Chapter Text
In 2017, Ainsley Ransom is in the middle of math class when his vision and body slips and spins and skewers and then his ears are pulsing with heartbeats and lungs and brains and chemicals.
His head pounds into a migraine very, very fast.
He wants it to be quiet. Please? He just wants
let him
His consciousness seeks something else, the inner bits of someone else, and he pushes or pulls or squeezes and all of a sudden, the people around him slow down and drop and their heads fall onto their desks and it’s finally a little more quiet. His head still pulses.
In 2018, he is cornered on his walk home by two boys who call him murderer
and filthy
mutie
and x-cannon-fodder-in-training and they start hurting him, very very bad, and his vision goes white and he feels two small bags of blood and muscle pop when he squeezes.
He can’t keep doing this.
He signs himself up for every extracurricular in the book and then doesn’t go. He finds trains to New York and Canada and wherever he can and begs the people he finds to teach him to control what he has, to fight like they do. He gets very very good at hurting people and being hurt, and pretends that the people his mentors have as enemies won’t hurt him either.
That is proven wrong in late 2019, when Ainsley Ransom comes home from school to find the door open and five people dead in the house.