There were cuts and bruises on everyone he saw. Or, more accurately, there were small slashes and scratches, or uncomfortably deep imprints where a nail or coin had been forced into the flesh.

Tony hadn't seen any non-mutant since he had woken. He knew Charles' excuse for them was frail; he knew very well that they were giving him a wide berth for a reason. Some part of him liked to think that they were ashamed, that he of all of them had managed to take Magneto down. It was a vicious little part of him, but it was there.

Charles had told him, kindly, with a hand on his and with soft eyes, that even still, nobody had told his teammates what he was. He held steadfast to his favourite philosophy, that it was up to him to tell people. But Tony wasn't stupid, by any means. They would know something was wrong with him. His rambling might make some people cry, but definitely not Magneto of all people.

He had glimpsed a curious looking Thor through the small window in the door; he smiled when he realised Tony was watching him back. But he made no move to come into the room. He almost seemed to find Tony staring right back at him a cue to leave.

He probably wasn't allowed to talk, Tony thought moodily. Tony would be viewed as unpredictable as ever by Cap.

His days continued in the same vein, thought with the notable absence of Thor. Or any of the others, anyway. Charles joined him for at least one meal a day – usually breakfast – and Rogue or Logan made quite a few incredibly awkward joint and separate calls which Tony appreciated nonetheless.

Perhaps the only thing Tony enjoyed about his captivity was the kids that would come and gawk at him. Not only did it stroke his ego considerably, but it allowed him to talk science and maths and books and the world in a way he hadn't experienced before. He had been way ahead of everyone else his own age when he was younger, and so had never experienced things from a child's point of view. He found they had a profoundly different mind set whether they were loved or hated by their parents.

He had been in his room for one hundred and eighty-four hours (eight days) when a twelve-year-old girl and her friends came in and demanded his opinion on The Catcher in the Rye.

'Hate it,' he said, shaking his head and grimacing, 'guy's too much like me when I was younger too. Or, I was like him. Who knows. Who cares, come to think of it –'

A boy's hair started to turn a deep burgundy. 'Wow, okay, cool it carrot-top. I didn't say it was badly written, per se, it just makes me shiver in distaste.'

'Well,' another boy replied, glancing uncomfortably at his friend's orange eyebrows, 'I thought it was brilliant.' About half of the group nodded in agreement. Disgruntled protests followed him, and somebody shot a blast of cool air down the back of his top. He screeched. Tony crossed his arms and tilted his head.

'Okay. It's like that. Show of hands who actually liked it and who thought it was a pile of –' Oh God, Clint was in the window. He looked and the kids, who stared at him like he was singing the words of the gospel off the bat. 'Change of plan. I have a visitor. Come back tomorrow with proper arguments, okay? Let's have a debate. Should be fun. Right? That's right, Mr Telekinesis over there, you keep walking. Put my tablet back where I left it.'\

The parade of pre-teens shuffled out of the room, glaring at Clint for his disruption. He looked ashamed and even more awkward.

'Sorry to break up the crèche,' he said awkwardly, sidling into the room and closing the door. Tony rose from his chair and started up the coffee machine in the corner. He didn't offer Clint anything. He ignored his comment.

'So, clean up must be taking a while,' Tony noted lightly, pressing the button. 'Haven't seen you guys around.' He heard Clint shift behind his back. Good, he thought, be uneasy.

'We just finished. I came here to talk to you about what happened.'

'I'm sure you just finished,' Tony replied wryly. He knew from his spies – or, nine year olds – that it had taken only a few days before everything was done and the plumbers had already been in. It was cosmetic stuff now, and the kids were excited because they were getting a new vending machine.

He sat back down. Clint looked at him expectantly. He decided he didn't want to give him what he wanted. No simplicity for that guy.

'You know the kid with the hair just then? He lives here permanently. Parents don't hate him or anything, like he's shown me his birthday cards, but they didn't want to have to pay off everyone who saw his hair change colour. He also told me they didn't like what people would think if they thought they allowed their kids dye their hair at ten.'

Clint frowned. He looked about to speak. Tony interrupted him. 'His name is Harry. His friend, Luca, looks pretty normal, but he can imitate other people's voices exactly. His parents actually let him go home over the holidays.' He revelled in making Clint uncomfortable. Some part of him felt guilty, but he overpowered it. 'Oh, there's Hannah that was there too. She hasn't actually seen her parents since she was about seven, I think she said. Not that she cares –'

'Okay, I get your point!' Clint shouted over him, looking angry. 'It's shit! So why do you act like you don't care when you do? We know that now but why were you such a dick?'

