All-Ages Summary: Together at last, Kitty and Kurt are enjoying one of the best months of their lives. But with the emergence of the mutant cure and the return of Kitty's ex-lover Peter, will history catch up with them? Continues Parts of a Whole and A Different Sameness.
Preamble… You don't have to be intimately familiar with all the ins and outs of X-Men comics to read this story; I tried to make things as "new reader friendly" as possible. Yet for those interested parties, there's a note at the end of each chapter about any comics that were referenced in a significant way. Continuity-wise, I'm considering the first arc of Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men and Nightcrawler's solo series as happening at the same time; it's a minor adjust, but just go with it—it will be worth it for the sake of the story, I promise :)
This story is part 3 of a trilogy. I'd recommend reading Parts of a Whole and A Different Sameness first. Or, if you want to jump right in here, you can always check them out later :) As always, reviews are great, but most of all enjoy!
Disclaimer #1: I don't own the X-Men or make a dime from imagining their between-panel exploits.
Disclaimer #2: My heroes always practice safe sex.
And finally… A very special thanks to Sundowhn for all your help with the preparation of this story, which is so much stronger for your insight. And to all the peeps over at CBR's Nightcrawler thread: a truly inspirational repository of Nightcrawler wisdom :)
Whole into Parts
PART ONE
~ Prologue ~
Then…
Midway through the bridge, a set of passing headlights lit up the car's cab just long enough for Kitty to catch more than a glimpse in the rear-view mirror of Amanda pressing Kurt's body into the corner of the backseat, tilting his fedora up off his head as she angled in to seal her open mouth against his, her fingertips running slowly down the lapel of his trench coat.
"Gross!" Kitty protested, covering her face with her hands while continuing to peek out through a gap between her fingers.
As they exited the tunnel back into the intermittent illumination of New York City at night, Amanda dutifully peeled herself off Kurt's body, smiling dreamily as she collapsed back into her own corner.
"Whew!" she exclaimed, exaggeratedly wiping the back of her hand across her brow. "Mr. Wagner, you do go on…"
Kurt smiled back at her, fang-tipped teeth flashing brightly in the streaming lights. "You're not so bad yourself, Ms. Sefton."
"Gross!" Kitty repeated. She turned to Peter in the driver's seat, pleading, "Can't you tell them to keep their hands off each other, at least until I fall asleep during the intermission?"
"But I thought you liked the opera, Katya."
"I do. But not when I have to chaperone this clown," said Kitty, tossing an incriminating thumb in Kurt's direction.
"Chaperone!" Kurt echoed, eyebrows raised to incredulous heights. "You're letting this official X-Man status go to your head a bit, hm?"
"I'm not the one necking like a teenager in the backseat!" Kitty shot back.
"Too bad for you," said Kurt, winking at Amanda who blew a kiss back at him.
"Argh!" Kitty grumbled, slouching into her seat and knotting her arms across her chest.
"What does she see in him?" asked Kurt, leaning forward between the seats and looking deliberately back and forth between Kitty's frown of annoyance and Peter's frown of concern. "I mean, when I'm right here…"
"Some people have no taste," Amanda agreed, shaking her head in mock lament.
Kitty rolled her eyes dramatically. "Yeah, right. I mean, even if you get past the looks…"
"Katya!" Peter chided.
Kitty ignored him. "… there's still the scintillating personality to contend with."
"Ha!" Kurt dove the extra distance forward and planted a lightning-quick kiss on Kitty's cheek, causing Kitty to squeal and aim a half-serious elbow at his already withdrawn face.
"Try that again," she warned, spinning in her seat to glare at him. "And you'll have to do your kissing without teeth."
Kurt merely grinned at her threat. "Well, since I'm taken, anyway, you could do worse than Piotr, here."
"Kurt…" Peter warned. "Do not antagonize her."
"I wouldn't dream of it. I'm just stating a fact."
"Oh look at that we're here," Kitty declared, quickly and loudly.
Peter pulled the car up to the curb outside the theatre, and Kurt and Amanda got out. He addressed Kurt through the open passenger's window.
"Kitty and I will meet you at the theatre, Kurt, after we park the auto."
Kurt took the opportunity to favour Kitty with one final, mischievous grin. "Don't you two get distracted along the way."
"Kurt!" Kitty cried emphatically, face flushing. "We wouldn't!"
"Pity. I would. Hurry up though, the show's about to start."
As Peter pulled the car away from the curb, Kitty's eyes followed Kurt and Amanda as they proceeded into the largely deserted courtyard. Kurt was well bundled up to avoid using his image inducer. Even so, Kitty imagined his tail was acting up under his trench coat, twitching at Amanda's innuendoes and tickling her body secretly when the chance arose…
Peter's rich, accented voice reigned in her galloping thoughts.
"Katya, you should not tease Kurt so."
"What?" she cried, whirling to look at him. "He started it! He always starts it."
"He starts things because he is insecure," Peter said seriously. "And with Kurt and Amanda… Things have not always been easy for them."
Kitty knew Peter's cryptic words were offering her a glimpse into the adult world, the kind of glimpse that seemed to be occurring with ever-greater frequency lately and that Kitty found fascinating, terrifying, and perplexing all at once. Try as she might, however, Kitty found she lacked the tools to know exactly how she should live up to the gravity of Peter's words.
"Okay," she agreed tentatively. "It's just, if he's insecure about the way he looks, why does he draw attention to it?"
"To make it seem like he does not care."
"But… he really does care."
"Da. Is that not obvious?"
Kitty blinked. It wasn't particularly obvious—not to her, anyway. At a loss, she decided to turn the conversation toward something she thought she could understand.
"And you, Piotr Nikolaievitch Rasputin," she said, tongue curling deliciously over the exotic sounds of his full name. "What do you care about?"
"I care about my friends," said Peter, pulling the car into a spot and turning off the engine. "And I care about—"
Kitty silenced him with a chaste kiss at the side of his lips.
"Yes?"
"Come," said Peter, eyes serious, cheek reddened. "Kurt and Amanda are waiting."
[Context for this scene is Uncanny X-Men #177]
~ Chapter One ~
Now…
They were calling it a cure.
48 hours ago, Dr. Kavita Rao had gone on national television and said the mutant strain was a disease. And that she and Benetech Labs had a drug to cure it.
