Hi, this is my first chapter of my first FanFiction story ever, so I am very excited to share it with you all! I do not own X-Men, but Laurien is my creation. I hope you all enjoy!
The mundane task of simply strolling down the street on the sidewalk was sweetened immensely by the perfume of autumn in the air. The crisp cold against her skin and a vent pumping out the rich scent of fresh bakery bread and pastries were a perfect mixture to send Laurien into a dizzyingly good mood.
The intoxicating scent of baked goods reminded Laurien of home. On fall mornings such as this when she was little, she frequently woke up to the sweet smell of fresh Ontbijtkoek drifting from downstairs where her mother was preparing breakfast. The memory was bittersweet, making Laurien's chest ache, but she held onto it tightly. Considering all the issues that were weighing on her mind, she was grateful for the distraction.
New York, though bustling with people and light, was plagued with worsening news from home and overseas. With the Americans and the Soviets at each other's throats and an ever-growing threat of nuclear annihilation, it was difficult to ignore the toll it was taking on everyone. Through her sunglasses, Laurien could see civilians rushing tirelessly from store to store; while some were buying every non-perishable canned food they could get their hands on, others were arguing profusely about something as frivolous as a parking spot, as headlines on newspapers everywhere reminded them of a sure demise.
President Kennedy's face was warped on the front page of the newspaper in the hand of the newsboy to her right, as he shouted out for all to hear of what they all already knew and feared. Laurien had known next to nothing about the man before she left London for America, but after only a few months in the city, she was quite overwhelmed by her new knowledge of all things American. It was admittedly very exciting to immerse oneself in completely new surroundings, but the reason why she was there put a damper on everything she did. The streets emitted an aura of hostility and danger, and everyone who passed seemed a possible threat in her eyes. It had been a depressing first few months in her new home. Today had been the first time in a while where she felt her heavy load lifting a bit.
She continued along the road, taking a right or a left every now and then. She hadn't any definite destination in mind, simply contenting herself to stroll along and let her eyes wander. Her gaze soon fixated upon a small colorful building, and upon closer observation, Laurien was pleased to behold a cheerful-looking bicycle shop. The front of the establishment was painted bright red with sunshine yellow trimming on the edges, and in the window was a shiny blue bike with black and white striped wheels. It was quite the contrast from the rest of the shops on the street, all of whom were painted a dreadfully dull shade of grey.
Laurien could feel her eyes changing their pigmentation as her mood picked up. When she lifted the sunglasses off of her face, she could make out the unmistakable golden glint as she found her reflection in the shop window. She managed a small smile before she lowered them back down. Her smile soon disappeared when she looked at the rest of herself; her face had grown gaunt and thin over the last couple of months, and the dark circles under her eyes were quite pronounced now. Laurien's supplies had been dwindling for a while from the unexpected move to New York. She had meant to restock, but with a lack of money and the severe lack of groceries in stores because of all the unrest of the nuclear threat, she was reduced to a can of beans, a slice of bread and an apple a day. Even with her job as a secretary at a legal office in the Upper East Side, it was just barely enough to pay for the small apartment she'd mercifully managed to attain under asking price.
She wasn't complaining though. She had been four at the devastating height of the Second World War, where food was abysmally scant and people were dying in the streets of hunger. Her family counted themselves lucky that they'd taken the risk to hide their hens in the attic when the Nazis came for the livestock. The beautiful creatures had supplied them and their neighbors with some much-needed eggs along with their meager rations. Despite the fact that the meal had kept her alive during the war, Laurien hadn't been able to stomach eating scrambled eggs since then.
As she looked closer in the window of the shop, behind the blue bicycle, she could spot the storeowner lowering a bright red tricycle down from the shelf to rest in front of a small rosy-cheeked boy and his ever-fretful mother. The boy's eyes shone at the sight of the bike, which dwarfed him in size, as the corners of his mouth slowly lifted into a smile that would make any mother's heart melt. Laurien smiled inwardly; the boy reminded her of her brother, Bastijn, and the mischievous way he grinned, meaning that trouble was to come.
After paying, the mother and the raven-haired boy wheeled the tricycle out the door when the mother accidentally dropped her bag on the ground. Lipstick, pocketbook, mints and other paraphernalia spilled out onto the sidewalk in a dispersed mess as the woman quickly knelt down to try and minimize the damage. A small movement near Laurien's foot drew her attention down to a Revlon lipstick case that had rolled away from the woman.
Laurien swiftly picked it off the ground and headed towards the woman who had managed to retrieve the majority of her belongings. She was about to hand it to the lady when she realized that the small boy wasn't with his mother anymore. Laurien quickly glanced around and soon spotted the child pushing his bike out onto the street, blissfully unaware of the car speeding towards him.
A cry ripped itself from Laurien's lips as boy entered the direct path of the speedster. She lurched forwards, desperately trying to reach him in time by normal means, but as the mother behind her shrieked in horror as she saw the car nearing the child, Laurien knew what she had to do.
It all seemed to happen in the matter of a second; Laurien raised her hand and stretched her fingers out towards the car. The front bumper stopped abruptly before it could hit the boy on the tricycle as if it had hit an invisible wall, and flipped forwards into the air. It narrowly missed the boy as it became airborne and cart wheeled violently to the ground on the other side of him, reminding Laurien of a pinwheel during a hurricane as it barreled towards the bicycle shop and, consequentially, Laurien and the mother.
