Part Two
It was a dank, muggy summer afternoon, the air thick and heavy with the threat of a coming storm. Bobby Drake leaned his chair back against his third-floor window, twisting his head around in an awkward attempt to catch a glimpse of the black limo purring its way up the paved driveway to the front of the mansion.
"Who is it, Bobby?" Jubilee asked from the crowded card table. "Please say UPS! I've been waiting for my new kung-fu collection to get here for, like, three weeks already!"
"Nope," the brown haired teenager responded, tilting his chair forward to land heavily on the carpet with a muffled THUMP. "But it looks like the Prof's back from England."
Plucking a duce and a four from his hand of cards, he skidded them over to the dealer saying, "Hey, 'Crawler, I'll take two."
Kurt slid him the new cards, only to smile slightly when he noticed the younger teen's expression falter once he saw what he'd been dealt. Bobby had the worst poker face the nineteen-year-old had ever seen.
"How does he look?" Kitty Pryde asked, her blue eyes concerned as she tossed a penny in for ante. Bobby seemed confused.
"How does who look?" he frowned, throwing his own penny on the pile.
"The Professor!" Kitty rolled her eyes. "Duh!"
Bobby scowled at her. "How should I know?" he shrugged. "All I saw was the limo. Why, is something wrong with him?"
"Well, the last call he made to us was from a hospital," Kurt spoke up, his long tail twitching in a reflection of his own growing concern. Suddenly, he stood, lifting the dealer's visor from his short, wavy hair and placing it next to his cards. "I'm going down."
"But wait!" Bobby started, alarmed as the others nodded their agreement. "What about the game?"
"The game can wait until after we've seen the Professor," Kitty said, heading for the door. "It's not like you had anything good, anyway. I'm going after Kurt."
"Me too," Jubilee said. Rahne nodded. Bobby watched for a moment as his friends filed from the room, then stood up so quickly he knocked his chair to the floor.
"Wait a second!" he called, jogging after them. "I'm coming too!"
Kurt shot the boy a look as he led the small group down the hall to the stairs. Jumping up onto the curving banister, he bounded his way to the first floor, the others pounding down the stairs close at his heels. Once the foyer came into view, however, he stopped short, ending in a startled crouch on the broad, decorative swirl of polished wood that marked the banister's end. The others clustered around him, eyes wide as they stared at the scene before them.
A slight, slender figure was standing in front of the large, bay window beside the open double doors that led to the front drive. She was dressed all in black, from her oddly old-fashioned hat to the ankle-length mackintosh raincoat that nearly obscured her damp galoshes from view. A thick braid of shiny, black hair ran just past the middle of her back, where it was tied off with a black, satin ribbon. Standing so forlornly before the gloomy backdrop of the hazy world outside, the strange girl cut an almost eerie figure, like a ghost from a Victorian novel. At least, that was the impression that crossed Kurt's mind before his attention was broken by the sharp sound of Professor Xavier clearing his throat.
"I see you've noticed our new arrival," he said dryly, gesturing for Logan to set the girl's surprisingly bright, red suitcases beside the floral sofa. The short, burly mutant did so with a grunt, then stumped off to close the limousine's trunk, firing the group of gawking teenagers a disapproving glare as he went. Kurt flushed slightly beneath his short, indigo fur, slowly climbing down from his perch to stand in front of his friends as the Professor continued his introduction.
"This," he said, holding out a hand to the girl from his wheelchair. "Is Alice Dhoraji. She's going to be a student here."
Kurt held his breath as the girl turned to face them, praying with all his might that she wouldn't scream when she saw him the way so many new students did…
…"Opa?"…
Her face was shadowed by the brim of her hat, but Kurt could tell from her posture how very nervous she was as she looked up at them…
"Opa!"
Kurt Wagner sat up in his overstuffed chair with a start, his golden eyes darting around the small living room in disorientation before landing on his grandson's anxious face.
"Kurti!" he smiled, holding out his arms to allow the boy to crawl up and snuggle into his lap. "What is the matter, mein Kind? Couldn't you sleep?"
Kurt shook his head. "No," he muffled against his grandfather's chest. "I miss my mom and dad."
"Ach, Liebling," Opa sighed, dropping a kiss on the boy's chestnut curls. "It's all right. Come now, sit up so I can see your handsome face."
Kurt blinked up at him, his brown eyes shiny with exhaustion and unshed tears. Opa smiled, gently wiping the moisture away from his pale cheeks with the callused pad of his fuzzy thumb.
It was uncanny how much of a resemblance his young namesake held to himself when he was small. His nose, his mouth, the shape of his eyes… But unlike the older mutant, young Kurt appeared perfectly human, from his rounded ears to his perfectly formed fingers and toes. For the old man, it was a source of secret pride that a mutant as obvious as him could have a grandson who looked so normal.
"There now," Opa said, curling his tail around to rub the boy's back with the spade. "Is that better?"
"Yeah," Kurt sniffled, resting his head against his grandfather's shoulder, his eyes focused on the umbrella stand by the door. "Opa?" he asked.
"Yes, Kurti?"
"Why do you use a cane?"
Opa chuckled slightly, holding up an over-large foot.