Since then, Kitty, recently appointed student advisor at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, was knee-deep in damage control, doing whatever she could to calm down an understandably anxious student body, reassuring them that their mutant statuses were secure and inalienable. But it wasn't going especially smoothly. The conversation she'd had earlier that day with a student who went by "Wing" had been particularly unsettling.
On a bench outside the Mansion, under a warm sun and a clear sky, Wing had told her about flying with a passionate gleam in his vibrant green eyes.
"When you're flying," he said. "In a very literal sense the world goes away. It makes everything else… smaller. And sort of okay, too. It's the most important feeling. I can't lose that."
Kitty had offered him a small, confidant, reassuring smile, as she replied. "Wing, just because someone goes on TV and says they have a 'cure for mutation'… that doesn't mean that it's even true. And if it is… nobody's going to force it on you. Mutants are a community. We're a people, and there's no way anybody can make us be what they want. We stick together and don't panic or overreact… you'll see. We're stronger than this."
Wing had stared at her as if she'd grown a third head. "Miss Pryde… Are you fucking retarded?"
Now, several hours later, in the evening of that same day, Kitty was in the conference room with her team—Scott, Emma, Logan, and Hank—discussing an upcoming raid on Benetech.
"I'm sorry—Why are we doing this again?"
All of Scott, Emma, and Hank exchanged not-unsubtle glances before Hank responded.
"Because we've found some more information about the cure that's not… My analysis indicates that the cure uses mutant DNA samples."
"Whose mutant DNA?" growled Logan.
"We don't know," Emma answered crisply. "That is what we need to find out."
Kitty looked quickly at Scott, who had his head turned deliberately away, and then Logan, who was looking directly at Scott. She felt quite certain she knew the name on the tip of both their tongues.
Scott said, "So we're agreed. We leave at 1100 hours. That's four hours from now. And as I'm sure I don't need to remind you all: until we have some firmer answers about exactly what's going on, we keep this between us. Understood?"
As they dispersed, Kitty was somehow the last person to leave—with one exception.
"Kitty."
Kitty gritted her teeth as she halted mid-step at the threshold of the door. She did her best to wipe her face blank as she turned to confront Emma's impassive facade.
"Yes?"
"Tell me," Emma began, dropping her eyes as she ran a long, tapered index finger along the edge of the desk, flicking away an invisible piece of dust. "How is your new pet doing?"
Kitty arched an eyebrow. "You can't possibly mean my boyfriend."
Emma looked up. "I mean Kurt," she clarified helpfully.
"My boyfriend is fine. Thanks for the concern."
Kitty turned decisively to leave, but Emma curled her fingers over her shoulder, stopping her.
"Kitty… You have no idea how hard it is for me to say this but… The two of you seem… happy together."
Kitty pivoted back toward her, at something of a loss at this new turn. "This better not be some kind of telepathic reverse-psychology thing, because I don't—"
"It's an observation, Kitty. That's all."
"Okay, Emma," Kitty said dryly, eyes narrowed, studying Emma's stiff, unreadable mouth and shallow, bleach-blue eyes. If she didn't know better, Kitty would have thought she saw a flicker of emotion there—sympathy? regret?—as Emma released her shoulder.
But she wasn't in the mood to analyze it. Grateful simply to be free of the ice queen's clutches, she beat a hasty exit.
Kitty started off down the hall at a blistering pace before realizing she needed a moment to think, to collect herself, before returning to her quarters. Slowing to a purposeful amble, Kitty let her mind reflect back on the whirlwind month that was. A month… Had it only been that long? Just a little more than a month since she returned to the X-Men, and even less time since she and Kurt had woken up together naked in her bed, a situation they'd repeated nearly all the days since.
For Kitty, harder than adjusting to the new dimension of the relationship with one her oldest friends had been trying to communicate the change to others who knew them just as well (if less intimately). Kitty had received more than her fair share of raised eyebrows and wide-eyed stares of incomprehension communicating the inevitably awkward information that, yes, that guy she used to make fun of incessantly was now the person she was having sex with, and yes, she was aware of how such a turn of events resembled the plot of a 40s romantic comedy and/or 90s sitcom. And then there was Rachel's even more unsettling knowing smile…
Thankfully, though, the hubbub died down quickly, X-Men being nothing if not adaptable. Yet Logan still troubled her. The tension in the air every time she and Kurt collided with him was palpable. Based on the fact that Logan behaved normally whenever Kitty saw him alone, she could tell that whatever the issue was, it was a Kurt and Logan thing. Still, Kitty was profoundly uncomfortable and more than a little angry being caught in the middle of it; too often, she felt like a bargaining chip in a game she didn't fully understand. Kurt continued to brush it off, telling her she was imagining things. But Kitty knew there was more to it than Kurt was letting on, and that whatever it was would come to a head sooner or later.
And then there was the "cure." Kitty's heart constricted just thinking about it, not to mention the possibility, however remote, that Jean might somehow be involved…
Kitty heard the shower running as she phased through the door to her quarters. She paused, listening to the sound, a slow, relieved smile spreading over her face, remembering: today was just one bad day among twenty-seven others that amounted to some of the best she'd ever known. She wet her lips with her tongue as she prepared to lose her uncertainty by embracing something—someone—she was certain of.
Kitty phased herself out of her clothes even as she passed into the bathroom, allowing all of her pants, sweater, bra, socks, and underwear to crumple to the floor at her feet before re-solidifying to slide open the shower door.
"Need a hand?"
"No," said Kurt, smiling calmly as he made space for her enter. "I could use two."
Kitty soaked her hair and smoothed it away from her face before sliding up against Kurt's soap and water-slick fur, kissing him deeply, wetly, as a warm river collected between her breasts, funnelling down to grease their tightly pressed bodies.
"Where's that tail of yours?"
"Where do you want it to be?"
It was a rhetorical question. Even as he spoke his tail was winding itself around her waist, following a trail of water between her butt cheeks to lift her thigh around his midsection as he leaned back against the wall to accept her weight, sighing into her mouth as she stirred her hands and fingernails through his wet fur, his fang intentionally clipping the edge of her tongue, just the way she liked.
The aftermath was almost as nice, enveloped in a large white bath towel while Kurt dried her, sometimes making her wetter in the process—but she wasn't complaining. By the time they finally left the bathroom, though, Kitty wearing a bathrobe, Kurt with a towel tied around his waist, Kitty felt the outside world creeping back in. She watched Kurt grab some underwear and a fresh white t-shirt from the top drawer of her dresser, biting the inside of her cheek as she watched him put on both, well-oiled muscles and ever-liquid tail bending and stretching beneath his still faintly water-dark indigo fur. For the briefest moment, a hint of her old trepidation returned, her mind and body overwhelmed with the sudden conviction: nothing human could be so beautiful.
