Institute app
Sep. 9th, 2012 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
comparative_insanityPLAYER: Emi
ARE YOU AT LEAST 14 YEARS OLD?: Yup!
IF UNDER 18 YEARS OLD, PLEASE STATE YOUR AGE: Over 18.
CONTACT: sweetjerry (Plurk) and alienGirlscout (AIM)
PERSONAL JOURNAL: sweetjerry
CHARACTERS PLAYED: None.
CHARACTER INFORMATION
NAME: Fai Flourite (I skipped the initial ”D” in his name, since it's a title that only makes sense in the TRC canon. Although I guess his middle name could be Didric or something ^^)
CANON: Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle/Horitsuba Gakuen (Horitsuba has an alternate universe version of him, and I am using both to base his personality of, since this version of him hasn't suffered nearly as much trauma as he has in TRC)
CANON REFERENCE: TRC reference | Horitsuba reference [Note that TRC Fai was originally named Yuui and then switched his name to Fai after his dead twin. However, Horitsuba Fai seems to be named Fai from the beginning, and his twin (the original Fai in TRC) is called Yuui. This is extremely confusing, but regrettably one of these weird canon facts. I have chosen to use the Horitsuba name/the name he is called through almost all of TRC, mostly because I am apping him together with a Horitsuba Yuui.]
AGE: 17
GENDER: Physically male. While no indication is given that he sees himself as mentally femaly, in Horitsuba he seems rather fond of crossdressing, and is also seen in women's clothing at least once in Tsubasa.
YEAR IN SCHOOL/FACULTY POSITION: HS-3 (He was held back his second year due to his problems focusing in some classes and repeatedly failing at more social sciences oriented subjects, and also gym because he has a tendency of acting out and not taking his assigned activities seriously)
APPEARANCE:
Since he's 17 he looks somewhat younger, and when he uses his power more intensely his eyes turn a rich gold (Like this minus the eye patch and long hair >_>). Otherwise his physique is gangly, all elbows and knees, and he's slim bordering on downright skinny. He usually dresses in very tight pants and shirts which more often than not show off his midriff, even if he's also got a penchant for slightly old-fashioned clothes, such as suit pants, crisp shirts, bowties, and assorted hats. He will occasionally turn up at school in girl's clothes like it ain't no thing, especially on special occasions.
He is identical to his twin save for a few things. His hair is shorter, ending just below his ears, and they dress differently. He has a scar on his left leg from breaking it while climbing when he was ten. Fai wears his nails long and often paints them, while Yuui has to keep them short since he plays the piano.
PERSONALITY: Fai is exuberant, chatty, smart-mouthed and very seldom serious about things, and he has a fondness for flamboyance and exaggerated drama. He's the kind of person that you notice, and he often tries to be at the center of everyone's attention, either by keeping people engaged in conversation or by pulling stunts to get noticed. Part of the reason for his fondness of dressing in girl clothes is the attention it gives him – the other part is that he simply thinks girl clothes are way prettier than guy clothes, and he feels very comfortable in them.
As a friend he can be trying, often teasing and needling the people around them to try to get a reaction, making fun of traits he finds funny, playing pranks and trying to see just how far he can push the people closest to him. This is never done in a mean-spirited way, but is simply his way of dealing with the fact that he's not very good at getting close to people, and the closer someone is the more the thought of losing them will intimidate him. He has a bit of a problem understanding when enough is enough, when a joke has been carried too far, and so instead of waiting for people he cares about to leave him, he sometimes drives them away on his own accord.
His innate insecurity will mean that most of the time he will put on a show rather than expose how he really feels. It's easier to smile and tease than to be open about his feelings and perhaps end up in disagreement with a potential friend. Thus he very rarely states his actual opinions on things, choosing instead to make a joke of things if he can, or to change the subject if things get too serious. He also has rather low self-confidence when it comes to certain things, seeing himself as a burden to everyone that cares about him, and as someone who will inevitably make life difficult for his friends. The worry of his friends when he pulls a stupid stunt or pushes people a bit too far only helps enforce this self-image as being too much trouble to be truly worth the effort, and it always confuses him when people stick around and won't give up.
He very rarely shows if he's angry and upset with someone, choosing instead to put up a pleasant and evasive front for as long as possible. If someone actually manages to make him so upset that this kind of behaviour isn't possible, he will most likely make passive-aggressive war on them and try to make their existence as unpleasant as possible, while still not showing any overt signs of anger. At the point where he actually loses his temper and snaps, he will more or less go ballistic at the offending party and very few people apart from his twin will be able to calm him down.
