i'll sit here in the ŠįľęŋčĘ

love only left me alone

but i'm at one with the silence

Xander was raised like a soldier, ever since he can remember. His birth family died when he was three, so he'd already passed Logan's general rule of starting training as soon as his kids could walk, so when Logan and Evi had taken him in, Logan had worked Xander hard to try catch him up to his surrogate siblings. However, it had become apparently pretty fast that Xander would never be on the same level as Ailis and Noah, because Xander didn't have the head or the heart for it that Logan's kids naturally had. So Xander had never really gone on a first mission, not like his surrogate siblings. Logan had still trained him, one on one, with fighting and everything else but Xander had just always felt like a disappointment. Because he had to be sheltered and kept safe, because he wasn't good enough to go out like his cousins.

They were all trained to think that emotions were bad, that they needed to be buried. If it hadn't been for Evi and Ailis, Xander probably would have turned out pretty emotionally retarded like Logan. Having Noah helped of course too, but he wasn't as in touch with his emotions as his adopted mother and sister. And Logan was the only father he'd ever known, he'd wanted desperately for his approval. To feel like he belonged, because growing up knowing full well that he didn't belong in Logan's family hadn't always been easy. Especially whenever he was left behind with Evi where it was safe, because Logan didn't trust that he wouldn't have to worry about Xander. He'd been told repeatedly growing up that he was too much like his biological father, and while Xander knew that Logan had loved Seth and his family, Xander always felt like it was a bad thing. He wanted to be more like Logan, the father figure he actually had, not like his biological family. One of the nicest things that Logan had ever tried to say to him was that he looked like his father, but Xander barely knew what his father even looked like, and it had just made him feel like he didn't belong even more.

Evi was better with him, as was Ailis. And around Noah he'd always felt he could be himself a little more. The rest of his family didn't ridicule him when he messed up, didn't tell him to shut up if he started making a quiet joke. They didn't really make him feel like he wasn't good enough, they tried to include him. Instead they wiped his tears away, hugged him, and they helped him to actually develop some social and emotional skills when they weren't being trained by Logan.

The one bad thing that Xander will ever say about Evi was that she did have a tendency to let Logan do what he wanted to the kids. Ailis stepped up for him and Noah a little more than Evi would, just because Evi knew that Logan was just trying to raise them to be strong. And that he really did love them, was just doing what he thought was best for them. So Xander had grown to never trust that he was safe just because Evi was also around, that he could be dragged up and into the middle of no where with no warning whatsoever. He still has vivid memories of waking up to Logan yanking him out of bed, just to thrust him through a portal and winding up in the middle of no where, Xander needing to make his way home. Which he always would, though he could never do it quite as fast as Ailis or Noah could. Another thing that was held over his head.

Another difference was that he didn't have the same powers that his cousins had. He wasn't a witch like them, he was similar in a way but his mother had been a faerie, and from her race he'd developed powers of telepathy, plus a fondness for nature and some control over plantlife. Spells that they learned that had required a blood sacrifice Xander hadn't been able to do, only able to draw power from the earth around him. Sometimes, when Logan had taken him out to train they'd gone somewhere decently far from the house, because if Xander was meant to do a spell that required a lot of energy, he would usually leave the area immediately around him, just five or 10 centimeters around him much worse for wear. And then Xander alwaays wanted to feel bad about that, and that would annoy Logan.

Because of all this, Xander grew up very quiet. He could take care of himself decently well, he'd had to, but he didn't like attention on him very much at all. He preferred to blend into the background, and often times Xander would do his absolute best to stay unnoticed if Logan was around, to not speak unless spoken to. Around the rest of his family Xander was a little more relaxed. He liked to throw in quiet jokes here and there. But he still didn't like much attention being on him, it would trigger some anxiety for him. And he still always felt different and he hated it.

Xander has always liked singing and playing the guitar, and he actually has a good voice. The only thing was while Evi was fine with it, Logan thought it was stupid that he liked to sing. It wasn't something strong, something that would keep him alive, so he was mocked for his enjoyment of it at a young age, to the point where Xander had decided to keep it a secret. Only his family would know about it, and now that he's in a new world, no one knew about it except for him. Growing up, even with the mocking, he'd never been completely able to ignore that part of himself. He liked to write music, to sing quietly to himself when he thought that no one was around. Or more accurately when Logan wasn't around. Evi had always been his biggest fan, had bought him his first guitar, had always told him that he had a good voice. But he wasn't good with attention, anyways, so it was just something that he liked to do on his own.

