Thorn • Scott Summers

thank you.

If anyone is still here with this, hello.
It's been quite some time. A lot of things have happened since I last updated, let alone wrote this story. I remember sitting in an English class my last year of high school with the draft for chapter 32 open just trying to figure something out, whatever came next, anything. But nothing ever came, and I let it slip my mind, and then I graduated, and new ideas swarmed into my head that ultimately clouded this one. I'm going into my fourth year of college now, and truthfully it was the news of these supposed personal information leaks that brought me back to the app. It is astonishing to me that even in my absence, so many people still read and came back to this work. After rereading bits of this story I'm surprised and somewhat pleased to find that I don't hate it. I actually kind of like it, which is rare for anything I write. My writing now has definitely improved, as tends to happen with age, but reading this made me feel incredibly nostalgic for the beginnings of my real productivity. This is the first and only fanfiction I wrote extensively, completely. A crush on a character turned into something big and it makes my heart swell that, my God, so many of you read it and liked it. 320,000 reads. Three-hundred and twenty thousand reads. I cannot wrap my head around that. When I published this story all those years ago I couldn't even have imagined it would reach that amount of attention. I wish I could thank and hug each and everyone of you. Please know that I am genuinely grateful for all of you, and I hope I provided a bit of solace for some fellow daydreamers.
I've moved on from writing fanfiction, though I'll still give ao3 a visit every now and then if I really like a character or story from something I'm watching. Even when I was writing this I felt a little embarrassed about it, in the sense that I would only reveal it to the people I knew also wrote fanfiction. Now I'm 21, and can safely say that the broader population of the people my age and older see fanfiction as something silly, weird, nerdy, etc etc, whatever adjective they find suiting for their view. Thankfully, I never moved onto that jaded view, and I cannot find anything but gratitude for the genre. It gave my young brain a gateway into literary creativity, baby-stepped me into writing in a way that classes in school never did. I took stories from the screen and made them my own, and this one was the one that enveloped me the most. It made me realize that I love researching more than anything, even more than the actual act of writing, and was the pathway to forming my own style and language. I'm eternally grateful for it, and will always keep it in my heart.
Today, after I read the last chapter I had published and saw all the comments of people yearning for the next one, I wondered why I was so stuck on that blank page all those years ago. Because I thought more was better, because readers were asking for it, because I didn't want it to end. I think that subconsciously the reason why I never updated was because I knew the last chapter was the end. A happy, optimistic one. I'm an incredibly obsessive person- I attribute that trait as one of the reasons for why I write- and it's rare for me to think that something I wrote is done, and was done well. This was one of those rarities. I'm so happy it made so many of you happy. I tried to work on a few things after this, primarily that Peter Parker one I mentioned in the last chapter (who knows, maybe in the next quarantine I'll go on a writing spree and finish it for you guys), but as an adult now I don't think about anything else but my future. My future, I hope, is filmmaking, and though you'll never know who I really am, I maintain the optimism that those of you who read this story will one day watch a film of mine. I'm writing three screenplays right now- did I mention I was obsessive? I fixate on female protagonists, as I did three years ago with Florence. She was the start, say, the blueprint for the girls I write now. She made me realize how much I love exploring the human condition, the darker parts of it- anger, resentment, pain, vulnerability. She started my fixation on psychology, female rage, the theory of monstrous feminine, what we do for the ones we love, the ones that hurt us. The women and girls that I write about now are an evolution of Florence- she will forever live in me as all of my protagonists do. I hope you'll get to meet them one day.

Again, thank you so much. Your love for this story means more than I can put into words. I hope you're well and safe and happy. I apologize that I didn't write this for you sooner, but I hope you too can read the last chapter and realize there was no better ending for that beloved group of mutants. I have to admit with genuine sadness that I don't really watch superhero and comic book movies like I used to, and it's been a while since I've thought about these characters. But they impacted me a lot when I was younger, and I'm a big believer that youth doesn't leave you- it stays in you forever. Florence, Scott, Jean, Ororo, Peter, Kurt, Warren, Jubilee, Erik, and Xavier- They'll stay with us.

I leave you with this— the only thing I had written on this draft, left untouched for three years, but, I think, fitting words to end on:

"There's something different in all of us, and nothing-- not a spell, big gloves, nothing-- can change that or take it away. We're all still mutants."
-Jubilee