From time to time, Fai will do things that are simply just weird, and he can act very childishly, playing pranks on the people around him and being amused by the silliest things. Sometimes his behaviour and his habit of being way too tactile can make people uncomfortable, and he seems to have a hard time grasping which kind of behaviour is okay, and what is not. However, Fai is very clever, and while his interpersonal skills are somewhat questionable, he at the same time has a great insight in how people work, and often astounds people with how much he can pick up from the smallest things. It's very hard to tell when he's just acting out for the fun of it, and when he's actively pushing a person to see how they will react.
He has a habit of being outright flirtatious with everyone he's in contact with, regardless of their own interest, and it's not easy to distinguish when he's actually interested from when he's flirting for the sake of flirting, or when he does it because making other people uncomfortable/flustered is fun.
If you actually manage to work your way through his defenses and put up with his teasing and pranks, he's a fanatically devoted friend and an unquestioning ally in everything you do. When it comes to helping a friend, he has little to no conscience, and will happily lie, steal or cheat if it thinks it is needed. However, most of the time he will if at all possible try to help people help themselves, as he believes his own involvement in things is more likely to be damaging than helpful. He looks up to his close friends – and especially his twin – with something that almost approaches hero-worship, and will go to the end of the earth and back again for them.
POWERS/ABILITIES: Since Fai's canon powers in Tsubasa are that he can do ”everything except for healing” and his magic is more or less on the level of that of a god, I felt that it was best to just ignore canon and instead work with something that makes sense with his personality.
So, Fai has a very particular kind of mind-bending powers that affect how people perceive him. He can make someone fear him, admire him, find him attractive, or find him so uninteresting that they completely forget he's in the same room, thus making him effectively invisible, and so on. The number of ways he can affect people are limitless. However, this power only pertains to how others see him, meaning he has no way of affecting how other people perceive each other. So he can't make a classmate hate their teacher, or cause two people to find each other attractive, or anything similar.
The number of people he can affect depends entirely on how much he's trying to alter their perception. For example, if he only wants to give people a vague positive impression of himself, he can influence a whole room full of people. But if he wants to affect powerful intimidation/attraction/so on, he can maybe control three or at most four people, and if it's as many as four then he can't do it for very long. The number of people he can affect goes up if he uses his powers while recording himself (say, for example, a video post – voice and text does nothing as the power is actually located in his eyes), but a recording will only hold a watered-down version of his powers.
Lastly, if someone already has a very strong impression of him as a person, or know him very well, it gets harder for him to control them. For example, he could never force his own twin to be uninterested in him or to hate him. If someone dislikes him strongly, it would be hard for him to make them like him/be attracted to him, and so on, but it will be easier to make them dislike him even more/make them feel intimidated by him/make them uninterested in him. Of course, since the power is in his eyes, a blind person will be completely unaffected. Shutting your eyes works too, but not if he already has started influencing you - and it only takes a brief glance for him to get you under his sway when he's using his powers.
As he grows more apt at using his abilities, he'll eventually be able to extend his influence, meaning affecting bigger groups than four strongly - and simpler impressions will be easier so to speak. The "don't see me" trick in particular is something he'll practice. But trying to affect a whole crowd will still dilute the effects, and so will affecting people via video.
With some training, he'll also start developing a kind-of secondary power, which will be to more literally affect how people see him. Meaning he'll be able to put up a sort of glamour to change people's perception of what he looks, sounds and acts like. This would effectively enable him to pretend to be a specific person, or simply not himself.
However, he would not be able to do this without trouble to more than maybe three or four persons, and it will still be limited to people who have actually lain eyes on him - starting to talk to someone before they have looked at him once would be a bad idea, since he'd still sound like himself to them. A blind person would be completely unaffected. And it won't change how he actually looks, meaning people with high mental resistance can block it out and won't be fooled. He will still be able to do it via video, but there will be "flaws" in the glamour then which will tip people off to that what they see is an illusion.
AU HISTORY: Fai has always been a bit of a ”problem child”, having problems paying attention to things he finds uninteresting and adhering to rules. In any group he was always the kid that made the most noise, and he would be all over the place if given half a chance, never staying still for long and endlessly making up stunts to scare the living daylight out of his minders – most particularly climbing on all manner of things without much regard to self-preservation. Even at an early age he had a habit for ”telling tales” and lying about things to get attention/recognition. At age eight, a teacher contacted his parents and suggested they'd make a proper evaluation of him, and he was diagnosed with ADHD.
