A/N: Thanks to everyone who favorited/followed/reviewed/continues to read this story! I really appreciate it.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything: not X-Men, not Psycho, not Coke or Neosporin or even Band-Aid, I swear.
Kitty experiences the mansion differently as an X-Man. It's like a different layer of life that she never knew existed before, thrumming just below the surface.
Now that she's starting seeing it, she sees all of it, the connections she couldn't make before.
The X-Men train hard and often. Everyone knows about Danger Room sessions, although they aren't as glamorous as the younger students believe them to be: there's a lot more sweat and tears and (occasionally) blood involved than in the alluring spy-movie version the kids tell stories about. But on top of training in the Danger Room, the X-Men have sparring days and miles of meetings and even sometimes regular gym workouts—treadmills and bench presses and all, which Kitty, quite frankly, finds completely insane ("Overkill" she'd whispered once to Bobby, who'd surreptitiously nodded). And that's not even the end of it. The newer members of the team—Piotr, Rogue, and Bobby—often have individual training sessions that seek to improve their weak spots and expound upon their strengths, much like the work Kitty's been doing with Logan. Bobby has told her before about his training with Storm, finding new applications for his mutation, stretching it to its limits. She learns that Rogue works with the Professor and Pete with Scott. It seems like a happy coincidence that she already trains individually with Logan.
The meetings show Kitty another side of being an X-Man, the side that the younger kids definitely never mention. Every other week the team attends an evening class on battlefield tactics and strategy. They call it a class, but it's more of a discussion. Scott draws diagrams, the Professor quotes Sun Tzu's The Art of War, and Kitty, mildly disturbed, sits and listens. The idea that they might be fighting wars does not sit well with her. She wants to protect people and improve public opinion of mutants—she wants the same thing as all of them, the Professor's dream. But…war? Is it really unavoidable?
Regardless, the information is useful, and she takes copious notes. It's not just war strategies they discuss, either: topics have drifted to knot tying and cleaning wounds and even water purification, all kinds of things any of them might possibly need to know. It resembles a think tank of sorts. There's always a half hour set aside, though, where they go over various code-named strategies—A2 and C15 and all kinds of numbers that Kitty has to make flashcards for in order to remember them all.
Then there are the monthly meetings, in which the team members discuss current mutant affairs; sometimes this includes trying to track or assess Magneto and his brotherhood. Kitty finds this more relevant. It's kind of like a monthly State of the Union address, only more specifically targeted to mutant issues. There's also a little State of the Team tucked in there: Kitty imagines it's at these types of meetings that they bring up adding new members. Of course, she's pretty sure the real decisions happen in meetings without her or Rogue or Pete or Bobby.
Kitty also discovers just how grueling Danger Room sessions can be. Some days they're fairly easy, especially if Scott is both in charge and having an off day (although he's gotten better at pulling himself together and making it to all his classes, he still has inevitable days of relapse). Other times they're ridiculously challenging, and leave her more sore and bruised than she'd ever thought a simulation could. On these days, more often than not they have to run through the exercise multiples times until they finally get through it. Even worse are the sessions where they face off against each other: Storm in particular is terrifying to fight.
There's a certain lingo, too, that comes with the job: just random words or phrases Kitty used to hear passed between team members that suddenly make sense. Before, Storm and Bobby would share a word that made them smile uncontrollably but that meant nothing to Kitty, or Pete would mention what sounded like a string of nonsense that would have Rogue nodding away: all these moments start clicking in Kitty's head now like a language she's just starting to decipher. But being an X-Man is more than all the extra training and classes and Danger Room sessions. It's the feeling of being part of the team, the sum of inside jokes and late evenings and early morning sparring, the experiences they all share. As much as Kitty's stomach turns at the thought of war, she knows the X-Men are so well trained because they need to be. And though this thought lingers in the back of her mind, she's still glad to be one of them.
Still, it's pretty overwhelming at first, all the training and meetings and whatnot, all the extra notes filling up her schedule. Kitty feels far less experienced and unable to keep up with it all in addition to her schoolwork.
But, as always, she's lucky to have Bobby. He coaches her through it, giving her tips and teaching her tricks for coping with it all, for keeping up. In return, she keeps him company in the kitchen when he wants a midnight snack and Rogue (sensibly, Kitty thinks) just wants to go to sleep.
It turns out that this happens quite a bit. There are times when Kitty finds it hard to sympathize with Bobby's metabolism, times when she just wants to follow suit with Rogue and collapse into her bed. But overall she's happy to have his company. She doesn't think he means to, but with Rogue and the X-Men and everything, he doesn't spend quite as much time with her as he used to. She misses times like these.
"How are you doing, Kit?" he asks her one night, near the beginning, and Kitty struggles with the words. It never occurs to her to be dishonest with Bobby.
"I'm adjusting," she says carefully. "It's just…I'm just so used to people overlooking me—I mean, I was one of those kids who always sat in the back of class. But now it turns out they've all been watching me, and suddenly I've been pulled into the spotlight." Absently she digs into an empty bag of chips and scoops out the sediment lingering in the bottom. "It feels like everyone's watching me now. And—I don't know, it's not as bad as I thought. Because it's here, and it's with you guys. But I'm still not used to it yet."
