PHANTOM ─ x-men ✓

01 | feeling hope

I want Colonel Hendry to pull the pin.

"Leena." Shaw's voice is like a thousand knives all stabbing me at once. Anger and hate boil up inside me. "Do you want to leave?"

For the first time, I look up, right into the eyes I've grown to despise. The eyes that haunt my dreams. They are my worst nightmare, and right now they are brimming with false worry for an imaginary daughter.

I almost want to laugh. The thought of Shaw caring for anyone is a joke, an impossibility. I can't hold his gaze, and look at a dripping glass of brandy sitting on the bar table. I watch as condensation forms on the side of the cup from the cold of the ice. It dribbles down, no doubt leaving a ring of water where the glass still sits.

Shaw sighs and goes back to talking with Hendry. "Go ahead. Pull it."

"I'll do it." Hendry says, but his voice is filled with hesitation. "I swear to God." he moves his hand to the pin, as if he is also trying to convince himself that he can do it.

Just pull the damn pin and get it over with. I grit my teeth. Perhaps this is my way out. It's been five years since Shaw first found me. Five years of torture, of being forced to use my abilities, of falling asleep at night with bruises blossoming along my neck and arms. Five years since he killed my parents.

I still remember the day, as fresh in my mind as if it occurred only days ago. It was raining, the kind of rain where it took you hours to dry. We had a little house in the suburbs of California. I went to school every day, then came home and helped make dinner with my mother, then we would play board games or watch the television.

I had just gotten home from school, drenched and ready to take a shower, when the front door crashed open and two men stepped into the house. My father immediately grabbed the shotgun from the wall. We had prepared for this ever since I had my first incident with my powers.

I had made a girl go into a panic induced coma simply by touching her, and the moment my skin connected with hers, they say both our eyes turned black. I didn't know, because I was too busy wondering why I could see all these horrible things. A broken arm, a bloody nose, a man lying dead in the street, his head oozing with blood.

There were more incidents like that, where I would trip fall unconscious if I walked by a man who we later found out to be a criminal, or I would cause a boy to start crying just from touching him. We were always prepared for someone to come asking questions, but it still shocked me when the men stepped into our living room.

The rest is a blur. One man, who I later came to realize was Shaw, asked if anything peculiar had ever occurred with me present. My father asked them to leave. Shaw asked if he could meet me, and my father cocked the gun. Shaw took a step toward me, his eyes full of malice, and my father shot. Only the bullet never reached Shaw. Instead it disappeared into  his raised hand, and Shaw stood up, turned to my father, and pressed it to my father's chest. My father was thrown across the room, cold and lifeless and bubbling from some invisible force. Dead.

That was when I lost it, my head so full of fear, torment, and other emotions I couldn't describe that when I screamed, the entire house erupted into darkness. Only the darkness wasn't like shadows, or the colour that covered clothes and objects. It was something real, something tangible, It was pure emotion, pulled from everyone around me and warped into a dark weapon. Dark energy. The outburst was so shocking that it took me a while to figure out where I was, as everything was now covered in these shadows.

Shaw led me away and out the door, where the emotions oozed out of the walls like blood or tar. I almost fainted when I saw the crumpled figure on the ground in the garden. Her eyes were glassy, and the swirling shadows covered her head. The life was gone from her eyes.