Comment to the reader: Hello again! For the record, I've been super busy lately – thus the extremely slow updating rate. Also the fact that I've gotten no comments on this, aside from Mali's. Anyone out there? Please? I love comments! I thrive on them. Really, just leaving any comment on it at all – even a totally negative one – brightens my day. It means that someone is actually reading this drivel, and is interested enough to let me know how they feel.
Oh, and I don't own the either the X-Men or Buffy universes. They belong to Marvel and Joss Whedon respectively.
Chapter 2: True Blue Hero
Kurt stiffened, the scream bringing up old fears and memories that he had tried to shove into the back of his mind for good. A dirty cage, people gaping at him in horror as he lay in a drug-induced daze; the red glare of fire from torches, the blood thirsty faces of the crowd...Humans! Hateful humans! What had he done to deserve this? Why had God allowed him to suffer through this? Kurt gritted his teeth as an anger long dead and cold flared up once more. It roared with a fury and strength that it had never had before, even in his darkest moments. It was the humans that did that to me! How could I stand to fight for their cause? The overpowering anger drove every thought from his mind except for revenge, pain, fear...
"Get AWAY from me, human!" he snarled, spinning around to face the pair that stood in his doorway; fangs bared, tail lashing. Despite their utterly normal and harmless appearance, something in him refused to believe his common sense, and was screaming at him t fight. He saw in the two women everything that had hurt him in his life, associating every hurt and pain that trying to live in a human's world had inflicted on him with the totally innocent pair in front of him. What are you doing, you idiot? Cut it out! The logical portion of his brain screamed back. Kurt fought against the strange anger, but found that somehow he could not shove it away. And it became harder to resist.
"Um, well you see, that's the misunderstanding here. Technically, I'm more than human." Buffy quipped, pulling a wooden stake, her weapon of choice, from out of her purse. "I'm the Slayer!" she yelled, lunging forward to attack the demon before her, only to stumble off-balance as her stake connected with nothing but a cloud of sulfurous smoke. She coughed and squinted her now burning eyes, scanning the room for the demon's presence. "Nice parlor trick." She commented conversationally, unconsciously moving closer to her little sister for protection. "Learn it from the circus?"
"As a matter of fact, I did." Hissed a voice from the ceiling. Buffy barely had time to register the direction of his voice before her stake was snatched from her grip by a long, dexterous tail. She looked up and saw that – much to her horror – the demon's grinning face was a mere arm's length away from her. Grinning wickedly, he transfered the stake from tail to hand with disconcerting ease. She was just considering her option of attack when the demon suddenly and without warning fell from the ceiling into a confused heap upon the floor.
With a supreme force of will, Kurt shoved the irrational anger and hatred away, fighting to regain his self-control. As he came back to himself, he felt a jolt of vertigo as he was suddenly crashing downwards, when he had been standing upright not a moment before. He felt a white-hot flash of pain as something pierced his skin, bringing him fully to his senses. "Was?" He blinked, rolling onto his back and looking down at the wooden stake that now protruded from his upper leg. "Oh..." He looked at the stake wonderingly. How did that get there?
"Well..." Buffy began, feeling more than a little confused about where she currently stood with the demon. He certainly didn't look hostile anymore. "That's what you get for playing with other people's things."
Kurt jerked in surprise, looking up at the blonde woman who stood over him. Where had she come from? He wondered idly. It was when he realized that she was standing in a defensive pose, fists raised, that he put two and two together. He felt the blood drain from his face, and a sick kind of dread fill him as the memory of that scream and the terrible anger he had felt returned to him. So much could have happened between then and now.
Buffy and the young teenager watched the play of emotions flickering across the demonic-looking man's face with a kind of morbid curiosity, "Should we, like, help him or something?" the teen whispered in Buffy's ear.
Buffy shook her head. "I'm not sure, Dawn. He could be faking or something...Wouldn't be the first time a demon tried to pull that one over me." She murmured back, but her voice held no conviction. The man – When did I start thinking of him as a man and not a demon? Buffy wondered – was obviously in pain and very confused. All of her heroine instincts were urging her to go to his aid, while all of her Slayer instincts warned her of treachery and told her to stay back.
