Warning! Does contain some spoilers to X-Men 2!



Disclaimer: Do you really think I own X-Men? If I did, I would have made sure that Colossus had a Russian accent, dammit! ^_^ And made him run around for a good TEN minutes instead of... well, I haven't been able to thus far read my watch in a theatre and actually time it.



Author's Note: There's Kitty. There's Colossus. They are one of my favourite couples. How could I have NOT written a fic for them in the movie? This takes place over the two days the "X-kids" have in the mansion, and some of the stuff which may or may not have happened. Those of you who ask yourselves, 'What? She's so crazy about the accents in the movie -or lack thereof- she doesn't even bother to write them in?' are correct. I didn't write any accents in because: A) I'm not sure who has them, B) I'm not sure how to write them because I don't know how they sound and C) do you know how long it takes to write in accents??!

Enjoy!



Chapter One: Night



Katherine's head fell into her hands, as her body sank beneath a large tree. She wanted to slam her head against the thick trunk, but she knew that it wouldn't do any good. Hurting yourself just because of some silly emotions was ridiculous. Also, it wouldn't do any good because she doubted she would be able to concentrate hard enough to keep her from phasing through the tree.

A crack of a branch alerted her to the danger. She spun, already changing her body into a more ethereal state. These mean were everywhere! She dove through the tree, and kept running.

Her hazel eyes were so wide that white showed all around. She didn't stop running. She phased through the large gate, unnoticed by the men, but she watched them. There were so many! They were like insignificant insects, crawling up and over the stone wall that was supposed to protect them all.

Climbing a tree, ignoring the sharp ends of the wooden plant ripping her night gown or poking her skin, she watched, horrified. The men with the green painted faces, the horrible guns, and the stark black clothing swarmed on the lawn, all of the heading towards the mansion, as if perfectly timed. The flashlights they held danced in the night, both outside and inside the house. It seemed that Siren's scream still hung in the air, making her ears ring.

Time seemed to stand still as she stared. More and more of them kept coming! Where did they all come from?

What if one of them caught her? What if they saw her and shot her in the tree, and she lost unconsciousness and broke her neck as she fell? Kitty Pryde had never been so scared in all her life. Her young body was shivering from the fear, her teeth from the cold. This awful night was making the day she'd discovered her mutant powers look like a walk in the park.

Her sharp mind finally seized control of her shocked body. Quivering like a leaf was not going to do anything. Fear never did any good; it was as useless as slamming her head into a tree. There were people in there; there were her friends in that building! If she felt bad now, imagine how bad she would feel if Bobby or Rogue were captured, if Jubilee was stabbed in the neck by those horrid devices? These fellow mutants were her friends, and she was not going to let them be captured!

Floating down from the tree, she tried to formulate a plan. She didn't have a weapon; so attack was really out of the question. She could try and take someone's gun and use it on the other men in black, but that was really risky. What if she was overpowered or shot before she could defend herself? Kitty knew she was good with computers, but she didn't know if she would be able how to figure out a gun she didn't even knew existed. She doubted it was as easy to use as the ones in 007.

As far as Kitty knew she had only one course to take. She was a mutant, and she would use her powers to the best of her growing ability! Her powers were ones of mainly self defence: the ability to spread out her atoms or whatnot and walk between individual molecules, or whatnot. It would take a lot of concentration -more than what she'd ever used before in class- but she was fairly certain she could extend the powers to include someone she was touching.

It didn't, of course, cross Kitty's mind that this was probably just as reckless as the idea as charging someone for a weapon she might not be able to use. All she knew was that she was going to be an X-Man someday, which meant that she was going to be a hero, and heroes did not run away like scared little fourteen year old girls.

Even if that was what they were.

All she had to do was run across the field that was swarming with government agents from God knew where, and phase not only back into the house, but somehow manage to avoid getting caught, get her friends out, all while worrying about the fact that she could only phase as long as she could hold her breath.

It was quite a lot for a fourteen year old girl to handle.

Kitty made into back unto the field before she heard the chopter. Returning to her normal state, she stopped and began to look around for it. No one ever said that geniuses were actually smart. Katherine began to run to the house, her lungs beginning to burn and her adrenaline rush beginning exhaust itself. She phased through a wall, and found herself face to backside with one of the government agents.

Phasing through the floor, she went by unnoticed, only to hang in the air of the basement level, another man in black and green face paint only a hair's breath from reaching the hem of her skirt. If he reached up to scratch his head. . . .

Carefully, she managed to float behind the man. Kitty took another deep breath, and phased to the second bottom level, although she had been told not to many times over by the Professor. Just because she could didn't mean she should, but in this case she figured he would make an exception.

Katherine found herself in a long hallway of blue walls and white lights. Or at least that was what it looked like. It was so bright in the second bottom level, after being outside and in the sleeping mansion, that it could very well have been white walls and blue lights and she would not have been able to tell the difference.

