A/N: I watched the X-Men movies without reading any of the comics or anything, and since there isn't a whole lot about Kitty in the movies, I decided to do my own take on her life and her background. I hope I got her personality right based on the movies, but anyways, enjoy! I'm thinking this will probably be two chapters long, maybe three.
The title is from a Kitty video I saw a million years ago. I'm pretty sure it's been taken down since, but it really stuck with me.
Disclaimer: I do not own X-Men.
When Kitty is ten, her parents get divorced. She knows she's supposed to be sad, and she is, a little, but what she feels immediately is relief.
They were usually quiet with their fighting, but sometimes they were loud and screamed things at each other that Kitty didn't want to hear. So she buried herself in her schoolwork. Reading helped her lose herself in another world, and in those months right before the divorce, her grades were higher than ever. Kitty had always been smart, but once she started throwing herself completely into studying she began doing even better.
On some level, doing so well meant she wouldn't be just another thing for her parents to argue about.
The divorce wasn't really a surprise, but one thing Kitty hadn't counted on was having to choose which parent to live with. She thinks about it hard one night and decides to split her time equally. But her mom ends up making the choice for her when she gives Kitty's father total custody and promptly moves to Boston. She sends Kitty letters at first, but the letters become less frequent after a while and eventually they stop altogether. Kitty never sees her again.
Kitty is thirteen when her mutation first manifests itself.
She's having a bad dream that night: mysterious people are chasing her, all the way up to the roof of a skyscraper. At the top, she slowly backs away from them, but they just keep coming after her, and suddenly she's stepped off the edge and there's nothing beneath her feet and she's falling falling falling
When Kitty wakes up, she's still falling.
She panics. Air is rushing by her so quickly, she can't stop herself, and she doesn't know where she is, definitely not in her room anymore and—
She lands in the basement, in a pile of dirty laundry near the washing machine. For a long time, Kitty just sits there, hugging her knees to her chest, trembling. She wonders what is happening to her.
It happens again the next night. And the next night, and the night after that. It still terrifies her. She briefly debates telling her dad, but decides not to. She's afraid of his reaction. She's afraid of what she is.
Kitty's seen fragments of the news before her dad tells her to go to bed, so she's heard about mutants, about the 'mutant problem'. There was a boy at her school who was caught once stretching his leg out to trip another boy walking two whole rows away from him. For a few weeks after that everyone avoided him, sometimes wrote mean notes on his locker, until he finally changed schools. Kitty has seen how mutants are treated, how they're different from anyone else.
She doesn't want to be different.
The nightmares continue. Sometimes they're more frequent, but other times they don't come for days at a time. Kitty makes sure never to move the laundry basket. Her dad asks why she's let the laundry pile up so much.
One day when Kitty comes home from school, her hand goes straight through the door as she's attempting to unlock it.
She freezes, staring at her hand.
Before anyone can see her, she pulls her hand back out, hastily unlocks the door, and slams it behind her. In the safety of the house, she sinks to the floor. Mutant, she thinks, and tries to get used to the idea.
Maybe it will go away if she just tries hard enough.
But it doesn't go away. If anything, it just happens more often. One morning in the shower, her feet start to sink through the bathroom floor and in her panic to pull them out, her arm goes straight through the wall and she's stuck like that for ten minutes. Another time she's cooking rice and her hand melts into the stove; it doesn't hurt until she pulls hard and gets burned on the way out. More than once she's woken in the middle of a dream to find only half her body actually in her bed, the other half suspended through the ceiling, looking down at the room below.
Kitty starts to feel invisible, like she's not really there.
Then it happens at school. She's taking an algebra test and is concentrating hard, one elbow resting on her desk, when suddenly she just falls through and crashes to the floor. She looks up to find everyone staring at her. Even the teacher.
Everyone treats Kitty differently after that. Kids she's always been friendly with start looking at her sideways, teachers whisper and stop abruptly when she approaches, and even her friends grow more distant. It doesn't help when she accidentally walks into the bathroom without even opening the door, or falls through the wall she's leaning against. Before long people are scribbling notes on her locker too.
Kitty's quiet by nature, but she becomes even quieter in the hopes that everyone will forget about her completely. She worries again that she's disappearing.
Half a year passes this way. Kitty pours herself more than ever into her schoolwork, and reserves the rest of her energy for trying not to be noticed. Her father seems oblivious. At home they've each retreated into their own separate worlds.
