I Want My Innocence Back

[[ooc located here

The bell rings, another day begins. A few students rush to class, others take it slowly, relaxed, still in their dorms, not caring if they arrive to first period late. A whole world exists parallel to the mundane routine at Jasper High--not the world of booze and parties, of sex in the dorms after dark. That's still the human world. The other one is twisted, supernatural, mutant.

The signs are there for those who look closely. Everywhere you look, you see remember. This morning, a cat's tail can be seen duct-taped to the wall in the cafeteria. Next to it, painted in blood on the wall, are the words, REMEMBER 1860.

It's the 11th grade GT math teacher's cat's tail and blood. He was a known superhuman-hater.

Everywhere you look, you see vive. Vive la Revolucion, Vive la Resistance. There's even a piece of vandalism that says Vive FCI, but it's been crossed out to illegibility by angry mutants.

It's time for first period. Where are you?

And in the war threatening to break out under all of our feet, where do you stand?

Keya Gurevich walks into Pre-AP Biology thinking of nothing but the bone structures in the human hand.

It's usually not like this for her the day after the full moon. Usually, she can still taste the blood in her mouth and feel where her claws just were, hear the screams and see the terror on her victim's faces...but she's been through so much in the past week, last night totally went over her head. Maybe she murdered someone, she doesn't remember--every second of every day for what feels like an eternity, she sees a pair of mutilated hands right in front of her face.

Seven days ago, she'd gone to FCI for her nightly training. There, she was forced to dissect a five-year-old vampire girl's hands and fuse silver to her carpals, metacarpals, each of her little phlanges. Fifteen years down the road, the girl could be a deadly threat to Keya--but she'd be working for the government by that point. It would never become a problem.

FCI wore many masks--it masqueraded itself as a prison, an insane asylum, a retirement home. Children born there were automatically lab mice, like the vampire girl, and, because most of the test subjects were either criminals, crazy people, or the sick and dying, no one bothered to stand up for them.

The teacher slapped Monday's test on Keya's desk. She'd gotten a D-minus. It made her want to scream. She clenched her fists--carpals, metacarpals, oh God, those tiny bleeding writhing phlanges--and kicked the underside of the table before flipping the paper over so that no one would see.

Her life consisted of a vicious circle of hiding things. She came to school and hid the fact that, come summer, she'd be long-gone to FCI. She snuck over to FCI and hid her little species problem, pretending to get sick around the same time every month. And, recently, she'd had to hide her slipping grades from her friends and family, because the information she retained wasn't what they tested over.

If the professor would just make her dissect a living person from head to toe, she could learn biology in one frantic, dying heartbeat.

The scariest part about government training was that she wasn't sure whether or not she was traumatized by it.

Add lycanthrope PMS out the wazoo and a D-minus on a test, and it was enough to make anyone want to rip throats out.

Charlize Clearwater had never been big on violence, but lately, the idea was starting to appeal to her. As she threw down her breakfast of waffles and orange juice in the cafeteria, a severed cat's tail taped to the wall caught her eye. Why didn't I think of that? she wondered.

Behind her quiet facade, she was mad at a lot of people, both living and deceased. Her bitterness towards humans came to the surface now as she looked upon the furry appendage, a commemoration of the Great Purge of 1860. Even reading about that horrible event disgusted her--to think, people were so closed minded back then. And still were.

But what really riled her up was thinking about the mutant authorities, who were greatly overstepping their power at the expense of their own kin. Like her two brothers, who they'd murdered.

Twins. Corbin and Daniel. Charlize never had been able to tell the two little guys apart, which just made it hurt more when she'd found out that the experiments killed them.

She shook her head vigorously to clear it. The bell was ringing, and she couldn't let herself be distracted in class by years-old bad memories.

She walked into biology and took her seat next to her friend, Keya Gurevich, who looked rather tense today. Must be that time of month, Charlize figured.

