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Clyde half-heartedly listens to his teacher lecturing them on the history of people with so-called ‘superhuman’ abilities while doodling in the margin of his textbook. Someone’s having a P.E. lesson outside, shouts of “that’s cheating” from the football pitch occasionally drifting through the open windows, and he’s probably going to get yelled at sometime soon for not paying attention, but it’s a warm afternoon and this is just so boring.

Rani pokes him in the back of the head with her pen, tutting at him, and Clyde jerks back into the lesson. He looks down at the page to find that amongst the doodles and cross-hatching, he’s written the word DUCK.

Shrugging, Clyde bends his head until his nose touches his textbook, just as the boy behind him sneezes. Streaks of fire shoot over him close enough for Clyde to feel the heat on the back of his neck but they land on the classroom floor instead, where they melt the lino until Lucy sighs in the front row, twisting in her seat to throw a handful of impenetrable ice over them.

Mr Cassidy turns around from the board long enough to give Jake a reproachful expression, but that’s pretty much what you get for putting yourself in classroom full of kids who can’t control their freaky abilities: stuff gets destroyed. Like, a lot.

Sometimes, just a little bit, Clyde wishes his power were a bit flashier. He’s not talking Jubilee flashy or whatever, but there’s something kind of sad about the fact that his eyes never glow and his hands never fill with flames and he doesn’t accidentally levitate. Nope, none of that stuff for him.

Rani is frowning at the note in Clyde’s textbook; he can’t work out if she’s impressed at the fact his visions are starting to have practical uses or if she disapproves of him drawing all over school property. He raises an eyebrow at her but she just shakes her head and goes back to copying down Mr Cassidy’s notes, good little student that she is and all, and Clyde sighs and starts clock-watching, musing on whether their uniforms are fireproof or not.

He’d really like not to have to find out the hard way.

-

It was kind of like getting a Hogwarts letter, except without owls and magic and you’re a wizard, Harry. Basically, all the good bits were missing; the only similarities were, really, the letter and the fact there was a booklist (conspicuously missing stuff about quidditch and magical creatures, which was a shame).

Clyde opened his acceptance letter to the school he hadn’t applied to on a wet afternoon while his mum was on the phone yelling at his dad for missing another child support payment. It wasn’t exactly a surprise, because he’d drawn a picture of this happening the week before, but it was the confirmation that he’d been kind of dreading that he was definitely a weirdo who was going to have to go to a special school. He wasn’t particularly attached to the local comprehensive he’d have had to go to otherwise: the uniform was ugly, the kids he’d gone to primary school with were pretty awful, and the rumour was that you’d get your face smashed into a brick wall sometime in the first month of term. It was just that Clyde didn’t want to have to be that boy: the one kept away from society for the good of it, who hadn’t seen his dad in years and whose power was going to get him eaten up by some weird government agency in the future.

His mum cried when he gave her the letter, then hugged him tightly and told him she was proud of him, because his mum is amazing.

Clyde’s always masked his real feelings with humour, so his only response was: “so, when do we go to Diagon Alley for my books?”

His mum laughed, wiped her wet cheeks, and responded with: “yeah, we’re probably just going to go on Amazon, darling.”

-

Maria’s complaining about the homework Miss Frost set and fixing Rani’s phone that she dropped yesterday, fingers skimming over bits of an iPhone Clyde is pretty sure that nobody outside of an Apple factory should see. Not that this matters; technology speaks to Maria – that’s how she puts it, anyway – and she can fix pretty much anything. Clyde’s mum looked kind of concerned when their TV started magically getting Sky, and then grounded him for a week, but she didn’t make Maria undo what she’d done to their regular bog-standard aerial.

Clyde’s kept the truth about how much faster their broadband is than everybody else’s a secret, for self-preservation reasons.

“What did you do to this?” Maria asks, cutting herself off halfway through her ranting about how nobody will ever, ever need to know about oxbow lakes in any amount of detail. “I mean, I thought you said you dropped this, not put it in a blender.”

“I watched a youtube video of that once,” Clyde observes, but neither of them are listening to him. Now would be an awesome time to have a best friend who walks to school with them, instead of having one who is not only the bloody Flash, but who is also so geeky that he’s probably been at school for about three hours already. Luke may respond to most stuff Clyde says with complete confusion, but breaking through Maria and Rani’s BFF stuff can be a bit tricky sometimes.

“Have I found your limit?” Rani asks, looking much too interested, already reaching into her rucksack for a notepad. Rani wants to be a journalist when she’s older, despite the fact that no one will ever employ her with her power, and she mostly practices her skills by asking them all invasive questions about their abilities.

“No,” Maria responds distractedly, eyes still on the iPhone, “but you should clearly not be allowed anything more technical than a pencil.”

