Nothing Less than Extraordinary

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My plan was to foremost ask if Judge Connally was alright before straight up inquiring about where he thought us Specials were headed in terms of "public security." Then maybe I would mention how Cheshire had the worst attitude of us all and still made no hesitation in saving the judge he had been feuding with all day. I also wanted to thank him for seeing through all the haze in order to arrest Macintyre. I doubted that a bunch of teens would be heard over the star-spangled general.

When I entered Connally's room, he appeared to be sleeping, but when I stepped to the foot of his bed, he simply opened his eyes.

"Last time I checked, you weren't my doctor," Connally tried to joke with a coarse voice.

"Yeah, but I can probably override their decade of higher education in a second with one touch," I joked back, causing him to smirk. When he wasn't in a robe sitting above us, he wasn't actually that scary despite the cuts and bruises along his face. I felt more comfortable around him than I did upon first meeting Maxwell before learning he was picking through my brain. "So how are you doing?"

"Better than dead thanks to you," he smirked.

"Not because of me...because of Cheshire," I corrected and vividly remembered seeing Cheshire beat life into the judge's chest and refuse my help. "He's honestly not that bad."

"Oh I know," he sighed, causing me to frown. He had been yelling at Cheshire for his disrespectful behavior and even had him arrested, but now he was simply agreeing with me without argument? "But who knows how he would've acted if you hadn't calmed him down?"

"I did that to save our case," I said honestly. "Cheshire is kind of intense when he wants to be and we didn't really need the world to see him fly off his handles all because..." I trailed off because I really didn't know why Cheshire had been in such a sour mood. During the recess, I could tell tension with him and Alice, which was understandable because he had just ruined his girlfriend's last three years all at once and didn't seem to have remorse about it no matter how much he loved her. But even before he had done that, he was on edge and angry about something more than the rest of us. He had to be considering he was escorted in by police officers leading me to believe he was emotionally charged enough to be caught. Only Alice had that affect on him. Connally watched my expression as I thought like I was saying everything out loud and he was trying to understand. "I should've just said 'you're right, he's not that bad.'"

"Oh I know," I was now hearing inside my head so prominently that it caused me to take a step back. There was no mistaking it for a mental message.

"You, you, you...you're a..."

"A telepath yes," Connally revealed with a grin. "Makes my job a whole lot easier."

That changed everything. Here we were thinking we were going to have to fight for our lives against some authoritative non-Special judge who would never understand us, but he was one of us! This made all the difference—especially since he was someone who could read right through everyone's minds with or without our verbal testimonies.

But there goes the Maxwell-level comfort.

"Don't worry, I'm not really the kind to pick people's brains on a constant basis. If I hadn't learned to control hearing everyone at once all the time, I'd probably go crazy," he laughed, which contradicted my previous thought about assuming he was doing just that.

"I'm just supposed to believe that?" I asked despite his self-amusing joke. I even glanced around as if we weren't the only ones in the room. "You're Special...just like us. And you're controlled, so how does that work?"