Kurt caught her eye as he snapped his underwear into place, casual movements adopting a trace of hesitancy under the gaze that she awkwardly blinked away before heading over to sit down on the edge of the bed.
"Is everything okay?" asked Kurt, sitting down next to her. "You seem very… far away all of a sudden."
"It's… Yeah, I'm good. I was just… It's been a long day, you know?"
"I can imagine," Kurt lamented, releasing a low breath. "I've been getting these strange reactions from people—from students—all day. I'm sure they want to ask me about the cure, but I don't think they know how to do it without sounding like they're… Well."
"What?"
"Well, like they're insulting me, I suppose."
Kitty looked at him. Wordlessly, she touched the side of his face, running her fingers over the edge of his pointed ear and imprinting the pout of his lips with her thumb before travelling down to his jaw line, sweeping along the edge before dropping to squeeze the side of his neck. Kurt brushed her fingers with his lips as they passed, but she could tell his heart wasn't in it.
"Everything where it should be?" he joked feebly.
Kitty offered a small, unconvincing smile, even as she dropped her eyes. "Always."
She saw Kurt's hand open and then close against his naked thigh as he considered, then rejected, reaching out to her.
"I'm okay, Katzchen," he said finally.
"I know."
"Even if it works, you know I would never…"
"I know, I know."
Kurt did lean over, then, dropping his forehead against hers and stroking his hand over her damp hair. Kitty breathed deeply as she laid a hand against his chest, feeling the subtle friction of his t-shirt against his fur.
"So was it just dealing with the students that got to you, or…"
"I sort of… I can't tell you yet. We're keeping it under wraps until we—I'm sorry."
"Oh," said Kurt, pulling away. "Okay."
"I'm sorry," she said again, imploring his forgiveness with her eyes. "There must be X.S.E. stuff sometimes that you're not supposed to share with other people."
"Other people," Kurt admitted. "But not you."
Kitty scrunched her eyes shut, grinding her back teeth. "Please don't be like that."
"Like what?"
"Like… you. Please don't make me feel any worse about it than I already do. I should be able to tell you—to tell everyone—really soon. Just…" She trailed off as she opened her eyes again into his. "Please."
Kurt studied her face, brow creased with concern, but not anger. "Okay," he agreed. "But, there's just one more thing."
"Kurt…"
"Whatever it is," he said, luminous eyes boring into her. "Promise me you'll be careful."
Kitty's lips bent ruefully, appreciating the irony of his concern. Her words, though, were genuine.
"Of course," she promised.
"Anyway," said Kurt, changing tracks as he got to his feet and returned to his clothing stash for some pants. "I really have to get going. I'm supposed to meet that man at the hospital at nine."
"About the… children?"
Kurt nodded. "I'd like to say I'll be back at a time but, well, you know how these things tend to go. Are you…?"
"I'll be… I'm out late tonight, too."
Kurt glanced at her quickly as he buttoned his pants, but, true to his word, he didn't question her.
"If I get back first," he said, "should I wait for you, or…?"
"Only, you know, if you want to…"
Kurt's face ignited into a wide, easy smile that spread like a healing poultice over all her fears.
"Now, Katzchen—what kind of question is that?"
[Kitty's conversation with Wing takes place in Astonishing X-Men #3]
~ Chapter Two ~
Kurt watched but didn't see the twilight landscape scrolling by through the window of the hired car Ororo had arranged to take him into the city. Instead, his mind swam with conflicting thoughts and images, though his genuine, serious worries about Kitty, the cure, and his current mission tended to become watery against the background of a certain irrepressible contentment.
Weeks ago, Kitty had been surprised by how easily he'd accepted the change in their relationship, by how untroubled he'd been by the varied reactions and increased scrutiny of their other friends. But from Kurt's standpoint it had seemed simple, especially when compared to everything they'd gone through just to arrive in each other's arms. Even now, thinking of Kitty made everything else seem easier. True, today hadn't been a great day, and it wasn't bound to get much better from the car ride onwards. Yet even fifteen minutes of being engulfed in warm water and Kitty Pryde's body made up for a lot. Life might not be perfect, what with his best friend still not talking to him, having to spend his evening investigating the horrific deaths of twelve children, and renewed attempts to challenge the status of the mutant race using science. But after it was all over, there would still be Kitty's smooth, firm body to come home to, the soothing rhythm of her heartbeat against his skin singing him to sleep.
The sound of the driver clearing his throat wrenched Kurt back to the present.
"Sorry to bother you," the driver began, eyeing Kurt in the rear-view mirror.
"It's okay," Kurt assured him, hoping the driver hadn't construed his erstwhile silence as rudeness. "I was just… thinking."
"'Bout all that stuff with the cure? It's everywhere. Had to turn off the radio just to escape."
Kurt offered a rueful half-smile. "I—Yes, I was thinking about it. A little. As you said, it's unavoidable."
"What I really wanted to ask, though, is—you're one of them, right? One of the X-Men?"
Kurt hesitated slightly. "That's right."
The driver nodded. "I figured. I recognized the lady—Storm, right?—who called. But nobody ever tells me anything. Probably for my own good and all that. But the thing is, I've been watching you back there for twenty minutes now and I can't for the life of me place you. You new?"
It was only then that Kurt remembered he was using his inducer to look life the "human" version of himself. He hadn't resorted to his inducer very often in recent years, doing his level best to present the world with his true face; as Logan had once told him, no one would ever get used to him as long as he continued to hide. Kurt wasn't particularly sure why he'd used his inducer that night, except that the heated cultural climate surrounding the cure almost certainly had something to do with it. Having his deception pointed out, he felt guilty, realizing he'd also deceived himself, passing off premeditation as simple habit.
"It's… I'm using a device. To alter my appearance."
"Oh."
The driver was quiet for a long minute, so that Kurt wondered if the conversation would end there. Finally, though, he spoke up again.
"You're Nightcrawler, right?"
Kurt blinked, slightly taken aback by his apparent notoriety. "Ja."
"Ha! I knew it. It's the accent. I knew he's—you're—German, so I took a chance."
"Oh."
