Kelly sat quietly in the back of the class. In the furthest corner, right next to the window, sitting by the window allowed opportunity for her to pretend. Music blasted loudly in her ears, the headband like headphones concealed by the large black hoodie she wore. It had been, once upon a time, her brother's hoodie.
She knew that the kids in her immediate vicinity could hear her music. At the front Mrs. Carlton was pretending not to know she wasn't paying attention. She didn't care anymore. She knew what the woman was saying even if she wasn't listening. The music blocked everything out.
The music allowed her to pretend her head wasn't bursting, wasn't feeling like it was going to explode any moment now. The music allowed her to pretend that the headache behind her eyes, pressing, shoving, twitching, hurting, was just your average headache that could be fixed with a couple of Advil.
She couldn't remember when it started. She woke up with a headache a couple of weeks ago and since it had just gotten worse. Her grades have dropped since. And her grades never drop. But she just couldn't think with this pounding in her head.
She hissed softly as a particularly painful volt went through her head. It felt like electricity. She pressed the glasses harder against her eyes, half trying to block out one pain by causing another. It didn't work. The headache was still there.
After the first week of this she started carrying prescription painkillers with her. She had swiped something like twenty bottles when the doctor hadn't looked. Just shoved her hand behind a group of them and pushed them into her backpack. She felt like a drug addict. It was the third, maybe fourth week now. People didn't just drink painkillers; they drank them only when they had headaches. She shouldn't have gone through sixteen bottles of painkillers in less than a month. That wasn't normal.
But the headaches weren't the worst of it. The most painful, horrible part, yes, but not the worst of it. Ever since they started things seemed to have changed. The brush of someone's hand had her seeing things. Things about them, their lives, she assumed. There was the occasional repeating of something the teachers would say, when no one in the class spoke, but the teacher and they were already on a different subject during the class.
The painkillers and Advil didn't take those away either.
Somewhere around…God, why can't he just shut…
He's going to kill us…
If we can just find her…She's probably cute…Scared shitless and in pain…
Her gaze snapped to the door of her English lit class. She slammed her books shut and dropped it into her backpack. She could tell the voices weren't here for the other kids. They were looking for her. She was scared shitless and she was in pain. Whoever they were they were looking for her. "Kelly?" She had zipped up her bag and thrown it over her shoulders.
She gazed at Mrs. Carlton. She didn't know what to say to the woman. "Doctor's appointment. I forgot. I'm late." She barely explained as she ran to the door and out of it, slamming it behind her
The hall was empty. She had been sure that whomever the voices had belonged to had been nearby. She had never really heard voices from far away. They had always been in confined spaces. Like the classrooms she had once loved. She ignored it and took off down the hall; everyone else was still in class. It was finally just her and the music and the pounding behind her eyes.
She snuck into the front offices and grabbed her car keys from the rack. They were supposed to leave it there to discourage skipping school. There was no way of getting the keys back without a formal letter from the principal. Unless of course you stole the keys to your own car, which she was doing now.
She jogged outside and dropped her bag on the seat next to the driver's side. The truck used to be her brother's truck as well. It was black in colour and big. More often than not she felt like an ant in it, but she's never given it up.
She pulled out of the parking lot, she recently started parking closest to the exit of the lot and furthest from the school, with a loud roar.
She was speeding, she knew that, but she just needed to get home. Her mom had been very supportive as of late. Her dad had distanced himself. Why she didn't really understand. She couldn't figure any of it out. It all more than just a little weird. For years it had been her mom who was distant and her father who she could talk to her. She didn't question it too much. She hated that everything started to change once the headaches started up.
She sped down the street, trying hard to concentrate on anything but the headache. Driving was like a second nature to her by now. It had become like breathing itself.
The shot of smoky mist collecting into a human form had her slamming down on the breaks and turning the steering wheel, forcing the truck to skid horizontally across the road. She stared at the man through the window and slowly reached over to grab her backpack. Her painkillers were in there and it was going to be a long run home. She didn't want to leave the truck, but people didn't appear out of nowhere in the middle of the road.
She carefully opened the truck, grabbing the keys, got out and shut the door again. She watched him over the back of the black truck. Her head was pounding badly now. It was probably heightened by her fear. The man watched her as she watched him. She couldn't hear a thing from him. She couldn't hear anything but the music and the pounding headache. The open, she assumed it was the open that blocked the voices from filling her head. Or voice, it was only one person. She didn't like standing there, watching him. She reached up, slowly and pulled the headphones off. The normal sounds returned to her. Birds chirping, the sound of a soft breeze, cars in the far off distance and a few cows here and there.
She lived in a small Texan community. Her father had moved them to the place about two months back. Wearing the hoodie in the sweltering heat was killing her. But it didn't matter much, it kept her arms from being reachable by people. She wore fingerless gloves as well, another thing that kept to minimum contact.