Another thing about his powers, his telepathy and his ability to copy powers was that he had been trained hard with them. Not his telepathy as much, just because Logan hated his mind being read, Xander had discovered purely by accident when he'd first gotten his powers, when he hadn't known what was going on. But he'd repeated some of the things he'd heard, and Logan had caught on pretty quickly as to what had been happening, and he'd been angry at him. Eventually Logan had calmed down, of course, but Evi and Ailis had both had to defend him. Though to Logan's credit, when he'd calmed he'd been decent about it. He hadn't shipped Xander off anywhere, had instead let Xander sleep in a little cabin on the property. Far enough from the house that he couldn't read anyone's thoughts but he could still come to the house for anything he needed, and he was still safe on the property. During that time anytime anyone came to check on him, or anytime he went to the house he'd practice blocking out thoughts. It took him a few days but eventually he'd developped a little more control over that power and had been allowed to return home, though he'd been warned very sternly that people's thoughts were private in Logan's house.

At the same time, he'd been trained hard on learning how to control it, and encouraged to use it against others when he could. It was one of the most useful tools he had, Logan would tell him, why not learn what people were thinking. Get a warning, if they were thinking bad things, and even if not, why not try to learn some of their secrets. Maybe it would come in handy to him, maybe he could sell the information he learned to the highest bidder. Evi, on the contrary, had encouraged him to have more faith in people than that. She'd told him that it wasn't bad to listen in a little, for his own safety, but that digging for information that he could use was wrong. For a long time, Xander had struggled with which of his parents to listen to, always wanting Logan's approval but adoring Evi. Eventually, Xander had figured out a way that he could listen in the background. He could hear what someone was thinking but it was like someone was talking at the other end of an empty hallway. He could hear most of the words being spoken, but he never really concentrated on them unless he heard something bad, or something dangerous. Every now and again he'd catch things that he didn't need to know, but for the most part this method worked for him, because it allowed people some privacy from him while also ensuring his safety.

As for his other power, Xander had very, very often been made to copy Logan, Ailis or Noah's power and learn how to use it. The use of fire wasn't natural to him at all. He had some control over it now, when he copied their power, but it had taken him a very, very long time to get anywhere near 'decent' with it, and he of course lacked the controlled with it that Ailis or Logan had. It had taken him double the time that it had taken her just to become relatively comfortable bursting into flames, and he still didn't like it. Nor should he, because he was half faerie and fire was unnatural to him and there was a desire to panic every time his arms caught fire, always terrified that he would be burned alive. With Noah's power he still had only the barest of control over it when he copied it, always finding the wind hard for him to control.

With the group he grew up in, it wasn't that uncommon for Gunner and Logan to pit their kids against each other, to help train them and, he was sure, for their entertainment. Because of that he gained experience on how to pick and choose what ability to copy when it came to things like dragons, that had quite a few powers he could opt to take, though only limited to one at a time. But he lost a lot of the battles he was sent into, so Logan didn't call on him often.

Xander is very organized. He grew up with how meticulous Logan was, and he inherited that. In his home or his space, everything had it's place and he was careful to keep it that way or it would start to bug him for some reason and he'd feel obligated to go fix it.

Xander doesn't like surprises, especially if he knows one is coming. He gets anxious about things like that, because quite often in his childhood, if he was surprised by something it was often to get left somewhere and told to find his own way home.

When Xander was ten, he'd been wandering alone in the woods and had come across an old faerie, one who immediately had taken a strong disliking to Xander because he was a halfling. Stuck in the old ways, he'd been later told. The two had fought, and honestly Xander might have won and knocked the faerie out – his goal – if the faerie hadn't teleported behind him and stabbed him in the side, leaving the knife in place. The faerie had left then, leaving him on his own. It had hurt like a bitch but he'd immediately made a make shift tournequet from his shirt and tied it right above the injury and had made his way home while pressing the rest of the shirt around the knife. Evi had stitched him back up for him with nothing but alcohol for the pain. During that time Logan had left for a while and after Xander had rested a few hours Logan had taken him out to where he'd locked the faerie up. Logan had made him copy his fire and then burn the faerie alive and watch. That was the first time that Xander had ever killed anyone, and the first time he'd discovered he had a little switch in his mind that he could mentally flip to just...numb himself. Because otherwise taking a life like that might have broken him, it was so against his very nature. But with the flip of this switch he'd been able to him to light the fae up and watch the whole time. It just made him not care, and it made it easy to do what needed to be done. He'd watched it all without protest, without flinching as the fae had screamed horribly and later, heading back, he'd had the feeling Logan was actually proud of him. For one of the first times ever. Xander had killed a few more people in his life since then, but it was always because Logan told him to, and he could only do it after flipping that switch first anyways.