Thus, even long before developing mutant powers, there has been a certain tension between him and his parents. He didn't act like other kids, and his frequent problems at school and in relation with other kids made them feel inadequate as parents, and they gradually came to resent him for it. They were doing everything right, so why didn't he get any better? The fact that his twin also was a lot calmer and more manageable resulted in them frequently comparing one to the other, and finding Fai lacking in every way.
His father suffers from Parkinson's disease, and his mother in particular has used this as an argument for why his behaviour is selfish and unkind. After all, doesn't his father have enough to worry about without him acting up and making trouble for everyone else, etc, etc. The illness – and especially the medication – also makes his father very tired during long periods of time, meaning his mother has to deal with such problems alone, and thus the evil circle spins on. They aren't bad people as such, but they are very ill equipped to deal with a child with special needs, and are far too prone to take out their own feelings of failure and helplessness on the cause, that is to say Fai.
When Yuui was sent off to Italy when they were both 14, Fai became reclusive and much more introvert for a long while, not dealing with the separation very well at all.Then he instead became obsessively driven to succeed in school so that he'd be able to follow his twin, somehow – the plan wasn't really very thought out, and when it naturally failed he felt inadequate and angry with himself for not being good enough.
It was around this time, when he was about 15 or so, and in conjunction with his relationship with his parents gradually worsening now that Yuui wasn't there to diffuse the situation, that Fai discovered his powers. At first, it started with unconscious manipulations of the people around him, trying to make himself more popular, trying to make teachers notice him less so he could do what he wanted. He slowly started to become aware that he could make people listen to him, that he could change how they looked at him and how they felt about him. And then one day, after too many comments from his parents on how he was always so much trouble, and couldn't me make an effort at least, and why couldn't he be more like his twin? ...well, Fai finally snapped and decided to make them taste a dose of their own medicine.
His parents, who already felt heavily inadequate and alienated from their own child, had this feeling intensified a hundred times over, until they were convinced that they were the worst parents any child could have and that they should more or less be ashamed of being alive. And there was Fai, his eyes eerily golden, smiling at them and asking how it felt. Was it nice, knowing you could never be perfect enough, never be smart enough, never be kind enough? That no matter what you did, you'd fail, until trying in itself was painful because you knew it didn't matter. Just trying would never be good enough.
It only lasted for a couple of minutes, and then Fai came to his senses, pulling back his influence over them in horror of what he'd done. But of course, by then it was far too late. The rift that already existed between him and his parents had grown to irreparable proportions, and now they didn't only feel like failed parents and as if they could never understand their son; now they also feared him. When they announced that he was going to be sent to the Xavier Institute, he was relieved more than anything.
Fai has kept in touch with his twin since he left, of course, and the family has visited in Italy a couple of times. But due to the way his powers were discovered and the guilt he still feels over the whole thing, he hasn't actually told Yuui about what kind of school he goes to, or that he's a mutant. Nor has he told anyone at the Xavier Institute about having a twin, opting instead to make up different stories that never match every time someone asks him if he has any siblings, or simply abruptly changing the subject. After a while people stopped asking, since he's far from the only one there with family issues.
Then when Yuui was found to have special powers too, Fai was guiltily relieved and happy that he wasn't alone, and pleased that Yuui was like him in this way at least. Seeing his own parents withdrawing from Yuui, and Yuui in turn resigning silently to this fact made him feel bad about his own reaction, but at the same time he's ecstatic to once more have his twin going to school with him.
SAMPLE
1ST PERSON SAMPLE: HERE (Tell me if anything else is needed)
THIRD PERSON SAMPLE: (This is supposed to be when he was sent to the Institute at age 15, meaning this is roughly two years ago. I hope that isn't a problem, since I think it still reflects his personality and introspective thoughts well enough.)
He stares down at his hands, chipped blue nail-polish looking like bruises in the stern light. He starts scraping at it, showering little glittering flakes into his lap, and his mother makes an impatient little noise. As her mouth tightens into a thin red line, little wrinkles appear around the corners, making her look older than she is. Her long flaxen hair is pulled up in an immaculate bun, not falling freely like it did when he was younger and both she and the world were a lot softer. Her eyes are warm hazel with small glints of yellowish green in the right light, and even those look harder, less like sun-warmed earth and more like gemstones.
