Rating: PG13
WARNINGS: violence, depressing content, astroturf.
1 --
When the explosion went off in Bayville's business district, a news crew was standing on the roof of the Carter building, cameras rolling grainy, unsteady footage of the scene below. The Q6 news team that day consisted of one reporter; a Miss Gina Newman, one camera man, and one tech boy in a ratty t-shirt trying to hold the wiring down in the wind. The feed was live, though over the next few days it would be repeated over and over on televisions across the country, causing Xavier to quietly remove all the television sets from the Institute.
Gina Newman, a pretty young woman with a slightly crooked nose and hair whipping madly across her face, was standing braced on the edge of the Carter building, a microphone in her mouth as she tried to shout over the storm. It was the first thunderhead of the season, a massive one that had rolled in that afternoon, roaring around the city and flashing dangerously close to the residential districts. The cloud was pregnant with rain but it hadn't fallen yet. When it did, the wind would make a monster.
Behind Gina, noxious smoke was billowing up from the street, the wind carrying it over the city, studded with red embers. Fire engines and police cars shrieked in the background, and the camera man had trouble keeping Gina in proper focus. The blistering red light behind her was making her wash out a dark, spindly shape.
The burning section, packaged neatly between the Carter Building where they stood and the historic bank building across the way, had been sealed by rubble just before All Hell broke loose. The Q6 news team had been present the whole way through, having been sent to cover the arrival of Senator Kelly. They, like several other news teams, had waited for over an hour, bored to death while Kelly's entourage arrived without him. He'd been indefinitely delayed, with no reason given.
As the appointed hour came and went and still no Kelly, two of the news teams had packed it in. Clouds were rolling in with a bad storm, and no one wanted to be caught in it. At 3:15, the time Kelly was supposed to begin a private speech inside the Carter Building, Gina had been chewing her pen on the roof, waiting docilely while the cameraman took storm footage to use as filler on tonight's news. They'd had to hump up the fire escape to get there, but if they'd bothered driving out here they might as well have something to show for it, dull as it might be.
It had been the tech boy who had noticed the commotion down below. Traffic was backing up and horns were blaring, unable to get through.
As soon as Gina saw them, the camera was turned around, and filming began.
On the road below had been a group of teenagers, or at least, probably teenagers. Four boys and one girl; three of the boys were wearing homemade body suits, and the fourth was morbidly obese. By themselves, they looked laughable.
It was the thing that had come with them that was causing the commotion.
If that thing had been a man at some point, Gina would have been surprised. He was enormous, hunched and crippled and almost piglike, his head weighed down by massive, fluid goiters hanging off his neck. Strapped onto his back, or maybe bolted on, Gina couldn't say for sure, were two massive chemical tanks, running lines into IVs clamped into his armpits and tubes into his mouth.
Seemingly out of nowhere, a second group dropped down to the street, three teens and one…creature. It was covered in blue fur. A boy from the second group, wearing a black visor, started shouting over the traffic noise at the others. Their audio equipment couldn't pick up the words, but Gina could tell a fight was immediate.
One of the boys, who was wearing what looked like a Pyrex mixing bowl on his head, raised his arms. From underneath the street there came an enormous groan, and the black tar road bucked. For a moment Gina could see the wall of the Carter building rolling up towards them, like a flicked carpet, or the shockwave of a hydrogen bomb, and then everything went to chaos. The building rocked under her feet and she grabbed onto the tech boy, shrieking as her heels went out from under her. The cameraman, perched on the edge, was bucked away and they grabbed at him, yanking him backwards by the shirt and onto his ass. He scrabbled to get the camera back on the road as the dust cloud billowed up towards them, obscuring everything. Behemoth slabs of masonry went falling into the cloud, disappearing into it almost gracefully, until the crunch of concrete on metal and a shrieking car alarm. People were screaming. Gina pulled out her cell phone and began to frantically dial the station.
By the time the wind carried off the dust and the camera could get a clear view, the Q6 news team had gotten a live feed through to the stations, and were on the air.
Walls had collapsed on both ends of the street, sealing off the roadway and blocking the mutants in. Gina tried to keep up, chattering as quickly as she could, explaining to the viewers what had gone on, and what was happening now. Debris had created a protected pocket from the storm, the wind picking up and howling over and around them, but not through them. People were still scrabbling to get out through the back of the buildings, and the mutants had begun to fight. They couldn't be anything BUT mutants. There was a white streak running too fast to track, a girl who seemed to be a walking electrical storm. The blue thing kept appearing and disappearing, and the grotesquely obese young man had begun to pick up slabs of toppled concrete and rebar, trying to smash their opponents. The hunched man, the ugly thing with the tanks stuck onto his back, wasn't fighting. He just stood there, looking bloated and witless, and waiting.
Eventually a girl with a ponytail, who had come with the second group, got too close. The man pulled his head back and his spine arched, his jaw dropped open, and the girl shrieked and threw up her arms as a jet of chemical sludge shot out of him. On contact with the air, it burst into flames. The girl recoiled but the chemicals shot right through her, hitting the asphalt and smearing into a wide, blistering pool. She ran out of his range.
