Title: real or imagined
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Rating: Teen
Length: ~440
Content notes: Allusions to canon-type violence
Author notes: Some introspective thoughts from Sean set during the movie. Written for a friend's birthday.
Badges: governor of gen
Summary: Everyone had told Sean that there were no monsters, but after some choice meetings, Sean wasn't so sure.

Sean never believed in monsters. There were always explanations for the things that went bump in the night beyond the idea of creeps and crawly things under the bed. There were vermin and expanding wood and winds that caught and shifted everything. Monsters weren’t real, they were figments of the imagination.

As soon as he shattered a window with his voice, he thought differently. Well, maybe not differently, but the idea that had had no merit before had some. What he could do defied typical reasoning, but it opened up the possibility of others doing the same thing.

He found that his voice had uses. He scared fish on his date, and just after he turned around - date long gone - he saw two men who wanted to turn his life around.

They said what he could do was a gift, never a curse, and for the first time Sean found himself thinking himself not a monster, but something else.

By the time that those two men had brought him back to the CIA, Sean believed less in monsters and more in different abilities. No longer was he the only one who could do something else. Charles and Erik each had their gifts and soon he learned about what everyone else in the compound could do. Hank had super-strength; Raven could shift into anyone; Armando adapted to anything; Alex had energy pulses that chopped a statue in half; Angel could fly and spit acid. There were more like them, no matter how few he knew right now.

So there weren’t monsters.

However, as the CIA was attacked by others like them, there might be room to believe in monsters: a red man who can teleport and sliced through CIA agents like a knife through warm bread; a man who absorbed energy enough to kill.

Until then, Sean never knew that all of their differences could be so purposefully destructive and deadly. Accidents happened - he knew that all too well from personal experience; heard much the same from Alex and Angel - but these men were not looking as if they cared for accidents or incidentals.

But if the world was full of monsters - ones who changed the fabric of what he knew was good and right - he would sure as hell would know how to protect his friends.

No one could save Darwin as he tried to keep Angel at their side, and that stung.

It seemed that Charles and Erik - who missed the fight while trying to find Shaw in Russia - had a similar idea.

Perhaps they could all be monsters when necessary if that yielded the right results.