Disclaimer: All characters belong to Marvel Comics and are being used for non-profit entertainment only. This story belongs to me.

They cover the walk like a carpet of writhing splashes of bright color. Their wings beat uselessly like pieces of torn silk blowing in the wind. Black feelers switch back and forth in wonder and amazement as the wings continue to pump.

A thousand wounded butterflies doomed to die, sentenced to live out the rest of their hours on the concert, helpless and grounded. Destined to pay for some atrocity by forfeiting their freedom to the same harsh winds that tore their wings to bits.

I hold myself away from them, apart from their mournful gazes and all-encompassing struggle. I can not allow myself to be sucked into their dilemma, to feel for them, to recognize the ties that bind us. We are kindred souls, the butterflies and me, but I can't let them know that. It would kill them to know that.

No matter how hard I try I cannot look away from the bodies of the butterflies, their wings fluttering slightly, in pain, and their eyes, black and beady, skittering over the edges of the world, longing for green grass and trees instead of concert. I wrap my arms around myself, even though it is not cold, and let the wind twine its airy fingers through my purple hair.

I was butterfly once. I knew how to fly higher then the sun, how to soar over the mountains, cross great plateaus of flowers and wheat. My wings were cut, slashed to bits not by the wind but by a clawed hand. I fell; I dropped like a stone to crash into a sea, surrounded by high rocks and cliffs. I dreamed of a woman with six arms.

When I woke up from my second chrysalis, I found that I had been wrapped in the sleek feathers of a hawk, bird of prey. It didn't matter to me much, I got past it, and I survived, like I survived the loss of my eyes. I became stronger for it, pushed my body to its limit so that I could make up for the decreased telepathic ability that this body offered me.

I was unhappy. I was a wounded butterfly with broken wings trapped in a glass jar trying to get out and never dying. Never dying.

Those were the unhappy times for me. I cut myself off from everyone, afraid of how they would react if they knew that my mind was not truly my own. Did I even know that my mind wasn't mine?

It was a thought, a trembling fantasy dream because if my suspicions about being linked to another, body and soul, were true then no one could hold me to anything I did. I would be without substance, a dead twig hanging on the tree.

I was the hawk and one day the butterfly found me. She wore my flesh with an air I had never managed. She was confident and accepting of her situation. It frightened her to be dying in a body that was not her own, but she never really showed it. We played cat and mouse in an attempt to figure out who was more hawk and who more butterfly. We were evenly matched.

I started guarding my thoughts more, hiding them in the back of my mind where I knew a butterfly, however weak and broken, still lived, stretching its gossamer wings.

Then, she died. My former body died, purging me of her thoughts, her soul in the instant that she did.

One would have imagined that I'd be happy at such a turnabout. Poof. Bad dream over, I'm the butterfly again. But I wasn't. I wasn't a butterfly and I wasn't a hawk. I was...empty. So empty that I didn't know what to do, how to get through it.

There have been a few times in my life when I considered committing suicide.

One of those was when I lost my eyes. It's a terrible thing not to be able to see. The whole world just turns into this tableau and it's not black because you don't know black anymore, it's just not there. I had trouble dealing with it. I could look through the eyes of other people but it wasn't the same. They weren't my eyes.

I have always been terribly selfish with things that are mine. As a child, I hid my favorite toys away so that Jamie would leave them alone.

After the loss of my original body, the thoughts of suicide heightened. I'd sit in the bathroom, in a tub of lukewarm water, and look at the razor blades some of the men used to shave with. I'd think about slicing through the pale yellow flesh, watching the blood run out and into the water, turning it a pale pink color. Sometimes I'd reach for the razor, hold it in my hand, and watch the light glint off the blade, bright and shiny and clean.

Something always stopped me. To this day, I do not know if it was the butterfly or the hawk that stepped in to tear the razor from my grip and bring me back to my right mind.

I shake myself out of my reminiscences and watch the dying flashes of color that lay on the concert walk. One has yellow wings spotted with dark purple and its wings beat the hardest even though they are the most torn. It must die, surely it knows this, yet it keeps trying, and it wants to live.

I want to live. I want to be free and clean and fly again above the world, higher than the sun, soar on the currents of the wind.

And I find that I am at another one of those points in my life when I start questioning everything and the idea of ending it all trickles into my mind again. I can no longer fly. It is not because I do not have wings. My wings are stronger and more beautiful than ever but they are trapped, closed around the evil form of the Shadow King.

He's locked in my mind, kept in hand only because I am using the totality of my power to subdue him. If I even allow my wings to twitch in the slightest, he will get out and destroy the world. For the good of the world, I must keep him in check. I must stay on the ground. I can not fly.

My wings have been battered and beaten down, cut to shreds and ripped off my back. I have tasted blood and felt the cold metal of a sword in my hand. Once I held my truest love in my arms and watched him die. I couldn't save him.

The wind picks up, twirling my hair around in its hands like the hair stylists who used to put my hair up for magazine shoots. My newest love, the one who has given a part of his soul, a portion of his life to save me from the Crimson Dawn, to restore part of my shattered spirit, is on a mission somewhere and I hope he comes back to me alive.

I look back down at the carpet of flickering color and see that the wings of the butterflies have stilled. They are dead. A thousand dead butterflies. They look like scattered leaves. Tomorrow I will sweep them all away.

With a heart-heavy sigh, I unfold my arms and turn away from the flash of too bright color on the pavement. I have been trying to be a butterfly for too long. Maybe I should try something else on for size, something that isn't as fragile as a gossamer winged flash of color.