HI EVERYBODY! Yeah, this is the edited first Chapter, more detail and considerably less confusing. A touch longer, but hey. I'm educating the world :P

So far I own all of the characters, but I'm just gonna go ahead and say that I don't own X-Men: Evolution or anybody from it. So yeah.

"Honey, you know it's just stage, too. It'll pass, and you love it here!" My father-Christopher- stated with that infuriatingly calm way of his, holding his hands out in a forgiving stance.

"It's your fault I'm caught in this damn place!" I spat at him. He took a small step back, startled. I continued with, "I hate it here, and I always have! Quit telling me that it'll all get better in the end when we both know it won't!"

"We moved here to start a new life. To leave the old behind." His voice was a steely calm and his glare followed me as I paced across the room. That argument had been repeated so many times, it almost sounded rehearsed.

"You just want to forget Mom." I snarled. He glared at me, but with more than a little hurt in his eyes.

"You know that's not true."

"Ooh, whee, my wife just died, so let's move to California and live happily ever after. Don't think about it and it'll just all go away. Right?" My voice was forcefully whimsy and light, but there was a definite venomous undertone.

I held my fingers to my temples, wincing at the sudden jam of pain in my head. There was sheen of sweat across my brow, I knew, because holding back those mental monsters was no easy task. It wasn't just mental concentration anymore, it was physical, too. I wished I could just let them go on him-bastard he was-but I knew I wouldn't. I wasn't strong enough to suffer the consequences, and I didn't hate him that much.

"Room. Now." He growled, furious but hurt. There was no arguing with that tone. I wasn't the kind to throw temper tantrums and stomp my feet and slam the door, but I did so anyways, acutely aware of the building pressure in my head. The second that the door to my room clicked shut, I screamed and collapsed to the floor. The things I had been trying so hard to keep in slammed around in my head and I was thrown roughly from one world to the next over and over.

My diamond palace, in all its sparkling beauty and rainbow halls. Blood-stained walls in an unfamiliar church. "Goodbye, mon ange." The last words of my mother, Victoire, echoed through my mind, getting colder and angrier each time. A baby wildebeest getting ripped down by lions, staining the savannah grass with blood. A fallen angel. A beautiful pale girl falling to the ground and laying there, unmoving, her once-trusting green eyes still open to the pain around her. A chess board. A plummeting king. Wars, starting with swords and catapults and ending with nuclear bombs. The endless screams of women losing their children and men losing their lives. And, lastly, a pair of red-on-black eyes filled my mind. Traitor, just like the rest of them.

Once again, I woke up in the hospital, head still swimming with the terrible essence of the place, just like the first time. A nurse that I recognized from previous visits quickly brought me a bucket to throw up in, and I couldn't concentrate with the nausea swimming around my head. Once again, the doctors saying that there was nothing wrong, pulling Dad aside for a secret conversation. Once again, they left with the parting words of 'just make sure you get plenty of sleep, and stay hydrated.' As if that would help.

The way back in the car was silent as I stared mindlessly through the window. The silence was uncomfortable for him, no doubt, but not for me. I liked silence. With silence, you could always hope for noise. With darkness you could always hope for light. It sounded silly, but I always had something to hope for when there was nothing.

"Dad…?" But there was always that one thing in the back of my mind. The question I knew how he would answer, but needed to ask anyway.

"Why can't you just control it? Hold them back? It scares the crap out of everyone, makes them suspicious, and I can't keep paying these hospital bills." His voice was cold at first, but it sank as the sentence continued.

"Then stop taking me to the hospital!" I spat, glaring at him, "It's not like that have any good advice, anyways."

"Why do you just let yourself go like that?" He persisted.

"Why do I even both with talking to you? You don't understand, you never will understand, and I don't want to bother trying to make you understand. You honestly think I want to be like this?" He finally went silent with defeat and pretended to pay attention to the road.

"Au revoir, celui qui a été une fois aimé." (Goodbye, one who was once loved.) I closed his bedroom door and walked through the house, giving everything one last look. I couldn't help but smile at the old books from my childhood, dusty and lined up on the shelves. Le Petit Prince, that had always been my favourite.

I sighed as I tried to remember something, anything, from France. But nothing came up. Dad had forbidden me to talk in French when he was around, because it reminded him too much of his little lost Victoire. But I would talk to myself in my room, quietly so as not to be heard, running over different conversation and situations. But he just couldn't stand the language anymore. It even got so bad he would ignore me for days if my accent slipped, even just a little. It reminded him too much of Mom. So I could speak fluent French and English with a perfect American accent. I left through the front door, in the middle of the night, with only a heavy backpack and an old, simple silver bracelet of Mom's. Dad had always said I knew nothing of the real world. Well, now I was going to prove him myself that plenty of kids had done just fine running away younger than sixteen, I leaped off into the night.

"I'll miss you forever, but I'm off into the world again," I whispered softly in French to my current caretaker and best friend, Alexandrine.

I said my parting words to the short, plump woman, the person who had watched me so carefully during the last two years. She was like an older sister, protective and careful and loving. Yes, I had been living in a tiny room in the back of her small restaurant, but it was a hell of a lot better on the streets.

Not wanting to forget my natural-born language, I had slowly made my way up to eastern Canada, Quebec to be exact, where quite a few still spoke the beautiful speech. But I was eighteen now, and I was going back to America. New York, to be precise.

I didn't know what made me want to go there, but it was just… I needed to. I couldn't quite explain it, though. Perhaps it had something to do with being the farthest well-known city away from where he lived, in the outskirts of Los Angeles. Maybe it was because of the size of the city, the anonymity. Every day with new faces, nobody who could judge you personally with a single glance. Yes, I could have retreated to the countryside in somewhere like Wisconsin or Ohio, but I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of me hiding out in a rural area, living inside an abandoned barn. No way. I don't hide from anybody.

No matter how many times I refused, Alexandrine had insisted on buying me a plane ticket to New York, but I had worked extra-hard and secretly shoved some of my tips into the restaurant tip jar, which she kept in a private stock for repairs on the restaurant and for making sure that we had something to fall back on in slow months. Just to give a little something back. Trying to blink a tear out of her eye Alexandrine gave me a little push out the door, mumbling about how she wouldn't want me to be late. But her voice was choked, and I could see how much she wanted to cry.

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