He keeps chipping away at the nail-polish, though, and on his left his father moves sharply. Fai doesn't flinch, because he's good at telling when it's an involuntary shudder, the kind no medication in all the world can take away, and when his father is actually annoyed with him. A sideways look tells him he's right. His father hasn't even noticed what he's doing. He's staring at the clock on the opposite wall, and a grey tiredness around his eyes suggests that he wants to be somewhere else, anywhere else than waiting here under the steadfast marching of the clock towards an uncertain future. Well, he's not the only one.
The waiting room is surprisingly well-furnished. As a child of the upper middle classes he recognises understated wealth when he sees it. Apparently the Xavier Institute has a lot of money going into it. He doesn't know quite why that surprises him so much; after all, he's heard that a lot of groundbreaking research happens here, and that there are a lot of faceless benefactors connected to the place. Maybe it's simply that to him, this place is punishment, and well-deserved such. He hadn't expected his cage to be of the gilded sort, and he doesn't quite know how to feel about it.
Even more surprising is that when they finally call them in, they apparently want to talk to himalone for a while. Not with his father lingering like bad self-conscience in the background, nor with his mother turning slowly to stone every time he taps his foot or squirms in his seat. They want to hear about his power in his own words, about how he found out about it. They ask him if he can maybe demonstrate, and he does the invisibility trick. He finds himself babbling, prattling animatedly about what he thinks he can do and what he can't, and they take notes as if every word and exuberant gesture is important to them.
He dares to finally ask if they're going to put him in a special needs class, and they smile kindly and say that in this school, they take it as a given that all students have special needs of one kind or other. Some people might spontaneously teleport every time they get nervous, or put fire to the drapes if they lose their temper. ADHD is just another thing that they're prepared to help out with, and of course his schooling will be adapted as they get to know him better.
He manages to smile brightly and joke about something, he barely knows what, to not show how his world has suddenly been rearranged. And as he walks away from the office, his parents exchanging looks as if he can't notice it, he has realized something very important. The Xavier Institute isn't a cage, after all.
It is just possible – barely believable – that this might be his way of finally freeing himself.
ARE YOU AT LEAST 14 YEARS OLD?: Yup!
IF UNDER 18 YEARS OLD, PLEASE STATE YOUR AGE: Over 18.
CONTACT: sweetjerry (Plurk) and alienGirlscout (AIM)
PERSONAL JOURNAL: sweetjerry
CHARACTERS PLAYED: None.
CHARACTER INFORMATION
NAME: Fai Flourite (I skipped the initial ”D” in his name, since it's a title that only makes sense in the TRC canon. Although I guess his middle name could be Didric or something ^^)
CANON: Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle/Horitsuba Gakuen (Horitsuba has an alternate universe version of him, and I am using both to base his personality of, since this version of him hasn't suffered nearly as much trauma as he has in TRC)
CANON REFERENCE: TRC reference | Horitsuba reference [Note that TRC Fai was originally named Yuui and then switched his name to Fai after his dead twin. However, Horitsuba Fai seems to be named Fai from the beginning, and his twin (the original Fai in TRC) is called Yuui. This is extremely confusing, but regrettably one of these weird canon facts. I have chosen to use the Horitsuba name/the name he is called through almost all of TRC, mostly because I am apping him together with a Horitsuba Yuui.]
AGE: 17
GENDER: Physically male. While no indication is given that he sees himself as mentally femaly, in Horitsuba he seems rather fond of crossdressing, and is also seen in women's clothing at least once in Tsubasa.
YEAR IN SCHOOL/FACULTY POSITION: HS-3 (He was held back his second year due to his problems focusing in some classes and repeatedly failing at more social sciences oriented subjects, and also gym because he has a tendency of acting out and not taking his assigned activities seriously)
APPEARANCE:
Since he's 17 he looks somewhat younger, and when he uses his power more intensely his eyes turn a rich gold (Like this minus the eye patch and long hair >_>). Otherwise his physique is gangly, all elbows and knees, and he's slim bordering on downright skinny. He usually dresses in very tight pants and shirts which more often than not show off his midriff, even if he's also got a penchant for slightly old-fashioned clothes, such as suit pants, crisp shirts, bowties, and assorted hats. He will occasionally turn up at school in girl's clothes like it ain't no thing, especially on special occasions.
