Notes: My life is being ruthlessly devoured by a canon-compliant Kitty/Xi'an story that keeps getting longer and angrier, and then terser and more depressing. I thought I'd write something faster (and happier) in the meantime, as an alternative to going back to therapy and admitting that I'm an idiot. I had a few ideas, and in the end it was either this, or a story about All-New X-Men #25 alternate universes. I flipped a coin, basically. Characters are Jessica Drew and Kitty Pryde, in Marvel Entertainment's Ultimate Comics setting. Other characters may show up, but it'll basically be limited to the cast of All-New Ultimates.

Deviance – The Ballad of Kitty and Jess
An "All-New Ultimates" 100 Themes vignette series
J.M. Andersen

Prompt 1 - "Firsts"

It was the Monday after the battle in Newark, the first time anyone had ever rung her condo over the intercom. She half-expected tax collectors.

"Hello?"

"Jessica? It's Katherine. Can I come upstairs?"

"I um, I don't know a Catherine."

"Yes, you do."

"Um, no?"

"Sound it out."

"...oh. Oh, right."

"Can I come up? Its raining."

"Yeah, yeah, of course. One sec."

"You do remember me, right?"

"Yeah. I remember you."

The first time they saw each other, they were both riding the 7, as the train was passing underneath the East River.

One of them had changed off the Seventh Avenue Local, two stops ago, from an afternoon audition at Lincoln Center. It was something the headmaster of her old school had promised to help her out with, a long time ago. When she had first arrived at his school, he had pulled some strings to get her a spot in weekly classes with a former principal dancer of the New York City Ballet. Even after their falling out, he had still kept his word and helped her this once again, now that Stevie had endorsed her readiness.

She was wearing loose jeans and a red hoodie over her audition clothes, her feet covered up by a pair of secondhand Doc Martens, and her ballet shoes and leg warmers tossed into her backpack along with her wallet and smart phone. She was sitting alone, even on a somewhat crowded train. Her phone was transmitting a low quality CD rip of an old Super Junky Monkey album into her wireless headset, while she waited for the end of the line.

The other one had just walked on, after riding the shuttle to Grand Central. She was running almost half-an-hour early for her shift at work, but had nothing else to do anyway, and there was no utility in acting like she was afraid of a place. Even if she was only living on the other side of the river, she had wanted to get out of Queens for the rest of her life, but only a few weeks later and she already had a full time job in Hunter's Point. She just had to make due with her unpleasant circumstances.

She was wearing a barista's uniform, absent the apron and hat, and had elected to stand with a loose grip on one of the subway poles. Even though her eyes weren't darting around, it was obvious that she was wary of the people around her. The other girl—and they both looked to be just a pair of normal teenagers—had looked up, alerted to how ill at ease she looked. She was the only thing worth looking at, because she was the only person in the car drawing attention to herself. Everyone else was just waiting, dead to the world, for their station and the opportunity to move on with their lives.

The brunette in the barista's uniform, on the other hand, looked at nerve's end. She was standing like she hadn't yet become accustomed to cramped rides with strangers. She probably looked like an out-of-towner, in a new job and anxious of all the sensationalist stories of horrible things that happen on New York trains. Except, she wasn't holding on to the safety bar like she was afraid of falling down, and most people new to the city tended to look at the map.

The brief moment of eye contact between them, brought about by a coincidence in schedules, and a momentary lapse of post-stress adjustment, could have gone down as their first and only. Just a single incidental meeting between two people on the outskirts of similar social circles. But then Electro decided that it was a perfect day to try and blow up a train.

Jessica had just buzzed her up to her sparsely furnished home, a third floor condo in a converted Chelsea, Manhattan row house, when she realized that she didn't even know what to say to her. They hadn't exactly left it on the best of terms. They hadn't really left it on any terms at all. She had just left the country abruptly, enlisted herself into the war, all without a word. She had basically left Johnny behind to die, and skipped out of town. Jessica didn't even know she was gone until uploads of her demands had started trending online.

She opened the door to the stairs, and a girl about her age and her height, with black eyes and short dark hair, strolled in after her without really saying hello. But that was Kitty for you. Jessica's one-time best friend: cute punk rocker from Flushing, and an anarchist revolutionary, jaded Star Wars fan, and shoot 'em up aficionado, who had been studying ballet and wushu since she was old enough to walk. When she walked into your home, it really was like you were hosting an alley cat—it was her building, not yours, and just hope you remembered to keep your food hidden away where tiny little paws couldn't reach.