Sometimes, after flipping that switch, it isn't always been easy to bring himself out of it. It's so much easier to feel nothing at all. He's sure that even left on his own that the feeling would probably go away on it's own after a few hours,but Evi or Ailis had always been able to bring him out of it pretty fast. Noah wasn't so good with his words or his emotions either, so if he found Xander first, he'd usually bring him to their mother and let her deal with it, and that had worked well enough.

Xander isn't picky. Food is food, and he will eat what he can, when he can, because he knows what it's like to have to survive in the wilderness for a time. Usually not longer than a few days, but that was still enough. He'd learned how to fish and hunt for those very reasons, and he was good at both. He liked doing both. There was something very satisfying about catching your own food, and knowing that you could survive on your own if you had to.

Logan never showed his emotions, had never hugged Xander or his siblings, never told them he loved them. But they'd all just known. Logan had tracked down the fae that had hurt Xander and given Xander the chance to kill him, after all. He wasn't sure he'd appreciated it much at the time, but he knows now that Logan likely really did think that he was helping. That allowing Xander to get his own revenge would make him stronger. Who knows, maybe it had. It had allowed him to find that mental switch in his mind, anyways.

He genuinely does like talking to people, he just thinks that he's bad at it because he's awkward. But he likes jokes. He doesn't make them as often as he'd like himself, but he appreciates jokes. Even ones that maybe he doesn't find funny, he still appreciates when people try to either lighten the mood or make him laugh. He likes when the mood is light, easy, it's what helps him feel more comfortable. So Xander is quick to smile or laugh quietly at jokes, maybe make quiet ones himself.

Naturally very tuned into the details of his environment. Logan had taught him to be observant, to note the exits and ways to get to them quickly whenever he entered a room. Now it was just second nature, it barely even registered that he was doing it, he just did, and then had that information stored away for if he needed it.

Xander works well on his own, but even with his desire to not be around others so much, he still prefers working in teams. It took some of the pressure off him, when someone else was there working with him and they could help each other out. This only works if he knows who he's working with, though, otherwise he would absolutely prefer to work alone. He trusts easier than he'd like and he hates it.

He tends to mind his own business a lot, ignoring shady things that he sees going on unless he has a reason to intervene, such as knowing someone there.

In terms of his future, even ignoring the fact that he's been transported to another world, he's never known what he wanted to do as a job. He knew he didn't want to be a hunter, or anything that required he fight for his own life. He was tired of that, so tired of fighting. Of feeling iandequate when fighting. If he hadn't been raised the way he had been, he'd be a far more gentle person, he was nearly sure. As it was, he was proud of his ability to fight at all, but that didn't mean that he liked doing it. In another world, if he'd been raised with his biological family, he'd probably be working at the circus with his mother right about now.

He was skilled and proficient with how to use most weapons or tools, and he knew how to care for himself if he took a nasty hit. He knew first aid, knew how to stitch himself up. That Evi had taught him, she had always been their care taker when they'd been hurt. Hell, for Xander's fourteenth birthday Logan had shot him in the shoulder and had made him dig the bullet out of himself and stitch himself up. He'd thought it would be useful, to know the pain of being shot. So that if it happened again, pain would never be something that made them freeze up. He and pain were good friends, at this point.

He's never been told he was a burden or anythng like that, but he knew he wasn't as skilled as Ailis or Noah, and he often feared that he was a disappointment. That Logan would have been much happier without having to raise him. But he'd always been close to Evi, always having to stay home with her, and she'd always made him feel alright.

Xander isn't lazy. It was hard to be that way, with someone like Logan as a father figure. Because of that, Xander quite liked to do things with his hands. To build things, or to make music, whatever it was. But he wasn't one to decide not to do something because he was lazy. However, one big fault that he has is that he's indecisive some times.

Xander is severely claustrophobic. He's not really sure how it had happened, but he can remember feeling trapped and terrified, unable to get out of something, but he's blocked some things out without really knowing it. He just knows that he doesn't do well when he's trapped, and a panic attack is a very real possibility in circumstances like that.