"E-es tut mir leid...Was...?" he began, before he shook his head, vaguely remembering that this was the wrong language to be speaking in. His head felt like someone had hit him with a block of cement, and the pain in his leg was not helping him to concentrate either. "I'm sorry." he began again, switching over to English. "What..did I...? Are you...?" He struggled to find the words as he forced himself into a sitting position, grimacing at the pain it caused him.
At his confused inquiry, Buffy felt her heroine instincts take over, telling her cautious Slayer instincts just where they could shove their advice. "How deep is it?" she asked the man, kneeling down to look at the wound in question.
"Its not too deep, I think." Gritting his teeth, Kurt reached down and tugged on the stake, to no effect other than a lance of pain and an increase in bleeding. "Or...maybe I'm wrong."
"Hm. But maybe removing it isn't the best idea in the world right now." Buffy remarked, eyeing the blood that was beginning to saturate the hotel room carpet. "Should probably wait until we can get you to a hospital." She continued, earning a wince from Kurt.
"I'm fine." He said a little too quickly, earning himself a strange look from Buffy. "Really." He assured her. "I've been through much worse. Besides, over the years, I have come to realize that a hospital really isn't any place for me to be sick. The response is usually one of a fire and pitchfork variety. Not exactly a healing environment."
"Err, right." Buffy stuttered, blushing a bit at her idiocity. "Battlefield medical care it is."
"Buffy the Battle Medic has a certain ring to it, for sure." Kurt jumped again at the sound of yet another unfamiliar voice and turned to his right to see Dawn grinning down at him.
Where did she come from? Kurt wondered, more than a little alarmed at his inability to detect her presence, despite the raw power that she seemed to radiate. I should have sensed her long before I heard her speak, especially with that amount of power!
"What?" Dawn demanded in an offended tone, glaring at the demon man. "Never seen a teenage girl before?"
"Not one with as much raw power as you seem to have!" Kurt sputtered, still off-balance from his failure to notice her before.
"Oh that." Buffy rolled her eyes at him. "Yeah, she really a giant ball of energy in human form that can open a portal to a hell dimension. How'd you know?"
Kurt gaped at her in silence. "Was?" he managed at last, looking at Dawn in astonishment. Dawn shrugged.
"S'true." She told him, matter-of-factly.
Kurt shook his head. "Ach, and I thought I had a messed up life. But apparently, there are stranger lives than that of an X-man."
"You're an X-man?!" Dawn gasped, her face lighting up in excitement. "Oh my God, I've seen you on TV! You're the Nightcreeper or something, right?"
Kurt winced. "Nightcrawler." he corrected automatically.
"But..wouldn't that make you a mutant?" Buffy asked him incredulously.
"Ja.,,," Kurt groaned, knowing where this conversation was heading.
"Not a demon?" Buffy asked, just to clarify.
"JA!" Kurt glared at her. "Listen, can we talk about something else? Or maybe focus on the fact that I'm kind of bleeding right now?"
"Uhh, right." Buffy mumbled, turning her attention back to Kurt's leg. "So first we should...do...something?" She smiled uncertainly at him.
"I'm going to bleed to death from a wooden stake, aren't I?" Kurt groaned, covering his face with his hands. "How embarrassing."
"Doesn't Giles know about this kind of thing?" Dawn asked Buffy. "Isn't that part of the whole Watcher deal? Medical care?"
"Oh right!" Buffy grinned at her sister, but her face quickly fell. "Not that we have any way of getting a hold of him right now. I left my cellphone in my car at the high school..." She looked hopefully at Dawn, who shook her head. "Well, that idea is rather lacking in usefulness then."
"Here, use mine." Kurt offered, pulling a small black phone emblazoned with an X from his jacket pocket. "Please hurry, I'm starting to feel a bit...woozy." Woozy in an understatement... he thought to himself as he rested his head on his good knee. I want to lie down.
Dawn quickly grabbed the cellphone before her sister could reach it, and happily examined the fancy device. "Neeeeat!" She said appreciatively as she began to dial.