Kurt wanted to ask the driver how he knew where Nightcrawler hailed from but he restrained himself, reasoning that it wasn't the type of thing a celebrity should do. He suddenly wondered why he didn't Google himself more often before remembering what happened the last time he'd done so…
"You don't…" the driver cleared his throat. "You don't have to use that thing you're using if… I mean, maybe it's for your mission or something but… I wouldn't want you to have to hide on my account."
Kurt considered the bald spot on the back of the driver's head, hating that he needed to doubt the man's apparent sincerity; after all, the driver could just as easily be digging for a free ticket to the freak show, looking for a good spook story to tell his children over breakfast after the night shift.
Almost as if he perceived Kurt's train of thought, the driver said, "I know how it is with you guys. My family worked for Charlie Xavier's family for years, back before they had me. Then I grew up and… Well, after my parents died, I fell on some hard times. My own fault, just, it happens, you know? And Charlie, he did me a favour. I used to do lots of driving for him, back in the day. But then I moved out to Jersey for my wife's work and—anyway, now I'm back but I'm just doing it part-time while I'm in school. I mean, I like driving, but I don't want to do it forever, right?"
Kurt nodded vaguely as he looked out at the scenery. But he perked up at the driver's next words.
"Charlie, he… Put it this way. He did more than do me a favour—he saved my life. He's… Well, he's a good man."
Kurt returned his gaze to the driver's sincere face in the mirror. "Ja," he said, clicking off his inducer. "He is."
"Jesus!" the driver exclaimed, chuckling. "You're Nightcrawler, all right."
"Kurt."
"What?"
"My name."
"Well I'm Jim. Jim Vanderbeek. Pleasure to meet you."
"Likewise."
"So… what about this cure? Does it work?"
"I can't—"
"Yeah, yeah. I figured. Just thought I'd give it a try."
Jim was quiet for a moment, fingers flexing on the steering wheel.
"If it does work," he said at last, "would you take it?"
Kurt met the flash of his own golden eyes in the mirror. "Would you?"
Jim shrugged nonchalantly. "Depends. I mean, seems like what you've got going must be pretty decent with the ladies. They're all into that Avatar and Twilight stuff. I bet you do okay."
"Um…" Kurt swallowed, equal parts stricken and intensely amused. "…thanks…?"
"No problem," Jim smiled genuinely.
Kurt looked back out the window and covered his mouth with his hand to stop his face from making expressions. He was already imagining how he'd relate the conversation to Kitty.
Thankfully, the next half hour was far more banal, largely consisting of Jim's descriptions of his two school-age, volleyball-obsessed daughters, his accountant wife, and their new townhouse in Brooklyn.
Finally, Jim pulled the car up to the curb outside Metro General Hospital.
"Here you go," he said. "I wasn't paid to wait but I don't mind if you—"
"No, it's okay. In my experience, these things tend to take certain… turns."
"You gonna go in like that?"
Kurt hesitated with his indigo-furred, two-fingered hand on the door handle. "I… ja, I think so."
Recovering quickly and with practiced ease from his momentary indecision, Kurt opened the door and climbed out of the car, crouching back into the open doorway just long enough to flash Jim a winning grin.
"After all," he joked. "It would be tragic if my fans didn't recognize me."
"Too right," Jim agreed seriously. "You gotta milk that. I'm tellin' you."
"Thanks," said Kurt, more genuine than not.
"No," said Jim, turning in his seat to look at him. "Thank you."
Kurt nodded once, and closed the door.
As he'd long-since trained himself to do instinctively, Kurt capitalized on his invisible pupils to surreptitiously watch people watching him as he crossed the street and entered the hospital. For people to see him watching them would be disastrous; it made him look suspicious or, worse, nervous. The most powerful defense against freakish-ness, Kurt knew, was to act confident, to project an air of being unaware, or at least unconcerned, about one's obvious bodily difference. Thankfully, most people did seem to ignore him, the world-weary receptionist barely even looking up from her computer as she gestured in the direction of the elevator. Perhaps, Kurt reasoned, he was less impressive than some of the other mutant specimens showing up on the news lately. For those glances that did linger, Kurt did what he always did, offering a small, welcoming smile, letting them know that he saw them staring, and that he didn't care.
Yet when his contact, nurse Christine Palmer, called his name, it was Kurt's turn to do a double-take. Surely, he thought, feeling the blood drain from his face beneath his blue skin, nurses who looked like that, wearing uniforms that short—and that tight—only appeared in a certain type of movies…
Christine's disarming smile turned Kurt's own tactics back against him, her eyes touring confidently over his person with an interest that was neither fear nor disgust.
Kurt cleared his throat and tried to remember Kitty. And his own name.
[Kurt begins his investigation at the hospital and meets Christine in Nightcrawler #1]
~ Chapter Three ~
Kitty was seated at the back of the plane, across from Logan. Hank and Scott were flying, with Emma tucked closely in behind. A slightly eerie quiet permeated the cabin, broken only by occasional exchanges of flight data between Scott and Hank.
Kitty turned to Lockheed, who was perched on her shoulder, his beady, reptilian eyes shooting daggers at Logan. When Logan returned the look, the dragon made a low, rumbling sound in his throat.
Logan said, "Hope your pal there's not thinkin' about a little friendly fire."
Kitty ticked a finger under Lockheed's chin that stopped his noise, though not his expression.
"He's okay," Kitty assured Logan. "Probably just nerves."
"Like all of us, huh?"
"You get nervous, Logan?"
"Everybody gets nervous sometimes, kiddo."
"And are you nervous now?"
"With Easy-Bake Oven over there givin' me the stink eye? I'm peein' my pants."
Kitty's lips twitched as she forced down a sputter of laughter.
Logan, too, offered a brief smile. But his gravity returned with his next words.
"I haven't talked to the elf since…" in an ironic gesture of nerves, he hesitated, eyes unreadable behind his mask."Is he—"
"He's fine," Kitty said quickly, glancing at the back of Emma's seemingly—or perhaps deceptively—oblivious head. "Worried, like the rest of us. But fine."
Logan nodded, and let the issue drop.
When they reached Benetech, Kitty was on point, tasked to make her way undetected into the basement and deal with any and all security measures. After making her way through several rooms and floors and past dozens of oblivious guards, Kitty, with Lockheed in tow, arrived at a deserted corridor from which she proceeded to move further down, through the floor to the next level and whatever lay underneath. On her first attempt, she phased at least a dozen feet down into the floor and got nowhere; there was nothing but solid metal in every direction. And not just any metal; as she phased through it, it felt strange—thick, almost, or at least thicker than any metal should ever feel when she was in her phased state.