She could also hear the noise from her headphones, they might now be dangling around her neck, but she had it on loud enough to cause her to still hear it. Her head pounded.
The man smiled at her just as two large arms wrapped around her in a deadlock, just above her elbows and digging painfully into her arms. She did it automatically. It was something Carter had always tried to force into her. She brought her hands up and touched the arms, while shifting her feet into a more balancing position. Her good thoughts went out the window the moment her bare fingers touched the skin of whoever was behind her.
She saw a firing squad and two men. A prison cell with the same two men. A man with medals. Military. She saw war. Everywhere. The sounds. The guns. The explosions. There were always two men, the same two men. From the civil war to the last war in whichever place there was last a war. The wars shifted to two young men, the lives they led and then younger and again younger, it came to a sick looking little boy impaling a man on claws that came from his knuckles and then running and being caught by the boy who was always there. Then it shifted to even younger. It was all life defining moments in the man's life.
And through all this her head felt like it was going to explode. She dropped her arms and her head. Her breathing ragged. She couldn't think straight. The only reason she probably did drop her arms was because she didn't have the energy left to hold them up. Her hair was plastered against her forehead and her hands shaking.
Fleeting touches has never left her this traumatized before. That could also be because the worst that happens, in the people she could possibly touch, lives are a bad case of the runs. "Stryker! Stryker! Do something! Colonel!" The man behind her shouted to someone.
The headache was fading. It was probably because she was loosing consciousness. She wasn't sure.
She woke a couple of hours later on the cream coloured couch in their living room. Kelly's first immediate thought was that she had made it home, and had probably just fallen asleep on the couch. She hadn't been sleeping well with the headache constantly running through her head.
But then she remembered the kid killing some man claiming to be his father. The other one, who had been playing with a knife earlier in the sick kid's room and the wars. She remembered the wars worst of all. The guns and the explosions and the people dying, things she had never before had to deal with. She was safe in their cosy little manor of a house.
She sat up slowly, the headache already back and so familiar. She ran a hand over her face and wondered if she hadn't dreamt all of it. Her parents wouldn't be home from work for another maybe six or eight hours. After all, she had left school barely twenty minutes after it had started.
She glanced around. The backpack was where she would leave it. She ran her hands down her face again and nodded to herself. She had dreamt all of it. She was working herself into a frenzy and had only dreamt it all. She slowly got up went to her bag, pulling a little orange bottle, with maybe a little less than half the pills it used to have, out and walked to the kitchen. She grabbed one of the eight glasses on the counter and stepped away from it.
She dropped it, allowing it to crash to the ground, as, for a fleeting moment, past happenings of the glass shot through her mind. A guy, Asian by the looks of it, wearing a tux had been drinking water from it. She glanced back and noticed the glasses for real, this time and stared at them.
She decided not to touch them. Decided that she didn't wan more glasses trying to tell her a story. She walked to the cupboard and pulled the sleeve of her hoodie down to open it, she then pulled a clean glass from it and walked to the fridge, she used the sleeve to open the door as well and grab the water pitcher. She poured the water and set it back inside the fridge. She kicked the door shut, and flicked the lid onto the island counter before tapping four pills out and replacing the lid. She leaned back into the fridge and watched the glasses as she put the pills in her mouth.
It was as if they could tell her a story by just standing there. She gulped the water and pills down before slowly drinking it and continuing to study the glasses. She knew her parents wouldn't be back before six in the evening, a quick glance at the clock to it was ten. Nine more hours. She had been wrong earlier.
A lot could happen in nine hours.
"You are awake. Good." A man said walking into the kitchen from the hall leading to the study and library and downstairs bathroom and also the stairs. She had come from the door leading to the living room, dining room and television room.
She recognized him as the man from the cell. Seven more men walked in, from the same direction. One was the Asian man who had been drinking from the now broken glass and two of them were from the wars. She didn't move from the fridge. Didn't uncross her legs of push away from balancing herself against the fridge. She knew that she should probably have been running from the back door and out towards the horses' camp where she could've taken one of the horses and rode to the nearest place of civilization, but she didn't. Curiosity kept her rooted to the spot.
A lot could happen in nine hours. She didn't recognize any of the other men around. Except the black man. He had been the one to appear in the middle of the road. He was probably from Texas with his hat and boots and whole given attitude. "Shouldn't you be screaming, running in fear and having us catch you?" The guy who spoke had two swords, katana, strapped to his back. She studied the swords more than she did the guy. He was right, she should be running, but running and then being caught only leaded to the fact of them touching her again and she didn't want to be touched.
She shrugged. "I'm fine where I am, thanks." She took a sip of water.
The Asian man's eyes flicked to the broken glass. "How are you feeling?" The military guy asked.
She didn't answer him for a moment, just watched him quietly and trying to figure out why they were even near her house. "You're not a doctor." She told him.