The professor handed the tests back, and Charlize was pleased to see that she'd gotten a 95. Not her best work, but she wasn't complaining. "Hey, Keya, what'd you get?" she asked, nudging her classmate with her elbow. Keya probably wouldn't say--she'd flipped over her test to hide her grade. But there were other ways of finding out...

With much concentration, Charlize managed to catch a wisp of a thought from Keya: D-minus. Eavesdropping on people's minds went against every code of etiquette Charlize could think of, but she'd been really curious. And besides, it's not like she'd lingered there and raked through all of her friend's darkest secrets. She'd withdrawn as soon as she got the grade.

After all, what was the use of studying mind-reading if she didn't put the power to use once in a while?

Charlize's eyes widened--it looked like Keya was having an episode. She shook her slightly, trying to snap her out of her wincing panic attack, but said nothing, not wanting to draw attention, and heaved a sigh of relief when Keya returned to normal.

"What was that?" she whispered, almost inaudibly, almost to herself. She didn't even try to pry into Keya's mind this time--she wasn't sure she wanted to know the answer. The lycan subconscious could be a very scary place.

"I, uh...failed," Keya finally answered Charlize's question.

"Ah, it's alright," said Charlize, trying to be comforting. "You'll do better next time. I could tutor you after school, if you want. Or even in the next off period, if you can't make it after school for whatever reason."

After one of the class members, Selena, answered a question about the test (which Charlize had gotten wrong, and made a note of in her notebook), the commotion about the grades started to die down. The class was ordered to split into lab groups for a brief lab involving chemical reactions. Charlize looked at the two girls in her immediate vicinity and shrugged. They'd make an alright team, assuming they wanted to be in a group with her.

He was in water. Some kind of water. Outside of the tube was a skinny bald man who tapped on the glass while wearing a chesire-cat's grin. Deacon opened his eyes. The man spoke but the water made it impossible to hear. He had some sort of mask on his face, feeding air to him through thick black tubes. The water had something in it. It tasted of copper and lime. This something made you tired, groggy and damn near brain-dead. But Deacon was slowly building a resistance to it. Best not to let it show until he was immune.
He watched the man type on a laptop, the room was hidden in darkness, save for the blue glare from the laptop and the green light from the bottom of the tube. A slight humming was coming from somewhere, possibly a fan from the ventillation.
Time.
It was now.
Move.
You idiot, move.
MOVE!!

Deacon's eyes widened as a pain shot up his spine. He screamed from behind the mask, the tube exploded, the water spilled out onto the metal floor and Deacon fell onto the shards. Wet. Cold. And Angry.
"Oh god... Crap! Security!!" The man shouted. Deacon looked up.
The screaming was blood curdling. A man who was in more pain than it was possible to deliver. That cracking sound of bone tearing off of bone was heard.


The bell sounded. And Deacon awoke in a cold sweat on his dorm bed. He looked to his table side clock and he could see he had missed his first class. He moved to check the time properly, he moved his hand over to the clock.It slid back as if in fear of his hand. Only a few inches, but it definately moved.


After thirty long minutes Deacon was ready and standing out side of his dorm room. He searched his mind and quickly realised where he had to be. He darted along the hall and away from the dorm building, then to the main building and burst through the doors. He ran along the sterilised, shiny halls and slid, stopping in front of a class room. He opened the door and saw that people were jumping into groups.
i hate being late.... he thought to himself. Then he began thinking of something. A noise. A loud, whining, high pitched noise. That noise, and blackness. That was all that would sit in his head, if he concentrated. It was an old trick to keep the mind-readers out. After all, they hear your thoughts, and this high-pitched squeal would be amplified in the reader if they invaded his thoughts. A little pain in the brain never hurt anyone. Except... Except...
"Deacon! uhm.. Just, go with those two and they'll fill you in n what we're doing" the teacher said waving her finger over Selena and the others.
"alright..." He mumbled as he walked over, ignoring the looks he was getting for being late three times in a row. It wasn't his fault though. He would try and get to class five minutes early every day. But the memories. They always came back when he slept. He had to relive them. It wasn't his fault he slept in, no, it was the damned --
"Hi! I'm Deacon, You don't mind if I work with you guys do you....?" He said with a smile on his face. A fake smile, but a damned good fake.

