Just an Average Boy

Chapter One

I'm not really sure how to do a dedication but anyway this is dedicated to icecream_cookies, who so kindly designed the awesome cover which would have been just a photo of my brother, with words scrawled over the image in messy font.

Jack sighed, tucking his knees into his chest.

He was a foundling, retrieved from the orphanage doorstep.

He had gone through seven sets of foster parents, and he had grown callous from the neglect.

People would come in, looking for a young boy to adopt, and they would peer at him, as if he were a rare species of animal in a zoo, but when they heard of his past they would walk to the next boy's room.

"No," they would say, shaking their heads. "Not after what happened to Monty."

Another family was coming today, he knew.

But they would be just the same, with no sympathy for him.

It wasn't Jack's fault.

Things just... Happened.

And he always seemed to be caught up in them.

"Yes, you see, with a child of my own, and another on the way, I don't want to go through the pain of childbirth again. But I want to fill the house with children, and..."

The door swung open, and Jack looked up.

In the doorway stood a man, with shaggy blonde hair and blue eyes, and a woman with ginger hair cut in a bob, with a suspiciously large stomach.

"This is Jack. Jack, meet Ian and Jillianne Hjuro." said his social worker. "But there is something I ought to tell you..."

Jack looked down.
Here we go again, he thought.

But when his social worker had finished, the couple did not look horrified.

"Tragic." the woman said. "But it only happened once; and lightning never strikes twice in the same place."

Jack didn't bother to point out that it wouldn't be in the same place, if they indeed adopted him.

They were, after all, just a new set of guardians, but he looked up eagerly, sensing something different, as though they were somehow set apart from all the other men and women in the world.

There was something otherworldly about them.

When all the paperwork was filled out, Jack went down to see Mr and Mrs Hjuro.

He never came down from his bedroom.

His social worker looked up in surprise. Normally, he would sulk when he was going to be adopted, not come downstairs to see his new foster parents.

"Oh, hello Jack." she said.

"There we go." said Mrs Hjuro, signing the last of the paperwork with a flourish.

Mr and Mrs Hjuro agreed with Jack's social worker that they would come back for him the next day, leaving time for him to pack.

Jack sat on the window will, watching as the red car drew out of the driveway.

Once it had faded into the distance, he jumped down off the sill, gathering the few possessions he still had and shoving them into a suitcase: the toy bat Monty had given him; the clock on his bedside table that always woke him up in the morning; and, most importantly of all, the silver rattle he'd been found with.

The next morning, as the same red car as yesterday reversed into the drive, Jack took a deep breath and walked downstairs, suitcase in hand.

And as the car drove away from the orphanage, this time with Jack in it, everything around him became a blur as he drove into his new life.