Clyde sniggers until Rani reminds him that he breaks pencils all the time. He protests that it’s not his fault, it’s this stupid precognition, but she just rolls her eyes, like her ability to phase through stuff hasn’t caused lots of accidents and chaos.

Sometimes, it’s actually kind of easy to see why the government opened up special schools for them all.

-

Luke’s sitting in the library with an essay they have two weeks to do mostly completed in front of him in his carefully rounded handwriting, the kind they teach you to do when you’re a kid and have to learn to join up the letters. Luke’s is picture perfect, like no one’s is, like a font on a computer. It weirded Clyde out when he first met Luke, but now it’s just another part of him, and he kind of likes it.

He flicks Luke’s ear to get his attention; Luke jumps and then blurs slightly. Clyde knows by now that that means Luke just leapt out of his chair, panicked and overly defensive, then realised it was Clyde and sat back down again, all in the space of about half a second.

Oh, yeah, as well as having one of the highest IQs on the planet (no, really), Luke can also move at the speed of light.

Well, nearly, something like that, Clyde basically tunes out Luke’s explanations once pi gets involved.

“Morning,” he says, dropping into the chair next to Luke’s and pretending that he didn’t see the flicker; Luke’s meant to be acting less like a startled rabbit these days, which is going, um, well.

“Morning,” Luke replies, smiling brightly at him. Clyde knows that somewhere behind that smile Luke is congratulating himself on dropping the ‘good’ part of the greeting, part of his ongoing quest to talk less like a BBC costume drama. Clyde’s happy to help out with that; he may not be able to create crazed scientific formulae at lunchtime when everyone else is in the cafeteria bitching about the food, but he is an expert at slang and pop culture. It may make his mum despair, but Luke is progressing pretty well under Clyde’s biased but diligent tutelage.

So, he’s going to show Luke Star Wars until he likes it and can make all the appropriate references. Whatever. That’s a totally acceptable thing to do.

Clyde tries a winning smile, tipping his head to one side. “So, about that homework Frost set us...”

Luke sighs, but Clyde is fairly sure there’s something fond in it. Probably.

“I’m only doing this because if you get detention again you won’t be able to come over tomorrow afternoon,” he says firmly, before sliding his Geography book over to Clyde.

“I won’t,” Clyde agrees cheerfully, clicking his biro and getting out his own, considerably more battered, book. “Thanks and stuff. I’ll probably do it myself next time.”

He almost doesn’t catch it, but when he thinks Clyde isn’t looking, Luke actually rolls his eyes. Clyde is weirdly proud.

-

Clyde doesn’t have an exciting story about when he realised he had superpowers; he didn’t collapse a house on top of anyone or wake up levitating or break an arm only to find it healing in front of his eyes seconds later. Really, he just spent most of his childhood in a state of déjà vu, answering questions before they were asked and waking screaming from nightmares about cars and train crashes. He foresaw his dad leaving, but then that was obvious to anyone with eyes, you didn’t need precognition to predict it. It took him a while to realise that things he dreamed and things he drew came true, but even once he had nothing traumatic and horrible happened to him, he’s not like Batman or anything.

Maria’s got stories about dismantling her childhood toys and building them into crude but functioning electronic devices, and about the time she accidentally built what turned out to be an atom bomb for a year five science project that was supposed to just be about how to create a working electrical circuit. Apparently some shadowy government agents turned up at her house to confiscate it, though they had made her a brand new project to hand in instead, one that wasn’t dangerous and one that she was explicitly not allowed to tamper with in any way.

Rani’s ability to phase through solid objects still isn’t quite fixed yet; when she isn’t concentrating she can sink literally halfway into a sofa or fall through a table, but it was a lot worse when she was a child. Getting stuck midway through a wall, unable to figure out how to go forwards or escape backwards, is bloody scary, Clyde has learned; Rani can’t suppress a shudder when she talks about it, a grimace tugging at her lips.

There’s a reason their school has more than one trained psychiatrist, and they all have to attend mandatory sessions. Clyde doesn’t have a lot to say in his; he doesn’t mind being able to see the future. He isn’t like the precognitives who show up on trashy TV shows, driven to the edge with seizures and nosebleeds and crazy. Which is good, because Clyde actually likes just living a mostly normal life with Sunday afternoon football in the park, takeaway on Fridays, and just the occasional heads-up for something that has yet to happen.

Luke’s life is different to everyone else’s, and he doesn’t tell his stories the way the rest of them do. Clyde knows why; knows because Luke told him, and only partly because he sketched it out in comic strip form.

Luke is human, but that’s not all he is.

-

After school on Thursday afternoons, Clyde has lessons with Professor Xavier, who is his head of year and also a telepath. When Clyde first met him it was weird, knowing that his teacher could hear all of his thoughts, dip down into his memories if he wanted to; he hasn’t got deep, dark, comic-book style secrets, but that doesn’t mean he wants his thoughts peeled out of him anyway.