A few seconds later he hawked, lacking a target, and fired out into the street again.
And again. And again.
Steadily, and surely, the ground began to disappear.
If Gina had been a sports reporter, or maybe a warzone correspondent, she could have given a brilliant play by play and made sense of the entire scenario. She fumbled to catch up as more asphalt disappeared under the flames and smoke began to pour up into the wind, choking her with the fumes. The newsfeed, which had already been pasted with the heading "Mutant Gang Wars" by the station, showed the unified team, reported to be the 'X-Men', distracted from the fight, trying to keep the city from burning out around them.
The other group had scattered. As soon as the ground had begun to disappear under chemical fires their confidence had waned. Gina could see them pulling back, confused and rattled as the chemical man began to fire at them too, trying to burn everything that moved with a glazed, insentient stare. Something had to have gone wrong. The fight wasn't supposed to be like this; even she could tell.
The fires roared out of control.
On the other side of the rubble barricades firemen, police and ambulance teams arrived, but the police took one look and began pushing people back, unwilling to risk it. The chemical burned, on and on, liquid and unrelenting. Fire teams and police were trapped on the other side of the rubble barricades, and no one was willing to risk stepping into the fight, even to save the city block.
One of the mutants, the white haired boy with exceptional speed, had already jumped the rubble barricades and dashed through police cruisers on the other side, leaving his teammates to fail on their own. He'd had the vicious, black haired girl thrown over his shoulder.
The original mutant gang were finally outnumbered. The leader, the boy who had caused the earthquake, climbed up on the wall of rubble and started shouting, trying to rally the pack, though whether to attack or retreat, Gina wasn't sure. The obese boy and the one with the tongue were both hiding behind a fallen wall, shielded from the flames. They looked at each other, and Gina saw the small one give their leader the finger.
In his moment of distraction the leader didn't seem to realize he'd caught the chemical man's attention, too. He turned on his stubby, deformed legs, reared back, and fired at the boy.
It hit him straight in the face, covering the bowl he had on his head and the ground behind him. He frantically disconnected the helmet and threw it away as the plastic began to melt, scrabbling to hide behind the wall with everyone else.
The cameraman suddenly pulled the view away from Gina's face and focused the lens on the other side of the street, on the rooftop of the crumbling bank building. A man in a black SWAT uniform had climbed the emergency fire escape, humping a heavy black case up onto the roof. The cameraman barely got the man in focus before swinging down again, recording where two of the X-Men, the girl in the ponytail and the fuzzy blue thing, had jumped down into the fire. The side of the building, where they had been clinging, was burning now, dripping with the thick chemical mess the chemical man had just shot at them. They were in the fire, in the boiling tar, and the fire went through them, leaving them untouched.
The reporter had no explanation.
Holding hands, they ran to one of only two clear spots left on the pavement; an irregular shape not six feet across, and only four yards from the chemical mutant. The second their hands unclasped the blue one hit his knees, both uniforms soaked with sweat and hair hanging in damp strings. They'd both been appearing and disappearing in their own ways almost constantly since the XMen had arrived, trying to avoid the fires
In the next few seconds, much happened, but only one part was caught on film. The man with the chemical tanks opened his mouth and reared back, ready to fire and cover that one sorry patch of ground they stood on (and them) with burning sludge. The two grabbed for each other.
Somewhere in the wind and the roar there was a faint pop, like a balloon being stuck with a pin. Suddenly, the top of the man's head was no longer attached to his jaw. A sniper shot from atop the bank building had blown it clear, spinning away like a disk to land in the melted asphalt. His tongue lolled helplessly in his jaw, no longer capped.
For a moment, clear fluid trickled up from his gullet as the goiters began to tear. The newscamera only caught two or three frames of the thing before the gullet erupted, and then the camera caught nothing. There was half a second of footage as the explosion flew up the side of the building at them, a flash of blue light, and the camera feed went dead.
Caught in the process of climbing the barricade, Jean Grey had frozen in an unnatural position, lips fallen open and face draining to the color of boiled pork fat. Scott, scrambling up behind her, grabbed her around the shoulders as her legs buckled.
Over the asphalt paving an enormous crackling blister of energy had formed, squeezed in between walls and corners, containing the explosion. Except for the wind, the street had gone eerily silent.
The screaming was immediate.
"KITTY!" Lance bellowed, shoving Freddy off him and scrambling out from behind their concrete shield. Jean's force field had stopped the fire only two feet from where they hid. He hit the side with his palms, recoiling with a howl as the superheated air burned his hands, but he couldn't go through.
Through the smoke and the fires still burning outside the bubble, it was impossible to see. The air inside was vicious, almost plasmatic, and through the distorted field something upright was moving, running over the liquefied asphalt towards the edge of Jean's forcefield. Kitty, both hands clasped over her face and eyes forced shut, tumbled out of side and hit the ground, scraping her shoulder on the rubble. She began to gasp, great, heaving lungfuls of grit and smoke that didn't seem to help her. Lance ran to her and picked her up underneath the arms, hauling her away from the fires. Kitty just lay there on his lap, gasping, clutching at Lance's shirt in a panic.
