Disclaimer- if you recognize it, it ain't mine.

Tomorrow

People always say that tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow. Such a strange word- it never comes, and always stays just beyond reach, just out of our grasp. Like the stars- dancing outside our reach, mocking us in our insignificance.

Tomorrow has been, gone, withered away to ash a billion times over, become an army of yesterdays. And yet, it still makes us reach forward, hoping we may come back with something new and wonderful within our hands.

I'm afraid I've lost my taste for tomorrow. I live from day-to-day, existing in each moment. But then, the very idea of the present is rather silly. I believe that there is only the future and the past, and we exist in the past. You see, we are always reacting to what just happened, we focus on what happened three seconds ago and don't bother with what will happen three seconds from now.

The future is just that- a shifting, uncertain, rather frightening thing that is terribly temperamental. Or maybe it isn't- I just see it that way because my future is all but gone, vanished. Like smoke in the wind, ice in summer, fire without fuel.

You see, once I believed in tomorrow. In the future. I actually had one, once. Not anymore.

Why, you ask?

My name is Tristan Kale, and I am a mutant.

I've been in this place for almost two years. It's where they send mutants who refused to be registered and tried to run. We-all of us-are kept locked up, a identification number tattooed on us. Mine's on the back of my neck.

I was a student at Xavier's School for the Gifted. Or mutants, to put it bluntly. I did all right, I suppose. I spent all my free time at the pond on campus- I can breathe underwater. Aquatic creatures like me rather too much, as well.

When the government enforced mutant registration, we fled. The whole school. I don't know what happened to the others, where they went, but I know what I did. I ran for the ocean.

I was caught at the beach. I stuck out like a sore thumb- having pale blue skin and white hair will do that to you. They tossed me in here- I don't really even know where here is, really.

My roommate is only fourteen- she was eleven when she was caught. She's ridiculously limber-the others call her the Contortionist-but that's only part of it. She can dissolve herself into some kind of weird vapor. She wears a collar to stop it, but that only controls it. At least until she figures out a way to get out of it.

Her name is Amanda, and she hasn't spoken since she arrived.

See what you do to people, Senator Kelly? You destroy lives, destroy futures. You even destroyed your own daughter.

I'm only seventeen. And I have seen more terror and fear and prejudice than any five times my age.

So you see, I don't believe in tomorrow anymore.