'Surprise, surprise,' she grimly told herself, hiding down a corridor. 'The G. I. Joe wannabees are down here too. They better not be crawling around the bedrooms like this. The Professor's gonna be mad enough as it is that they came down here and broke into his mansion, but Illyana's gonna have a fit if they ate all her chocolate!'

Footsteps began to grow loud. She daringly snuck a little closer to the bright lights of the hidden X-Men base. She could see some sort of mechanical device her fingers itched to play with, but she concentrated on the men. One of them was rather short, about as tall as Wolverine, she'd say, but was comically fat around the middle. The other was indistinguishable: just another military man trying to be a big shot.

"We managed to capture a few," the military man said. "The rest managed to escape through a series of tunnels that weren't in our schematics."

Her eyes widened. Of course! The tunnels! Why hadn't she thought of that? Of course they'd try to escape? But how many was a few? She balled her fists, shaking them at the man. "C'mon!" she hissed. "Names! Give me names! Numbers! Anything!"

"I see. And how many is a few?" the fatter man asked. Katherine could have hugged him at that moment.

"Six, sir."

She was ecstatic. Six! Only six of them had been captured? A raid in the middle of the night, most of the targets younger children, all of them with largely undeveloped mutant powers, against men trained since they were as old as she and armed with tranquillizer darts and only six of them had been taken? That was astonishing!

Katherine wanted to stay and hear more, but she knew that time was of the essence. If her new family had managed to escape from the building and into the underground tunnel system, then they were probably still on the move. Katherine didn't know if she'd be able to find them once they got too far.

Pausing, she took a few deep breaths, trying to calm her body down. She was happy and tired all at the same time. She'd only gotten a few hours of sleep when she'd been so rudely interrupted by kidnapping thieves, her bottom was low on food and energy, and she couldn't remember using her powers so much in such a short period of time.

'Come on, kiddo,' she encouraged herself. 'You wanna be an X-Men, right? This is your training for it. Your friends are out there, and if you wanna lick these people then we X-Kids have got to stick together! Ready? Okay. . . .'

Her grand exit was paused. The really nifty looking machine was making sounds! It was pointed out some type of door, although it was the oddest looking door Katherine had ever seen. It looked like something that could have been out of The Lord of the Rings, if hobbits had used shiny blue glass pieces and reflective metal for their doorways, that is.

It whirled, and twirled, and the fat man smiled. She couldn't see his face, but Kitty was sure it was the kind of evil, bag guy smile reminiscent of Jafar's from Aladdin, and the only reason she knew he was smiling was that his whole being seemed to suddenly be not quite so melancholy.

The man said only one word: "Cerebro."

Kitty phased through a wall, making her way to the tunnels in a series of zig-zag movements, keeping her eyes open for more of the men in the green face paint. Cerebro? What the heck was Cerebro? Sure, it sounded a lot like a mis-pronunciation of Cerberus from the stories of the underworld, but she doubted the Professor was keeping a dog -let alone a three headed dog- in the X-Men training ground. If that was what they were trying to reach though, it must be pretty important.



[Some time later. . . .]



Emerging from the tunnel system, she rubbed her stomach, which was growling. Annoyingly, it was growling without stopping. Katherine tried to remember when she had last eaten. She remembered it had been pizza, and that she hadn't gotten a lot of it. A houseful of teenagers and children; nobody had really gotten a lot. But they didn't get pizza often, and given how many hugs Wolverine had received after allowing them to order pizza, it would be a long time before he did it again.

Rubbing her eyes, she covered a yawn with the other hand. Oh, she'd kill to get her toothbrush back. Or have a shower. Or to get some more sleep!

"Freeze!" somebody shouted.

Doing so, she pursed her lips, trying to pin a name to the voice. Finding it, she rolled her eyes. "Alex Summers, relax! I'm not going to do anything to hurt you, unless you try and shot one of your solar ray crappy attacks or whatever at me, in which case I swear I'll... I'll plant a bug in your computer and hide your surf board where even you can't find it!"

Alex's bleach blonde head popped out of a nearby bush, leaves sticking out of his hair like porcupine quills. "Okay! Fine! Whatever! We just wanted to make sure that you weren't one of them." His face took on a rather concerned expression, nodding back at the house.

"Do I look like a six foot tall man covered in war paint, black clothing, totting around a gun that shoots tranquilliser darts like an automatic riffle? No? Good. I didn't think so." Katherine smiled to show there were no hard feelings and slapped him heartily on the back. "Okay, so you're guarding the exit from the mansion, but where's everybody else? I'd heard everybody else came this way."

Alex nervously looked at the tunnel entrance, then at Kitty, who tapped her foot. He sighed and hacked his way out of the bush. "I'll take you to them," he sighed. "I'm not supposed to leave the door, in case they come up after us. But knowing you, you'll start threatening me again. What's the matter, Kitty? Didn't get all your math homework done? I was going to send out a flare in anything happened."