Kitty keeps quiet, as always. Her nightmares don't increase, but they don't go away either. She's afraid that one day, she won't stop at the basement; that instead she'll just keep falling forever. This thought scares her more than anything.
She decides to learn to control it. She starts slowly, trying to put her hand through her bedroom wall. She begins to notice a particular feeling when it's about to happen: a feeling of weightlessness, of emptiness almost. Like she's nothing more than air.
It's frustrating trying to control something she doesn't understand, but little by little, Kitty starts to learn.
Soon she's able to walk through walls whenever she feels like it, but she still hasn't been able to keep herself from falling.
Kitty is fourteen when Professor X comes to her house.
Her dad isn't home and he always told her not to talk to strangers, but Kitty is curious and maybe also a little lonely, so she lets the Professor in. She sits on the couch across from him, as if it's just a normal day and he's just a normal visitor, but somehow she senses that this will change everything.
"I run a school for people like you," he tells her. "People like us."
"A school for mutants," Kitty says. It's the first time she's ever said that word out loud.
"Yes," the Professor says carefully, gauging her reaction.
Kitty shifts her gaze to her hands, then back up to him. "So you can help me control it?" she blurts out, thinking of the nightmares, the endless falling.
Yes, he tells her, and he tells her about his school, even gives her a brochure, and sitting there with him, Kitty doesn't feel so out of place. She feels comfortable, and safe, and not at all invisible.
That's when her dad comes home. He stops in his tracks, seeing her sitting across from a complete stranger, but the Professor wheels over and offers his hand and Kitty's dad reluctantly accepts the handshake.
"You're a mutant too, aren't you," he says accusingly. "You run the mutant school. And you want my daughter to go there."
The Professor looks surprised, but the expression is only there for an instant.
"I know who you are," Kitty's dad continues. "You don't have to lie to me."
Kitty just blinks at him. She didn't know he knew. She wonders why he never said anything.
"Can I talk to my daughter alone," he says, more of a command then a question. The Professor gives him a long, searching glance, but he nods and leaves. The house seems eerily still without him there, like the calm just before a storm.
In that moment it looks like somebody else's house.
Kitty's dad seems just as uncomfortable as she is. He looks at her for a minute without speaking, and Kitty is surprised to find both warmth and an inexplicable distance in his eyes. "Listen, Kitty," he begins awkwardly, "I thought if I just ignored this, it would go away. You hid it well enough around me. I thought maybe…I don't know. Maybe you'd grow out of it. But if it's really a problem that's not going to go away, I can help. I'll take you to a doctor, an expert, whatever. I'll help you find a way to fix it."
Kitty stares at him. She can't count how many times she's wished whatever was wrong with her would just go away. But over time she's accepted that it wasn't going to, that the only option was to learn to control it. Now that she knows there's a place for people just like her, she doesn't feel strange, or wrong, or even that different, and for the first time in the last couple years she knows exactly who she is.
She doesn't want to ignore it anymore; she doesn't want to go backwards.
Kitty takes a deep breath.
"Dad, there's nothing wrong with me. I don't need to be fixed. This is just who I am."
Her father stares back at her. "It's not normal. I've seen these—these mutants on TV. They're not normal."
"I want to go to this school, Dad," Kitty says evenly. "I want to learn how to use my power. It's part of me and it's not going to go away, and I need you to accept that."
Her father's face is getting red. "My daughter is not a mutant."
Kitty stands as tall as she can. "Yes, she is."
It seems like he is fighting with himself, weighing her good points with her bad. Kitty has to stop herself from taking a step backwards. She notices his clenched hands, the tenseness of his muscles, an old scar along his forearm that she's never seen before—this man is like a stranger, and she's already lost him.
"Have it your way," he says, voice stiff with anger. "Go to this freak school. But Kitty," he adds warningly, "if you go, you don't have a place here anymore. Don't come back."
Before she knows it, her father is heading for the door.
Kitty is frozen for a long time. She doesn't realize how long until she notices the Professor sitting in front of her, watching her steadily. He doesn't say anything. He lets her make her own choice.
"I want to go to your school," she tells him, her voice surprisingly level. "But I have to leave right now."
He nods at her. Kitty wonders how he can be so calm, then wonders how she can be so calm. "I'm sorry that it had to happen this way," the Professor says. There's genuine sympathy in the tone of his words, but also a certain jadedness, as if he's seen this situation play out over and over again. "But I know you'll be happier at my school. You'll be accepted. It would only hurt you to live among people who deny who you are."
His words ring inside Kitty for a long time afterwards, because she finally understands exactly what he means.