Hi, this is my first chapter of my first FanFiction story ever, so I am very excited to share it with you all! I do not own X-Men, but Laurien is my creation. I hope you all enjoy!

The simply mundane task of just strolling down the street on the sidewalk was sweetened immensely by the perfume of autumn in the air. The crisp cold against her skin and a vent pumping out the rich scent of fresh bakery bread and pastries were a perfect mixture to send Laurien into a dizzyingly good mood. Considering all the issues that were weighing on her mind, it was a welcome change of pace.

New York, though bustling with people and light, was plagued with worsening news from home and overseas. With the Americans and the Soviets at each other's throats and an ever-growing threat of nuclear annihilation, it was difficult to ignore the toll it was taking on everyone.

Through her sunglasses, Laurien could see civilians rushing tirelessly from store to store; buying every non-perishable canned food they could get their hands on, others were arguing profusely about something as frivolous as a parking spot, and headlines on newspapers everywhere reminding them of a sure demise.

President Kennedy's face was warped on the paper in the hand of the newsboy to her right, as he shouted out for all to hear of what they already knew. Laurien knew next to nothing about the man before she left London for America, but after only a few months in the city, she was quite overwhelmed by her new knowledge of all things American.

It was admittedly very exciting to immerse oneself in completely new surroundings, but the reason why she was there put a damper on everything she did. The streets gave off an aura of hostility and danger, and everyone who passed seemed a threat in her eyes. It had been a depressing first few months in her new home, today had been the first time in a while where she felt her heavy load lifting a bit.

The bakery bread reminded Laurien of home. On fall mornings when she was little, she constantly woke up to the sweet smell of fresh Ontbijtkoek drifting from downstairs where her mother was preparing breakfast. The memory was bittersweet, but Laurien held on to it, grateful for the distraction.

She continued along the road, taking a right or a left every now and then. Soon a small colorful building was in sight and, upon closer observation, Laurien was pleased to behold a cheerful looking bicycle shop. The whole front of the establishment was painted bright red with sunshine yellow trimming on the edges, and in the window was a shiny blue bike with black and white striped wheels. It was quite the contrast from the rest of the shops on the street, of whom were all painted a terrifyingly dull shade of grey.

Laurien could feel her eyes changing their pigmentation as her mood picked up. When she lifted the sunglasses off of her face, she could make out the unmistakable golden glint as she found her reflection in the shop window. She managed a small smile before she lowered them back down. It soon disappeared when she looked at the rest of herself; her face had grown gaunt and thin over the last couple of months, and it was quite evident now. Laurien's supplies had been dwindling for a while from the unexpected move to New York. She meant to restock, but with a lack of money and the severe lack of groceries in stores because of all the unrest of the nuclear threat, she was reduced to a can of beans, a slice of bread and an apple a day. Even with her unfulfilling job as a secretary at a legal office in the Upper East Side, it was just barely enough to pay for the small apartment she'd mercifully managed to attain under asking price.

She wasn't complaining though, she had been four at the bloody height of the Second World War, where food was abysmally scant and people were dying in the streets of hunger. Her family counted themselves lucky that they'd owned a hen to supply them and their neighbors with eggs along with their meager rations. Laurien still, for the life of her, couldn't eat scrambled eggs since the end of the war.

As she looked closer in the window of the shop, behind the blue bicycle, she could see the storeowner lowering a bright red tricycle down from the shelf to rest in front of a small rosy-cheeked boy and his ever-fretful mother. The boy's eyes shone at the sight of the bike, which dwarfed him in size, as the corners of his small red mouth slowly lifted into a smile that would make any mother's heart melt. Laurien smiled inwardly, the boy reminded her of her brother, Bastijn, and the mischievous way he grinned, meaning that trouble was to come.

After paying, the mother and the raven-haired boy wheeled the tricycle out the door when the mother accidentally dropped her bag on the ground. Lipstick, pocketbook, mints and other paraphernalia spilled out onto the sidewalk in a dispersed mess as the woman quickly knelt down to try and minimize the damage. A small movement near Laurien's foot drew her attention down to the Revlon lipstick case that had rolled away from the woman.

Laurien swiftly picked it off the ground and headed towards the woman who had managed to retrieve the majority of her belongings. She was about to hand it to the lady when she realized that the small boy wasn't with her anymore. Laurien quickly glanced around and soon spotted the child pushing his bike out onto the street, blissfully unaware of the car speeding towards him.

Seeing her vision flash bright blue with alarm, a cry ripped itself from Laurien's lips as boy entered the direct path of the speedster. She lurched forwards, desperately trying to reach him in time, but as the mother behind her shrieked in horror as the car was nearing the child; she knew what she had to do.

It all seemed to happen in a second; Laurien raised her hand and stretched it out towards the car. The front bumper stopped abruptly before it could hit the boy on the tricycle as if it had hit an invisible wall and flipped forwards into the air. It narrowly missed the boy as it became airborne and cart wheeled violently to the ground on the other side of him, reminding Laurien of a pinwheel during a hurricane as it barreled towards the bicycle shop and, consequentially, Laurien and the mother.

