changed the name slightly to reflect the fact that the new fic is more like a reimagining of the same story and less a straight remake.

The Power of Hidden Emotions

Chapter 1

Matilda stacked her reference books onto the shelf with a smile of fondness for the old friends who had helped her through such a challenging school year. Any way she looked at it, Matilda had overloaded herself. Now she could breath - for a short while - before she dove into completing her dissertation to get her Masters of Science at the University of Leeds.

It was fantastic that she lived in Leeds and had been able to live at home while attending the prestigious university. She would have missed Jenny way too much if she had needed to move in order to pursue her education.

Matilda took herself downstairs to help Jennifer prep Dinner, though help was a strong word. What she actually did was sit at the wooden table in the kitchen and watch Jenny cook.

Matilda liked to watch Jenny do things. She never got over how graceful she was while doing absolutely anything. She knew that Jenny had wanted to be a dancer when she was a little girl. Unfortunately, her aunt had considered dance to be the most worthless thing ever invented by humans. Nonetheless, every movement she made was to an internal melody. While Jennifer worked, every once in a while she would turn and look at Matilda with a pleased and tender look that made Matilda want to melt.

"Do you want to stir for me while I do the chicken?" Jenny asked.

"Oh sure."

Matilda got off her butt and took over the station at the stove, eyes following Jenny as she bent to reach into the refrigerator for the chicken. She sighed heavily, glad that Jennifer didn't have a clue that Matilda was basically addicted to being around her. She had long ago decided that happiness was defined by being in the same room as Jennifer Honey.

"Hey, pass me a knife would you?" Jenny asked.

It was barely within her reach so Matilda had to lean away from stove to get it. To her surprise, it glided last two inches to land handle first her palm.

"I saw that!" Jennifer said. "Your power really is coming back. Isn't it?"

It first happened about a week ago. Jenny had interrupted Matilda's studying for her last exam to force a breather upon her, in the form of a game of scrabble. Matilda had been amused by the way Jenny's hair kept falling in front of her eyes as she leaned over the board. Jenny had called her on her distracted state and Matilda, flustered, had reached for her pieces, only to find them floating toward her like levitating superconductors. After it had happened once she had tried it again with Jenny's encouragement, but failed to make anything special happen.

She had been forced to put it out of her mind to concentrate on studying for her last exam. Her grades were important, and while the return of her powers 10 years after she had lost them was surprising, it wasn't the strangest thing that had ever happened to her.

She had first come across this seemingly supernatural telekinetic ability when she was a little kid. The ability had disappeared after a short while. It had motivated her to pursue her masters in science in the area of quantum physics. She wanted to research the physical laws behind the ability, although she had never shared her own experiences with the academic establishment. If they believed her, she feared for her safety. She did not want to become some sort of lab rat. If they didn't believe her, she knew that it might ruin her chances to ever be a respected scientist.

Jenny had supported her in keeping the secret.

Now Matilda and Jenny sat across from each other at the dinner table. Jenny had dug into her dinner but Matilda stared at her food, concentrating intently. She was hoping for a repeat showing of her power.

It would be so much easier to research something that she could actually test. She remembered the first time she had ever moved something on purpose. She remembered how she had felt, the words she had used put herself in the mind frame where her power worked.

"I'm smart, you're dumb; I'm big, you're little; I'm right, you're wrong, and there's nothing you can do about it."

Those had been her father's taunts.

She had been such an angry little girl. Her life at that point had been one unfair moment after another. She had believed that it was her duty to punish all the terrible people around her. Negative emotions had driven her powers back then. She called upon those feelings now.

She thought, for the first time in years, what it was like to watch Miss Trunchbull come into Jennifers classroom and show her friend such disdain and disrespect. The sick feeling she had gotten while watching a kind and wonderful adult be bullied the way her own father bullied her. She let herself become angry at those old memories, attempting to recreate the feelings of her youth. It wasn't working though. She could not raise the fork out of her dish. It felt utterly impossible to do so.

She recalled more recent events. That time when she was accused of plagiarising because another student had stolen her work and turned it in as their own. The teacher had called her a lying, cheating, little girl, and tried to get her expelled. He hadn't believed that someone of her age could be that smart, or dedicated. But he'd sealed his fate when he had explained, snidely, that men showed more variance in their IQ than women did. Men were more likely to be either mental retards or savants than women were, and therefore Matilda could not be as smart as she 'pretended' to be because she was a girl.