She returned to the main corridor and said her goodbyes to Lockheed before trying again. It seemed to take forever. There was at least one hundred feet of metal guarding what must be a truly priceless—or truly dangerous—secret.
Finally, Kitty felt her feet touch open air, and lowered herself gratefully into a wide, metal-lined corridor. Stealthily avoiding a pack of guards, she moved instinctively forward, toward a large door at the end of the hallway that seemed to be the focus of the guards' protection. In abeyance to the old adage about the enemy of an enemy, Kitty fought off the disquieting sensation in her muscles, still rubbery after passing through the seemingly endless expanse of alien metal, and phased her hand through the door's thick lock, which swung open just as the guards turned the corner.
"We have a hostile!"
"Drop her! Drop her!"
The bullet whizzed painlessly through Kitty only to collide with a loud "klang" against the metal surface in front of her, a surface that Kitty realized all in a moment was not a wall—it was a body.
Kitty's breath evaporated from her lungs even as her heart exploded in her chest. She froze, stock still, watching his massive steel body dive at and through her, dispatching the guards with brutal efficiency.
"Peter…?"
Kitty's breath returned to her amid the penetrating reality of the guards' bones shattering against the walls.
"Stop, Peter… Please stop… You'll kill them…"
Releasing the last guard, Peter turned to her, dropping his metal armour to reveal his too-familiar pale grey eyes. He stumbled toward her like a man in a dream.
"Katya?"
He dropped to his knees at her feet as a sob wracked his body, gripping the back of her legs as he pressed his face against her stomach.
"Oh God… Finally…"
Three hours later, Kitty was back at the Mansion, back in the blessed quiet, dark, and safety of her quarters, exploding spaceships, rampaging mutant hoards, corrupt S.H.E.I.L.D. agents, and a previously presumed dead ex-love of her life seeming very far away—dreamlike compared to the dreaming body in her bed, indigo chest rising and falling in oblivious regularity.
For a moment, her relief was tangible, like being wrapped up in a warm quilt after coming in from the cold. But as she approached the bed, watching, depending on the sureness of Kurt's body, a change came over her. The more she looked at him, the less she seemed to be able to see him. Sections of his exposed upper body were enveloped—erased—in shadow, an effect of his light-refracting fur. Kitty was familiar with the sight, and yet it struck her cold; it washed over her, chilling her down to her bones, the feeling that Kurt was disappearing, fading into the ether. Like a ghost. Or a memory…
Lacking the bodily control to phase out of her uniform, Kitty fought trembling hands as she undressed the old fashioned way before slipping into bed next to him, rubbing her face against the back of his neck and kissing him behind his ear, luxuriating in the assurance of his solidity. Kurt stirred groggily, a low moan of contentment rumbling in his throat.
"Welcome back," he mumbled sleepily.
As he rolled over to collect her in his arms, Kitty flinched at the roughness of his left hand, which she realized was wrapped in a bandage.
"Are you…?"
"Hm? Oh, I burned myself when… I'll tell you about it tomorrow."
Kitty overlapped his hands and forearms, sighing gratefully as she felt the soft friction of his fur against her skin. One of his feet covered hers, reassuring in its uniqueness, as his tail curled itself around her waist, twitching once against her bare stomach before lying still.
"What about you?" Kurt whispered, half-awake, against her ear.
"I'm… I'll tell you about it tomorrow," she said.
But Kurt was already asleep.
[The raid on Benetech where Kitty finds Peter comes from Astonishing X-Men #4]
~ Chapter Four ~
When Peter wrapped his strong arms fully around Kurt's much smaller body, lifting him almost off the ground in the intensity of his embrace, Kitty knew Kurt hugged him back just as genuinely. Yet she also knew that when she'd told Kurt that morning of Peter's return, his reaction had been ever so slightly conflicted.
"This doesn't change anything," she'd told him, fingers trailing through his hair.
"Of course," he'd said, eyes not quite completing his attempt at a reassuring smile. "I just don't want you to feel that—"
"This doesn't change anything."
"Okay, Katzchen. Okay."
Now, after a long day of training, teaching, medical exams, and general housekeeping, the active, available senior staff were assembled in the conference room to hear Hank and Scott's report on the cure—though of course ceremonies of reunion with an old friend had come first.
Once everyone finally settled down enough to deal with the business at hand, Kitty found herself seated at the long conference table between Kurt and Ororo, and across from Peter and Logan. The other seats were filled by Hank, Scott, Warren, Rachel, Lucas, Emma, and Sam—who Kitty could tell was feeling a little out of place. Everyone was in their casual clothes after a long day, and the effect of that informality was a tad unsettling; it felt a bit like protesting too much against the seriousness of the situation.
"I'll get right to the point," said Hank, who was sitting at the head of the table, next to Scott. "I don't know which is the good news and which the bad, so I'll just say both. First of all, the cure works. Second, all the viable samples and the vast majority of the data Benetech held are now destroyed. But that said, in all likelihood, it will only be a setback. The cure may very well be a reality we'll have to live with, whether we like it or not."
Sam said, "The cure works… how, exactly? What are we actually talkin' about, here? Does it suppress mutant abilities, or…"
Hank shook his head. "It's not like the mutant suppression drugs we've seen before. This drug actually has the power to suppress the mutant gene at a fundamental level, initiating a total physical transformation. Muscles, bone structure—everything is affected."
"And does it work on second generation mutants?" asked Ororo.
"Yes," Hank confirmed. "As far as I can tell, anyone with an X gene is fair game. Though the process would obviously be more… involved… depending on the nature of the mutation—or mutations."
Silence reigned for a moment after that, Kitty noticing more than one body shift uncomfortably in their chair registering the implications of Hank's words.
Finally, Kurt spoke up. "And you have a sample of this drug in the lab right now?"
"I've already raked him over the coals, elf, believe me," said Logan.
"Good," Kurt assented, eyes still grilling Hank.
Hank released a heavy sigh. "Look—what the two of you need to understand is, we need to consider that this might be a good option for some people. For people whose mutations are not… Well, not viable."
"And who decides that?" Kurt questioned.
"The individual, obviously."
"And we're to assume those individuals are making free, culturally unbiased choices?"