In the split second she had before impact, she pushed the mother out of harm's way with her powers whilst bracing herself for the imminent impact, when instead; something around her middle suddenly jerked her violently to the side.

She was propelled several feet before she crashed to the ground, hitting her head hard on the pavement as she tumbled. Her sunglasses clattered to the side as Laurien rolled until an outdoor patio table from the café next door finally stopped her. The contents fell in a scattered pattern on the ground as the table tipped over and fell with a clang. It took her a few moments of lying crumpled on the concrete with her ears ringing before Laurien tried to lift up her bruised body. But as she got up, a screaming pain in her left shoulder caused her to intake sharply as she came to the conclusion that it was most likely dislocated.

Knowing that she didn't have that much time before someone came over to ask her if she was alright, Laurien gritted her teeth and used her power to grip her arm and set it back into place. She cried out quietly but retrieved her composure quickly as she took in her surroundings. She blinked numbly, as everything around her seemed to be continuing in slow motion.

People were running towards the smoking car that had lodged itself in the shattered glass of the bicycle shop that had only a second ago been behind her. Her mind raced at how she had not been hit, the fact that no one but the woman had been beside her perplexed her, even more since she had been using her power to push the woman out of the way in the first place.

She looked around and breathed a sigh of relief to see that the lady was already gathering her boy into her arms with nothing more than a scratch or two from her falling over. Laurien returned her gaze to the bicycle shop in dismay, it was terribly wrecked and the storeowner was literally on the verge of pulling his own hair out in distress at the sight.

Horrible guilt threatened to overwhelm Laurien's conscience. Her sloppy meddling had cause this carnage. She could have simply lifted the child out of the way and completely avoided the destruction, but it was painfully known to Laurien that she didn't think well in split second situations.

Silently cursing herself for her carelessness and stupidity, she was suddenly painfully aware of something smarting from the back of her head and lifted her hand up to feel it. The skin was extremely tender and hot as it sent stars dancing in front of her eyes when she touched it, and when she brought her hand back, her thin fingers were smeared with her own blood.

Suddenly, the hairs on the back of her neck rose at the sensation of someone watching her. Glancing up, she was dismayed to see her suspicions confirmed as two men were looking attentively at her from across the crowded street.

Between the two of them, the one on the right looked the least threatening, and had an almost, she admitted, pleasant air about him as she made direct eye contact with the man. She studied him closely, noting the way he raised his hand to his temple slowly, as if she were an easily spooked animal.

Without warning, her mind was invaded with quick cuts of pictures that vaguely resembled recent memories, the crash, the boy, the shop, and the newspaper with JFK. They quickly shifted to flashes of further past, as if she was reviewing her life in reverse. Sooner than she would have preferred, they reached the painful memories that she would rather have left alone to fade away; London, Bastijn, Roosje, Daan, her parents, the war….

As quickly as they had come, they disappeared to reveal the street once again and the two men, the one on the right now with tears running freely from his eyes as the other looked on with cautious concern. Laurien could feel tears of her own rising in her red eyes, but she angrily rubbed them away with her sleeve as she started to slowly back away, blatantly ignoring the shrieking pain throbbing through her body with each step.

She glared at the men as she retreated, hating them for the sole reason of her not understanding what had just happened. What had he done? Had he been responsible for the unauthorized trip through her memories? He must have, for there was no way in her right mind that Laurien could or even would voluntarily relive those times.

Her retreat was abruptly interrupted by a small scraping noise to her right, where she saw the woman's Revlon lipstick case spinning round and round in obsessive tiny circles of its own accord on the concrete. It would have been a normal occurrence for Laurien as her powers had been with her as long as she could remember, but the fact that she wasn't the one controlling it sent a jolt of shock through her body.

Feeling panic start to rise in her chest, Laurien quickly glanced up at the men and saw the taller man raise an eyebrow at her in acknowledgement and his eyes flicker towards the lipstick as it swiftly and unexpectedly jumped into her hand.

She stared unseeingly at it for a moment, but it soon came into focus. A compact case with a shiny exterior, not a scratch on it, must have been a recent purchase. Laurien popped the cap and twisted it to reveal the dark red shade, not unlike the color of the blood on her fingers.

In her rapidly fogging state, she came to the realization that it must have been him who yanked her away from the crash. At this, her head throbbed terribly, threatening to rid her of her consciousness at a moment's notice as she attained that she could not deal with all of this right at that time. She desperately wanted to go home, not her foreign shack of an apartment, but the one in Alkmaar, her real home.

Coming to her decision and genuinely wanting nothing to do with any of this overload of confusion, she hurriedly pocketed the case and grabbed her cracked sunglasses from where they were thrown. She placed them precariously back on her face, and with one last look at the two of them, she turned away and fled from the scene.

So that was the first chapter of Remembrance, hope you all liked it! Please review!