#instistarter

Klara wipes the tears from her face quickly when she hears footsteps entering the lounge room she sat in. Without a bedroom currently, she hadn’t known where to go and so ended up here, empty at the time. The conversation with Charlotte only cemented everything she’d felt in regretting leaving, cutting deeper with rejection. What irony, that her leaving out of fear of rejection from one she loved would lead to that exact thing from another.

“I’m a little busy,” she tells them. It’s then that she feels something. A... presence? Energy? Someone using their powers? She’s not sure. She turns to the other person, hands alight with flame. 

“Whatever you’re doing, would you stop?”

She scratches the back of her neck anxiously as she peers down at the scribble of numbers and symbols that she’d taken down for notes. “Fuck...” she mutters to herself and slumps back. “Can’t I just get a degree in killing people?” 

She lists these all off with her free hand, starting over again when she runs out of fingers for points. “And there’s especially no boinking the Prof’s daughter...unless you’re a Summers brother.” She squints, “Favoritism here is real. Anyway.” She sits up and tosses the ball to whoever is listening. “This place is for orphans, right? So why is it so goddamn boring during the holidays?”

Awhile back, Felix was walking around minding their own business when they realized something wasn’t right. They’d stepped into a time that should have been over about one hundred and forty years ago. During those lost few months, they came across a man claiming he wanted to help mutants like Felix. They took the man’s offer, because there was no other choice at the time, and came to be friends with the telepath. Somewhere along that friendship, they both realized they could use Felix’s ability to slip through time to their advantage. That’s why the vampire showed up here at the Institute in 2018 six months ago.

They blinked like flashing lights as he sat on the train, the sixteenth one he’d been on in the past few days. Before then there was a bus. A few planes. He walked, ran, hitchhiked. All the while, the same coordinates sat at the forefront of his mind. He didn’t really have to ask for help, but when he did his voice sounded different from these people’s. This wasn’t his home, he didn’t know where home was. Maybe home was calling to him, so he went.

If this was his home, he might be fucking rich. 

He stares up at the mansion with his brows raised, scratching the itchy hair growing on his cheeks and jaw. Did he usually shave? He can’t remember. There’s heavy foot traffic around him, mostly young people, but he doesn’t stop anyone. They were carrying books and bags, some were sitting under trees with their noses in said books like they were... studying. “This is a school,” he says definitively, looking back up at the front door with renewed purpose then he slowly frowns. “This is a... school?”

Lorna had had green hair longer than she could remember. It simply grew that way. As a child, she’d sometimes tried to cover it with coal or kohl or even shoe polish. But she’d grown tired of it, and typically simply covered her hair these days with a silk bonnet that tucked it away.