'Barton, you chose to be different,' Tony said, sipping his coffee and staring him down. He stayed calm, even though he could feel his anger and confusion. Clint protested. 'You did – you didn't have to accept SHIELD; you didn't have to be some super spy. You didn't have to use your bow and arrow trick. You think they have a chance to choose when their hair changes colour for no good reason?'

Clint paused and stared at the bed. 'Professor X said it was up to you to tell us. We didn't know what to think, after. But, Thor kind of nudged us down the right path. Bruce sort of figured it out. That you're a – well. That you can –'

'Jesus, Katniss, you can say the word mutant. I won't cry.'

'We don't know what you can do but we know that you were nasty about mutants before. And we don't know why. Cap can't get his head around it – he doesn't understand it at all. Bruce is just quiet and Thor won't tell us anything even though he knows more than he lets on. Same for Natasha.'

Tony understood. He wouldn't quite understand it either. But he thought about why he had chosen to do this, and he understood himself with clarity that was quite unexpected. He had never been so anti-mutant before he came back here – he hadn't gone on the marches or anything, but he also hadn't condemned anyone. Sure, he hadn't changed the original contracts from when his dad got them written in the sixties or something, but he had tried to stay out of the way. He pretended he had bigger fish to fry. He pretended to be ignorant.

That had been his little barrier, his protection. He was an asshole, but nobody really expected anything better from him. He decided he would just say it straight. He was, really, quite tired of hiding.

'If everybody already thinks you're a self-centred ass with a head the size of a country with just enough sympathy for others to half-way fill a paddling pool, why would you break that kind of cover?' Tony felt tired. 'I couldn't turn around and suddenly support the one thing my dad had paid enough attention to to hate so much.'

Clint looked downcast. 'But you hate your dad. Wouldn't it make sense for you to disagree with him?'

'You're forgetting nobody knows we didn't get along.' Sometimes, Tony forgot that not everybody was split in two, into public and private. He had lived his life in halves only.

Oozing from Clint was a feeling of regret. There were still elements of upset and anger, though it was more of the self-righteous kind, the sort that fuelled charity galas and gaudy events in aid of insert-cute-charity-here. But, it was dissipating. It floated off into the atmosphere like dust.

'You need to tell Cap and Bruce about this, you know.' Clint finally said, looking Tony in the eye for only about the second time in the entire meeting. Incident, Tony wanted to call it. He carried on; 'I won't ask you what it is you can do and I don't think I can forgive you for what you've said. You said it and you don't mean it but you still said it. But I sort of understand now.'

'Fine.' Tony replied in a clipped tone. It was intentional. 'I'll come round tonight.' He didn't know where to find them but he would run into them somehow. He hoped he wouldn't actually fine them. 'Tell them what I've said. I can't be bothered to go over it again. Parental issues aren't my favourite kind of small talk.'

'I don't think it's any of ours,' Clint grinned back. They'd shared that smile many times.

Tony swung by at quarter to nine in the evening after sullenly wandering the corridors making as much effort to avoid being observant as he could. He regretted his offer, but at least he could move. He couldn't imagine sitting in the random room he'd been left to sequester away in, waiting for judgement to come upon him.

Natasha and Thor stood against the wall, looking smug, as Bruce seemed to vibrate with nervous energy and Steve held an expression of perpetual confusion. He didn't seem to understand Tony's reasoning, and he thought that he never really would. He was too good, too naïve. And Tony himself sometimes thought he couldn't quite grasp it either.

He felt uncharacteristically nervous. He could feel the same coming off of Bruce, and Steve was mostly apprehensive as opposed to worry. He murmured a greeting and then sat on the old armchair he knew for a fact Clint had filched from one of the common rooms.

'Hi Tony,' Bruce said quietly, smiling. Tony could feel the nervousness recede; he found it quite incredible the way in which Bruce managed to have such control over his emotions. It was certainty significantly better than Tony had been for quite a while in his younger years, and he was an Empath for God's sake.

Tony smiled back in reply. He said hello to Cap specifically. 'I don't really know what you want me to say – or, I don't know where you want me to start. Or anything really.'

'Tony,' Steve replied, 'Clint told us what you said to him. I can't say I really understand it –' Tony almost laughed, he could be so predictable '—but I think we'd just like the truth now. I can't agree with how you've acted the past months … but we've all got to be truthful with eachother if we want to go forward in the right way.'

'You're assuming there is a way of going forward.' Tony replied.