The professor is young, with a ridiculous floppy haircut and a reassuring smile; he wears cardigans and drinks a lot of coffee and has a tendency to drift off in the middle of biology lessons and stare of the window for long periods of time, while the class play hangman on the edges of each other’s books. Xavier is also helping Clyde learn to get some kind of control over his precognition, so that his visions of the future will amount to more than messy sketches done when he isn’t concentrating, or dreams he can’t remember, half-tangled with his subconscious.

It’s never easy trying to pick apart what is a vision of the future from the stuff with the singing squirrels and birthday cake.

There’s a class of water, four different pencils and a blank sketchbook lying on the desk when Clyde gets to Xavier’s office.

“Hi, sir,” he says, dropping his bag next to the chair and sitting down, flexing his fingers.

“Clyde.” Professor Xavier is standing by the window, looking vague and thoughtful and frankly not like anyone who should be allowed in charge of children, although he’s sharper than he comes across. “Are you ready?”

“Yeah.” These sessions make Clyde a little nervous, still, because instead of prophetic sketches showing up among Clyde’s GCSE art coursework or the comic book he’s drawing in his spare time, this is him deliberately trying to trigger a vision. It doesn’t hurt or anything, but it still means handing his brain over to something else for a while, slipping into something that isn’t cool enough to be a trance. Nothing scary’s ever happened, and it’s not like the occlumency lessons – yes, Clyde’s entire life can now be summed up with Harry Potter references, he’s not sorry – or whatever, but sometimes he’s scared that he won’t get back.

He picks up a 2B pencil, takes a deep breath, and closes his eyes.

-

Luke’s house is a lovely big one in a much nicer area than Clyde’s flat; Luke’s mum is an investigative reporter and even though she spends a lot more of her time dealing with human-alien relations – no, really, that’s another weird aspect of the world – she still seems to make a decent amount of money if the size of their house is anything to go by.

They’re meant to be doing their English homework – Ms Darkholme is all smiles and niceness until you fail to hand some work in, and then she turns absolutely terrifying – but their copies of To Kill A Mockingbird are lying forgotten on the coffee table in favour of eating Jaffa Cakes and watching Maria trying to build a working TV remote using a broken microwave they found in a skip on the way home. When they first started going to a school for kids with weird powers, a part of Clyde had kind of assumed that their homework would mainly involve watching old Spider-Man cartoons and reading comics, though those theories were quickly dissolved the first time Ms Darkholme handed out Macbeth.

Clyde really likes Luke’s house, and not just because his attic is full of cool random alien devices that his mum collects from the various extraterrestrial ambassadors she meets. It’s not even because he spends enough time here for it to be a second home; he likes to give his mum a bit of time and space to herself, since bringing him up was never exactly easy, and Luke and his mum are always happy to set an extra place at the table. There’s just something about it that makes him feel relaxed and content, something that doesn’t extend to Maria or Rani’s houses, or even his own.

Maria attempts to change the channel and her current makeshift remote makes a crackling noise and sparks. Luke blurs and the next moment he appears again, holding one of those fire extinguishers that works for electrical fires – you learn the difference quickly at their school; you can’t always rely on having someone who can produce either water or ice with their mind, after all. Clyde frowns.

“Where did you nick that from?” he asks.

Luke shrugs. “I’ll return it if we don’t need it,” he says, expression painfully earnest, “and I left them a note saying it had been borrowed for an emergency.”

Clyde’s pretty sure that stealing someone’s fire extinguisher, whatever the emergency, is still considered, you know, theft, but he doesn’t point it out because it’s not his job to be Luke’s moral compass, that’s Rani’s. They agreed and Maria drew up a chart and everything. Rani is, right now, looking much more interested in whether the thing Maria’s built is going to explode or not, and is making notes in tidy shorthand in the notebook she keeps around for researching all their powers. It’s got Superman on it; Clyde bought it for her birthday last year.

He looks down at his English book to find he’s written that shit’s going to blow up instead of whatever he meant to say about Atticus Finch, and he opens his mouth to pass this message on when he finds himself moving. That’s not even how to describe it, it’s like being punched in the chest, breath ripping out of him and world swirling enough for him to collapse into the carpet, dizzy. The air smells like smoke and Maria is swearing and Clyde can feel hands around his arms and knows that it’s Luke, knows that Luke got him out of the way of the mini explosion. Rani would be unhurt, since she can phase through anything, and Maria sounds fine too, but Luke moved to get out of the way and took Clyde with him.

It’s kind of cool, because Clyde didn’t know that Luke could move people with him when he’s using his superspeed, but mostly he just feels like he might have left several of his vital organs on the other side of the room.

“Are you okay?” Luke is asking worriedly, shaking Clyde a little, and oh, Clyde likes Luke’s mum, he doesn’t want to throw up on her carpet when the room’s already a bit charred and smelling like the fifth of November.