"Who put you up to that hairball scheme?" she demanded, thinking it sounded like a death wish if she'd ever heard one.

"I volunteered." He smirked, and Kitty felt herself smile in return. She'd missed these guys, even though she'd been away from them for a little under an hour. "How'd you get out? Siren woke me up."

"Light. It shone right in my eyes. I'm surprised I wasn't blinded by it." She began to turn red, as if embarrassed that she had used her powers to escape the midnight raid. "Then I phased out. So. . . ."

He stopped and pointed. "It's right ahead. They've got a small fire going, but none of us really feel like sleeping. I'm going back to the entrance. If they find anything to eat, can you send some my way?"

"Uh-huh." She nodded and thanked Havoc for helping her. Kitty doubted she would have been able to find the other X-kids, as they were lovingly called by some, on her own. There was too much open land. They could have been anywhere.

Pushing by some cedar bushed, Katherine suddenly screamed, her cry cut off as she shut her eyes and made herself phase as quickly as she could. Opening them, she saw the metal arm sticking into her sternum and out the other side. Lifting her face, she glared at Colossus, though it took quite some effort.

The large Russian man extracted his arm and shifted back into his human form. She was amused to see he was blushing and felt herself begin to do the same. "Sorry, Katya," he apologized in his thick Russian accent.

Kitty felt herself beginning to feel light-headed.

He ran a hand through hair as dark as the coal he sometimes sketched with, blue eyes staring down at her. "I thought you might have been the enemy." Peter nervously looked around. When he saw that nobody was around, he tousled her hair as he would have his little sister's. "Although, I must admit it is good to see you are not an enemy, Katya. It is better to see you have not been captured."

She felt a sudden sense of relief wash over her. Katherine had never realized what would have happened if Peter had been one of the six captured. Her fatigue threw itself upon her again, so when she threw her arms around Peter, it was so much a hug as it was a hug and a near collapse. Her eyes began to water, and she sniffled loudly. When his arm wrapped around her, she felt all the fear her body had begun to remember, vanish. Kitty took a deep breath. He smelled like acrylic paints. No doubt he'd been up late, painting.

Eventually, she spoke. "It's nice to see that you weren't captured either."

A moment later her mind took control over her heart, and she let go of him. Blushing deeper than she had with Havoc, Kathetrine reminded herself she was fourteen years old, one of the older X-kids. Standing in a business-like manner, she asked, "Who else is missing?"

"Jubilee, Bobby, Rogue, John, Lance, Wolverine, Sam. . . ."

One of the other kids popped out of the bush behind Colossus, interrupting the older boy. His young face was taught and bitter. Pietro Maximoff's voice made her shiver. "Wolverine's missing. They got an adult X-Man! Don't you see? We're done for! They're going to come and grab us and stick us into tiny little cubicles where we get stuck with needles and put into excruciating tests on a daily basis! That is, if they don't flat out kill us. How do we know that those guns weren't filled with poison?"

Behind Colossus, there was a whimper. He briefly glared at Pietro, then went to the sound. Katherine followed him. The other kids had made a small fire -Kitty couldn't even guess as to how- and had pulled up logs around the fire. Standing by the edge, she watched as Peter gently picked up his little sister, and began to stroke her hair.

"Will you give it up?" he demanded in a hushed whisper. "You're scaring the other students."

"Yeah, well, they all should be scared! Because we're all going to die!" At his harsh tone, several of the students whimpered or curled up into tighter balls. He caught Colossus' even heavier glare, and rolled his eyes. "Don't say anything, you dead weight. I'm going to go for a walk. At least I can outrun the guys in the guns." He took off, dirt kicking up in his trail.

"He's right," came a voice from beyond the dim firelight. Katherine couldn't recognize it; it must have been one of the new kids. "How do we know the guns weren't poisonous? Siren got it. Maybe she's gonna die. . . ."

"Siren is not going to die," Peter sternly replied. "She's only sleeping. Right now she's having wonderful dreams of gum drop lane and other such childish things. Perhaps you should try to do the same."

Katherine nodded. "And he wasn't right about Wolverine, either." She felt rather exposed and clutched the neck of her nightgown. "The Professor told us about his healing factor? Those of you who weren't here last year missed it, but we actually saw it in work. Rogue took it to heal the wounds Wolverine had... accidentally... given her. It might work on tranquillisers, too. You know, cleansing the blood stream. If that's true, then he got out alive. It's Wolverine! You've all heard the Ellis Island stories. And Wolverine wouldn't leave without Rogue, with all they've already been through together. . . ."

"And Rogue wouldn't leave without Bobby," Peter finished, "with all they're going to be through. That means that there are still three other X-Men out there."