"Shit! WE NEED SOME HELP!" He shouted, terror getting the best of his common sense. There wasn't any help. There was a great whooping sound as the top of the bubble broke and plasmatic air spilled out into the wind. On the rooftop the news team scrambled to reconnect with the station, terrified badly but still alive. The sniper was shouting into his radio, redfaced, furious, and shaking.
A few moments later the bubble disappeared completely as Jean Grey lost consciousness. Scott collected her carefully, already exhausted from the heat, and began to carry her to safety.
On the other side of the mess, a panicked Lance was holding Kitty tightly, murmuring that he was sorry about the fight they'd had and it was all his fault and all she had to do was breathe and stay with him and he'd never get angry at her again just stay with him. Kitty, lungs scalded, gasped like a landed fish. Her eyes were leaking involuntary tears, leaving clean streaks in the soot on her temples.
Behind them, paramedics and firemen were trying to scale the rubble blocking the street. It had been Lance's earthquakes that had sealed them in, and Lance's earthquakes that led to such a painful delay in medical attention. He staggered to his feet, Kitty in his arms, and began the climb to meet them halfway.
Freddy sat on the hot ground, roasting and nearly unconscious from fluid loss and the heat. He was the only one who saw Todd standing on top of the fallen wall, balancing precariously between twisted rebar and crumbling concrete bricks, and looking vacantly at the melted ground where the bubble had been. Amidst the fallen bricks and twisted metal, Something Black was stuck in the tar.
It would be another thirty minutes before anyone else realized that Kurt Wagner had failed to teleport.
2 --
It was a little after 3 AM when Bernd Wagner was awoken, rather rudely, by the sound of the telephone ringing. It rang once. Twice. Beside him, Ingred, his wife of 22 years, pulled the pillow over her head and made absolutely no move to get up. Bernd let it ring again. A fourth time. Finally he grumbled and sat up, wedging his feet blindly into his slippers. He stood and padded out into the darkened hallway in his boxer shorts, eyes still shut, and fumbled on the wall of the living room for the phone. He pulled the handset off the cradle and pushed it to his head, grunting something into the line.
There was a moments pause.
"Mr. Wagner?" Said a man's voice, clear and crisp. He'd said it like an Englishman would. Or an American. Bernd blinked fuzzily and tried to put his brain back together.
"Ja?"
A slight click. "Mr. Wagner, this is Professer Xavier, from the Institute."
A few moments pause again. Bernd put a hand on his forehead, thoughts slowly coming into focus.
"I understand it's very late where you are, but I'm afraid this isn't a social call, Mr. Wagner."
The tone. Through the haze in his thoughts, Xavier's carefully controlled tone set off dormant alarms. He asked the first question any parents would ask, getting a phone call at this hour. "What is it? Is everything alright?"
"—Mr. Wagner, I think you might wish to sit down…"
Everything lurched into wretched and terrible clarity. The formal titles. The hour. That phrase. He suddenly knew the topic of the call.
"What's happened to Kurt?" He asked immediately, voice sounding odd in his own head. "Is he alright? Has he been hurt?"
Xavier paused. "Yes. Yes he has."
Bernd swallowed. "Hurt bad?"
"….yes.
The line was silent for almost five seconds.
"Is he dead?" he asked finally.
And Xavier replied.
"Yes. I'm sorry."
Vertigo had begun to roll up Bernd's stomach. He braced a hand against the wall.
"Tell me how."
Xavier did.
Ingred woke again two hours later, bladder aching and fragments of a strange dream rolling uncomfortably through her head. It was a dream she'd had before, the one where the house was burning, and she couldn't make Kurt leave. He'd set the fire, after all. Neither suicide attempts or burning alive were new to the Wagner family, but both had, once, nearly taken her son away, and the dreams made her uncomfortable.
She rolled over and tried to ignore it, putting an arm out into the space where her husband usually slept, and finding it empty. She sat up a little, frowning. Bernd wasn't a particularly early riser, and he never had been. Rolling out of bed, Igred put on her faded blue bathrobe and took care of urgent business first, turning on the bathroom light and wincing at the brightness. When she was finished she wandered out into the living room, expecting her husband must have gone back to sleep on the sofa so he wouldn't wake her up.
In the strange early light coming through the window blinds Ingred blinked at Bernd, sitting on the sofa with his head in his hands, pushing against his temples like they might burst out. Something in her stomach fluttered and she hurried over, bare feet scuffing on the carpet. "Bernd?"
She knelt beside him, hands going to his shoulders. It was a moment before he looked up.
He stared at her for a long time.
And then, Bernd started to cry.
3 --
Kurt's parents arrived at the airport two days later, having been caught in a tangle of delays and missed flights. They'd packed meager, disorganized carry on bags, and it didn't look like Mrs. Wagner had combed her hair since they'd gotten the news. Xavier had them brought to the Institute and given them a day to recuperate before making them deal with anything else. Or he tried to, anyway. Mrs. Wagner had insisted, in a horrible, inarguable way, that she had to see the body.