“Less shaking,” he croaks and if no one’s screaming then he’s clearly made the shift physically intact, even if it doesn’t feel like it. “If you could not ever do that again, though, that would be awesome.”

Rani’s already snapping pictures of him on her iPhone, because Rani is a great person and is going to be an even greater reporter one day, but is frequently a terrible friend, and Clyde closes his eyes and decides to let someone else deal with the chaos for once.

-

The problem with Luke discovering that his power can also involve other people is that no one is going to be a willing test subject. If you’re supposed to move faster than other people can blink, then your body can adapt and it’s all cool. If you’re not supposed to move that fast, though, Clyde can attest that it’s a bloody horrible experience. Even Rani, who’s the one who’s meant to be interested in this kind of thing, refuses to try it out.

“Besides,” she points out, gaze on her notebook, “Luke did it on the spur of the moment in an emergency. He might not be able to do it again if he consciously tries.”

It’s been two days and, on the plus side, Clyde no longer feels like his internal organs are trying to escape his body. Luke’s expression is one of permanent guilt, no matter how many times Clyde tells him that he probably saved him from at least losing his eyebrows, if not something way more permanent.

“Wouldn’t want to lose my natural prettiness,” he explained the last time he was trying to cut Luke off mid-apology, which made Luke choke and shut up.

Professor Xavier is also interested in this new development in Luke’s power, though Dr McCoy is technically in charge of Luke’s training; he can’t think of a way around the safety issue either.

“Maybe Luke could try it with something smaller than people first,” Clyde suggests, stretching out on Maria’s sofa and watching as Rani continues to scribble in her notebook.

That gets her interest. “Like what?”

Clyde shrugs. “Kittens?”

Luke’s look of abject horror is worth it; Maria throws a pen at Clyde, rolling her eyes. “It’s okay, Luke, nobody wants you to accidentally murder kittens.”

“Or deliberately,” Clyde adds, while Rani tuts and concentrates on her notes.

Luke is still looking a little uncertain, but he’s relatively new at all this, and hasn’t got the hang of teasing yet. He will; it’s a part of Clyde’s surprisingly detailed plan to get Luke integrated into normal-people society, or as normal as you can be when the government keeps you away from the public in case you hurt them.

It’s a valid point, even if Clyde isn’t physically dangerous and isn’t trained enough to be mentally dangerous yet. He’s working on it, though; after all, his precognition can teach him all kinds of things. Xavier used the phrase bring governments down as a reason why Clyde had to be careful only to use his abilities for good, but really, it was just incentive to learn to manipulate them quicker. Because seriously, that’s awesome.

“Nobody’s hurting anything, Luke,” he says, almost without meaning to, just to make Luke smile again.

-

Clyde’s mum is sitting on the sofa when he gets home. She attempts a smile, but her eyes are tight with anxiety. Clyde quickly thinks back through all the dreams he’s had lately – he’s not supposed to dream the future anymore, that’s what the training is for, but sometimes bits and pieces slip in anyway – and all the pictures he’s drawn, and he can’t find anything potentially awful.

“What’s happened?” he asks, sitting down next to her. He wants to reach for her hand, but changes his mind at the last minute, curling his fingers into a cushion cover instead.

“Everything’s fine,” she says quickly. “I just... your father called.”

Clyde feels his stomach clench, because his dad usually only calls once a year, somewhere around his birthday but never on the right day. It’s okay, because Clyde got used to it all a long time ago, and he doesn’t really want his dad back in his life.

His mum tries another one of those smiles before she says: “he’s going to have a baby.”

Despite the fact he doesn’t care, Clyde still feels a little bit like he’s been punched in the stomach. He’s known all along that his dad doesn’t want them – doesn’t want him, doesn’t want his mum, doesn’t want whatever messed-up little family they could’ve got going – but there’s a difference between knowing that and realising that his dad is starting a whole new family, one he presumably does actually want.

“Replacing his freak kid?” he asks, startling himself with the bitterness in his voice.

He’s too old for his mum to lie to him, and he likes that she doesn’t. “I don’t know,” she replies. “But you should probably know that it isn’t me that carries the gene.”

Well, that’s... interesting.

“Does dad know?” he asks.

She shakes her head, and her smile is just slightly wicked.

It’s probably a little bad that that makes Clyde feel better, but it really does.

That night, he dreams about babies and wings and phonecalls at three in the morning, and when he wakes up he can’t work out what’s real and what isn’t.

-

“You’re sad,” Luke observes in the library the next morning, as Clyde doodles on his algebra homework and Luke struggles over the York Notes for To Kill A Mockingbird, trying to empathise with emotions he hasn’t completely worked out for himself yet. English isn’t Luke’s strongest subject; he’s okay with the grammar stuff, since it was all programmed into his head, but the literature side of things just confuses the hell out of him.

