Us Mutants Prefer the Term "Special"

x30x

I woke up with my right arm was reaching across Zaine's body and my left arm wedged between us. I blinked a while to wake up and slowly rose up to glance up at Zaine, but he was sound asleep, with the lightest noise of snoring. I smiled at the cuteness of it all and felt at peace as he inhaled and exhaled in sighs of sleep. I repositioned myself again to just lay there for the sleep that Zaine deserved, but then I heard knocking on the door. I didn't even think about getting up and I closed my eyes and buried my face in Zaine's chest...but then they knocked again.

"Open up! I know you're not asleep!" Cheshire yelled through the door. Sh!t. I felt my heart beat speed up as Zaine's breath remained the same. There was more banging on the door. "Union, there are important things going on!"

Important things? Before I got to question it there was another rhythm on the door before I heard him grab the doorknob. But by then, I had stopped feeling the serene breathing from Zaine's slumber as his hand on the opposite side of me slightly moved as he felt the fabric of my shirt with his arm stretched around my shoulder.

"And don't freak out, but Aspen isn't here..." he was warning as he opened the door, but then stopped when he saw me at Zaine's side as he started to awake and was adjusting to the bright room and groggy state. Zaine removed his arm from around me as he sat up against the headboard. "...never mind."

"What?" Zaine asked, confused, with a light yawn.

"Nothing," Cheshire said, glancing between me and Zaine with a playful smirk. I could only hide my smile by falling back onto the bed and start to get off of it.

"What's going on?" Zaine asked as he got up from the bed and walked over to the coat closet and pulled out a pair of jeans, opposed to some gym shorts that he was wearing. I didn't know why he was changing his clothes. Everyone else had extra bags and outfits from Cheshire's never ending wallet, but Zaine only bought clothes if he really had to. Yet, no matter what, no one cared what we wore here.

"The news," he sighed.

=XXX=

"With devastated families all over the country questioning why this is happening to ordinary children, responses have been made to propose an injection to prevent the mutiny amongst—" the national news reported towards the end of the section before moving on. "Our very own president will speak on behalf of the epidemic."

"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked Cheshire as Zaine stood in front of the TV with his arms crossed and his back facing me.

"Someone is convincing the freaking national medical department that Special People are dying off from our extra genes, but somehow whoever this government organization is, is targeting mutants that weren't at the Academy, giving them some makeshift cure to kill them off, only to try and distribute the real cure to everyone to make sure mutants no longer exist," Cheshire explained, after, I'm sure Jane did.

"We don't have some disease; they can't cure us!" Zaine yelled.

"Zaine, you saw the syringes and you saw the school. They have a cure—"

He turned around to look at me.

"What I saw was bodies and bodies laying lifeless on the floor," he retold in a whisper. "If they had the cure, they wouldn't have needed to massacre all of those—"

"You heard the radio when we were there," I reminded. "They were ordered to take back all of the ones that were cured and not killed."

"Like they know the difference!" Zaine yelled. "They probably disposed of all of them just to be sure none of this blew up in their faces—"