He is identical to his twin save for a few things. His hair is shorter, ending just below his ears, and they dress differently. He has a scar on his left leg from breaking it while climbing when he was ten. Fai wears his nails long and often paints them, while Yuui has to keep them short since he plays the piano.
PERSONALITY: Fai is exuberant, chatty, smart-mouthed and very seldom serious about things, and he has a fondness for flamboyance and exaggerated drama. He's the kind of person that you notice, and he often tries to be at the center of everyone's attention, either by keeping people engaged in conversation or by pulling stunts to get noticed. Part of the reason for his fondness of dressing in girl clothes is the attention it gives him – the other part is that he simply thinks girl clothes are way prettier than guy clothes, and he feels very comfortable in them.
As a friend he can be trying, often teasing and needling the people around them to try to get a reaction, making fun of traits he finds funny, playing pranks and trying to see just how far he can push the people closest to him. This is never done in a mean-spirited way, but is simply his way of dealing with the fact that he's not very good at getting close to people, and the closer someone is the more the thought of losing them will intimidate him. He has a bit of a problem understanding when enough is enough, when a joke has been carried too far, and so instead of waiting for people he cares about to leave him, he sometimes drives them away on his own accord.
His innate insecurity will mean that most of the time he will put on a show rather than expose how he really feels. It's easier to smile and tease than to be open about his feelings and perhaps end up in disagreement with a potential friend. Thus he very rarely states his actual opinions on things, choosing instead to make a joke of things if he can, or to change the subject if things get too serious. He also has rather low self-confidence when it comes to certain things, seeing himself as a burden to everyone that cares about him, and as someone who will inevitably make life difficult for his friends. The worry of his friends when he pulls a stupid stunt or pushes people a bit too far only helps enforce this self-image as being too much trouble to be truly worth the effort, and it always confuses him when people stick around and won't give up.
He very rarely shows if he's angry and upset with someone, choosing instead to put up a pleasant and evasive front for as long as possible. If someone actually manages to make him so upset that this kind of behaviour isn't possible, he will most likely make passive-aggressive war on them and try to make their existence as unpleasant as possible, while still not showing any overt signs of anger. At the point where he actually loses his temper and snaps, he will more or less go ballistic at the offending party and very few people apart from his twin will be able to calm him down.
From time to time, Fai will do things that are simply just weird, and he can act very childishly, playing pranks on the people around him and being amused by the silliest things. Sometimes his behaviour and his habit of being way too tactile can make people uncomfortable, and he seems to have a hard time grasping which kind of behaviour is okay, and what is not. However, Fai is very clever, and while his interpersonal skills are somewhat questionable, he at the same time has a great insight in how people work, and often astounds people with how much he can pick up from the smallest things. It's very hard to tell when he's just acting out for the fun of it, and when he's actively pushing a person to see how they will react.
He has a habit of being outright flirtatious with everyone he's in contact with, regardless of their own interest, and it's not easy to distinguish when he's actually interested from when he's flirting for the sake of flirting, or when he does it because making other people uncomfortable/flustered is fun.
If you actually manage to work your way through his defenses and put up with his teasing and pranks, he's a fanatically devoted friend and an unquestioning ally in everything you do. When it comes to helping a friend, he has little to no conscience, and will happily lie, steal or cheat if it thinks it is needed. However, most of the time he will if at all possible try to help people help themselves, as he believes his own involvement in things is more likely to be damaging than helpful. He looks up to his close friends – and especially his twin – with something that almost approaches hero-worship, and will go to the end of the earth and back again for them.
POWERS/ABILITIES: Since Fai's canon powers in Tsubasa are that he can do ”everything except for healing” and his magic is more or less on the level of that of a god, I felt that it was best to just ignore canon and instead work with something that makes sense with his personality.
So, Fai has a very particular kind of mind-bending powers that affect how people perceive him. He can make someone fear him, admire him, find him attractive, or find him so uninteresting that they completely forget he's in the same room, thus making him effectively invisible, and so on. The number of ways he can affect people are limitless. However, this power only pertains to how others see him, meaning he has no way of affecting how other people perceive each other. So he can't make a classmate hate their teacher, or cause two people to find each other attractive, or anything similar.