"It's my feet," he explained, stiffly wriggling the two large toes and the smaller one that served as his heel. "Arthritis has been creeping into the toes, lately. Hands too, I'm afraid. The cane helps me get around."
"Does it hurt much?"
"Oh, sometimes," Opa said. "But I have medicine for that. You don't have to worry about me, Kurti. I'm as healthy as a prize-winning ox, and for a man my age, that's not half bad."
"How old are you?" Kurti asked, his eyes bright with curiosity. Opa laughed out loud, shooting a quick glance at his watch.
"Old enough to know that two in the morning is far too late for a nine-year-old boy to be up and asking so many questions!" he grinned, adjusting his position slightly so he could pry himself off the chair. Holding out a hand to his grandson, he said, "Come along, Kurti. It's time we both went to bed."
Kurt sighed. "OK," he said, taking his grandfather's hand. "But that was a really wussy cop-out."
Opa raised an eyebrow. "Is that so," he said.
"Totally," Kurt nodded.
"Well," Opa said thoughtfully. "If I told you that I was born in nineteen--"
"No!" Kurt exclaimed, realizing at once where his grandfather was headed with this. "It's way too late for math problems!"
"Well, there you have it then," Opa grinned with a laugh as he led the boy down the narrow hall. "If you want the answer, you have to be willing to work for it."
Kurt scowled, hanging by the door to his bedroom as Opa went in to turn down the rumpled sheets.
"Here we go," he smiled, stepping back for a moment as Kurt jumped onto the bed, then leaning over to tuck him in. "Comfortable?"
"Yeah, I guess," Kurt said, staring up at the shadows of the swaying leaves on the ceiling.
"Wunderbar," Opa grinned, backing away towards the door. "Gute Nacht, Kurti."
"Opa?"
"Ach, almost made it," Opa smiled, crossing the room once more to sit at the edge of his grandson's bed. "What is it, Kurti?"
"Will you tell me a story?"
"Ah," Opa said. "Thus surfaces the dreaded question all grandparents fear."
"Well, you don't have to if you--"
"Nein, nein, mein Kind," Opa assured him, with a smile. "Your Opa was just teasing you. What kind of story would you like to hear? Adventure? Romance? A ghost story, perhaps? I'm good at those." He bared his long fangs in demonstration, his golden eyes afire in the dimness of the shadowed room as his spaded tail playfully snaked out to poke his grandson in the side.
"Ack!" Kurt giggled, squirming out of reach. "No, no, nothing scary," he said once he'd recovered his breath. "I want a true story. I want to know what things were like when you were an X-Man. Before Excalibur and IX-MO and everything."
Opa raised his bushy eyebrows, an all but invisible gesture in the dimness. "That's quite a tall order, mein Junge," he said. "And a lot of it is so scary, it would probably give you nightmares. Bitte, Kurti, ask me something else."
Just then, he straightened, his troubled eyes brightening as a sudden thought occurred to him.
"Hey, I know," he grinned. "Why don't I tell you the story of brave Dr. Peter Blood who was sold into slavery by King James II and became a pirate--"
"No!" Kurt insisted.
"No Captain Blood?" Opa squeaked in a small voice, his eyes pleading with the boy to reconsider. But Kurt was firm.
"No!" he said, his arms crossed over his chest. "I told you, I want to hear a true story!"
Opa sighed deeply, running a fuzzy hand through his slowly graying curls. "The problem is, Kurti," he tried to explain, "I really wouldn't know where to begin. All those history book writers and documentary makers have explained it all so much better than I could…"
"But I don't want a history lesson!" Kurt protested. "I want to know about you! You and Grandma Alice. How did you meet? When was your first mission together? Why did you wait so long to get married? And what about in World War III, when you both…"
Opa closed his eyes, his grandson's questions fading away in the face of the rushing emotions sparked by the sound of his wife's name. It had been three months, just three short months since her funeral, and the pain of her passing was still fresh in his heart.
It took several long moments for his stuttering brain to recover enough to register the rest of what his grandson was saying, and even then he didn't catch it all. It sounded like he was complaining about how his parents never told him anything…
"Kurti, Liebling," Opa interrupted, suddenly feeling incredibly old. Then he sighed, finally giving up the fight.
"All right," he said, resting his hand on his grandson's knee. "You win. I'll tell you everything you want to know about your grandma and me. But not right now."
"But, Opa…" Kurt whined, grabbing onto his grandfather's tail in an attempt to stop the old man from rising. Opa just gave his tail an expert twist, freeing it easily as he levered himself off the bed with a disheartening creaking of joints.
"Tomorrow, Kurti," the old man promised, leaning down to plant a kiss on the boy's smooth forehead before heading slowly for the door. "I'll tell you tomorrow. Right now, though, it's very late. And I'm very tired."
Kurt nodded, sobered slightly by the disturbing heaviness in his grandfather's tone. Sitting up slightly in bed, he called after him, "Gute Nacht, Opa!"
Opa paused at the doorway, turning back to face his concerned grandson with a warm grin. "Gute Nacht, Kurti. Sweet dreams."
Relieved that his Opa really did seem to be OK, Kurt shot him a grin of his own, then snuggled down into his pillow. He was asleep before his grandfather left the room.
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