Kurt's body had presented a problem. It had been impossible, of course, for anyone there to prevent the coroner from collecting it. The only way would have been to steal it, and with the coroner waiting on site, it would have been impossible. When the fires were out and the asphalt cooled, Kurt's body had to be cut out of the pavement, with saws and finally chisels. In the horrible afternoon light, the only thing identifiable to the poor worker were two rows of glistening white fangs, shining out of a head that no longer had any lips.
In any other situation, the coroner might have held out for identification, but after Xavier's claim it had seemed redundant. The bones of the feet and hands were unmistakable for anyone else, and half of the tail had come up with the body (having not examined the body closely, Xavier had no way of knowing that the last four vertebrae and the remains of the spade were still buried in the asphalt) With a few photos and a slew of papers, they'd released it to the Institute, Xavier having held legal guardianship at the time of death.
Kurt's body was currently under lock and key in cold storage. Once the proper funeral arrangements had been made it would be transferred to the casket, sealed in, and buried. Logan, unfortunately for him, would probably get the morbid duty of handling it. He'd done it once already.
When Kurt's parents insisted on seeing him Xavier had explained, as tactfully as he could, that it wasn't a good idea. The remains were unviewable.
They'd insisted anyway.
From the sound of Mrs. Wagner's wailing, Xavier suspected it would have saved a lot of nightmares if they hadn't.
In the days after the fight, two obituaries of interest ran in the paper. The first, of course, was Kurt Wagner's. The wording was careful and precise, and gave no mention of funeral times or cause of death. It had used last year's school photo.
The other was for a Harold Coster, best known to his friends as Bucket, though why wasn't mentioned. He'd been born in Bethlehem, NJ, from which he had disappeared almost two months ago. He was a professional entertainer; a phenomenal fire eater. The picture next to the obituary bore no resemblance to the man that had been shot in Bayville's business district.
Something had happened to him in those two months. But the few people who knew never said a word.
Magneto kept his secrets.
In school, the officially circulated story was that there had been a car accident upstate in which Kurt Wagner had died, quickly and painlessly. It was what was posted in the daily bulletin the next morning. A few people had been upset, and a few girls had cried. Amanda, having seen the news the day before, wasn't in school to hear it. She was home sick. Their breakup, which was yet new and unannounced (and entirely Kurt's idea) had added the little extra sting to the death that pushed it past Excruciating and into Unbearable. Her parents didn't know what to do.
Also missing from school was Kitty, out with a 'respiratory infection', and several other students from the Institute, including Scott and Jean. As for the Brotherhood, no one showed up but Pietro and Wanda. They didn't call in sick, though; they just never arrived. It wouldn't be the first time they'd skipped as a group, and no one asked any questions. If they had, they might have been interested to find out that all were laid out with a combination of heat exhaustion, smoke inhalation, and dehydration. They hadn't even made it three blocks from the site of the battle before Todd had begun to choke on his own vomit. Lance, being the least affected of the three, had been stuck with the awful duty of getting them all to safety, and to keep Todd from dying. None of them had actually made it back to the boarding house until the next night.
The day after, a day in which no one from the Boarding House attended on principal as much as illness, the time of Wagner's memorial service was announced. It would occur after a small, private funeral, on Sunday afternoon. Of the students at school, Amanda was the only one to receive personal notification of the funeral service. Her mother went to the store Saturday and bought her a black dress, which resulted in another bout of crying, but when Sunday rolled around she had it on with her black dress shoes.
Sunday was a beautiful day. The thunderhead which had whipped the fires into a frenzy had left calm, cool weather in its wake. The sun came out early and stayed that way, drying up the morning dew, and at ten o'clock there were only a few clouds in the sky, the amiable cotton kind that drifted into daydeam shapes. The spring leaves were new and fresh, the grass smelled brilliantly green, and from the cemetery, the town was carefully hidden behind old maple trees.
It was too nice of a day to be wearing black.
When Amanda arrived with her mother at five minutes to ten she was the last one, wandering up the hill in black pumps and nylons, feeling ill. Some ways from the funeral service an earth mover was sitting out with two men, playing cards on top of the cab. Supposedly they weren't visible from the burying place, but you saw them going up, and you'd see them going down. There was no helping it.
The plot purchased for Kurt Wagner was at an odd angle on a hill, surrounded by new, flat stones that made it almost look like there was no cemetery here at all. Neon green Astroturf was laid out around the area, covering the mound of earth, and a bank of chrysanthemums had been placed to try to hide it.
It didn't work.
Underneath a black canopy they'd gathered, a grouping of only family and closest friends. Also one enemy. Lance, sporting a brand new shiner and still looking pale, was standing uncomfortably behind Kitty. Kitty had been put in a chair, a small portable oxygen tank resting by her feet and hissing at regular intervals, compensating for healing lung tissue. She wasn't crying, but she was prepared to be, a fistful of tissues already wadded up in her hand. That oxygen tank had already been used to wail on Lance a good few times already. In the past few days she'd cried, she'd blamed herself for not using her powers on Kurt again, and she'd blamed Lance. But foremost, despite her attacks, she blamed herself.