The number of people he can affect depends entirely on how much he's trying to alter their perception. For example, if he only wants to give people a vague positive impression of himself, he can influence a whole room full of people. But if he wants to affect powerful intimidation/attraction/so on, he can maybe control three or at most four people, and if it's as many as four then he can't do it for very long. The number of people he can affect goes up if he uses his powers while recording himself (say, for example, a video post – voice and text does nothing as the power is actually located in his eyes), but a recording will only hold a watered-down version of his powers.
Lastly, if someone already has a very strong impression of him as a person, or know him very well, it gets harder for him to control them. For example, he could never force his own twin to be uninterested in him or to hate him. If someone dislikes him strongly, it would be hard for him to make them like him/be attracted to him, and so on, but it will be easier to make them dislike him even more/make them feel intimidated by him/make them uninterested in him. Of course, since the power is in his eyes, a blind person will be completely unaffected. Shutting your eyes works too, but not if he already has started influencing you - and it only takes a brief glance for him to get you under his sway when he's using his powers.
As he grows more apt at using his abilities, he'll eventually be able to extend his influence, meaning affecting bigger groups than four strongly - and simpler impressions will be easier so to speak. The "don't see me" trick in particular is something he'll practice. But trying to affect a whole crowd will still dilute the effects, and so will affecting people via video.
With some training, he'll also start developing a kind-of secondary power, which will be to more literally affect how people see him. Meaning he'll be able to put up a sort of glamour to change people's perception of what he looks, sounds and acts like. This would effectively enable him to pretend to be a specific person, or simply not himself.
However, he would not be able to do this without trouble to more than maybe three or four persons, and it will still be limited to people who have actually lain eyes on him - starting to talk to someone before they have looked at him once would be a bad idea, since he'd still sound like himself to them. A blind person would be completely unaffected. And it won't change how he actually looks, meaning people with high mental resistance can block it out and won't be fooled. He will still be able to do it via video, but there will be "flaws" in the glamour then which will tip people off to that what they see is an illusion.
AU HISTORY: Fai has always been a bit of a ”problem child”, having problems paying attention to things he finds uninteresting and adhering to rules. In any group he was always the kid that made the most noise, and he would be all over the place if given half a chance, never staying still for long and endlessly making up stunts to scare the living daylight out of his minders – most particularly climbing on all manner of things without much regard to self-preservation. Even at an early age he had a habit for ”telling tales” and lying about things to get attention/recognition. At age eight, a teacher contacted his parents and suggested they'd make a proper evaluation of him, and he was diagnosed with ADHD.
Thus, even long before developing mutant powers, there has been a certain tension between him and his parents. He didn't act like other kids, and his frequent problems at school and in relation with other kids made them feel inadequate as parents, and they gradually came to resent him for it. They were doing everything right, so why didn't he get any better? The fact that his twin also was a lot calmer and more manageable resulted in them frequently comparing one to the other, and finding Fai lacking in every way.
His father suffers from Parkinson's disease, and his mother in particular has used this as an argument for why his behaviour is selfish and unkind. After all, doesn't his father have enough to worry about without him acting up and making trouble for everyone else, etc, etc. The illness – and especially the medication – also makes his father very tired during long periods of time, meaning his mother has to deal with such problems alone, and thus the evil circle spins on. They aren't bad people as such, but they are very ill equipped to deal with a child with special needs, and are far too prone to take out their own feelings of failure and helplessness on the cause, that is to say Fai.
When Yuui was sent off to Italy when they were both 14, Fai became reclusive and much more introvert for a long while, not dealing with the separation very well at all.Then he instead became obsessively driven to succeed in school so that he'd be able to follow his twin, somehow – the plan wasn't really very thought out, and when it naturally failed he felt inadequate and angry with himself for not being good enough.
It was around this time, when he was about 15 or so, and in conjunction with his relationship with his parents gradually worsening now that Yuui wasn't there to diffuse the situation, that Fai discovered his powers. At first, it started with unconscious manipulations of the people around him, trying to make himself more popular, trying to make teachers notice him less so he could do what he wanted. He slowly started to become aware that he could make people listen to him, that he could change how they looked at him and how they felt about him. And then one day, after too many comments from his parents on how he was always so much trouble, and couldn't me make an effort at least, and why couldn't he be more like his twin? ...well, Fai finally snapped and decided to make them taste a dose of their own medicine.