Clyde raises his head, surprised. “I know you haven’t got the hang of facial expressions,” he tells him, “because Maria had to point out to you last week that Mr Shaw was cross with you for correcting him.”

“He was wrong,” Luke says simply, like he did at the time. He looks thoughtful, and then says: “maybe it’s just that I know you.”

Clyde bites the inside of his mouth so he can’t react to the words at all, forcibly reminding himself that Luke can’t even figure out the basic emotions of a story about childhood, since he never had one of his own or anything, let alone anything else. He’s going to shove Luke in the direction of Hollyoaks when it’s time, because that’ll teach him everything he needs to know about dating and crushes and might even help him get some kind of snog out of a girl in their maths class, but it really isn’t time for that yet.

“I’m alright,” he tells Luke. “I mean, brownie points for figuring out feelings and stuff, but I’ll be fine.”

His pen bites through the page of his maths book, but he’s fine, really.

Luke just looks at him, quiet and expectant. Clyde thinks about it. He could tell Rani and Maria; Rani’s smart, she’d know what to say, and Maria’s mum left them last year so she can identify, but somehow the thought of saying all this aloud to people who’ll understand what it really means makes his stomach twist.

“My dad’s girlfriend is pregnant,” Clyde says at last, not looking at Luke. He’s drawn shapeless spirals and little blocky childish houses on his homework, nothing helpful. “So. He’s doing to have another baby.”

There’s silence while Luke considers this. Luke doesn’t have a father; technically he has no parents at all, since he was grown by aliens who didn’t realise they had the DNA of someone with superhuman powers. Luke escaped fairly soon after that, since he could run faster than any of them could think, but it means that now he’s a human who looks like a teenager but isn’t, with a head full of information programmed into it that he didn’t learn for himself, and no idea what basic interaction with people should involve.

“Is he having the baby to replace you?” Luke asks eventually, and, ouch, it stings when said aloud.

“Yeah,” Clyde manages. “Yeah, he is, because I’m nothing that he wanted in his kid.”

When he risks a look at Luke, he’s frowning. “Then he’s an idiot,” he decides at last, and it’s so unexpected that Clyde laughs, too loud, making the librarian frown at them.

Luke immediately looks upset. “Did I get something wrong?” he asks.

“No, mate,” Clyde replies, throwing an arm around his shoulders, “no, you got something absolutely bloody right.”

-

Mr Summers always wants Clyde to push himself, which he supposes is fair enough in a teacher, but really, oil paints are not his medium. He can sketch, and he’s even got the hang of watercolours, but anything that requires a massive canvas and slopping stuff onto it is kind of beyond him. Maybe it’s because Mr Summers keeps pressing him to be about the impressions of things, the feel of things, and Clyde is used to pushing for details, distinguishing marks.

Really, all he wants from his life is to be able to draw a bloody comic book that won’t end up with accidental sequences ripped straight from real life in two weeks’ time. He gets the feeling he’d be sued if that happened, and that would be the least of his problems.

Maria’s trying to form something out of clay and chickenwire for her coursework. It’s really only technology that she has a magic touch for, so there’s clay everywhere and the whole thing is semi-collapsing and Clyde can’t help laughing when he turns around to check her progress.

She arches an unimpressed eyebrow. “I’m pretty sure your painting is the personification of emo,” she informs him. “All you need is, like, a clown trying to rip his face off or something.”

Admittedly, Clyde’s been using a lot of red and black and purple in his painting. It’s not even all deliberate; the paints keep smearing together and darkening themselves and he’s not even sure what it is he’s painting. It’s not the attempt at a night scene in the nearby park that he was going to have a go at, anyway.

“You have a lump of clay with bits of wire you keep cutting yourself on poking out of it,” Clyde reminds her.

“I’m only doing this because I didn’t want to do drama with Rani,” Maria shrugs easily. “You’re the one whose life is supposed to be all about art.”

Mr Summers lets them use his classroom after school to work on projects that would be too messy to do at home, which is pretty cool of him. Clyde’s room is basically full of sheets of paper and sketchbooks with loose pages trying to escape – although at least he’s stopped trying to draw on the wallpaper in his sleep; that was always awkward in the morning – so it’s enough of a mess without him adding paint spillages to it all. Besides, he doesn’t even want to be painting whatever this freaky mess is; it’s going to drag down his grade if Mr Summers makes him hand it in at the end of term.

Clyde tips his head critically to one side, adding a sweep of deep red paint to the lower left-hand corner of the canvas.

“Maybe it’ll get better when it dries,” he suggests doubtfully.

Maria makes a non-committal sound, but then she’s got clay smudged on her face and plasters all over her hands, so she doesn’t get to judge him.

It’s possible they should both have taken drama with Rani after all.