"If only I could memorize that well," Keya said to the girl. "I'm more of a hands-on learner..."

She winced: bleeding fingers, ripped off nails, raw nailbeds, tears, pitiful, sniffling vampire tears...

"I mean, you know that old saying. I do and I understand, right? And yeah, sure, I'd love to be in a group with you." Yeah, then I might pass. "I'm Keya, by the way, and this is Charlize," she introduced her characteristically quiet friend. "And you are?"

Her head turned as a boy entered the room. She couldn't place a name to him, but he'd been late before, so she remembered his face. "Hi! I'm Deacon, You don't mind if I work with you guys do you....?" he asked.

"Sure, no problem. You know about chemical catalysis, right?"

[[Crap, I'm on my friend's computer right now, he's having a pool party. It's me, Min, just ignore the fact that I forgot to log out. This is the second time in a row I've done this. I'll log out of his account now and back into mine, and I'll try to remind him to log back into his when I leave.]]

Deacon winced a little. It was a while since anyone had actually seemed to act nicely towards him. His spacey, stare-through-your-soul, gaze often creeped people out. At least that's what he assumed.

"You know about chemical catalysis, right?" She had asked him, and then his left eye flicked wider than the other. He stood, staringly blankly for about three seconds and then, "changing the rate of a chemical reaction...my means of chemical catalyst...." He then shook his head and smiled, knowing he had searched through his brain and found the right info.

Deacon's brain worked a little differently from other's probably due to.... It often sorted things into areas, labelled them and marked them for reference. Deacon simply had to find the marker and there the info was. The way he did this was he would picture himself in a large warehouse, lined with aisles all marked with the different peices of knowledge. At the far back of the warehouse, for some reason he couldn't place, was a wooden door. It was always locked. Memories his mind wanted no acess to. Must be memories of what he did during the night.


"NO! Deacon!... Please... You don't understand.... YOu're dangerOuS! We...You're" The voice turned to a deep blurring as did the memory, "And you'll never control it! It'll find it's place inside you and destroy you... taking..." The voice again, distorted and dissolved.

He shook his head out of that memory. He never understood, and could never fill in the blanks. "Oh! I'm Deacon, Deacon Young... Charlize....And Keya.. Right?" He smiled again. Somehow, he just knew their names. Like knowing them was a relfex, they just came to him.

Keya's instincts told her that the boy who'd just joined he group wasn't entirely normal. And she was thinking normal by her standards, mutant standards.

He knew his facts about science, alright, but he spewed the information with a weird look in his eyes. It made even Keya a bit uncomfortable, and she thought she had seen it all. The way cringed reminded her of herself, whenever she wanted to push a nasty memory from her mind.

What took her off guard even more was the fact that Deacon knew her name. Perhaps it wasn't anything to worry about--they had spent all year in class together, after all. But Keya still had a funny feeling, and everything he did was backing it up.

She wasn't going to say anything, though. For all she knew, he might be a coworker of hers, one she hadn't met in the FCI compound yet.

"Nice to meet you," she said. She started to measure out some of an alkaline solution for the lab, but then decided she'd be better off leaving it to the people who knew what they were doing. "Eeh...maybe I'll record the results this time," she said, digging around in her backpack for her notebook. "Where did I put that thing..."

In the middle of her searching, she dropped her bag and its contents spilled everywhere: shrink-wrapped sandwich for lunch, writing utensils…FCI security badge…

Panic seized Keya as she saw that fall out. Thankfully, it landed facedown, and she was able to snatch it up and shove it into her pocket, a close save.

Provided that nobody asked questions.

[[Yeah, the lab doesn't make sense, and it doesn't matter what the point of it is...the important thing is that there's a strong basic solution, which IF plans to use for a plot device.]]