In the mere instant she had at her disposal before impact, Laurien pushed the mother out of harm's way with her powers whilst bracing herself for the imminent collision, when instead something around her middle suddenly jerked her violently to the side.
Laurien was propelled several feet before she came crashing to the ground, hitting the back of her head hard on the pavement as she tumbled. Her sunglasses clattered to the side as Laurien rolled briefly, until an outdoor patio table from the café next door finally stopped her. The items occupying the table fell in a scattered pattern on the ground as it tipped over and hit the concrete with a clang. It took her a few moments of lying crumpled on the concrete with her ears ringing before Laurien tried to lift up her bruised body. She stopped short, a screaming pain in her left shoulder caused her to intake sharply as she came to the conclusion that it was most likely dislocated.
Knowing that she didn't have that much time before someone came over to ask her if she was alright, Laurien gritted her teeth and used her power to grip her arm and set it back into place with a forceful tug. She cried out quietly, squeezing her eyes shut tight as pain radiated throughout her shoulder, but quickly attempted to retrieve her composure by taking in her surroundings. She blinked numbly, as everything around her seemed to be continuing in slow motion. People were running towards the smoking car that had lodged itself in the shattered glass of the bicycle shop that had only a second ago been behind her. Her mind raced at how she had not been hit, the fact that no one but the woman had been beside her perplexed her, even more since she had been using her power to push the woman out of the way in the first place.
She looked around and breathed a shaky sigh of relief to see that the lady was already gathering her boy into her arms with nothing more than a scratch or two from her having fallen over. Laurien returned her gaze to the bicycle shop, her stomach sinking in dismay. It was terribly wrecked and the storeowner was quite literally on the verge of pulling his own hair out in distress at the sight. Horrible guilt threatened to overwhelm Laurien's conscience. Her sloppy meddling had cause this carnage. She could have simply lifted the child out of the way and completely avoided the destruction, but it was painfully known to Laurien that she didn't think well in split second situations.
Silently cursing herself for her carelessness and stupidity, she was suddenly painfully aware of the throbbing emanating from the back of her head. The skin was extremely tender and hot, sending stars dancing in front of her eyes when she tentatively touched it. She brought her hand back before her eyes, only to find her fingers smeared with her own blood.
Suddenly, the hairs on the back of her neck rose at the unnerving sensation of someone watching her. Glancing up, she was dismayed to see her suspicions confirmed as two men were looking attentively at her from across the chaos of the crowded street. Upon first glance, they could easily be mistaken for brothers. They both possessed brunet hair and strikingly bright blue eyes, but the similarities ended there. She couldn't quite tell if it was in the way they held themselves or how their gazes met hers, but she suddenly thought that they were quite an unlikely pair of individuals. While the man wearing the leather jacket gave her a sense of unease, the shorter fellow in the trench coat looked somewhat less threatening, and had an almost pleasant air about him which confused her. Laurien held the man's calculated gaze as she slowly rose to her feet, attempting to ignore the way her body silently screamed its discontent. She studied him closely in turn, noting the way he raised his hand to his temple slowly, as if she were an easily spooked animal.
Without warning, her mind was invaded with quick cuts of pictures that vaguely resembled recent memories; the crash, the little boy, the shop, and the newspaper with JFK's face upon it. They quickly shifted to flashes of further past, as if she was reviewing her life in reverse. Sooner than she would have preferred, they reached the painful memories that she would rather have left alone to fade away; The arrival in London, Bastijn, Roosje, Daan, her brief life in Ypres, her parents, the war….
As quickly as they had come, the memories disappeared to reveal the street once again and the two men, the pleasant fellow now with a tear running freely from his eye as the other looked on with cautious concern. Laurien could feel tears of her own rising in her now furiously red eyes, but she angrily rubbed them away with her sleeve as she started to slowly back away. Despite herself, she stumbled slightly, a shrieking pain piercing through her body with each step. She glared at the men as she retreated, hating them for the sole reason of her not fully understanding what had just happened. What had he done? Had he been responsible for the sudden trip through her memories? He must have, for there was no way in her right mind that Laurien could or even would voluntarily relive those times.
Her retreat was abruptly interrupted by a small scraping noise to her right, where she saw the woman's Revlon lipstick case spinning round and round in obsessive tiny circles of its own accord on the concrete where she'd dropped it in the fall. It would have been a normal occurrence for Laurien, considering her abilities, but the fact that she wasn't the one controlling it sent a jolt of shock through her body. Feeling panic start to rise in her chest, Laurien quickly glanced up at the men and saw the taller man raise an eyebrow at her in acknowledgement before his eyes flit towards the lipstick as it swiftly and unexpectedly jumped into her hand. She stared unseeingly at it for a moment, but it soon came into focus. A compact case with a shiny exterior, not a scratch on it, must have been a recent purchase. Laurien popped the cap and twisted it to reveal the dark red shade, not unlike the colour of the blood still on her fingers.
In her rapidly fogging state, she came to the realization that it must have been him who yanked her away from the crash. At this, her head throbbed terribly, threatening to rid her of her consciousness at a moment's notice as she decided that she couldn't handle this situation at this very instance. She desperately wanted to go home; Not her foreign shack of an apartment, but the one in Alkmaar, her real home. Coming to her decision and genuinely wanting nothing to do with any of this overload of confusion, she hurriedly pocketed the case and grabbed her cracked sunglasses from where they were thrown. She placed them precariously back on her face, and with one last look at the two men, she turned away and fled from the scene.
So that was the first chapter of Remembrance, hope you all liked it! Please review!