Flickers (Charles Xavier)

Chapter 26

The following morning, while making a quick trip to a coffee shop down the road to grab a croissant and a cup of tea to take back to her hotel room, Iris spotted a headline at a news stand that instantly caught her eye.

VIOLENT MUTANT GIRL WHO LASHED OUT AT HER TEACHER NAMED!

Beneath the headline was a picture of a young girl with bright ginger hair scowling at the camera. It looked blurry, as though it had been zoomed in and cropped too much. With a frown, Iris picked up a copy of the paper. The vendor raised his eyebrows and shook his head, "Crazy, huh? Wonder how many other mutants are hiding right under our noses. Makes you think – who can you trust? These monsters are everywhere."

"Hmm," Iris murmured quietly, passing over some change to the man, "Crazy indeed."

She raised a finger to her temple as she walked away. A moment later, the man yelped and ran behind a stack of newspapers and magazines, his face flushing bright red. She smirked as she turned the corner, keeping her finger to her temple and making the man think he was naked for as long as she was within her radius of strength.

Iris couldn't help but laugh as she lowered her hand, but a moment later her thoughts flickered to her accidental attack on Hank in the training room. She shook her head, trying to think of something else, but it was too late – a small flame had emerged in the centre of her palm. She stared at it for a second, before closing her palm quickly. She'd been foolish to use her abilities in public when she hadn't gained control yet.

Hesitantly, she reopened her hand and breathed a sigh of relief. A flame that small had been put out by her closing her hand. She'd been lucky. She kicked herself as she made her way back to her hotel room. She had to be more careful. All it took was for her emotions to get only slightly out of control. She still had a lot to learn.

When she got back to her room, she sat down on the bed and read through the article about the young mutant girl, trying not to get croissant crumbs on it.

The young girl was called Jessica Riley, and she attended a school just at the edge of the city. She lived with her parents and they had no other children.

Iris couldn't believe that the newspaper had been allowed to release such personal information about the young girl. It was a serious invasion of her and her family's privacy. The media were going to make their lives hell.

She reached over to the bedside table and grabbed a notebook, making notes on the young girl's name and the area that she lived in. It wasn't an area that she'd been to before, but she knew whereabouts it was. She was sure a cab driver would know their way there.

Before she really knew what she was doing, she'd grabbed her jacket, thrown her notebook and pen into a bag and was leaving the hotel room. She hailed a cab and asked the driver to take her to the school that had been named in the news report yesterday. If he recognised the name of it from the stories about Jessica, he didn't say anything. She sat there absentmindedly tapping her pen against her teeth while he drove through the traffic and out of the city. She still wasn't really sure what she was going, but decided that she was just going to do what came to her. She didn't have a plan, but hadn't her best journalism always come from her making spontaneous decisions? Going to the mansion ten years before had been a spontaneous decision, and she'd never regretted it. It had been Logan who'd seized the opportunity of her being there and had saved her from a life of not knowing who she truly was.

Even now, she still didn't regret it.

The cab driver pulled up outside the school, and Iris asked him to wait for her as she got out. She could hear the sound of children playing, and with a pang wondered how the kids were doing back home.