Deacon moved his head closer with a look of unease, "to tell you the truth, I don't know what I'm doing either.. I was sort of shoved into this class when I came to this place. I think they just wanted to make sure I was dealt with quickly you know? But I can try. Try is all I can do, we can't all read the teacher's mind for the answers." He shot a dead glare towards Selena and then moved it to the table, slowly moving over the small pattern on it and then over his fingernails. But away from his hands. Looking at himself brought back the memories and the memories hurt. Every time. They hurt a lot.

It clicked. Clicked in his head like a thunderstorm.
How'd I... Wait what's FCI... Vampires? he thought before shouting as loud as he can , "jesus christ!!!" and jumping back landing onto another table with wide eyes looking as if someone had shown him a picture of the world's-most-disgusting-thing. That image felt burned into his cornea. "She was crying! She was crying, damnit and you just kept cutting and going further!" Tears were strolling down his cheeks. He realised where he was, and realised people were looking at him as if he was about to explode like a human A-bomb. Deacon wiped his face and bolted to the class room's door.

He sat in the quiet, cool, hall. Resting his head against the wall. His head was aching, pulsing in pain. The image he saw was fading,
"What did I see... What ..." Then he realised he didn't know what he freaked out about. He couldn't remember what he was screaming about or what he was crying for. It was as if the moment he left the classroom the memory left him.

A screeching sound, a loud clatter, and then, an explosion of burning emotion...

For a single moment, it seemed like Keya, Deacon, and Charlize were locked together by a thread of serendipity. First, Keya spilled all her belongings. Charlize caught a glimpse of a plastic ID card of some sort before Keya stowed it in a flash. Then, Deacon was screaming, and Charlize was screaming too, in her mind. She was thirteen again, receiving word that her brothers had died. She was trashing her bedroom, screaming obsceneties to the heavens...those government bastards knew they couldn't take it, they knew they'd die, THEY KNEW!

The tension didn't ease even after Deacon darted out of the room. Looking suspiciously at Keya, Charlize asked, "What was that?" She reached into her classmate's pocket and pulled out the card, staring at it in horror, gaping at that unholy TLA (three-letter-acronym).

Blinking hard to squeeze back the tears, she stood up from the table and shot a deadly glare at Keya. "You--you bitch!"

She didn't care that it was a terrible thing to say. She didn't care that this was her best friend--it didn't matter. Keya was FCI. She was a murderer. And Charlize was going to give her hell for it.

"I called you a bitch, you bitch!" Charlize growled, her usually timid demeanor giving way to rage.

She wanted to fight Keya, but knew that some sort of weird lycan dominance games would come into play, so she couldn't just go throwing punches all willy nilly. She'd have to aim low and play dirty.

Thinking fast, she snatched up the flask of the strong base from the lab table and held it threateningly under Keya's chin. "I don't care what your excuse is," she seethed. "I don't care what you did or did not want to do. You are a murderer. You want to feel pain? Fine then! FEEL IT! You want to be experimented on? Be my guest! But don't perform sick experiments on others!"

Charlize took a step back, acting like she was going to calm down and put down the flash, only to turn back around and splash the solution right in Keya's direction, thinking of nothing but how much she wanted her to hurt.

In the split second in which the liquid was airborne, her fists clenched, prepared to fight the conventional way in case Keya dodged in time.

Deacon opened his eyes and saw he was still sitting in the hall, leaning his back against the wall and breathing slow. Keeping his breathing in check kept his headache in check. Keep it uniform, that's what the older one always said. The man in the black jacket. Always wore a gas mask. Always kept the same tone. Always kept it uniform. That's what he would tell them. Uniform and safe, secure and protected. But protected from what? Them? From others? No. Couldn't be. Noone knew about Deacon except those who guarded his room and those who kept him in check. In line. Asleep. Tamed. Safe, secure and protected.

His vision blurred. Two black boots and black trousers were standing before him. The person, who was simply a silhouette, knelt down to look at Deacon face to face. He spoke with a harsh and near demonic voice:
"Protected huh? They were keeping you safe. From yourself. It's in your nature to destroy yourself, do you know that? Destroy, destroy, destroy. good You're getting weaker... It's my turn soon. Soon enough. Tick-tock, little man. Tick-tock."
The blurred silhouette with the demon's voice walked away. His boots making a loud echo in the hall. Deacon felt weak, as if all strength was washed from his muscles. And then his sight came into focus again. And everything was a clear picture. Strength back, he shot up and looked in the direction the man had walked. Nothing. Not a trace.

