His

She had spent most of her life attempting to continue the isolation without it being noticeable. Wendy had grown up in sterile environment, nothing but a –mostly- empty room with a few adults coming now and again to perform experiments.
That was the only life she had known till she ended puberty, and once freed she didn’t quite know how to handle any other kind of environment.

Certainly Wendy didn’t want to spend the rest of her existence locked up in an asylum, certainly she didn’t want to be subjected over and over to any kind of experiments and treatments the doctors chose to perform on her. She wanted the solitude, but not the utter and constant submission, the impossibility to make any decision at all.
Which would make her encounter with James all the more ironic.

Her parents, as many others, did care about their daughter. They were simply at wit’s ends. She was different, in a time where different was either wrong or deeply feared. They wanted a solution for her, they wanted nothing but to fix her. The remedies, though, can sometimes be worse than the illness. And in the case of Wendy Thomas, it most certainly was.

She had never been average. She would never be confused with an unremarkable, dull, mundane girl next door. From her looks to her blooming powers, she was different. Luscious red hair, as bright as an open flame; bright green eyes which seemed to bring people in –with cuteness as a child, with beauty as a young woman- almost as much as her smile would... the few times she had any good reason to flash one at anyone.

A pear shaped face; a straight and bulbous little nose and a full pair of rosey lips greeted her each morning when she looked in the mirror. Her skin was rather on the pale side, for Wendy wasn’t keen on sunbathing or using revealing clothes.
Her silhouette, at age 19, was lean yet feminine: Slightly rounded in a pleasing manner, with signs of her flare for athletics.


Wendy lived alone, in a small and unassuming apartment she managed to rent with the minimum wage job she had landed almost an year ago, when first arriving to New York. She had been living in the same place, serving the same tables every day in the same greasy dinner, and other than some customers ogling her, no one seemed to mind her any longer. At first her coworkers seemed to either wonder why a girl like her was wasting her time in a place like that, or attempting to get her to agree on going on a date. After months of either rejections or long pauses followed by silence, they decided she was probably there because, contrary to popular belief, a girl who looked like her could most definitely be just a loser.

Beauty, however, was just a side effect of her true potential. Wendy had been cursed –or blessed, for that matter- with a rare decease which altered her dna substantially from birth. At first doctors were concerned, and deeply so. She seemed to develop serious illnesses from thin air –sometimes even illnesses she shouldn’t have been able to develop at all-, and yet swiftly healed. The pain, the weeping and the fear remained, though.

Most of her childhood was spent in hospital rooms, isolated from the rest of the world, as increasingly fascinated doctors and scientists observed her. Soon those same doctors managed to get her parents to agree to experiments. For Wendy’s benefits, they claimed.
Her healing powers didn’t seem to be limited to herself. If presented with a rotting vegetable or a decaying flower, Wendy seemed able, under the right circumstances, to bring it back to its former glory. Not only it would once again be fresh, but it would be at its peak. As juicy as a vegetable could be or as colorful as a flower bloomed.

Wendy became somewhat of a lab rat, and though her parents were assured solutions were being researched to bring her daughter to some kind of normality, in reality, her abilities were being studied and expanded to its full limits.

A teenaged Wendy Thomas couldn’t remember a single day in her life where she had been free to simply run around a playground or try to sneak a few more minutes of storytime before bedtime. No. Time schedules and constant tests were the life she knew. At 8 am she’d get up, no matter if it was a weekday, weekend or a holiday. Christmas didn’t bring a single gift with it, and neither did her birthday. Oh, no, such luxuries weren’t permitted. Her parents were assured it was for the best. A strict lifestyle would only enhance her possibilities of being rehabilitated.

At age 18, though, it all changed. This wasn’t some secret organization or obscured department of the government, no. This was a legal -albeit always looking for the next loophole- institution, and as such they needed consent. Consent her parents had granted through the years.

When it came time for Wendy to decide, though, no amount of persuasion –not from her doctors, not from her parents, not even from a rather manipulative therapist- could manage to convince the young woman to sign the new consent sheet.
Her answer was no. No to the treatments, not to the schedules, not to even continuing communications with her parents. To her, mom and dad had never truly existed, though she was attempted to call for her many times during the painful nights.

For an entire year after leaving the only life she had known, Wendy didn’t hold any great ambitions nor dreams, other than keeping to herself, and enjoying a new kind of existence.

She wasn’t a pariah. She wasn’t antisocial, nor grumpy, and in fact most of her customers were pleased with her tranquil smile and polite manners. Yet she never agreed on going out with coworkers, she never turned a stranger into a friend, and she didn’t hold anyone dear to her heart. Just as she had intended.


Till that fateful night, anyways. Everything changed from there on.