His parents, who already felt heavily inadequate and alienated from their own child, had this feeling intensified a hundred times over, until they were convinced that they were the worst parents any child could have and that they should more or less be ashamed of being alive. And there was Fai, his eyes eerily golden, smiling at them and asking how it felt. Was it nice, knowing you could never be perfect enough, never be smart enough, never be kind enough? That no matter what you did, you'd fail, until trying in itself was painful because you knew it didn't matter. Just trying would never be good enough.
It only lasted for a couple of minutes, and then Fai came to his senses, pulling back his influence over them in horror of what he'd done. But of course, by then it was far too late. The rift that already existed between him and his parents had grown to irreparable proportions, and now they didn't only feel like failed parents and as if they could never understand their son; now they also feared him. When they announced that he was going to be sent to the Xavier Institute, he was relieved more than anything.
Fai has kept in touch with his twin since he left, of course, and the family has visited in Italy a couple of times. But due to the way his powers were discovered and the guilt he still feels over the whole thing, he hasn't actually told Yuui about what kind of school he goes to, or that he's a mutant. Nor has he told anyone at the Xavier Institute about having a twin, opting instead to make up different stories that never match every time someone asks him if he has any siblings, or simply abruptly changing the subject. After a while people stopped asking, since he's far from the only one there with family issues.
Then when Yuui was found to have special powers too, Fai was guiltily relieved and happy that he wasn't alone, and pleased that Yuui was like him in this way at least. Seeing his own parents withdrawing from Yuui, and Yuui in turn resigning silently to this fact made him feel bad about his own reaction, but at the same time he's ecstatic to once more have his twin going to school with him.
SAMPLE
1ST PERSON SAMPLE: HERE (Tell me if anything else is needed)
THIRD PERSON SAMPLE: (This is supposed to be when he was sent to the Institute at age 15, meaning this is roughly two years ago. I hope that isn't a problem, since I think it still reflects his personality and introspective thoughts well enough.)
He stares down at his hands, chipped blue nail-polish looking like bruises in the stern light. He starts scraping at it, showering little glittering flakes into his lap, and his mother makes an impatient little noise. As her mouth tightens into a thin red line, little wrinkles appear around the corners, making her look older than she is. Her long flaxen hair is pulled up in an immaculate bun, not falling freely like it did when he was younger and both she and the world were a lot softer. Her eyes are warm hazel with small glints of yellowish green in the right light, and even those look harder, less like sun-warmed earth and more like gemstones.
He keeps chipping away at the nail-polish, though, and on his left his father moves sharply. Fai doesn't flinch, because he's good at telling when it's an involuntary shudder, the kind no medication in all the world can take away, and when his father is actually annoyed with him. A sideways look tells him he's right. His father hasn't even noticed what he's doing. He's staring at the clock on the opposite wall, and a grey tiredness around his eyes suggests that he wants to be somewhere else, anywhere else than waiting here under the steadfast marching of the clock towards an uncertain future. Well, he's not the only one.
The waiting room is surprisingly well-furnished. As a child of the upper middle classes he recognises understated wealth when he sees it. Apparently the Xavier Institute has a lot of money going into it. He doesn't know quite why that surprises him so much; after all, he's heard that a lot of groundbreaking research happens here, and that there are a lot of faceless benefactors connected to the place. Maybe it's simply that to him, this place is punishment, and well-deserved such. He hadn't expected his cage to be of the gilded sort, and he doesn't quite know how to feel about it.
Even more surprising is that when they finally call them in, they apparently want to talk to himalone for a while. Not with his father lingering like bad self-conscience in the background, nor with his mother turning slowly to stone every time he taps his foot or squirms in his seat. They want to hear about his power in his own words, about how he found out about it. They ask him if he can maybe demonstrate, and he does the invisibility trick. He finds himself babbling, prattling animatedly about what he thinks he can do and what he can't, and they take notes as if every word and exuberant gesture is important to them.
He dares to finally ask if they're going to put him in a special needs class, and they smile kindly and say that in this school, they take it as a given that all students have special needs of one kind or other. Some people might spontaneously teleport every time they get nervous, or put fire to the drapes if they lose their temper. ADHD is just another thing that they're prepared to help out with, and of course his schooling will be adapted as they get to know him better.
He manages to smile brightly and joke about something, he barely knows what, to not show how his world has suddenly been rearranged. And as he walks away from the office, his parents exchanging looks as if he can't notice it, he has realized something very important. The Xavier Institute isn't a cage, after all.
It is just possible – barely believable – that this might be his way of finally freeing himself.
