There are rules, what you're supposed to do the first day after a loved one dies...then the first week...then the first month...all the way to the first year, to the first Yartzeit. When it was Peter she was mourning, she had drug herself through it all, like clockwork, like an automaton dragging behind it the weight of a crushed and broken heart. But she had done it, all the way through, and she had come out the other side not like a phoenix but like something stumbling out of hibernation, weak and fragile and tremulous but alive.
When it was Kurt she was mourning, she'd done nothing at all.
It wasn't that Kitty didn't feel the grief, or that her German friend hadn't deserved to be honored in such a way. Quite the contrary, in fact: the pain of his passing had been so great it had swallowed her whole, a foe enormous and insurmountable that went with her every moment she went insubstantial and haunted her sleeping hours. Kurt's absence in her life, as she tried to pull it back together and install it into a rhythm, was unchartable, the leviathan in the deep. The heat-death of her capacity to care. She could not turn to look at it, she could not address it, she could not listen to the howl of the winds in her own heart or it would be all she'd ever do again.
She never finished mourning Kurt. She never started. She just put it aside and moved forward and turned the lights off on the parts of her that played pirates in the Danger Room and stayed up until three am watching Errol Flynn and went to every two-bit circus that rolled its way through New York and watched the acrobats with the eyes of an enchanted child.
It wasn't accurate to say she never thought of him now, years after the accident, but it was perhaps accurate to say that the ache of his loss had become something she'd learned to live with. He didn't fill her every waking thought. Not every dream was haunted by his bright, sad eyes. Except-except now, watching the news of the heavy rains in Germany and watching the flooding tear through the landscape Kurt had once introduced her to as home, in a year that felt like it was a million years away, he was fresh on her mind. The distressed, unhappy faces of the displaced German refugees stirred a simulacrum in her mind of the fuzzy blue elf, his voice full of pain and compassion. He had always cared for his people, whether that be the X-Men or mutants or Germans or the Roma, often times far more than the last two groups had ever cared for him. He would have wanted to go home, to help the helpless, to touch and bolster the few remaining scraps he had left behind him of the parts of his childhood he had cherished.
She took the Blackbird without warning or asking permission that evening, headed for Bavaria.
The plane mostly flew itself, and in the time it took to get from New York to Germany-even at such an accelerated pace-Kitty looked over the small portfolio she had taken from her office. Now that she had it all together in one place, it seemed so paltry; just a few names, not even enough to fill up a printed page, of people Kurt had once known that remained alive. Feuer the Fire-Eater, whose name was of course not really Feuer, Annalisa, who had been Amanda's alternate for the acrobatic performance, an old priest in a small town near to Winzeldorf whom Kurt had apparently written letters to his entire life outside of Germany. A handful of others, people whom Kitty had never met, whom she realized abruptly may not have even known Kurt had passed away. What could have Father Schroder thought, when the letters suddenly stopped? Did Annalisa wonder why no more Christmas presents arrived from America, clumsily but lovingly wrapped? Did-
-no. It was too much. Putting a hand over her eyes, Kitty pushed the papers to the side and waited for the alert that would tell her she needed to help the plane land somewhere discrete and out of the way of the swollen Danube. She would have to deal with them one at a time, nor risk drowning in something far more dangerous and more potent than the dirty flood water.
She took a day to deal with each of the names on the list. She had to; every encounter was a process, a production even, no matter how kind Feuer was, no matter how sad and understanding Father Schroder had seemed, no matter how lovely Annalisa's children were. Every day she had to dismantle some of the armor around her heart, take to the fortress she'd built inside herself with a wrench and a crowbar until she'd torn pieces of it down, only so that she could let out the pain and sorrow and the phantom images of a departed blue and fuzzy friend that were appropriate to each situation. She sat over coffee, tea, and most often Dinkelacker-of course-and reminisced, made golems out of her memories so that she could pour all her associated emotion into them and carve them into life with a gesture and hastily murmured Hebrew. Rage. Guilt. Defeat. Pain. Loneliness. Love. Fear. Everything she had ever felt for or about Kurt, shaped like clay by her hands and heart and laid out on the kiln of the strangers' attentions, baked by the fire of their shared longing for a man long gone.
By the time she crossed the last name off of the list, Kitty felt like she'd been upended and all of her contents poured out. There was a hollowness in her almost the shape and size of the immeasurable grief she'd held in her, and she was afraid to explore the edges of the wound, unsure if she was more scared of finding it wasn't all mended or finding that it was.
The last day was supposed to be for herself, to recover her composure before she dove head-first back into the chaos and violence that so often surrounded the school. She bought a cheap wind-up camera at a local tourist shop and spent most of the day wandering through Winzeldorf, taking pictures of the churches or the gardens in the mid-summer sweat; anything that caught her eye and made her think of Kurt. She found, as she filled up the roll of film, that it wasn't pain that she felt every time she pressed the shutter. For the first time since Kurt had died, she could think on him with fondness that wasn't riding on the tail of the sharp-toothed monster that had been her missing.
Kitty had been afraid it would feel like a betrayal. Instead, letting go felt more like she had finally stopped the crying she'd never started, finally accepted the reality that Kurt was gone, and while that wasn't okay, it wasn't the end of the world.
It wasn't the end of the world.
As the sun set, she packed a late dinner and hiked out to the ruins of Schloss Wagner.
The villagers of Winzeldorf had more or less torn the manor down with their bare hands and their farming tools, in the days after Kurt's birth, fueled by their rage at Mystique's murderous deceit and by their own ignorant fear. That had been years and years ago, but no one had ever come to clean up the mess or clear away the broken stone and rotted wood. It was if the locals felt the whole place was cursed, and maybe they did-their ignorance seemed to have no end. Still, their ignorance meant it was a good place to pick her way onto some broken bit of wall and have some solitude to tie her newfound sense of peace off with.
Kurt wouldn't have wanted her to bury herself in grief anyway. It had been hard, trying to pull back enough to get perspective, but it felt so obvious now. He'd have been so upset with her, letting the pall of his death drain the color from everything in her life. She had spent three years failing to honor his memory, failing to honor his passing, more or less failing him at every turn, and Kitty Pryde was convinced she was not going to fail Kurt any longer. No, now was time to try to embrace the joie de vivre he'd left behind, and go back out to live life again instead of simply surviving. Feeling a smile creep over her face, Kitty raised her beer to the last rays of the sunset. If she could not honor him as was befitting her faith, she could at least honor him with his. "The Lord be with you, Fuzzy."
She had just about gotten the beer to her mouth when the absolute last sound she expected to hear rasped itself into being out of the darkening woods behind her. The last voice she could have anticipated, which was almost ironic given everything else.
"And also with you, Katzchen."