Steve blinked. 'Of course there is. You'd have to do a lot more than the past few weeks to be kicked off the team at this point. Nothing short of maiming one of us, to be honest.' He seemed to pause and think deeply for a second. 'Not that we – I – condone what you've said. At all.' Bruce shrugged.

'It's okay, Cap, nobody is doubting your honour,' he said, rolling his eyes. He didn't like to think of what would happen if he got kicked off the team, and so he essentially cancelled the thought whenever it sauntered into his head. The reassurance, all the same, was incredibly gratifying.

'We know Natasha knows and Thor, so please just tell us what kind of weird spell you can cast so we stop feeling like Steve in Macy's,'

Steve was affronted. 'You know that was soon after I got out, and I didn't expect customer service like that –'

'Could you just start speaking before this goes to schoolyard level, please,' Bruce asked, eyes tired and hand rubbing his forehead in muted frustration.

Tony agreed with him; he had been in more than a few of those kinds of arguments himself. Loudly, he started. 'Can I just say it's not like mind control,'

'Well that's a relief,' Clint put in sarcastically.

'It's kind of subtler than that.' Tony ignored Natasha's small huff of breath and her amusement and his being in any way subtle. 'I'm sort of, well – I'm like a radio station. But instead of getting waves I get feelings. Emotions. Not that I actually feel them myself, but I feel other people's. Does that – does that make sense? At all?'

Tony watched Thor and Natasha watch them. Both had their arms crossed. Clint sat back against his chair and made a small grunt of revelation, and Steve tilted his head to the left and made the furrow of his brow even deeper. He looked like a child faced with algebra for the first time. Not that Tony would really understand that level of confusion.

Bruce leaned forward, elbows on his corduroy – ew – trousers and hands clasping his chin. 'So, would empathy by the right word?' He asked slowly. Tony nodded. Bruce pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose. 'That's … really interesting.'

'Can you feel us now?' Clint asked, looking slightly spooked.

Tony nodded again. 'I can. It's usually hard to put a name to it though. Feelings aren't one thing or the other, they're more of, like, a remix.'

'Did you just, really, say that –' Natasha asked from the corner, before Clint interrupted her. She looked annoyed, but didn't really feel it. She was far too used to it by this point, Tony supposed.

'You know how useful that could have been when we had to go up against that massive machine thing with that weirdo in the middle of it?' Clint exclaimed, pointing at Tony. Tony laughed in reply.

'Yeah it wasn't exactly the suit that figured it was actually a human and not a robot,' Clint covered his face and groaned. When he uncovered it, he appeared lined, looking at the ceiling in awe.

Tony turned his body slightly to face Steve. Bruce looked like he was thinking hard, and it was usually that face that prevented Tony from pestering him. He didn't think he should make this time the exception.

'I thought it would be something really bad or embarrassing,' Cap said weakly. He looked – and felt – considerably relieved. Tony felt it too, but then he realised it was actually his own emotion too. It explained why it was so powerful.

'We thought it would be something technology-based,' Natasha said, gesturing to herself and Thor. He nodded.

Tony felt somewhat betrayed. 'You guys have been talking about me?'

Thor looked nonplussed. 'Of course.' He said. 'How could we not. We had nobody else to talk to about it.' He paused, then added: 'And at least we can be very covert.'

Steve grumbled to Tony's left. Clint started making loud accusations and protestations. The mood, being heavy and blanketing over the room, immediately began to evaporate.

Bruce clapped Tony on the shoulder. 'Does this mean we'll rename the lab mutant central?'

Tony barked out a laugh. He felt surprised and honoured that they had all taken it so well. Perhaps the realisation that he was a mutant happened earlier, or maybe it was just all in their separate heads and he hadn't realised. They most likely thought he was some kind of shape shifter, or he was hiding wings or something. Maybe they assumed he had something like twelve extra nipples.

'Come on, they're completely different kinds of mutation,' Tony laughed, rolling his eyes while replying and shifting back to face Bruce, who was opposite him. It seemed to him that Bruce flourished under the challenge. He felt a quick surge of satisfaction come off him as he began to argue back. Biology was, of course, his forte.

On the other side of the mansion, Charles was keeping an eye out. He smiled.

Finally bloody finished. Thank you, , for allowing me to upload this after months of faff. Faff for no reason. Unexplainable faff.

More importantly, thanks to you guys who made it happen. First story finished, huh?!

Please, shove sequel ideas at me. I love em.

Much love and relief,

Spell x