This just popped into my head last night and seemed like something that I ought to write down. It turned out kinda interesting, I think. Nominally in the X-Men universe, but don't look for anyone you know there. Cookies for
![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
telyanofcelore, who kept insisting it wasn't over, and then gave me the ending.
As a child she made herself filmy dragonfly wings, stolen green saran stretched over unbent clothes hangers, and pinned them to her cardigan. If her father saw her with them he would growl and yank them off her back, plastic crumpling in his heavy hands like the dragonflies’ wings when the boys upstairs caught them in the yard. But time and again she remade them, her shining perfect wings, and when she closed her eyes she could fly.
A few years later the first trickles of rumor began filtering through the city, of children world-over waking up one day able to read minds, lift trucks over their heads, set things on fire with their eyes. Children sprouting fur, or scales, or tails. Or wings. And she didn’t dare to hope, even a little, even if she dreamed of green-gold wings that would carry her away.
She wakes up on her sixteenth birthday with gills fluttering on her neck and scales like tiny jewels pebbling her body, and when she walks into the living room a man from that school upstate is drinking coffee and talking to her father. There’s nothing he can say to stop her father throwing her out of the house, but she gets to stand in the door of his plane and watch the dank, claustrophobic apartment and the trash-strewn, pot-holed streets fall away tiny and insignificant beneath her feet.
The other students at the school are nice to her – no one’s ever been nice to her before – and no one looks at her strangely – she doesn’t stand out at all – and no one minds if she spends all day in the pool just floating and staring at the sky, and she doesn’t think about running away and she never thinks about going home.
But sometimes at night she wakes up, and the fragments of dreams that fall away quicker than she can hold are of dragonfly wings and the endless sky.
no subject
Continues to look good - what a lovely idea that was.