Kurt grinned at her. "Yes, well, being an X-man does have its perks at times, I'll admit." Dawn grinned back at him as she walked into the bathroom with the phone, already chatting with whomever she had called. "She reminds me of a friend of mine. A very nice young girl." Kurt said conversationally, breaking the short silence that had formed between them.
Buffy smiled, feeling oddly proud of her little sister. "Yeah, I could do worse."
Kurt nodded, and lay his head down on his knee again. "How long do you think it will take them to get here?" he asked her quietly, looking at the steady stream of blood flowing down his leg and staining the white carpet. "Because I'm not sure how much longer I can stay awake." He closed his eyes and concentrated on blocking out the pain and staying awake.
Something in the tone of his voice set off warning bells in Buffy's mind, and she turned to look at him with concern. "Nightcrawler?" She reached out to gently shake him by the shoulder, and Kurt opened his eyes and looked at her blearily. "Hey. Hang in there." She commanded him. "Giles will be here -"
The sound of the door being kicked in quite suddenly interrupted Buffy's sentence. A panicked looking middle-aged man with tousled brown hair and glasses burst into the room, looking around frantically until his blue eyes fell upon the pair sitting together in the corner of the room. He hurried over to them, and wasted no time in kneeling before them, quickly opening the large black suitcase he had brought with him.
"Soon." Buffy finished. "Well, that was quicker than I expected, Giles."
"Yes, well, I happened to be in the neighborhood." Giles explained brusquely, and examined Kurt's leg with a practiced eye. "Quite a nasty wound, but I'm sure I'll have you fixed up in no time." He began to pull several bottles of a shining gold liquid from the case and set it beside him. "Though I must admit, my knowledge of the Neyaphem demon-kin is rather limited. You're not even supposed to exist in this dimension after all."
"You won't have to worry about that at least." Buffy assured him. "Sorry Giles, this one's a mutant. Not a demon."
"Um...actually..." Kurt began and the others turned to look at him. He lowered his head and avoided their gaze, mumbling something they quite couldn't get.
"What was that?" Buffy asked him, wondering about the sudden change in attitude.
"I said he's right. I'm half-Neyaphem...My father was Azazel." Kurt lowered his head and hunched his shoulders, steeling himself for a deathblow from the Slayer that never came. After a pause, He risked a glance at her.
"What?" She demanded, rasing an eyebrow. "You think just because I know you're a half-demon now I'll kill you? You're acting like a kicked puppy."
"Aren't you the Slayer?" he asked her, hesitantly.
"Well, last time I checked I was, but I might have to get back to you on that." Buffy rolled her eyes at him.
"The one girl in all the world who fights against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness?" he questioned again, trying to understand.
"Yeeeaah. The forces of darkness." Buffy reminded him. "Emphasis on the darkness. Not all demons are bad, you know. I've dated a few actually."
"Really?" Kurt gaped at her in surprise.
"Darn skippy!" Buffy affirmed, and laughed as Kurt breathed a sigh of relief.
"I suppose I am just a little too used to people trying to kill me these days." Kurt admitted with a weak smile and a worried glance to his leg.
Giles cleared his throat, trying to regain the two's wandering attentions. "Yes, that's very good and all, But, Buffy...the stake will have to come out." He gave the Slayer a significant look, and Buffy gave Kurt an apologetic look of her own.
"This is going to hurt a bit..." she warned him.
And then it was Kurt's turn to roll his eyes. "You're kidding, I thought it would be painless!" He exclaimed, his voice laden with sarcasm.
Buffy laughed and wrapped her hands around the stake. "On the count of three." She told him.
Kurt nodded and closed his eyes, bracing himself.
"One."
How strange, to begin the day with a stakeout, He thought.
"Two."
And to end it, getting a stake out.
"THREE!"
Kurt howled in pain as Buffy yanked hard on the stake, pulling it quickly and smoothly out of his leg. The pain overwhelmed him, and it was only a few seconds later that he gave up fighting to stay conscious and let the warm blackness encompass him.