Circumstances had meant that they'd only seen each other sporadically over the last two years, ever since Peter's funeral. They were about the same height now, so Kitty must have hit a late growth spurt sometime before she turned eighteen. She had expected a hat and sunglasses, the world renowned favorite disguise of famous and infamous people the world over (whether they be actors or uncharged war criminals), and to be fair, she was wearing a baseball cap. But if Kitty hadn't still been carrying around that same taped-up black backpack, with that stupid Spider-Man plushie sarcastically safety-pinned to the remaining side pocket, it might have taken her a while to recognize her.

The Dazzler band shirt and the mismatching jeans and denim jacket were common enough elements to Kitty's recent homeless period that they wouldn't have thrown her. Her skin looked a lot darker, but that wasn't shocking for someone who had led a military campaign in the desert, and she had seen her often enough in the news to expect it. Instead, it was the change in appearance since her last media appearance six days ago, that took her aback.

"Wow."

"Yep."

"They teach you that at X-Man training?"

"God yes. My cosplay got ten times better after the first month. I went to Liz Allen's Halloween party as Liz Allen."

"Of course you did." Don't even know what to say to that, Jessica thought. "I was kind of expecting you to keep your face covered in public."

"That's for people who secretly want to get noticed and recognized."

She was just wearing makeup, but it was a lot more makeup than usual, and what she had put on worked so well with her outfit and the face full of metal studs and rings that it was hard even notice what it was doing to tone down the shape of her face. The darker-than-usual lipstick and the dusting of extra gunk around her eyes just seemed like an accessory to the piercings and trashy band shirt, and not worth paying attention to. It made it harder to notice slight contouring color above her eyes, when your focus was immediately drawn to the silver rings running through her right eyebrow, or to the curved barbell on the other side. The same way with the two tiny rings in the side of her nose, and the the slight highlighting on each side that made it look wider and broader. She'd played around with darkening and contouring the hollow area of her cheeks, in conjunction with the way her hair fell near her jaw, to smooth out her face and make it look slightly oval.

"Pinstripes?" Jessica noted, as Kitty pulled off her Yankees ball cap and crumpled it, uncaring, into her jacket pocket. "That must kill you in a million ways."

"Ugh, I know, right? I needed the extra shadow for my forehead. Its all I could find. I felt more dirty walking through Midtown than I ever did when I was living in sewer tunnels."

She can almost see the flash of a metal bead on Kitty's tongue—and no, she definitely went all the way with that. She'd kind of wondered if the nose and eyebrow rings were just clipped on.

"I can't believe you just took off. You didn't even tell anyone you were still alive. Again."

"I couldn't think about anything but how bad I needed to pass out somewhere. Tony and Spider-Man saw me. I wasn't thinking about it, but didn't they say anything?"

"They knew you survived the fight, but then you just wandered off on your own. I mean, Stark injected you with bottled crazy, and then you didn't even stick around for a checkup. We didn't know you weren't in a hospital, or if you were in a morgue, or at the bottom of the bay. "

Speaking of drowning: Kitty's clothes and hair are wet, but the rest of her is not, which seemed to suggest mutant superpower antics were at work. So much for everyone being created equal, Jessica thought. She got icky little spray glands beneath her fingernails, which in practice meant lots of time spent picking bits of gunk out from underneath them, along with a desperate need for nail polish if she wanted to avoid grossing people out, and a perpetual fear of accidentally webbing her lunch. Kitty, on the other hand, got to be dry.

"So where have you been?"

"Devora's house," that being Kitty's mother, who she also didn't speak to for most of the last few years. "She said she was happy to see me... I don't know, it was getting too crowded on her lawn to stick around. You don't mind, right?"

"No, I don't mind. Don't get me wrong, it would have been nice for you to call in advance. But you wouldn't be you if you did."

"I could have just moved in without telling you. You never would have known, until you got your water bill."

"I think I would have noticed you sleeping on the couch."

"Not if I phased. I could sleep inside of the couch."

"How did you survive at boarding school, without having boundaries?"

"I did buzz your door. Unlike last time." Doors are boundaries.

"Last two times." Not to you, they're not.

The first time had been two days after the assassination of Scott Summers. Jessica had come home to find Kitty already passed out on her coffee table, extremities splayed over the edge, and her soul wholly given over to the majestic healing power of gravity. They'd been impromptu roommates for the better part of a week until Kitty had left to finish her business in Westchester with the other surviving remnants of the X-Men.

The second time, Kitty had been missing for a month after firebombing a news truck and publicly thrashing Peter, and both of their friends, on her mother's front lawn. Once again Jessica had just come home one day and found Kitty waiting for her, unannounced: this time in the kitchen, ostensibly cooking dinner as a half-baked apology for all the food she ate the last time she snuck in.

"So I'm learning." Okay, fair.

"That's true. First time for everything." Welcome home, I guess.

Kitty just beamed and dropped her backpack into the umbrella bucket.

Thanks.