Spyke's dark eyes sparkled in the light. "Aunt Ororo's out there too, with Professor Jean, on an errand for Professor Xavier. Don't forget that the Professor himself is out there somewhere, with Cyclops. If the X-Men are out there, then we really don't have anything to worry about." Voices stirred around the campfire, echoing agreements. They had found a wisp of hope and they were going to clutch to it until it cut them.

Full of doubt, the unidentifiable voice from earlier spoke out again. "But what are we going to do until they come back? We don't know how long they're planning on being out. Remember how long Wolverine was out before? What are we going to do until then? It's not like we can go back to the mansion. . . ."

"Yes, we can," Kitty said before she knew what she was saying. Even Peter looked rather doubtful. She pressed on. "They were looking for something called Cerebro, and they wanted to capture mutants. Whether we like it or not, they have both. That having been completed, they have no reason left to stay at the mansion. They'll be gone sooner or later, and I suspect sooner rather than later. When they're gone, we can go back. We're young, but we're powerful. We're mutants. We can start to rebuild the school while we wait for the others to come home; while we wait for the Professor to contact us.

"We may look like little children to the eyes of the adults, but we aren't. Well, we are, but we're so much more! We have endless energy. We all got how many hours of sleep, and we're still up, when we could have fallen asleep while we were running. We're strong, because we have each other: people we learn with and train with almost everyday. We're determined. Isn't that what one of the thing of being a mutant taught us? To always work at expanding and controlling our powers? What's that really but having a goal and constantly striving to obtain it? Lastly, we're brave. So what if we ran from them? They were cowardly, adult men going against people half their size and three quarters their age! The point is that we'll turn around and face them. The monster under the bed may scare us at first, but we'll look under the bed to prove there's nothing to be afraid of."

"I'm hungry," Illyana whimpered. She rubbed her runny nose and buried her face into her brother's shoulder. Held in the arms of her tall brother and wrapped in the blanket from a bed, she looked really small.

Peter continued stroking her head. "I know. We're all tired and hungry. Everybody get to bed. Alex and I will awaken you if anything goes wrong. Before you know it, it will be tomorrow morning and we can head back to the mansion for Saturday morning cartoons."

Grumbling, yawning, and nodding, the kids settled down again. Katherine watched as Peter put his sister down on the ground beside Siren, who was still sleeping. They both looked like little angels. She followed him to an unoccupied stump, and sat down beside him. Kitty reached out and touched his arm gently. "Are you really planning on staying up alright? Aren't you going to get any sleep?"

"Nyet. Ah, no, Katya. I told them that I would stay up, and I will. It's not like I haven't pulled all-nighters before. Except last time I also had caffeine. Your speech. . . ." He seemed to turn red, but he smiled and continued, pushing his emotion away. That was usually a difficult task for Peter. "Your speech was motivated, but it didn't remove all my doubts. They wanted mutants, and they have six. As you said, they are cowards. They may not be satisfied with six mutants."

He paused. "Have you thought about going into politics or something, Katya? You speak quite well. Myself, I'd like to teach art, but I might end up getting you to write my lectures for me."

Katherine grinned, then covered a yawn with her hand. He suggested she catch some sleep, but Kitty refused. "If you're not going to sleep, then I'm not either." She paused. "Ah, thank you, though, Peter."

Her hair fell over her shoulder, and the firelight flickered over her face. Peter saw her shiver, and he wrapped a large arm over her shoulder, drawing her close. Some of the kids were sharing blankets, but the older students had refused them. They could deal with and get over a cold sooner than the younger children. She looked so pretty to him, just now. His fingertips began to itch for his art supplies, wishing he could draw her, just as she was at that moment. Just as he was contemplating working up the courage to give Katherine a peck on the cheek, she repeated a question for the third time.

"I asked you if you knew what Cerebro was. If we knew what this Cerebro is, then maybe we could figure out why they would want it."

"Sorry, tovarisch. I don't know what this Cerebro is. Perhaps when Storm and Jean get back, they may be able to suggest possible reason as to why. Myself, I am more interested in knowing how it was there, or that the Xavier Institute was actually a school made entirely of mutants."

Neither or spoke for what seemed like a very long time. They focussed on the fire, watching it slowly die out. Eventually, Pietro came back and curled up in a corner with some of his friends. Havok also returned, all but dragging himself. He just fell to the ground, already snoring.

Peter pulled Katherine a little closer, leaning their heads together. They were both so comfortable, they worried about falling asleep, but both of them were so determined to stay awake and protect their friends they remained wide awake. "Katya?" he whispered when the stars were at their brightest.

"Yeah?" she asked, her voice quieter than a cat's footsteps.

"I truly am most relieved to see that you're safe and sound."

"Are you trying to make small talk, Peter?"

"Nyet."

"Well in that case, I'm glad you're here too."