Title: Solid
Summary: What could be is only the road often left behind without glancing left when walking right. [AU one-shot]
Warning: OC's, unwed motherhood, swearing, timeline well after Ascension.
Disclaimer: I only own the two OC's and really, I'd rather not.
-:-
Women keep a special corner of their hearts for sins they have never committed.
-Cornelia Otis Skinner.
She knew for a fact that running away the first chance she got from the home of Charles Xavier when the white plastic stick turned blue was the dumbest thing she could possibly have done. But she only realized that about three years after she was gone and was so far into her chosen path that turning around would lead her, probably, even deeper into the woods. Like Red Riding Hood going back to Grandmother's house after she decided to give birth to the Wolf's cubs… That didn't come out right, but her point went along those lines. And, technically, she did give birth to the Wolf's cubs, but it wasn't her fault—it was the fault of her mutation taking on an odd little turn that not even Xavier could have foreseen like the representative of the all-knowing he seemed to be when she was fifteen years old and had never even contemplated contraception when she wasn't dating.
Pills in little holders in the colors of light pink or blue, small enough to be a tick-tack. She thought that the only girl—or kind of girl—that took those sorts of medication was Tabby. It made her blush to even look at a condom when the teachers rounded up the students and made them pay attention to lectures on hormones and all the students usually flinched or laughed when the thirty year old gym teacher brought out a banana and opened up sealed plastic with liquid inside to keep sheep skin or the like clean and still comfortable to use.
She sold the house in Canada when the kids (they were not her true children in blood [no matter how much she wished they were] but she still loved them more than the air she breathed) turned fourteen and were bordering on fifteen. They loved the wilderness that was their backyard, but weren't too saddened since they had only lived there since they were ten and before that they had lived in Montana-Colorado-Alaska and had very few emotional ties to anyplace for any reason other than the landscape and the freedom to be who they were as long as they stayed in the woods and homes Kitty rented or bought and near each other in case they ran into trouble.
"Oh, my God… You're a ma? You're a, honest to Magneto and Xavier and Mystique, ma?"
Toad had gotten taller since the last she'd seen him, seventeen to her fifteen. Or, he would be taller if he stood straight and his back wired out into a stiff board that she hypothesized his spine couldn't allow for extended periods. He was more handsome, actually and she had to check herself from staring in what could be considered an impolite manner as she fiddled with the coded lock on his cage door; the fingers she was using too bulky and difficult to feel because the stolen form was a good foot taller and she was starting to notice that pain in her ribs that always started up when she was losing hold.
Quicksilver stayed quiet in his own sell, still a little out of it from the drugs that his system was trying to wipe out like it did when he could the flu for a couple hours; both feet tingling and unpleasant in his suit as if they should have had gangrene rather than a side effect. He did recognize the girl in the borrowed body, though. As far as he was aware, not a whole lot of other mutants had anything even similar to the abilities of Kitty Pryde.
"Yes. I am. Now are you going to follow me, or what, because this body is starting to resist and I don't want him sounding the alarm before I get the pass-code activated."
"Of course," Todd smiled, teeth not quite as crooked, but just as yellow as they had been when he picked pockets in the gym just out of sight of Principal (now Senator) Kelly, "But, go wit' you where, girl?"
Teeth that were not Kitty's, but teeth she could feel and almost taste, grit as she reeled in the intense feeling of synapses waking up again. The plastic of the numbers on the code panel would have seemed sleek if she weren't wearing the gloves that were so similar to the ones Nic had gotten her the previous year's Mothers Day; though not as tight and certainly not the same blue color as Kurt.
Kitty wasn't exactly sure how she had managed to hide from Xavier when she had been pregnant with two children that didn't even look remotely alike and certainly weren't related (absolutely, she was sure that Nicolai was most likely Logan's-Freddy's-Juggernaut's-Piotr's [they were all invulnerable in their own ways, she could never be completely sure] and [probably] Ororo's son because of his healing factor, strength and caramel skin with cloudy hair [more, really, like a combo of Dimity white and Glass Slipper blue that twined]; she wasn't so sure about Jesalin since she looked like both Mystique and Kurt, but more feline and with Rahne's Pagoda Red-Brown fur [her tail having no spade, but like a bottlebrush haired cat and still strong enough to hold her hanging upside down, fur along the rest of her just as thin as Kurt's as well] that Kitty made sure stayed sleek and healthy since the day both children were born in the hotel room she'd rented when she went into labor and carried her delivery tools in a backpack), but she had managed well enough so that she just sort of decided to go back to Bayville, even though she had managed—without error—to teach Nic and Jes how to control their powers.
