Hawk and Dove

"You're steaming."

It all started around puberty, like most things do. In normal cases, boys turn into young men and welcome things like body hair growth and voice deepening. Although awkward, it was usually a process that was exciting and harmless. Unless you were Dan. In that case, puberty brought something that was the opposite of normal. One day when he was twelve, he was arguing with his little brother, and suddenly the lounge curtains were on fire.

After the smoke detectors had gone off, everyone except for Dan's father was standing on the sidewalk. Mr. Howell had brought in the garden hose from the garage and doused the fire. All the windows were open to let the lingering smoke out. The sofa and carpet were singed. The curtains were unsalvageable. Everyone was confused.

"Boys," Mrs. Howell, the family dog under her arm, had turned to her sons, "What happened in there?"

"I don't know!" cried Adrien, tears springing in the seven-year-old's eyes, "D-Dan was yelling at me, and-and-and then the curtains exploded!"

Dan looked outraged. "I didn't do it! They were just on fire suddenly!" he said, wanting to make sure that he was not in fact the only person yelling in the situation, "And Adrien was yelling too!"

Mrs. Howell looked between her sons apprehensively. "Well, whatever happened, be more careful," she advised before her husband opened the front door and said they should be okay.

His mother and Adrien went into the house first, the smaller boy forgetting his distress and just being happy to get out of the early winter cold. Dan fell back, his heart rate suddenly increasing as a thought dawned on him. He didn't feel cold at all.

The next incident occurred just a few weeks later at school. Dan had not been doing well in maths class... in fact, he was nearly failing, and to pass the semester he needed at least a B on the last test. He was a nervous wreck until his maths lesson. Then, as the teacher handed tests back, she gave Dan his with a disconcerting sigh. When he flipped over the paper, he spotted a big red D written in the corner. He hadn't failed the test, but the semester was out the window. This was it, wasn't it? Dan thought. It was over, he would never get out of Berkshire, he would never go to university, and he was a failure.

Dan crumpled the test paper in his hands while he squeezed his jaw. It wasn't long before he started to smell something burning. Dan opened his fists to see that the paper he crumpled had started to turn brown and curl as if it had been thrown into a fire. With wide eyes, he quickly stuffed it into his backpack and looked around. The kids around him were looking around curiously. They probably smelled the burning paper.

But how did he make it burn? He was angry, yes, he felt like he could have set the paper on fire but that didn't usually mean he could actually set it on fire. So that day, in Year 5, Dan figured out that he was not like the other kids. He was one of them.

Different, mutant, super, whatever they were. At that point, all Dan knew about them was that they were taken away from their families and sent somewhere far away to play with their freaky powers. That would not be him. That was not what he wanted.

Dan kept his abilities to himself for quite some time. For a while it was easy. Don't get worked up, don't burn anything. Year 9 was when that started to get hard. Stress started to get to teenage Dan, and his powers were getting harder and harder to control. After he had singed his duvet and burned his English essay for the third time, he decided he needed to do some research. When his parents and brother were safely asleep in their beds, Dan stole down to the den to use the family desktop computer. It wasn't much, but harnessing the power of Google was the best way to get information without leaving a trace.