The kid couldn't be much older than fourteen at most but there was something to the way he moved an air of danger perhaps as if he was expecting me to jump at him any moment and already had seven different options of how to kill me properly and probably painfully before I could even touch him.

Black boots resting nonchalantly on the table, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and unshaven cheeks that still hadn't developed their first fuss... All was belying the look in his eyes. Cold and hard like crushed ice.

He crushed the cigarette and lit a new one just by touching its tip with his fingers. The look in his eyes was one that told me that he'd as easily set fire to my bones if I tried something funny.

"It is...not as if I want to speak ill of the dead. I owe them too much, but then again people would be surprised to hear my side of the story. And at the moment I am down on money and luck... So I figured one of you media vultures might like a look into their brains and might give me a shitload of money for it as well."

I glare at him. I don't like being called a vulture... No, I leave that for green-clad escapees from the home for geriatrics.

"I know you think I am fucked up. Not anything like the other one, not like lovely little Siku that everyone loves. Her X-Men where the bright and happy ones, that still cared. But I saw the darker sides...Logan's barely controlled rages and his constant threat loomed over my childhood. Yes, I was safe. As safe as one can ever be sharing a household with people that can level a mountain by looking at it...one of them even blew up an entire world once. Everyone rebels in their teens. EVERYONE...But when the people you have to rebel against are like that, it is harsher than usual. For me it was setting fire to things."

He smirks at me and opens his hand with a fireball floating over it... As if it was a joke of some sort. And I can't help it, the old wit wants to come to the surface. I want to laugh at him to make myself less afraid. The spidersense tells me that he is only moments from trying to hit me with the fire...perhaps not to kill, but to hurt me just a little. He enjoys my fear.

"Imagine... Imagine your childhood. You are surrounded not by your parents but by a group of terrorists. Yes, I call them terrorists by their deeds. Some were great and heroic...but they still leveled city-blocks to have people listen to their demands."

"Regal Storm...always regal, and so in control of herself you could almost hear her nerves like violin strings ready to pop. And they said that Scott was the anal one... And looked by their "wind-goddess" all the time. Isn't that a laugh and a half? Scott...Scott was actually the most humane of them...I think I will miss him, he after all knew what I was going through. What it is like to be an orphan and forced to grow up fast... He'd listen and try to help. Not by forcing me in any direction as you might expect...but by letting me choose and by helping me stand by my own decisions."

I relax slowly as his face becomes less of a mask of indifference and comes closer to the grief I know has to be there. And then his face hardens again...

"Some of them...So self-absorbed that they wouldn't give a rat's ass for anyone or anything but themselves. Oh, I KNOW I am every bit as bad, but I am supposed to. I am a teenager. But Rogue, Piotr, they called them grown-ups. And still they let themselves drown in the self-pity and angst that should have been my domain instead of trying to grow out of it. Logan...Logan had much the same problem, but for him it was the rage. He never DID hit me without a reason. But hit me he did, and the threats...the claws always close to the surface."

He smirks and touches one of the scars in his face.

"It is a bad thing to make your rebellion close to one such as him. It leaves marks. Others...Bishop...Blaire...McCoy...they could as well have been somewhere else. They always remained strangers locked inside their own little worlds. Hank in his laboratory, Bishop in his paranoia and Allison in her vanity and self-absorption."

He shrugs as if dismissing even the thought of them.

"They were nothing to me...less even since they mostly got in the way of my wishes and my need to be free. Of my need not to hide anymore."

And this is when I finally ask the question that is burning me.

"So it was for revenge...You killed them because they made lousy parents?"

And he just nods.

"In the end... It was them or me, and I have been trained by the very best. All of the very best."