Charlize was almost disappointed when Keya gave up to her. She didn't want to let her pull that dog-pack fight-for-dominance shit she always did. Usually, when one dog submitted to another's dominance, the fight was over...but this was the human world. It was ruled by more than instinct. It had bitterness, it had hate.

In a flurry of emotion, Charlize launched herself across the lab table in an attempt to throttle Keya. "Don't you start apologizing, you coward! I'm not finished with you yet!" she growled.

A few other students, as well as the teacher, were eventually able to pry her off. She didn't know how much more damage she'd inflicted up to that point. When the teacher threw her out of the room and ordered her to the office, she seemed to realize, for the first time, what she'd been doing.

"Oh...my...God..."

She didn't want to regret it. When she'd done it, she felt justified. She thought she was avenging her brothers. But now, all she saw was that she'd completely lost her mind.

She saw Deacon sitting in the hall and gave him a little smile. It made her feel minimally better that she wasn't the only one who freaked out in the middle of class. "Do you know which way the office is?" she asked him.

She knew. She was just procrastinating.

Deacon slowly, and shakily, turned his head. A wide chesire-cat smile was stretched across his face. It faded and his face became emotionless. Even his manner of holding himself changed.
He stood with a straight back and hands at his sides, his brown hair flopped forward and he flicked it out of his eyes. And then he spoke, not with his usual accent either. But a strange, and creepy, deep demonic one. As if he had just smoked a thousand cigarettes in his time outside the class.
"Oh-hoh. The big bad wolf, out to play. Well guess what, it ain't just sheep hiding out here." He quickly moved and grabbed her neck, his mouth just a few centimetres from hers "There are monsters in big dark woods..." Deacon laughed and threw her back. "Well, boy, I gotta admit. I never thought I'd enjoy being in a body. But... It's kinda fun." he pointed his finger at the floor just before his feet and slowly moved it along to Charlize's feet, as he did, a crack formed in the floor, following the line he pointed out. Deacon made a fist "boom." He said casually and opened his palm quickly. The end of crooked cracked line exploded into a small crater. "Telekinesis is fun, but where did you learn it Deacon? You can't sponge where there ain't water. There must have been something in the water... Their tests were... Atrificial pow-" His eyes windened and he clutched his head. He swung back and forth trying to regain stability, he slammed against the wall a few times and slumped to the floor, breathing heavily,
"I-im sorry. I... Thought I could control him.. Looks like I was wrong. I apologise." He swung an arm out and pointed to the other wall of the hallway, "Keep heading in that direction. Youll find the office."

Charlize gasped as Deacon caught her around the neck. "What are you--?" she started to say, but wasn't sure how to finish the question.

What did she want to say? What are you doing? Or perhaps, What are you thinking?

He threw her back and her head hit the wall. As she rubbed it to assess how hard she'd hit, Deacon somehow began to open up a crack in the ground, finishing by blowing a hole in it. Charlize crawled away just in time.

Just when Charlize was on the verge of freaking out again, Deacon began apologizing. By this point, she was getting tired of people showing her their crazy sides and then saying sorry. She heard her lab partner, Selena, asking if she was alright, and saw both Selena and Keya heading down to the nurse's office, but she barely registered it. Pulling herself to her feet, her breathing shallow and fast, she finally found the right question to ask Deacon:

"What are you?"

Like Selena, she didn't stick around to hear the answer, turning around and darting to the office to face her punishment. She hoped Deacon wouldn't be offended: she hadn't meant it to sound mean, she was just confused and scared as hell, first by what she'd just proved herself capable of, and now, what he'd just shown her. She took extra schooling for her telepathy and RMM, but never in her life had she seen anything like what she'd just witnessed.