-

They moved a lot when Clyde was a kid, because he was angry a lot of the time and didn’t always know why and so reacted mostly by acting like a little shit in class. Sooner or later there were letters home or someone punched him in the face, and then he moved schools and sometimes homes. Precognition is tough on a child; it’s sometimes difficult to tell what’s real and what’s the future and what’s something you’ve just made up, and the situation with his dad had already made the world lopsided enough.

Clyde’s had friends before, because he learned how to fit in fairly quickly and he’s not entirely maladjusted, after all – not like some of the kids here are, the ones who’ve hurt themselves or their friends or their families – but he’s never stayed anywhere long enough to get close with anyone, never cared enough to bother with anything more than casual acquaintances and video games.

Now it’s different, because being with other people who are weirdos too, who can understand at least sort of what you’re going through – even if their life experiences are different and sometimes really disturbing – creates all these bonds, whether you want them or not. Clyde ended up friends with Maria within two hours of his first day at the school, because she giggled in the wrong moment in their first assembly and he caught her eye, and then they met Rani and it became, like, a thing. Rani and Maria are his friends, and they’re great, and they have the whole BFF thing going on which is cool, and he was happy like that. And then Luke, grown on a spaceship and born at the age of fourteen, moved in across the road from Maria, and that changed everything.

He drew Luke before he ever met him – not in detail, just an impression of dark eyes and messy hair and a mouth twisted with something like hopeful confusion – and he’s still got the picture somewhere, lost in amongst the debris of his room. He doesn’t always keep drawings, since he does so damn many of them, but he’s kept the one of Luke because he gets the feeling that it’s important. After all, Maria and Rani were the most important part of his life for three years and he didn’t draw either of them before they became his friends.

If you’d asked him when he was younger, Clyde would probably not have suggested that his first proper actual best friend should be a boy who’s weird even by their pretty low standards, who doesn’t know who Lady Gaga is and who could probably build a makeshift bomb out of an iPhone but still has fundamental problems with texting.

Even though he can’t play video games and if they watch TV or movies Clyde finds himself answering the most awkward questions about everything, he still enjoys hanging out with Luke more than he’s ever enjoyed hanging out with anyone before. Professor Xavier has suggested that he should probably try and read more into these facts during their sessions, since Clyde draws a lot of pictures that just contain simple things about what Luke’s tomorrow is going to involve, but he’s happy enough not looking too deeply, not making anything complicated.

Anyway, however you look at it, Clyde’s life is a little weird even by the standards set by being able to see the future, and sometimes it worries him that he doesn’t care more than he does.

-

Professor Xavier says that he needs to care about it, but Clyde can’t, because even though he doesn’t want it to hurt it still does. His dad hasn’t been a real, active part of his life for longer than Clyde really wants to remember, but the fact that he has a new family, a new life, and wants no part of Clyde’s anymore grates in every way that matters. So it doesn’t matter how many sessions Xavier spends trying to get him to try and concentrate on his future half-sibling, the kid his dad imagines will be new and improved and all the things Clyde isn’t; it doesn’t matter because Clyde doesn’t want to know. Or maybe it’s more complicated than that, and he can’t know.

Either way, he defiantly draws the plot twist in tomorrow night’s Eastenders and a fight that will break out at lunch time tomorrow, while Xavier tuts a little and sighs and tells Clyde that if he keeps trying to suppress his abilities they’ll only force them out in other ways.

Clyde laughs at him and rolls his eyes and says something flippant, and does his best to ignore the fact that all he does these days is dream in babies and feathers and full-blown wings. If his half-sibling is really going to be born with wings, or grow them in later; well, it’s not like a heads-up from him is going to help anything anyway. And if his dad really wanted to talk to him then he wouldn’t call when he knows Clyde’s still at school.

Maria invites herself over to sit in his room and say nothing, sprawled comfortably on his bed looking at the normal, non-prophetic sketches he’s blu-tacked everywhere. Her mum got married again last year, and while Maria’s parents are much more awesome and much less complicated than Clyde’s, well, she knows enough about what he’s going through.

“I wish I’d got the wings,” Clyde says eventually, because, well, there’s nothing else to say.

Maria looks thoughtful, head tipping to one side. “I bet they moult,” she replies.

In spite of himself, Clyde laughs, and hugs her amongst the crumpled sheets of paper.

-

The concept of sleepovers is so exciting and confusing to Luke that it’s impossible to squash his exuberance by pointing out that none of them are nine anymore; mostly, admittedly, because Luke can then respond with I was never nine and, yeah, fuck.