Hank's leonine face lowered in his version of a frown. "You've always had your mutations, Kurt. It's not like that for everyone."
"That's true," Kurt conceded, eyes alight with a rare intensity beneath his stern brow. "Unlike some of you, I've never had the luxury of pretending not to be different."
Kitty laid her hand on Kurt's arm. "Kurt…"
But Kurt wasn't finished yet. "That cure… It's pretending, Henry. Hiding. There is no 'cure' for who we are."
Hank was about to reply but Scott cut in with a raised hand. "Okay. Kurt—we get it. We all know how dangerous this cure is—what a slippery slope it represents. That's precisely why we're having this meeting—so we can all be on the same page about handling this situation as effectively as possible."
Kitty drifted off for the next part of the discussion. She was sure that Kurt would never want the cure. More than that, she was sure that she would never want him to want it. Still, though, she wondered if Hank had a point, especially considering the tragic, desperate mutants who'd accosted them at Benetech the night before. Kitty knew that Kurt wasn't like them. His mutation was useful, viable, beautiful. And yet… She couldn't deny that she hadn't always thought that way. There had been a time when Kurt's appearance had terrified her because he represented something she feared she might become.
Regarding Kurt's profile now, solemn above his black button-down shirt open at the collarbone and rolled up to his elbows, she couldn't untangle his face's traditionally attractive aspects from the objectively strange ones. Studying him, she couldn't separate any of his graceful cheekbones and aquiline nose, or the shiny strands of his wavy hair spilling over his forehead where they perpetually slipped out from behind his pointed ear, or his indigo fur and flashlight eyes demarked by thin borders of dark, foreboding shadows. Yet even as Kitty told herself she couldn't separate those elements, she found herself doing so, making a clear distinction between his nose and his eyes, eyes that she loved for being so uniquely his, and yet sometimes hated for their mystery. She couldn't deny that his eyes could be a barrier, that her longing to feel and know the depths of her own gaze in his was sometimes rebuffed by their pupil-less, reflection-less surface.
At that moment, though, she didn't need to see Kurt's pupils to know where he was looking, which was straight across the table at Peter. When Kurt blinked his gaze away, apparently returning his attention to Scott at the head of the table, Kitty took his place, swallowing hard against the still-unsettling reality of Peter's living, breathing presence. Everything about him appeared unchanged, from his straight eyebrows to his lantern jaw and the shallow dimple in his chin. Except for his eyes. While Peter's eyes had always been deep with secret gravity, they now appeared truly bottomless, grey-blue wells that would always give the lie to his seemingly impenetrable body.
Peter caught her looking at him, and offered a small, close-lipped smile. Kitty looked away quickly.
"Unless anyone has any other questions," Scott was saying. "I guess we're done here. Hank and I are going to continue to monitor the situation, and we'll keep you all posted of any and all future developments."
As they began to disperse, Kitty could tell that Peter was taking his time, waiting for her. Kurt lingered in turn before Logan rescued him.
"C'mon, elf. I owe you a brew."
Kurt nodded, though he was unable to resist a quick glance backwards at Kitty as he led Logan out of the room.
"Pete," Logan called over his shoulder. "You gonna join us?"
"In a moment, Logan," said Peter, eyes not leaving Kitty's.
Logan closed the door behind him, leaving Kitty and Peter alone in the suddenly cavernous silence. They were both standing, separated by the width of the conference table.
Kitty said, "Before you say whatever it is you want to say, there's something you need to know. Something that I was too bamboozled to tell you last night. You see, I've been… Kurt and I are…"
Peter's eyebrows crawled up into his forehead. "You and… Kurt?"
He paused for a long, incredulous moment before he laughed, voice and body exulting with a rare, consuming mirth.
Kitty seethed with fury, fingernails digging into the palms of her hands, embracing the steadying pain against the nearly overwhelming desire to jump across the table and punch him.
"God damn it, Peter."
Peter's face fell abruptly. "Your are… serious?"
Kitty's eyes darted away. She crossed her arms over her chest, keeping her fists tightly curled.
"Oh Katya," he pleaded, stepping around the end of the table to stand by her side. "I am sorry. Truly. I… I did not think—"
"That's obvious."
Humbled, Peter dropped his head.
After a moment, Kitty took pity on him.
"I know it sounds—" she began, but stopped herself quickly, hating her words' implication of doubt.
"You've been gone for a long time," she finished pathetically.
"Da. I… see."
They were both quiet for another long moment.
"May I tell you something?" he asked.
"I—yes."
"When I was in that room, there were times when I wanted to die. Those times, I would think of your face. Your voice. Your… To see you again, it is…"
"I… I know…"
Touching the side of her face ever so gently with the back of his large hand, Peter bent down, and kissed the side of her lips. Kitty remained perfectly still except for an involuntary, uncontrollable tremor.
~ Chapter Five ~
Logan tossed Kurt a beer that he caught with his hand and then passed quickly to his tail to catch the opener.
"Does this mean we're friends again?" Kurt ironized, cracking open the beer before returning it to his hand.
"Ask me again in an hour," said Logan, popping open his own cap with the tip of his claw.
"And do I also have to wait to point out the double standard of—"
"Yes."
"Fine."
Logan took a seat at one of the bar stools behind the kitchen's island counter, while Kurt, wanting to keep his distance, remained standing, leaning up against the cupboard doors on the other side of the island. He crossed his arms, resting his beer against his exposed forearm between frequent, long sips.
Finally, Logan said, "Hell of a thing… Finding Pete…"
"Ja," Kurt agreed. "It's a miracle."
Logan looked at him, frowning. "Don't be weird about it."
"I don't—"
"You know what I mean."
Kurt stared down at his beer, flexing his hand around the neck of the bottle, also frowning. "And how, exactly, am I supposed to not be weird about it?"
"You know what you guys have. You can't let…" Logan hesitated, filling the silence with a gulp of beer. "What's past is past," he finished lamely.
"Easy for you to say."
"Don't ride me, Kurt. I'm trying to help you here."
"Sure."
When Kurt raised his eyes he saw Logan's fierce scowl smouldering with bitter, undisguised aggravation.
"Okay," Logan said tightly through a clenched jaw. "I guess you want me to spell it out. What I'm trying to say is I forgive you. Will you stop being a dick now?"
Kurt shrugged, causing Logan's eyebrows to burrow even deeper into the bridge of his nose.
"Damn, but you can be an ornery bastard when you want to be."
