Project X [18+] [Fanfiction]

Chapter IV: Warm Comfort

The night had been long but oddly fulfilling; and I had spent more time with the toy that the headmistress had given me than she likely expected I would. After my shower I took it to bed with me, and as I went through a pattern of restless sleep my rotation tended to be to slumber for two hours, use it again, sleep for another two, use it again. I looked at the toy as essentially training, little different from pushing my limits in the Danger Room before a big mission. Oddly enough I felt more vulnerable than I ever did before a mission, and I somehow felt like my personal stakes were much higher.

If nothing else, it was a risk I was not accustomed to taking. It was in my nature to put my body in harm's way; I was designed for that sort of thing and thought nothing of it. My wounds would heal within moments, and I would be ready to throw myself in front of a new danger almost immediately. But this...this task I had been given, it was one of the first times I had been frightened by a mission for my own sake. There would be no armies of A.I.M. agents shooting at me, there would be no Juggernaut throwing me through a plate glass window. If I failed what I had been training for, there was more on the line than merely my physical well being. If I failed, I would have to seriously consider that such interactions were simply beyond what I could do. It was odd; sensations and feelings that I had never before cared about now seemed critical to protect, and a part of me was worried about failing to ever experience them.

What the headmistress had said the previous day was right; I did envy humans, at least in the simplicity of their lives. They could go on dates with each other, and they could have sex without fear of their special abilities hurting someone. Their lives were so rarely hard on the level of which most mutants had suffered; and their emotions ran unchecked because of it. For every mutant that was well adjusted and didn't suffer trauma in their history, there was a hundred that considered trust to be a luxury they could not afford. It was the reason places like the mansion existed, and it was the foundation of why the world needed Charles Xavier and the X-Men.

It was also why the X-Men needed to exist; to give those people a place to belong. I was no different, without the mansion and without the X-Men, I could only imagine where my life would have led. The best case scenario would have led to me being used as a weapon by some supervillain, and the worst case was in a darker place, either cut up into tubes in Mr. Sinister's lab, or even just wasting away in the streets cutting men sexually for enough money to survive.

It was hard to imagine which was worse, and that was why I felt determined. Determined to prove that I was beyond irreparable damage, determined to show that given the chance Laura Kinney could be more than what she was created for. I could have friendships, I could have sex, and maybe I could even have more.

I had slept in that day, partly thanks to my erratic sleep schedule brought on by the toy. It wasn't until an alarm sounded on my communicator that I had been forced to rise, and in an instant I had gone from lazily drifting in and out of sleep in bed to slipping into my gear. As soon as I had rounded the halls I could tell that the team was being collected; something was happening in the city and our services were required.

I was glad for the distraction. I had a big evening planned, and a little bit of heroic violence was the perfect thing to stop me from dwelling on all that could go wrong.

As it turned out, my evening was full of the sort of distraction that I desired. I had been called out with another group of students to help bring in a new young mutant that had violently realized his powers of pyrokinesis. He had already set fire to a significant part of the block, and had run screaming into the street, completely unable to understand why he was on fire but not burning. His actions were completely unintentional; he was a young man that had never wished to hurt anybody, but found himself in a sudden, impossible situation. As we had descended on the scene it was my task to keep the authorities away from him until he could be controlled and recovered. I spent my afternoon darting in and out of alleyways; slashing tires and drawing fire from the police as taunts of "freak" and "mutie" were thrown at me with great hatred. Their taunts only drove me further on my mission, and I continued to harass and distract them until I received the message that our new friend had been recovered. I put my skills to use in extracting myself, and I made my way back to the mansion on my own means.