KOTLC Sokeefe One-Shots, Alternate Endings, etc

The Girl: part 1 (Fitz POV)

A/N: @Sokeefe4EVA2  requested Fitz's POV of the very start of the story, when he first found Sophie in San Diego. This will be told in two parts.

Of all the places Fitz had visited since he began helping his father search for the mysterious missing girl, San Diego might have been the worst.

All of the Forbidden Cities smelled wrong—the air was polluted, and there were no Pures to help filter out the stink and the pollution.

But fires this severe?

Fires that had apparently been burning for days?

The air quality was horrible.

His dad had already looked up the information on the girl Fitz would be observing today. So he knew that she would not be at school, but with her class at a place called the Natural History Museum.

Except...this was not natural history.

All these dinosaurs?

They weren't extinct. And they didn't look like that at all.

Fitz always got a kick out of seeing the different human cultures. It always made him thankful to be an elf.

He knew humans did the best they could.

And honestly? It made him kind of sad. The humans populating (and destroying) the earth these days knew nothing of what their ancient ancestors had done thousands of years ago.

But they were paying the price for it all the same.

But somewhere among the billions of people was one girl, not much younger than Fitz, who was carrying a huge secret. One she didn't even know herself.

This girl wouldn't be the one.

None of the girls ever were.

But when you are sent an article from a human newspaper about a crazy smart child prodigy...you have to look into it.

So Fitz waited in the museum, holding the newspaper with a front page article entitled CHILD PRODIGY CHOOSES CITY COLLEGE OVER IVY LEAGUE and pretending to read it.

He'd already studied the picture, but it was printed in black and white, and didn't seem to be very good quality. That made it impossible to tell just by looking at a photograph.

But he should be able to tell once he actually saw her.

He heard as a bunch of teenagers mocked a younger, smaller girl for answering a question correctly.

This must be the girl in question.

Sophie, according to the article.

When he looked up a moment later, he found that she was looking right at him.

Looking kind of...miserable and embarrassed.

Was that from the way her classmates treated her, or from the fact that he was holding a newspaper article about her?

That didn't matter. What mattered was that he experienced first a thrill—she was way prettier than any human girl he'd seen before—followed by inevitable disappointment.

Her eyes were brown.

She wasn't an elf.

Just an uncommonly smart and uncommonly beautiful human.

And her peers obviously hated her for it.

Thinking he had better make absolutely sure this was the girl from the article—and to give her at least some friendly interaction today—Fitz smiled at her and walked toward her.