She had a feeling she needed to go back because of the news on their tiny television in the living room (which her son and daughter were only allowed to see two hours a day with the promise that their homework [the school they went to was a dwarf compared to Bayville High, but Jes still needed her powers plus an inducer to attend]) that broadcasted a scene from Bayville after the registration act had fallen through and there had been a mention of Xavier's School accepting any new mutant children that would like help. An hour after that, the local station had alerted the public that new metal detectors would be installed in the school her children went to that would beep if an X-gene endowed child passed through the gate.
She had cried after dinner and woken up Nic (he'd been so shy, but direct as he had started to be when he'd hit his first true growth spurt as a mutant and accidentally broke a three hundred year old tree in half and sent it crashing to the ground with enough impact to sound like a thunder storm) so that he came in to her bedroom to ask what was wrong. Crying harder in front of her almost half-way to thirty son had lead to the teen hugging her for an hour and Jes coming in after that hour to run her four fingered (clipped claws) hands through the still very thick, but now very long hair of the woman that had accepted both children and loved them and told them bedtime stories that were true ("And even though he had only three fingers, blue fur and looked like an elf out of a fairy story, he was actually the sweetest prince from a faraway land that gained the love of simple, but loving mortal girl. His sister, as I recall, also gained the love of a prince of thieves from a land not so far away, but very different from a simple idea of what was considered right.") since the moment they came into the world.
She'd told them that they should be ready to pack up what was important the following morning, because they were taking the truck with the shell on the back and the two beds within (it was warm and got them around since they were seven whenever something went wrong and they had to get out of town before something horrible happened) and they were headed to that place she had told them about to shape their world view in the best way she felt she knew how. They had been shocked more than disappointed. They had been excited, even beyond those simple emotions after breakfast the next morning (Jes packing up all of her CDs and the photos of animals she'd imprinted on [zoo animals that were much easier to change into than human beings; a gift Kitty had made possible by sneaking her into the Los Angeles Zoo every night for a week straight to add to the amount of forms she catalogued away for emergencies only] that included polar bears, Amazon Forest toads, whooping cranes, snow owls, mountain goats, white lions and tigers and—her personal favorite—a matriarch elephant. Nic just grabbing his jeans, favorite shirts [he was difficult to shop for, seeing as his strength and altered abilities often left his clothing in tatters and shreds when training was over; but for just being himself he always wore the black and blue shirts with patterns and designs of badgers-hawks-doves-crows-fighting fish] and making sure Kitty didn't forget the horse pills she ate every day to keep from getting pregnant again [vitamin C tablets by the dozens, vials full of estrogen and such, blue pills that Kitty stocked up on every week]), barely registering that they were never going back again.
It was actually amazingly simple; getting captured by an anti-mutant group, forced into a little prison away from each other and then escaping with way more kids than they thought they would able to given that they rarely spent time with anyone but each other, but…they'd had nothing but the best training.
Jes had been lucky to be checked over like a weird new breed of squirrel and then get some of the guy's skin under the pads of her hand before she got tossed into a holding cell with two girls her age and a little younger; the man had been a high level drone, obviously, otherwise when she switched into his fat, balding form to brace her face against the lock thing in the door, the eyes she'd imprinted wouldn't have sent the door opening wide like a mouth. She was more than happy to give a little swagger in the jerk's form for the two girls in her cell to see (the older girl had introduced herself as Emma [a telepath of some kind, judging by the way she'd been holding her head that had a doozy of a bruise forming near the base of her bangs before it disappeared into the covering of her bright platinum hair; her eyes trying to focus on something that was not among the three of them as they wandered the halls and continued to let even more children—in twos and threes—from their cells] and the younger girl with the lightly blue skin and spotted eye had mumbled her name was Neena ["I'm lucky…most times."]) and then laugh at.
Nic—pacifist that didn't really like to fight that he was; running calloused hands through his long hair to settle his nerves and seeming to amuse the fish boy that had helped him up from landing on the solid concrete floor—had been even luckier when their captors thought his powers were limited to short bursts of strength that he feigned as being true so they wouldn't catch on. He'd kicked the door to his and everyone on his block's cell in with very little effort (really, if the wackos that took them thought steel, lead and some other mixed metals would do the job of holding certain mutants, he didn't see how they had made an operation like this work so long).