Lance, despite this treatment, didn't seem interested in going anywhere. He'd had to abandon her in the arms of paramedics and run. He hadn't known if she would be okay. It stuck in his gut like a tumor.
Xavier was in attendance at the funeral, but the only Institute students were Scott, Jean, and Rogue. The rest would be attending the public memorial service. The last two mourners, the ones Amanda didn't quite recognize, could only be Kurt's parents. Mrs. Wagner had Rogue at her side, awkwardly not hugging her, and when she saw Amanda she held her hands out. Amanda went.
In the middle of the group, on bearings over an empty pit, was a white enameled coffin.
The priest had looked to Xavier to confirm that this was, indeed, everyone. It was a catholic funeral. Amanda, a baptized but nonpracticing protestant, might have felt a little out of the loop had she been able to focus. She was standing in a hill, on neon Astroturf, staring at a glittering white coffin. Had the coffin been black or brown or some dark, somber color, maybe this feeling of unreality would've stayed away. Maybe she could have convinced herself the box was real. But here, surrounded by all this black, it didn't look right.
It didn't look like KURT.
But still, the funeral was endured well. When it was over it felt like a weight had been added to Amanda's stomach. No one had broken down, though, not even Kurt's mother, and Amanda wasn't sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. It didn't feel very good. It felt like somebody should have been screaming.
When it was time to leave, people moved hesitantly, drifting away from the gravesite like wheat chaff. The last to move were Kurt's parents. Mrs. Wagner kissed the top of the coffin and put here forehead against it, shaking. Amanda crept a wary step closer before realizing the woman had begun to cry. Once she started, Amanda started, but now that the funeral was over it seemed alright.
Before they left, two things were placed on top of the coffin; one was a family photo, a Polaroid, weighted down by the wreath. It showed Kurt the way he'd looked as a little boy, laughing in a flare of white light while his mother, much younger, tickled him to the ground, both grinning and unaware of the photographer. The other was the earrings Amanda had worn to the funeral. She hadn't had anything else to leave.
From her position at the car, Amanda's mother had watched the goings on with an unhappy knot in her stomach. She hadn't been foolish enough to believe, as Amanda did, that Kurt Wagner had been her daughter's one true love. But he had been her FIRST, and what had happened here would never completely go away. She knew this as both a mother and as a woman. From the car, she had been the only one who had seen the latecomer to the funeral, a scrawny, homeless looking boy who'd come creeping up behind them, hiding behind the marble mausoleum at the top of the hill. He was a sick color, with mousey, uncut hair and ripped blue jeans, studded punk bracers on his wrists. He'd braced his back against the wall and leaned there, looking unsteady and nauseous.
Partway through the service the boy had slid down and wrapped his arms around his knees, hiding his face in them, and shaking bad enough that even she could see it.
By the time they drove away, he hadn't moved an inch.
4 --
In too many ways, this week felt like an eternity. But as their seven day stint in America neared its end, it also felt all too short. It was only seven days, after all.
Sometimes, Mrs. Wagner feared her perception of time had been distorted. It had been worst their first day, the day they'd been exhausted from travel and lack of sleep, the day she'd demanded to see what was left of her son. She'd expected to see his face, burnt badly and almost skinless, but still Kurt. She'd expected to see him lying on the table the way bodies look in funeral parlors, the eyes closed, the expression peaceful, one arm draped casually over his stomach. She'd prepared herself for that.
She hadn't prepared herself for the blasted, twisted thing frozen onto the metal, sitting in an empty meat locker in the basement of the manor. If it really was a meat locker. Kurt's body had been burned into a position of horrible agony, a defensive curl that was nearly impossible to force him out of. She didn't want to think how Mr. Logan had gotten him into the casket, eventually.
That night, when she'd tried to sleep, she'd had nightmares. She'd given up after the first hour.
But that had been on the first day, and now it was the night of the fifth. It was an interesting time, learning about her son, to meet these people he had talked about, and to finally see proof that he had learned to socialize. And it had been a bitter blessing to finally speak to Amanda. Kurt had spoken of her in such glittering terms for so long, she'd half expected to see cardboard wings growing out the back of her dress. But Amanda was a good girl. Her tears after the funeral made her all the more dear.
That had been yesterday.
Until this afternoon, neither she nor Bernd had summoned up the nerve to actually touch anything in Kurt's room. They'd been shown it, of course, and they would have to sort through it at least to some degree before going back. What they didn't want to keep, and what the other students didn't want as mementos, they'd give to a charity. It was the same way Kurt's college fund would be going (though in truth the fund had been started as a sad sort of joke only a few years ago. There wasn't enough in it to make much difference.)
Mrs. Wanger had only drifted through, running her hands through the air above his school papers, afraid on some level she couldn't grasp to touch any of it. Bernd had had to make the first move.
