Well, I saw Rise of the Guardians yesterday, and have been reading the fanfiction for a while. I admit to getting bit by the fanbug. (Yes, I think JF is hot. To quote tumblr- 'I really need to stop falling in love with animated characters'!)

So, here I go. Fair warning- later chapters may be rated T for swearing, but I put up warnings. Will probably be Jack x OC, eventually, but I don't want that to be the main focus.

Thanks for Reading- and Review!

Not so long ago, but in a time you can probably barely remember, I was like you. I was normal, ordinary. Someone who would pass you on the street, or sit next to you on the bus, and never know your name. Someone who passed through the world, uprooted and seeing, but never touching.

I once believed with all my heart and soul in the figures that all children revere, as all children do- and then I forgot that belief, as do most children when they grow. I became just another average being, unnoticed and unremarked.

But appearances can be deceiving. Children grow up, but legends live on- as long as they are believed in. And you're never too old to believe- so they say.

I was born with the ability to see things unseen- those same legends and tales you read in books and hear about before your mother tucks you in. And I was born with a destiny.

I never accepted my fate- or my gift. I cursed the sight that forced me to see the magic I could never touch; ran from it and the world that took all I cared about from me.

But destiny has a way of catching up with you- and legends are born, not made.

This is my story.

I know you must be eager to read this, if you've gotten this far, but for most of my life, I never felt what I saw worth mentioning- and I never wanted to think about my past. Reader- don't skip this introduction. You'll understand this story better. For every story has a beginning- and I'm afraid the pages to come start in the middle.

I lost my parents early- or, rather my mother and my family. I never knew my father, not then, anyway, and not for a long time. I was twelve the night our house burned down, the only one to escape, and not unscathed.

The blaze consumed my mother, my grandmother, my home, and left my legs and feet scarred with the means of my escape. But I'm ahead of myself. I never was very good at patience.

My mother was nineteen when she had me; unemployed and without a partner to show for her pregnancy. So she scraped by- went on welfare and returned home her own, slightly less poor, mother. The house was old and from the forties, run down and ancient, but it was a house and not an apartment or the street.

Thus, in due time, I was born, and for the majority of my life there I called home. I can't say, really, if I was happy or not-certainly we were poor- but I was loved and that was enough.

But one night, that disappeared- the night of the fire. The investigators never could determine what triggered it, but the blaze quickly spread from the ground floor to the second, cutting off escape. I remember the twisted shadows on the walls, and my mother's voice alternately begging with someone and screaming for me to run. I must have gotten out of the window, for I remember running across the roof, my feet burning on the superheated tiles and flames licking at my legs before I fell into a rescuer's arms.

I spent the next few weeks or so in the hospital- and the next four years being shunted across the country from one distant relative to another. I was lucky, though. I escaped the foster system and all of its lurking horrors.

But no one ever took me long. After all, who wants a teenage misfit who barely speaks to anyone over her own age, when your own home is crowded with kids?

And even when a permanent home was offered, I never accepted it- I ran so far and so fast from the gift I was cursed with and the shadows that followed me, I never had time.

But Destiny has a mind of its own. You can't escape it, no matter how you try- and mine found me on one momentous day; a day that seemed like any other.