When the two teens met up with the others (no man left behind, they'd made sure that all the cells were empty) at an annex that led to a whole lot of tunnels that were easy to get lost in, they'd greeted with simple "Hey, Brownie-Mix" and "Hi there, Day Trader" and automatically assigned Nic to lead and Jes to follow behind the rest. A classic rule of the strongest checking for traps and the second in command making sure no stragglers got captured; just like their mother had taught them when out on training sessions in the mountains.
Big surprise (but not really) that the second they were one town over from Bayville and had stopped for gas and some hot food (Jesalin could not have been more happy to get out of the truck's front seat and stretch her tail away from being wrapped around her torso, inducer still on when she actually jumped out of the truck so she looked exactly like she would if she had not the brown fur and just peach skin and brown hair styled a little like Kitty when she was that age; Nic cracking all the bones he could in a wide stretch, white canines a sharp contrast to his dark skin) that some paramilitary FOH had been sweeping the area like the sore losers they were. Kitty had turned her back for a second to get up the nerve to call the Institute and the next thing she knew, the phone on its wire clattered against its booth because of Jes screaming and Nic trying his best to kick his foot through something that looked like a plane they were being hauled into by some men in camouflage gear.
Taking the truck and phasing through every single car while she was driving at over a hundred miles an hour had been a minor miracle when she had been hyperventilating the entire time and had to stop on the side of the road when one of the following planes of the one that had taken her kids had been shot down by a large black jet (not X-Men material; too bulky) and then the black jet had gone down as well.
It had been an even larger miracle when she'd crashed in on what had formerly been two of the Brotherhood being knocked around by larger men with mutant stunners Kitty had never seen in her practices in hacking to keep an eye out for things that could have been horribly adverse to Nic and Jes if they ever ran into the sort that could stop Nic's healing factor and strength that was more than Fred Dukes and Colossus combined, or could turn off Jesalin's ability to change into one of her alters (that could save her life four out of five times). They'd been dragged into the plane that had gone down and Kitty had been lucky to phase into the metal bird before it took off. She'd huddled into the cockpit and kept an eye on Toad and Quicksilver when they'd been tossed hurriedly into cages probably made of something near as strong as Adamantium.
"Hey… You're Nightcrawler, aren't you?"
"Uh, ja."
The tiny little teenage girl mutant hopped up and down, her wiry tail slapping the one she'd called her brother in the arm in the process. Her laughter was loud, but not unpleasant to Rogue as she stood to the side and helped the African descended but white, long haired teen boy lead the much younger and smaller mutant children down the tunnels the two X-Men had traversed only to run into young mutants that had been doing their jobs for them (getting the kids taken from Bayville High as well as the Xavier training grounds away from the cells they'd been put in and acting like they were altogether so it didn't freak the smaller ones out). Rogue smiled wide and the teen boy rolled his eyes when the girl hopped right next to Kurt and hugged him tight around the shoulders, gushing about being his biggest fan ever; also asking if he had a pen so he could please-please-please sign his name on her upper arm which she would never ever wash off, please.
Sometimes, Kitty counted herself lucky that she'd trained harder than anything to tone her power to her choosing after she left Xavier's. It left her exhausted every day before Nic and Jes got out of school and needed their own training, but it also, apparently, saved her own, Pietro and Todd's lives when they neared the location the kids were being held, the X-Jet in all its glory parked on the ground with a tree rammed through it that meant it positively could not take off. They hadn't expected heat seeking missiles to take flight from the side of the mountain (later revealed to be the only weapons Bobby Drake and Wanda Maximoff had not had time to turn off before it had gone off with the children being released with the adults' help) and head towards them, but seeing as Kitty had been the one flying the plane, it had been awesome to fly into another mountain for the second time in her life—Quicksilver and Toad almost pissing themselves when it was revealed that the mountain was much bigger than Kitty had ever handled and when the missiles carved holes with soot into the mountain's side, she'd landed the plane only after they'd hovered near the X-Jet for thirty seconds, the plane and Kitty blinking in and out of phasing.
Avalanche and Cyclops had blinked when Nightcrawler and Kurt came up to the surface with all the kids and two unexpected teens that seemed to know the names of every last one of them with high enthusiasm, but had not remarked on it until they had found themselves inside the plane, the two unexpected teens worrying over a brunette none of the adults seemed to think that they would ever see again.
"Is that Kitty?" Scott almost barked like a mad bulldog at Quicksilver and Toad, stepping over a little girl that liked to be called Pixie while out on the field, though whose name really didn't matter enough for Avalanche to bother learning, "Is this Kitty Pryde?"