Tonight, with as much courage as she could muster, she'd gone through his notebooks.
Kurt wasn't the kind of boy who'd keep something so dangerous as a journal, but in the plain spiral notebooks he'd taken to school he'd sometimes added commentary, and sometimes lopsided sketches. He wasn't an artist, and made no pretense to be, but most of the time she could tell what he'd done. Most of it was impersonal, biology notes and struggling math problems with shaky nuclear mushroom clouds in the middle of them. Some pages towards the beginning had swirling, lovesick doodles of hearts and stars all around the name AMANDA. Those got fewer and far between as the dates on the top of the notes got more recent. On one, near the end of the book, an awkward little cartoon frog had been drawn on top of the history notes, tongue tied around something that hadn't been drawn in. It looked like it was hanging off a pole. She didn't pay it much mind; she knew how distracted Kurt could get.
Bernd had taken up the more ambitious project of sorting out the contents of Kurt's desk. It was mostly old homework assignments and chemistry notes. In the right hand drawer, however, hidden under a mess of paperwork and pencil shavings, he'd uncovered a strip of condoms, apparently being used. It had a piece of scotch tape on it, where it had been stuck to a piece of paper. Part of the accompanying note had torn off on the tape. There were only three letters; IEL, and part of a D, and the lettering was blocky and jagged. She and her husband had stared at them for a while, then wordlessly chucked them into the cardboard box with the rest of the desk's contents.
They didn't have the nerve to actually sort it INSIDE the room yet. It was easier sprawled out in their own. Nobody bothered them, and if things became too much they could just put what they were doing down and take a breather.
She thought, maybe, she should call and talk to Amanda about the condoms. But also, maybe she shouldn't. Her son's sex life was inarguably no longer an issue, after all, and prying could ensure the girl never talked to them again.
She decided to sleep on it, and she and Bernd called it a night around 10 pm. They hadn't done much, but she was feeling sick and miserable, and couldn't really stand another hour. She couldn't sleep, either, but from the sound of Bernd's breathing beside her, she didn't think he could, either. He was quiet, when bad things happened. Years ago, when they'd both been young, Ingred had mistaken that quiet for a deep inner strength, one that she could lean on when things got rough. Bernd had seemed like a sturdy oak.
The delusion had been quick to fade.
Bernd, like many men, were only quiet because they were too weak to spare a word. His silence was a solitary one; he would deal with himself, and leave Ingred to deal with herself in turn. It wasn't what she'd wanted. But it was what she'd come to accept.
There had been a time, a few years ago, after Kurt had given his single and failed suicide attempt, that Bernd's silence had almost ended them. She hadn't been able to bear the house; Kurt's miserable and shameful barricade in his attic bedroom, and her husband's dull quiet on the other side of the table each morning. She'd almost walked away from both of them.
It had been the binding secret of their son that kept her there.
If she were to disappear, what would happen to Kurt? What would happen to any of them? Could she walk the earth knowing what she knew, what she could never talk about and never confess, that she had left a creature who had needed her perhaps more than anything because she couldn't bear the silence? What sort of guilt would that be?
She'd stayed. And when Kurt had gotten over that blackness, that secret straw that had broken his back, she'd learned to love her husband again.
Through thick or thin, this was forever. Whether she liked the silence or not.
Around two in the morning Ingred got up quietly from bed, giving up on rest, and slipped on the terry bathrobe one of the students had loaned to her, since their own luggage had been so pitifully inadequate. Bernd had determinedly pretended to be asleep. Padding across the floor on bare feet, Ingred wandered out of the bedroom and down the corridor, not entirely admitting to herself this was an enormous circuit simply to walk past Kurt's door and put her head inside. Just to see what he'd owned, still laid out peacefully, his covers not pulled up on his bed, almost like he'd be back any moment.
She wouldn't admit it, but that was what she planned to do, anyway.
She took the long way. She passed many silent doors, some students snoring placidly behind them, and wandered through a common room with a couch and a place where a television should be. She passed one room with the light still on, noises from a video game coming through the door. Near the end of the hall was Kurt's. It was dark, of course. She walked towards it grimly, arms tightening around her middle, and frowned when she heard someone swearing. One of the other students must have woken up.
Of course, it wasn't one of the students. When she approached Kurt's door she heard a crash, coming from INSIDE her son's room. Ingred threw open the door with a shout, not sure what she was expecting. In the room, the intruder turned and gaped at her, dimly lit by the light from the window and obviously not expecting to be caught. Kurt's room had been thrown into shambles. All the desk drawers had been yanked back out, the dresser drawers yawning and rifled. The mattress had been flipped up on its side, exposing the empty space underneath the bed. The intruder, a gangly, hunched boy in a brown sweater, was clutching a shoebox he'd taken from underneath there, webbed fingers gone white. Ingred put a hand up to turn on the light, and the boy shook out of his stupor. He took an enormous leap towards the open window, holding onto the box, and Ingred lunged after him, catching him by the torn leg of his jean. The boy yelped and, unbalanced, fell chin first onto the floor. The box jumped out of his grip and spilled open underneath the window.