Kurt eyes widened. "I can be—"
"Okay. Just—I'm sorry. Okay? Can we drink now?"
"We're already—"
"Don't push it."
Kurt offered another nonchalant shrug. "So would you take it? If you could?"
Logan wrinkled his nose as though disgusted by the question. "You really need to ask me that? You must be more shook up than I thought."
"Since when am I 'shook up'?"
"Since your girlfriend's ex-lover came back from the dead and you pretty much yelled at one of your best friends in a meeting for no good reason."
"No good reason?" Kurt echoed, the fuse finally crackling on his own restrained anger and frustration. "Again with the double—"
"It's different for me," Logan interrupted. "Getting in fights is what I do. But it's not like you."
Kurt's golden eyes narrowed above his firm mouth. "Oh? And you're the one who decides that, are you? Is that not what this is really all about? Your belief that you know me better than I know myself?"
Logan glared back at him just a moment longer before dropping his eyes and releasing a weary breath. He raked a slow hand through his thick hair.
"Kurt…" he began again, voice softened as a wave broken on the rocks. "Elf… I…"
But Logan never got a chance to continue his thought, as Peter picked that moment to make his entrance.
"Am I intruding?" he asked, hesitating in the doorway.
"'Course not," Logan assured him, welcoming him in with a sweep of his arm. "Grab yourself a beer. And refill us while you're at it."
Peter dutifully distributed three fresh beers before taking a seat on the stool next to Logan's.
Logan raised his bottle. "Cheers."
The three men exchanged glances as their bottles collided, though all but Logan's eyes—which were locked on Kurt—scuttled away quickly.
After they'd each taken several long, serious tugs on their beers, Logan said, "Just like old times, huh?"
"Da," Peter agreed. "It is as though nothing has changed. Except…"
Kurt worked hard to temper an instinctual urge to disappear as Peter's eyes rolled his way.
"Piotr, I—"
Peter stopped him with a raised hand. "No, Kurt. Please. As Katya says, I have been gone for a long time."
He paused, then, his eyes turning inward on some dark landscape neither Kurt nor Logan could ever know.
"She deserves happiness," he said at last.
"Ja," Kurt agreed tonelessly. "She does."
"So," Logan began, redirecting things toward another, equally fraught terrain. "What do you make of this cure, Pete?"
Peter shook his head slowly, taking a long swallow. "Truthfully, I do not know, Logan. It is too much for me to process, on top of everything."
"Would you take it?" Logan asked, half-seriously.
"Nyet. I like my mutation. What I do not like are the problems it has caused for my friends and family. But the cure will do nothing to help that."
"Amen," said Logan, celebrating with a gulp of beer.
Peter turned his attention to Kurt. "But what of you, Kurt? You seemed so sure in the meeting, but I wonder if you are being totally honest."
"You think I want the cure?" Kurt asked.
"No," said Peter. "But I do think you are exaggerating your certainty on the issue."
Kurt eyed him, wondering when he'd gotten so perceptive. "Maybe," he conceded. "But really, I'm like you. I like my mutation. What I don't like is when it becomes a burden—on myself or others."
Peter nodded gravely, but Kurt could tell he suspected the issue was more complicated than he was letting on.
"Well aren't you all a bunch of philosophers," Logan drawled.
"But how is everyone else?" asked Peter, switching tracks. "Emma? Running the school? And she is… with Scott?"
"Yup," Logan confirmed. "Crazy how things come full circle, ain't it?"
"And how is Ororo?"
Logan snorted. "Ororo is as Ororo does. You know—same old."
Peter's eyes grew distant again before he dropped his gaze to his beer.
He said, "I find she looks… older."
"Don't tell her that," Logan joked.
"I do not mean physically. It is just that… I sense you have all been through a lot while I have been gone."
"That's why we're so glad you're back," said Logan. "We could really use an extra pair of hands. Especially ones made out of organic steel."
Peter raised his eyes to Logan's. "Are you seeing anyone, Logan?"
"Next question."
"And Ororo?"
"Really, Piotr," said Kurt, forcing a smile as he re-entered the conversation. "You should know her better than that."
Logan said, "Hard to believe, sometimes, that you guys used to fight over her back in the day."
"I love Ororo as a sister," said Peter. "To think there could have been something more was… misguided."
"What about you, elf?"
Kurt less than subtly redirected the question. "It seems to me that of late, you've been spending more time with her than anyone."
Logan grinned. "What're friends for, right?"
The conversation continued for well over an hour and several more beers with the reminiscences delving further and further into the past, not least of all because they were all deliberately avoiding any reference to Kitty.
"Remember the first time we all went to space?" asked Logan. "There you were, Pete, having a nervous breakdown, and all Kurt here can think about is how jealous his old friends are gonna be when he gets back to Earth and tells 'em about it."
"Kurt has always been a good deal braver than myself, Logan," Peter offered, nodding graciously in Kurt's direction.
"You've developed a sense of humor since last we talked, ja?"
"Ain't that the truth," Logan agreed. "We all remember when Pete saved your petrified blue butt that time you took a jaunt outside the carnival wagon and figured out the hard we weren't on the ground anymore."
Kurt scoffed in mock annoyance. "You try materializing someplace—anyplace—you didn't expect after a teleport. It is not a pleasant experience."
"Do not worry, friend Kurt," Peter assured him, fighting back a smile. "I am always happy to help. Especially since you weigh so little."
They all laughed, then, but Kurt's heart wasn't in it. Although he did feel truly grateful for the miracle of his dear friend's resurrection, everything seemed to strike him the wrong way, every joke bearing the ring of an unwelcome double entendre. Each beer and each memory made him feel increasingly unmoored, thrusting him back into situations and eras he was happier leaving behind forever. Also, the more conspicuously absent Kitty was in their remembrances, the more he found himself thinking about her, from the early days but also from two hours before in the conference room, when he'd caught her, out of the corner of his eye, studying himself and Peter in turn. What did she see, he wondered, when she compared them side-by-side? Did she see two different men? A current lover and a former one? One mutation and another?