"Yes," the dark young mutant that had launched himself into the plane with the feline looking young lady answered for both SHIELD members, making sure Shadowcat's head stayed on his lap while the other checked her over for any external injuries aside from her bleeding nose that could easily be explained away as caused by the stress from landing the plane in the way that was necessary, "This is Kitty Pryde. Would you please stop shouting, though, Mr. Summers? It's no good if she wakes up thinking someone's attacking her."
Scott looked as if he were going to say something at that, but was quickly interrupted by Kurt and Rogue taking a seat next to their prone friend, Quicksilver oddly taking it upon himself to work the speakers the plane came with and telling the newly rescued students and everyone else to please "Sit down and enjoy the ride back to Mutant Manor. We should be arriving within the hour and regret to say this ride will experience turbulence."
That got everything going again as Cyclops took the captain's seat and brought them all into the air again, Avalanche still just stunned and observing from standing in the back his former girlfriend and the blood pouring out of her nose, the age of the two teenagers and the way the girl kept whispering, "It's gonna be okay, mom, we're heading to Mr. Xavier's. That'll be great, huh?"
Things would get moving again when Toad opened his mouth to explain why they were late, but for that moment Lance Alvers would allow himself to be submerged in complete shock.
"You seriously have been gone for sixteen years because your mutation got you pregnant?"
"I admit it was a stupid thing to do," Kitty sighed at Kurt as the blue elf sat uncomfortably (most likely contemplating whether or not Jes [running around downstairs and entertaining some of the children that she and Nic had rescued from cages while they waited for Logan to stop using the Danger Room that he'd been inside since hearing the Half-Pint was back and had her own children] was possibly his sister or his daughter) next to the med-bay bed Kitty had been in since they'd taken her passed out body out of the rescue plane's driver's seat and out of Nicolai's iron grip, "But can you really blame me? My parents are—were—religious enough that they would have hauled me out of the Institute the second I told them I was knocked up, regardless of the fact that I had never had sex. From my view at the time, I was screwed no matter what; at least if I was going to leave it would be on my terms."
Kurt blinked at her (his hair was actually the same as when he was in high school and it made her smile so hard when she woke up) and patted the top of her head before smiling and saying simply, "That is so stupid."
Kitty rolled her eyes and lightly cuffed Kurt's pointy ear, lifting herself from her laid down position so she could look him in the eye with her long hair less heavy on her shoulders than before she'd passed out in the plane and it had felt like she'd had a whaling net tossed over her, "Well, I know that now. Back then I was a bubble-headed, valley girl idiot. Teenagers are all stupid and at the time, I was their queen."
The blanket covering Kitty up felt a little tighter as the doors to the med-bay opened and Wolverine—well, Logan, considering he was dressed in civvies and not yellow with blue—stepped in, air leaving his nostrils heated and drawn, but apparently he didn't want to look at Kitty with all the degrees and warnings of a thunderstorm, so he tempered himself down when his eyes met the woman's. She was still the size she was when she left, but she actually looked like a mom and he couldn't yell or fault her for that when it was apparent to him by just looking at those teenagers (he smelled himself and Storm on the boy, the girl smelling of Mystique and Sabertooth [how hard it must have been thinking of what they came from, but not actually knowing how deep it went]; not a bit of the rage and hate from their blood seeping into how they treated each other under the watchful eyes of someone who was only a girl herself) that she had done a better job of raising two mutants not her own than practically every parent or foster parent of the students in the school. He did his best impression of a smile and stepped over to her.
Xavier didn't exactly know how to react when one of his former students had ended up being brought in after overusing her phasing abilities, passed out on a gurney that Jean and Hank had accepted the moment the plane touched down and the hatch opened like a dragon giving up a treasure; but he had not judged. He had only directed Hank and Jean to take Kitty down and treat her to the best of their abilities; he would be down after he saw to the rest of the students.
Nic and Jes had been told to wait until Kitty—their mother, Toad had supplied, as he helped Avalanche out of the plane as Lance tried not to throw up and become as unconscious as Kitty after the reveal that his high school girlfriend had been pregnant when there was absolutely no way he was the father; Scott had slugged him in the eye and tried to do more before Nic had held the X-Man leader back—[not breaking a sweat and trying not to break Scott with hands the other students had witnessed beat down a slab of steel that separated them from their freedom]-and promised that his mom (Jesalin's mother as well) had gotten pregnant because of her mutation—was awake to go and see her. Which was fine by Jes, seeing as they had gone through similar situations before with Kitty feeling like she could succeed at something and then overcompensated to make it happen, and she was curious to look around.