By the end of that fiasco, she had gotten him fired by finding and making public a paper that he had plagiarised when he had been a student. He'd gotten away with it for so long because back when he had written them, papers were not automatically submitted to anti-plagiarising software for analysis.

That was in her first year, and after that she had experienced few problems of the same kind. She focused on that sentiment of giving someone their well deserved punishment but she could not raise the fork.

"Matilda, are you going to kill it or eat it?" Jenny asked mildly.

Matilda groaned and began to rub the furrows out of her brows. "I can't do it. I am doing all the things I did back then, I am working myself up and getting angry. It's not working at all."

"You didn't seem angry earlier while we were cooking. What were you feeling when you grabbed the knife?"

Matilda had an excellent memory, as close to the stereotypical eidetic memory of fiction as real life could supply. The scene had been tranquil. Jenny cooking, her just sitting at the table in the kitchen, her table, her kitchen. At home. She had been feeling calm and happy - not unusual feelings for her to feel these days at all.

"Happy."

"So... be happy."

She looked at the fork and made peace with it. If it didn't want to rise, that was ok. She loved the fork. It part of her home. She had fond memories of the forks in this house, she had eaten many fine things with them. The fork, forkishly refused to rise into the air. Well, she hadn't expected it to.

Happiness was a warm cup of hot chocolate on rainy day. Happiness was putting two facts that nobody had ever put together before and reaching a conclusion and realising that this new idea made the universe make more sense. Happiness was the day Jennifer Honey signed her legal guardianship papers. If that wasn't happiness, she didn't know what was, and she focused on that giddy feeling.

The fork remained steadfast and refused to budge.

It was evident that emotion was the key to unlocking her power, but what emotion exactly? This morning, the telekinesis had surprised her by showing up with the sunrise. She had been dreaming before she woke up. The first thing that had caught her eye had been some of the books on her shelves. She had felt compelled to test her powers, for some reason sure that they would work.

Lazy, with sleep still in her eyes, she had expected the books to rise, and they had. It was easy. She played with them a short while until they all fell to the floor at once. She couldn't get them to dance again, so she gave up got out of bed.

Before she had woken though.. she had been dreaming. She had nearly forgotten the dream, having been distracted by the unexpected return of her power. But now, because she had thought of it, she remembered the dream.

It had been little more than an impression of being hugged from behind, with a hand resting lightly under her shirt, lightly touching the sensitive skin of her stomach. A small thing, but it had felt significant and intense. The person holding her in this embrace had been Jenny and she had known it, even though she couldn't see her face. Matilda had woken up feeling light headed and woozy. She felt dizzy just thinking about it now, and clenched the table with her hands. Woah.

The fork rose out out of the dish.

"Oh, look! You did it!" Matilda looked away from the fork full of chicken and looked at Jenny. Her face had broken into a smile of pure delight. Carefully, Matilda put the fork down in her curry and rice, but she felt like she was buzzing.

She was hyper aware of her limbs, and of the way she was breathing, and of a feeling behind her eyes. A sort of internal pressure, or heat. She turned around and lifted the all the kitchen spoons off the wall where they hung on little hooks. She juggled them until the pressure went away.

It took about a minute before she felt ready to send them back to their homes. She looked down at her hands, which she now noticed were gripping the table. She specifically did not look up at Jenny.

"Oh my god, It's been so long since you could do that. I am so pleased for you."

"I need to go for a little bit." Matilda said, standing up abruptly. She needed to get away and think and... experiment. She suddenly thought she knew what emotion unlocked her power, and it was as embarrassing as hell. She had to be sure before she even brought it up.

"Don't you want to eat first?"

No. Honesty was best. "I think I might know what unlocked this telekinesis, but I need to test it out, experiment, and for that I need to be alone."

"Right now?"

"Yeah... this is important."

"All right, I'll save your dinner for you."

Matilda pursed her lips in a grateful, if tight smile and went up to her room. She sat on her bed, knees drawn to her chest and hugged herself until her heart stopped beating so awkwardly.

a/n: If this chapter appeals to you, please find it at An Archive Of Our Own (AO3) under the name Dartxni. Thankyou!