Anyway, he gets excited and it’s easy enough to mock him instead of acknowledging the fact that Clyde is eternally happy to sleep on the leaky airbed on Luke’s bedroom floor. Sarah Jane, Luke’s mum, is really cool even when you take out the fact aliens are always appearing in their back garden or attic, and she welcomed Clyde into her home immediately with none of the suspicious eyes or too-thoughtful expressions that too many people – including Rani’s headmaster dad – have treated him with in the past. Clyde talks too much and laughs too loudly and has a tendency to doodle all over whatever he’s near, whether it’s appropriate or not, but he’s nowhere near as bad as parents seem to want to paint him.

He’s at home on Bannerman Road; knows where all the creaky stairs are, knows where everything’s kept in the kitchen, knows just from the angle of the attic door whether Sarah Jane’s working or if she doesn’t mind them wandering in to touch all the extraterrestrial artefacts she has just lying around, even though more than once Clyde’s got electric shocked as a result.

And, well, if he likes sleeping in Luke’s room, among posters of the periodic table and a whiteboard with complicated formulae tumbled across it, a couple of Clyde’s lazy casual sketches stuck with magnets to the edge, well, that’s something else, something he’s not going to prod at too hard.

...There’s too much light and too much noise and someone is screaming, everyone is screaming, and Clyde’s hands are moving, too fast for him to work out what they’re doing, and something explodes to his left and the sky turns purple and then there’s a shrieking like engines or... or something, and Clyde’s fingers feel like they’re burning, and he turns wildly looking for an escape route or an explanation or something and-

“Clyde!” It’s Luke, just Luke, in pyjamas with his hair ruffled from sleep and his eyes a little too wide, and his hands are spread on Clyde’s shaking shoulders. “Clyde, it’s okay, you were dreaming.”

He wants to press his hands to Luke’s shoulders in response, looking for something real, but his hands are curled around... pens, Clyde thinks they are; he has a biro in his left hand and a marker of some kind in his right, and he doesn’t know how he got them. The room is mostly dark, the only light from Luke’s bedside lamp, which is casting a slight golden glow over everything.

“I...” His throat hurts, his lips are dry, and maybe this is what Professor Xavier was talking about when he said that if Clyde didn’t push through his barriers a little his abilities would come out in other ways.

“It’s okay now.” That isn’t Luke talking, that’s Sarah Jane, and Clyde pulls away from Luke, the pens dropping from numb fingers. She hands Clyde a glass of water and he sips at it gratefully, guilty for waking everyone up.

“I don’t know what that was,” he says, when he can speak again. “I mean, there was a lot of screaming, and fire, and people, I think? Only they didn’t look like people.”

“I know,” Luke says quietly, and nods his head at something behind Clyde.

When Clyde turns, he finds that he’s drawn his dream all over Luke’s wall. The biro has bitten into the paintwork, half-carved lines that are a little wobbly because Clyde isn’t left-handed, while the lines of the felt-tip are thicker, more sure. In the middle, he’s drawn what appears to be a large blue box with windows, and RUN is blocked out above it.

Next to it, in shaky biro, is what looks kind of like a pepper pot with lines coming out of it, and Clyde takes a minute to reflect that he is apparently not that great an artist at three in the morning on a wall with inadequate materials.

“I don’t know what that is,” he admits, shrugging sheepishly.

“I do,” Sarah Jane says, and she looks pale. “It’s a message, Clyde, but it isn’t for any of us.” She forces a smile suddenly, and rests a hand against his shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she says, “this isn’t your problem anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” Clyde tells her. “I mean, I’m really sorry.”

Her smile slides into something more genuine. “It’s alright,” she tells him, “nothing we can’t fix, and well, if you’re right, then it’s important that you drew that.”

Later, bundled up in a sleeping bag again, with hints of dawn behind the curtains, Clyde admits to the half-darkness: “that’s never happened before. It was like the most vivid dream I’ve ever had, you know?”

“I don’t dream,” Luke replies sleepily, and Clyde always forgets that about him because, well, it’s kind of strange.

He thinks about babies and wings and fires and blue boxes and the curl of Luke’s smile. “I’m not sure I do either,” he murmurs.

-

“So Luke nearly kills you by moving you faster than humans are meant to travel, and you retaliate by having some kind of psychotic vision and carving it into his bedroom wall?” Rani asks, bent over her notebook.

“I want a cut of the royalties when you eventually write this really embarrassing book about our teenage years,” Clyde tells her, dodging the question.

“Mum says we can replaster over it,” Luke adds. “And he didn’t scorch the sofa.”

Maria looks sheepish, but laughs anyway. “I’ve been practicing,” she says, “and I haven’t blown anything up since then.”

“If you don’t count my garden shed,” Rani points out, not looking up from her notebook. “I think you might have replaced Clyde at the top of my dad’s Suspicious Friends of Rani’s list.”

“Hey,” Clyde protests, “I worked long and hard to get there!”

He didn’t, not really, but it’s not his fault that Rani’s dad is basically predisposed to distrust anyone who looks like they might make trouble in a classroom. Clyde’s been making disruptive but casual trouble for years, and kept it up until Luke arrived, with his painfully reproachful looks. Now, he keeps his trouble quieter, and just tries not to doodle on the tables in Sharpie anymore.