A couple of the younger students, Sammy and Nitro—neither much older than Jamie when he'd been introduced to the Institute(Sammy at thirteen and Nitro just introduced to the age of fourteen) and with more or less better control of their powers—had been the ones to get Nicolai away from the med-bay doors. Sammy's red scales had softened Nic up and the smell of electricity coming off of Nitro made him want to haul the kid away from anything that could blow up—like oxygen tanks.
Following weeks would lead to Nic keeping an eye on both boys in a fashion Storm and Jean would mention and pick at as being almost exactly like Scott when Kurt had come along (full of fierce needs to stick to the rules, but fair and loose around perceived brothers). Jes would pick up on following Kurt and Rogue around like a puppy until she got absolutely bored with them ("I can't decide," Kitty would mention over coffee with Ororo and Tabby, blue eyes observing her daughter outside in the pool atop her brother's shoulders before flipping them both back under the water, "Whether her high self-esteem is part of her mutation, or just her personality.") and started teaching Domino how to do summersaults and handstands for Danger Room Sessions.
"How would you feel about being an instructor here, Kitty?" The Professor would ask as Kitty just finished up a training session with quite a few of the children as well as Jes and Nic (covering for Wolverine as he had been called away by Nick Fury at the last minute), "We would love to have you back and, from what I can tell from watching your children, I know you'd be quite good at it."
"I know they're not your blood kids," Rogue started, still not used to comforting after sixteen years and, with the prodigal student and her children settled into the Institute, participating in Danger Room sessions and making sure homework got finished, leaving her head a little foggy despite the grand tea Kitty had made before morning exercises and stretching still limber legs, "But, you did a really great thing making sure you didn't, you know… let them turn out worse by not loving them. And they do have blue eyes, so maybe they kinda are yours."
"…Thank you."
The tears were joyful and brief. The both of them really hated water that mixed and was made with emotion. Kitty wiped them away and finished her tea before Kurt came to warn them about the Danger Room session the adults would be learning with Wolverine and Storm that morning.
Shadowcat's hair in its long braid swayed back and forth as she walked between Rogue and Kurt, the scrunchy holding it together bouncing off of Kurt's shoulders and Rogue's wrist like a pendulum between magnetized points; solid in feeling as it bounced back on contact and then again.
Okay, so, notes. Basically, I wrote this fic like five years ago and it was in a notebook in my closet. It was supposed to be a chapter fic, but I'm choking on those at the moment so a one-shot is what this is now.
To clear up some things: I HATE writing OCs. I hate making them and I hate reading about them (mostly), so forgive that I'm only filling out the basic blueprints down here. Seriously, while some OCs are great, I think of the bulk of them as plague rats that interfere in the writing process. And flames are going to devour me, I just know it.
Jesalin: Basically, she's Kurt spliced with Rahne, spliced with a cat, spliced with Rogue and Mystique. She has Kitty's old tendency to use the word 'like' every other sentence. With an inducer and her powers, as a normal person, she looks like Girl Kurt from the episode Adrift with Rogue's hair (not the white part) and pointed ears. She can touch five people or animals a day and retain their form for twenty-four hours. If she only touches two people and nobody else, she can combine their form and walk around in their hybrid version for an uncalculated amount of time. (Mystique's ability, but with Rogue's rule of touch.) I didn't like making this character very much, but I wanted to get the image of girl Kurt from the episode Adrift out of my head.
Nicolai: Fast healer, has super strength. Yeah, I am that uninventive. I did give him hair and skin mostly like Ororo, though, so I think I get points for that, seeing as the rest of him is pure Logan loaded up on sedatives. I didn't decide whether he'd be short like Logan, though, so it's a very good thing I put this whole fic in the perspective of two teenagers around fully grown adults or little children no older than fifteen. It would have been mind numbing to figure out what to do about the kid's height, I kid you not.
Yes, I know Nic and Jes is highly uninventive, but that was in the extremely rough draft—paper version—of this and it kinda stuck.
Also, I realize beyond shadows of a doubt that the theory of Kitty getting pregnant by mutation is as old as the day is long, but, like I said, this was drafted so long ago that it was probably still new at the time. As they say: Don't hate the player, hate the game. As they don't say: Hate the game, because it screws the players over a large portion of the time.
Why did I write this?