The boy made a scramble for the box, and Ingred walloped him over the head with Kurt's desk lamp. He shrieked and dropped it again, slapping his palms over his injured skull, and Ingred vaguely noticed that he was bleeding. The boy scrambled out the window and dropped out of sight. She ran to the sill, expecting to hear the sickening crack as he hit the ground, but when she got there he was already disappearing, hopping like a frog for the Institute's fence. Ingred made sure he actually went over it, then looked back into the room. What would he want to steal? How could anyone steal from a dead boy? He had to be a mutant; he couldn't be anything else, but was he from the Institute? He looked vaguely familiar. Knowing she was going to take this up with Xavier first thing, Ingred stooped and began carefully collecting the shoebox.
Its contents were simple; one Polaroid camera, the one they'd sent him for his birthday so he could send them pictures of his new home, and about a film pack's worth of photographs. She scooped them together carefully and squinted at them in the dim light. It was too dark to see properly; they were badly shot. Standing up, she crossed and turned on the light, nudging the mattress back down with a springy whump onto the frame as she passed it.
The photographs, about twenty in all, were all of the same person.
Ingred quickly sat down on the bed.
They were in disarray and out of order, but they weren't impossible. In the first photograph there was that ugly, familiar boy, the one who had just been in here stealing. He was wearing the same brown sweater and the same torn jeans, with black bracers around his wrists. He was just sitting on the railing of somewhere, at least two floors up, slouched over with a cigarette wedged in his teeth. He was giving the camera a suspicious look. Behind him, in the lot adjacent, was a truck station as seen at sundown, the light making everything orange.
It was a place she'd never seen before, and these were obviously not photos intended for prying eyes.
Ingred went through them carefully, turning them the right way as she went. The next was a picture of a Day's Inn sign, the webbed hand making a victory V the only human part in the picture. The next one was badly out of sequence; that ugly boy was shirtless, sitting in a window in the middle of the night and smoking again. It was a candid shot, but a good one. The next; Kurt himself, at a twisted angle, trying to wrestle the camera away from whoever held it. He was laughing, though. He was also completely naked.
Ingred thought maybe she should stop. This wasn't her business.
She kept going.
The next photo, out of sequence; the ugly boy tangled in the sheets of a motel bed, skin shiny with sweat, mouth open, and eyes closed. He was half turgid. He had either just been, or his partner had been, quite thoroughly fucked.
She didn't need to ask who the partner was.
The next photo, another weird angle; she could see the top of the ugly boy's head, and part of his face. There was something blue, the way her son's chest and stomach had to look from his own point of view. The boy had his mouth and a hand around Kurt's—
That was it for her. Ingred shoved the Polaroids and the camera back in the box, slapping the lid down. She didn't realize she was shaking a little.
That was what the boy had been trying to steal, evidence of…of…what? Her son's and his own homosexual experimentation? One night in a motel with a Polaroid camera?
…How many nights had there been WITHOUT the camera?
Ingred's stomach felt a little weak. How long did you have to be going with someone before you let them take pictures of that? She never would have done it, not in a million years, and she couldn't see anyone doing it on a one night stand. And if it was awkward, one shot experimentation, why had Kurt brought the Polaroid? Why would he want a record?
And…what about AMANDA? Hadn't Kurt always gushed about her when they talked on the phone? Hadn't he been acting like the perfect lovesick boy? True, he'd slowed down on that after a while, and in the past few months he'd all but stopped, but Ingred had just thought things were getting more serious. When something moved from Infatuation to Love, you didn't always want to tell your parents about it.
Maybe he'd stopped talking about it because he'd been doing other things, and couldn't risk the questions.
Feeling a little ill, and knowing maybe more about her son now than she'd wanted to, Ingred stuffed the photos under the bed again and left the room in disarray. She turned out the lights as she went.
5 --
It all looked so…empty without Kurt's things. The rooms in the house were nondescript, designed to be used over and over by different students with no regards for personality. The room had been scrubbed and reassembled, the linens changed and a new, impersonal comforter put on the bed. The shelves were empty and dusted and the curtains were drawn, leaving the room dark and smelling vaguely of clean linens and Windex. It was like a hotel room, waiting for the next student who would wander into the Institute, lost and needing a home.
It was amazing how easily Kurt's existence could be erased.
Rogue leaned against the doorframe, looking over the dim room and wondering how long it would take to fill it again. Not long, she expected. With Senator Kelly's new smear campaign against the mutants in full effect, the phobia was starting to rise. It was more and more frequent that children were finding themselves suddenly disowned when their first symptoms began to appear. It would probably take less than a week to fill this room.
Sometimes, a part of Rogue that she didn't like very much told her that it would have been better if no one had warned them about Magneto's 'new recruit,' and his impending attack on the Carter Building. It would have been better if Kelly had been burnt alive by the Harold Coster. Then there would be no Senator, and there would have been no fight, and everyone would be okay. Kitty wouldn't be carrying around that oxygen tank and wheezing when she walked, lungs burned and possibly never to recover completely. The police wouldn't have had the opportunity to shoot Magneto's new man, whom Rogue suspected wasn't working under his own free will. And Kurt wouldn't have died.