He laughed. The sound didn't sound all that bright and cheerful to her. "No, I am not. I'm a Colonel and have created a special team for the CIA." The Colonel told her.
She nodded slowly. The headache should've dulled by now. But as always it was still burning hard behind her eyes. "Then you don't need to know how I'm feeling." She told him.
"I can help you." He said.
She laughed. She knew she was going to cry if she didn't stop soon, but couldn't seem to be able to stop. Her laughter soon turned to sobs. "My doctor can't help me," she said between laughing sobs, "and you think some CIA colonel can help me. I'm sick!" She screamed at him. "There's nothing that can help me!" She continued to scream as she slid down the fridge. "I'm hallucinating and hearing things. Whatever I have is killing me."
"You aren't sick and you aren't insane, if that is what you are thinking. And you are not dying." He said.
She ignored him, just tried to regain her senses and bearings. She evened her breathing out. She could still feel tears slipping down her face and closed her eyes. Trying not to think, she didn't need to think and she knew it. Thinking led to a worse headache. "You still can't stop it." She told him eventually.
"Oh?" He sounded amused. He walked around the counter island and crouched in front of her. "When you touch people you see things. Things about them. You can hear the thoughts of people." She stared at him. "You're a mutant, my dear. You have a mutation in your genes that allow you to be able to do this. I can help you train to control it." He said further on.
"A mutant?" She asked in a disbelieving tone.
The door banged open and her head snapped up. She heard her parents arguing in the front lobby and cursed. She scrambled past him and grabbed at the pieces of the glass, she quickly threw them away. She packed the glasses in the dishwasher and turned to the voices coming closer now. She was about to tell the group to disappear when she realized they were already gone. For a moment she wasn't sure if she had imagined the whole conversation as well.
Her mother walked through the door with a serene smile on her face and her father with a dark scowl. He glared at her for a long time. "Why aren't you in school?" He asked angrily. "You lied and told them you were going to the doctor." He continued.
She glanced at the door, the only door through which they could've gone. The door that led to the library, study and downstairs bathroom and also the stairs. "My head." She answered. "It's killing me and I figured if I could just lay down for a bit, it would go away." She was glad that her dad hadn't discovered her stash of painkillers. He'd have caught a fit.
He sighed and turned back to the door, probably going back to work again. "You need to stop with the headaches, Kelly. I understand that you miss him. But you have to stop living a life that doesn't belong to you and you have to stop trying to create his presence. He's gone." She didn't wait for anything else, jogged out to the foyer, grabbed her backpack and ran upstairs. She hated talking about Carter.
If they weren't trying to make he go to a therapist about him, they were telling her she needed to stop trying to remember him. She hated them for it. They had no idea how hard it was. How hard it was to realize he'd never be back. She walked into her room and like any teenager slammed the door as hard as possible, regretting it a moment later.
She felt like pulling her hair out of her head. She spun around, ready to just dive onto her bed and forget everything that's happened recently. She could hear her parents arguing lightly downstairs as they went back to their cars. She didn't get the chance to take her own bed. The guy with the katana was on it, boots and all. Legs crossed and studying one of the orange bottles next to him. She sighed. Now she was going to have to convince her dad to buy her a new bed. "You just ruined any chance I might have of actually being able to sleep." She said with a sigh.
"You need to lay of the painkillers." He answered.
She walked up to him, knowing she was going to regret it later, pulling her fingerless glove from her right hand off and dropping it to the floor. She pressed her hand to his cheek and projected every bit of the headache she had been feeling for the last three or four weeks onto him.
No amount of headache could stop the torrent of his history slamming into her. Everything. From his father to the military to becoming a mercenary to becoming a soldier for Stryker.
By the time she felt like she had punished him sufficiently enough she knew far more about him than she'd like to have known. She could feel the cold sweat running down her back and didn't need to look to know she was shaking. She felt cold to the bone.
She could probably blame it on not having ever met someone who willingly killed people for money.
She dropped onto the plush purple carpet and studied him. He was whining now. She felt him as he walked in. James Howlett, the guy who had tried to stop her from running. She hated it. She always knew when people she had touched entered a room she was in. It was like their presence mingled with the air around them and then directed its attention to her, shouting at her that they have arrived. Like she needed to know they have arrived. "There's a bottle of painkillers in the table next to you." She told him after a moment. His whining was working on her head. And he never shut up.
"Why does he need painkillers?" The Asian man asked.
She stared out her window for a long time. "Because I gave him a headache." She muttered eventually.
There was silence around her. "You can project what you are feeling onto others?" Colonel Stryker asked.
"Yes. Some. All I really did was take a headache from his life and enhanced it to the point of what I feel daily." She said.
"You can alter memories." He muttered. She nodded slowly. "But you cannot distinguish the one from the other. While altering a memory you still see the person you touches past. I can help you."
She studied the blue sky. "Fine." She muttered and got up. "I'll go with you. As long as you get me away from here."