As he considered the question, Kurt studied Peter's face and body for hints, for the unknowable secret of Kitty's perception. With his broad shoulders, wide forehead, square jaw, blue eyes, and black hair, it was Peter who, out of all the X-Men, most resembled a comic book hero. He looks like Superman, Kurt thought. Like a Russian Superman…
And the longer Kurt looked the louder Hank's words seemed to resound inside his brain: "…people whose mutations are not… viable…"
Kurt's arms contracted tighter around his body, hand clenching the neck of his bottle. He already had a memory of what it felt like without his fur—without his tail—although he usually chose to remember the time he'd had his X gene negated by Mr. Sinister's manipulation of the High Evolutionary's technology as a foggy dream. But in reality, it was a nightmare. And now, it came unbidden to Kurt's mind, the way he'd felt imprisoned within his newly smooth skin, every touch, every step, feeling like a haunting, as though his consciousness were haunting the body of a stranger. Without his tail, he hadn't even been able to walk a straight line; the world was suddenly tilted at an angle for which he was always over-compensating in the wrong direction, a situation his five-toed feet only exacerbated. For a whole week, he'd been tripping over those feet before finally reaching the first stage of acceptance, broken-heartedly admitting that he simply wasn't able to move the way he used to. Yet for someone who had once enjoyed an inborn grace, an almost preturnatural althleticism and agility hardwired into his very genetic structure, such an experience had been beyond humiliating—it had been outright torture.
Truly, every change wrought upon his body had felt like a mutilation; even gaining toes and fingers had felt like losing something. The whole experience had been so objectively appalling that when Kurt thought about it, as when he thought about the cure, it wasn't that he doubted himself—not really. Instead, where doubt crept in was when he considered the decision someone else might make—or thought they might make—if they were in his place, inside his skin. Jim Vanderbeek's good-natured reassurance to the contrary, Kurt felt certain that most people wouldn't hesitate to take the cure; after all, it takes a special person to actually want to be a freak.
And was that, after all, what it was? The world would be safer without mutants, of that there was no doubt. Yet that end did not justify the means of forcing people to abandon the gifts they'd been born with. Still, though, what right did he have to make his own decision, to choose pleasures of the flesh over the needs of the many, the very security and future of the planet? Parsed within such a context, the selfishness of his choice rankled him. If he was being honest with himself, he had to admit that nearly equal with the physical terror of having his body altered was the psychological terror of normalcy, of mediocrity.
Kurt caught his reflection in his beer bottle as he raised it to his lips, his face long and distorted in the green glass. His eyes were bottomless holes in a dark, wavering mass whose edges were defined by points, by sharp ears that seemed as big as his face, and by the glistening, elongated white tip of a fang that flickered into view as he opened his mouth to drink.
Kurt's hand felt unsteady as he completed the difficult task of swallowing. He actually started when he heard Logan speak his name.
"Kurt. Hey, elf—you still with us, here?"
"Ja," Kurt breathed. "I just… Maybe I should…"
He was unable to avoid a final, uncomfortable glance at Peter, who respectfully dropped his eyes, perceiving correctly that if Kurt left, he would be going to Kitty's quarters, rather than his own.
On his way out Kurt stopped next to Peter, laying a hand on his shoulder.
"It really is good to have you back," he said genuinely.
"It is good to be back," Peter assured him, briefly covering Kurt's hand with his.
A few minutes later, when Kurt entered Kitty's darkened quarters, his night vision immediately zeroed in on the bed, and on Kitty, fast asleep after a long day and too little rest. She was lying on her side, forming a loose s-curve easily discernible under the thin blankets pouring themselves into wrinkles around her naked body. Her pale right arm and shoulder were outside the blankets, her hand resting on the pillow in front of her face while her wavy, auburn hair splayed out behind her like a sunburst. The loosely-pursed lips of her sleeping face might have been smiling were her oblivion not beyond emotion, embodying something elemental and unnameable. She looks like an angel, Kurt thought. But not the kind from Christmas cards or stained-glass windows. No—Kitty's beauty was the true glory of revelation.
Kurt felt almost like an intruder as he made his way slowly, carefully, to the side of the bed, feeling robbed of his usual grace far in excess of his mild intoxication. Pondering her angelic face, he seriously considered backing away, returning by foot or by teleport to his own bed where he'd spent so little time of late. Yet some sixth-sense of Kitty's made his choice for him, as she stirred to wakefulness under his gaze.
She groaned softly, lips curving into an unmistakably contented smile below her heavy-lidded, bleary eyes.
"Hey fuzzy… Welcome back…"
Kurt sat down on the edge of the bed, hoping he was mirroring her calm smile as he touched her face, stroking his fingers tenderly over the tangled strands of her hair.
"Are you coming in here or what?" she kidded dreamily.
Kurt closed his eyes and sank a fang into the inside of his lip as he felt her hand close around the base of his tail. As she swept her fingers down its length, he couldn't resist its relaxing into her grip, succumbing effortlessly to the manipulations of her familiar touch. Even before Kitty paid special attention to massaging around the contours of his tail's tip, Kurt's heart was throbbing between his legs anticipating her, imagining her hands on his body, stoking against the grain at the back of his neck and the base of his spine, imagining, too, her body under his; he could already feel her, supplicating and eager, awash in the past and future reality of her smooth skin sliding against his fur as he burrowed ever deeper into her, her fingers kneading into his buttocks as she threw her left leg over his shoulder and he trailed his lips along her calf before her fingernails raked across his ribs and he felt a low animal moan rise in his throat as his tail lashed desperately against their bodies, begging once more for her steadying hand…
But it was a reluctant desire. He wanted her but didn't want her, or else wanted her in a different way, wishing there was a way he could want her that he could absolutely trust, something less fickle than the primitive rush he'd get from the lustful, sure, confidential way she had of touching his tail, that most animal, least reliable part of him.
Ultimately, he did make love to her, though afterwards he wished he hadn't, even as he knew it had been unavoidable, irresistible. Moving on top of her, he'd had the disturbing sensation of being absent from the scene, of watching himself from a great distance. And the more he tried to focus on the task at hand the further away he seemed to get. He felt the wrong kind of relief when she came and he could allow himself to do the same, a purely obligatory bodily response he barely experienced except to take note of it.
He didn't know—couldn't know—what Kitty was feeling afterwards, couldn't know whether she'd noticed his distress or experienced any of her own. Everything seemed disconcertingly normal, Kitty curled up against his body, fingers stroking through his fur as her breathing grew calm, relaxing into sleep. Kurt stayed awake much longer, incapacitated and anesthetized by warring compulsions to either grip her tightly, desperately against him, or else get up and run, fast and as far away as possible. When he finally did fall into a haunted sleep it was in the wake of the question: how could getting closer make someone seem farther away?
~End of Part One~