Todd should have kept his damned mouth shut.
Oh, she knew for a fact that Todd hadn't warned Kurt because of any concern for Senator Kelly. The boy had been scared. He'd told Kurt that Magneto had brought in a new weapon, someone so much more dangerous than them, and that he had to stay the hell away from the fight. Kurt had told Xavier, which had ensured, in turn, that Kelly was someplace else, and the X-Men were in position. Some of them, anyway. An unexpected secondary attack by Magneto in the Institute's computer systems made the arrival of reinforcements slow to non existent.
They hadn't been prepared for what Magneto had sent. The man's explosive nature made him impossible to attack. Unfortunately, the police hadn't understood the mutation, and had shot him anyway.
There were so many people she could blame.
It was early afternoon, and in about 22 hours Kurt's parents would be on the flight back to Germany, what of Kurt's they'd decided to keep already sent ahead by mail. Rogue absently put her hand in her pocket and touched the chain of black beads; the little rosary Kurt had kept in his pocket, bought at the Christian Gift Center in the mall when an X-Men exercise destroyed his old one. After that he'd always left it on the beside table during missions and training, instead of putting it over his neck, under the uniform. She supposed she should have left it for Kurt's parents to take. She'd wanted something, though, something of his that had meaning. He was her brother as much as he was their son.
Glancing into the corridor to make sure she was alone, Rogue stepped quietly into the room, keeping her shoes soft on the wooden floor. Kurt's parents had been scarce these past few days, cleaning out this room and doing what must be done. They'd spent some time talking with almost every one of Kurt's friends, and had spent a little time with her herself. A lot of it, however, had been spent with Amanda. They seemed to find comfort in her. Rogue wondered if Amanda had even told them they weren't together anymore.
She knew Kurt hadn't told his parents yet. He'd been planning to during the weekend phone call, to tell them about what had happened with Amanda, but only that. Rogue had told him that if he was going to go this far, why not just tell them everything? He'd refused, and she supposed she could understand why. They'd been so thrilled when he'd told them he had a girlfriend, so happy he'd managed something normal, and he was supposed to ruin their illusion? What would he tell them instead? Breaking up was bad enough. Should he tell them that he was gay, too? That he'd been screwing around with a cold blooded boy, with webbed fingers and a six foot tongue? How much 'different' could they be expected to accept?
How much could HE be expected to?
It had been a long and agonizing decision to just give Amanda the word, and he'd felt horrible. He hadn't told Amanda the real reason for the breakup, though. As far as she knew, she was the only one Kurt had ever told. She thought Kitty might have an inkling, though. She was seeing someone from the Boardinghouse too, after all, and something must have slipped.
Sticking out from behind the bookcase, near the window, Rogue saw a little white corner of paper. She stooped and slid it out from behind the shelving. It was a Polaroid, grainy and illuminated only by the flash. It was the sole stray from the box Mrs. Wagner had found a few nights ago, and, after consulting with her husband, burned in a wire waste basket out behind the Institute.
The photograph, taken at arm's length and partially obscured by Kurt's forearm, was an off center picture of a kiss. One of Kurt's eyes was squinted open, making sure the camera was in the right place, and Todd had his arms wrapped around his neck, pulling him off balance. Behind them it was shadows and glimmers.
When had Kurt taken this? She remembered his Polariod; he'd had a brief and entertaining love affair with the camera, sneaking up on people and snapping them when they weren't paying attention. He'd been in more than one wrestling match to get the photos away from him. Rogue stared at the photo, wondering if she should give it to the Wagners. She could sit them down, maybe, and explain to them what she knew. She could tell them that their son hadn't wanted to lie to them, but he hadn't wanted to hurt them, either, and he'd thought it had to be one or the other. Two months ago he'd started seeing Todd. Unofficially, of course. Rogue herself hadn't found out until three weeks ago, when Kurt had slipped up and she'd put two and two together. He'd begged her not to tell. She'd said she wouldn't.
Eventually, she slipped the photo into her pocket.
She wouldn't break her word.
6 --
The sun was shining the afternoon Kurt's parents went back to Germany. Across town, reconstruction was starting on the scorched area of the business district, taking advantage of the calm weather. The storm season wasn't over, but maybe they had a few days before the next one broke.
The Wagners had been seen to the airport by Amanda and her mother, who had offered to give them a ride. They'd gotten to like each other over the past week. Amanda was a sweet girl. Mrs. Wagner would like to think that, had he lived, Kurt would have cleaned his act up and married her in a few years. They couldn't have had grandchildren, of course, but they could have bought a little house in Bayville, the proverbial starter home with a white picket fence, and lived there all of their lives.
It was a scenario Mrs. Wagner could live with.
And at the cemetery, the groundskeeper picked sticky cigarette butts out of the sod on Kurt Wagner's grave, cursing the asshole who kept smoking there. Some people had no respect for his job.