“What did Professor Xavier say about it?” Luke asks, poking the straw into his carton of orange juice.

“The usual,” Clyde shrugs. “That I’m probably not letting certain visions of the future through and it’s making the other ones more violent because I’m bottlenecking instead of opening the floodgates.”

Maria stops fiddling with her phone and Luke frowns a little, but it’s Rani who asks: “do you want to open the floodgates?” Her notebook is still there, but the cap is back on her pen, so she’s probably being an actual friend and not a teenage reporter here. Clyde doesn’t mind the latter too much, because he knows it’s important to her, but it’s nice to remember that she doesn’t just view them all as interesting potential stories.

“I don’t know,” Clyde admits. “Because after that I have to learn how to filter them, and, well, unless it’s lottery numbers I don’t actually want to know everything.”

“Wouldn’t that be cheating?” Luke asks.

There are laws that mean supernaturally powered people can’t enter the lottery, but that isn’t the point.

“Sure,” Clyde shrugs, “but where there are laws there are loopholes.”

Rani laughs, shaking her head slightly, and takes the lid off her pen again. Clyde imagines she’s going to write something like he might carve lottery numbers into the wall, and makes a mental note to hide all the pens in his bedroom until he’s sure it’s safe.

-

A lot of his life now involves stuff like meditating and concentrating until he has to reach for the neurofen, and Professor Xavier is giving him extra sessions with is both awesome and frustrated. Clyde’s getting blisters from all his drawing implements, and all he really knows is that he’s making progress, his powers are hitting yet another level of puberty, and it’s both cool and really scary.

All in all, it’s kind of a relief to get back to hiding in Mr Summers’ classroom with the oil paints he doesn’t know how to use, and a load of the year eights’ artwork drying on the racks in the corner.

Clyde still isn’t sure what he’s doing with this picture; it doesn’t match any of his plans, but it’s more than him just not being able to use oil paints, because he’s made no effort to start again to match his sketches. Somewhere deep down, something knows what he’s painting, even if he doesn’t. He’s been sticking with it, even when Maria laughs at him – not that her weird sculpture thing is getting any better, so she can’t talk – and sooner or later it’s either going to turn out to be something complicated and abstract, or it’s going to turn into something.

Well, that’s what he’s hoping, anyway.

Today, he’s listening to his vastly improved mp3 player – thanks, Maria – and working in a darker red than the red he’s used before, possibly to highlight something about the large red curve at the bottom of the canvas. Actually, he thinks absently, it’s a t-shirt. A red t-shirt.

Clyde blinks, because this is about as close to sense as this painting has ever got, and that’s both exciting and a little bit terrifying, because this has been taking shape over weeks and he’s never really thought about it, and who knows what that’s going to end in.

He adds a little more white to the top corner, to the centre, to where he’s picking out confusing details he didn’t even know were there before. He shrugs, humming along to his music; maybe he’s opened the floodgates Professor Xavier keeps going on about, and that’s why this painting is finally making sense.

Actually, Clyde owns a t-shirt that exact shade of red, now he thinks about it.

The bell goes loudly, reminding Clyde that even the various afterschool clubs have stopped and he should get out of here before the cleaners come in. He lays down his brush, stepping back.

You’d have to know what you’re looking for in amongst the darkness, the half-light filtering through curtains, but there are two figures in the foreground of the painting, pressed as close together as they can be, moonlight glinting off eyelashes. One of them’s wearing a t-shirt that Clyde is pretty sure is his, and the other one... well, Clyde would know that messy hair anywhere, know the set of those shoulders and the slightest curve that might be a mouth, even in shadow.

Either his subconscious is kind of a weirdo and really, really insistent, or... huh. That’s all he can really summon, even though the situation deserves more. Just one big: ...huh.

Clyde stands and stares at the painting for a few minutes, and then smiles wryly. Whatever it is, he definitely can’t hand this in as coursework.

Are you coming over? Luke has managed to text him, and Clyde mentally applauds him for the way he’s finally learned that texts don’t require subject lines or formal greetings (although part of him is nostalgic for when all Luke’s texts came signed yours sincerely). He carries his palette and brush over to the sink, running them under the cold water, while he considers his reply, considers if his brain has decided to start trolling him for its own entertainment, and how he’s supposed to tell the difference.

The lines aren’t picked out yet, but there are definitely fingers at the collar of Clyde’s painted t-shirt, curled in the fabric, pulling at it. It’s a moment in time, frozen and too intimate and very possibly set in the equivalent of stone.

Sure, he types once he’s dried his hands, see you in a few.

He covers the painting with a cloth, careful not to smudge it, and only looks back twice as he leaves.

Okay, three times.