Bobby swallows the last bite of his hastily-thrown-together sandwich as he ponders. "I've never really been afraid of being in the spotlight," he says. "But when I was the new one on the team, I was always kind of scared that I'd screw up really badly and the other X-Men would be, like, shaking their heads and taking notes and stuff." When he laughs, Kitty does too, like a reflex. "I got over it," he shrugs.
"I'll get over it, too."
"That's the spirit." With a grin, Bobby holds out his empty plate, and Kitty grabs the chip bag and, giggling, they clink them together in a late-night junk food toast.
Not too long afterwards Bobby, with Storm's permission, offers to coach her in the art of the Danger Room. Kitty accepts. Out of everything, the Danger Room is taking the longest time for her to get used to. She finds it disconcerting how fast the setting can shift, how one normal room can suddenly expand and become a burning battlefield full of wreckage. Sometimes it feels like an omen of the future. Kitty knows it's fake, but it's just so real. It makes her mouth go dry every time.
Bobby meets her there in the evening and cues up one of the easier simulations, and through the next hour he's at her side, fighting enemies with her and guiding her along. Kitty loses herself a little bit, and is surprised by how easily it happens: without the pressure it's all instinct, instinct and strategy. When they finish and the simulation powers down, Kitty tries her best to blink it away. This part is disconcerting, too: the rapid change, the dissolving of her visual hallucination.
"Not bad," Bobby comments, brow furrowing as he turns to her. "You okay?" he asks. The fingers of his left hand lift and extend just slightly, as if they're trying to reach out and some unknown force is holding them back.
"I never get used to this," Kitty admits. "It freaks me out how real it feels. I forgot myself for a while back there."
"Yeah, it is pretty weird at first. I know it doesn't seem like it now, but you'll used to it, I promise."
Forgetting her seriousness, she shoots him an impish grin. "Well, if it's a promise from the estimable Mr. Robert Drake, I guess it must be true."
"All right, all right, settle down," Bobby retorts teasingly. "Want to come up with me, get something to drink?"
"Sure. That sounds nice."
They head slowly to the kitchen, trading wisecracks and making comfortable small talk. The kitchen has pretty much become their late-night hangout spot: it's filled with snacks and is a comfortable enough distance from most of the mansion's inhabitants, although Jones does tend to wander in every now and then. Kitty settles easily into a chair while Bobby rummages through the cabinets for the sodas that the professors insist on keeping hidden from the younger kids. He emerges with two Cokes and brings them over, cooling them in his hands as he walks. "Hey, can you freeze mine a little? Like into a slush?" Kitty requests as he takes a seat across from her.
Bobby obliges. "This is the real reason I'm on the team," he mutters, handing the Coke to her. "So everyone can have cold drinks whenever they want."
Kitty shakes slush into her smiling mouth. "You finally figured it out, Drake."
"Only took me a couple years," he grumbles jokingly. "Well, you know the only reason you're on the team is so you can keep us all from getting shot, right?"
"Hey, not cool. Don't kick a girl when she's down."
"You don't seem that down to me," Bobby says thoughtfully, drumming two fingers reflexively against his soda can, each tap leaving a touch of frost in its wake. When he picks the Coke back up for a sip, Kitty notices its thicker consistency: he's mimicked her. "I mean, you know. Danger Room needs some work, but what about the rest of it? You think you're not doing so well?"
Kitty surprises herself with the touch of honesty behind her joking statement when she answers, "Nope, I'd say I'm pretty much kicking ass."
"Jeez, Pryde," Bobby laughs, "take it down a notch."
"What? Can't handle this?"
"I don't think anybody can." With a chuckle that sounds suspiciously like Logan's, Bobby drains his Coke slush. "Come on, Miss Kickass. Let's get some sleep."
Her days are so full now that they seem to rush by before she can catch them. Before Kitty knows it, the leaves outside are deepening into wine reds and the sunlight falls in a late-afternoon slant through the trees. Hoping to capture the last remnants of mild weather before the winter creeps in, she brings her homework outside to her favorite tree.
It's already occupied. Kitty recognizes the distinctive shine of Jubilee's hair, and this urges her forward. She doesn't see Jubilee as much as she used to, and she misses the company: offhand observations, that unique brand of humor, chewing gum and painted nails and loud yellow jacket and all. As she approaches, she sees that Theresa and Rachael are playing a card game—Kitty thinks she recognizes Speed—while Jubilee sits with her knees up, chewing the end of a pen and watching with studied languidness. Kitty lowers herself down beside them.
"Hey, girl," Jubes says, a little lazily, around the pen. The other two are too caught up in their game to acknowledge her. "I'm playing winner," Jubes adds, noticing Kitty watching.
"I just wanted to watch," Kitty assures her.
"Suit yourself."
Theresa wins a round and Rachael scowls, scooping up the extra cards and deftly arranging them. They start the next round, hands flying, plucking cards and discarding them with swift precision. Kitty looks over to Jubilee again. "So. Anything new around here?"
Jubilee presses her tongue between her teeth as she thinks. "Prof X hired a new doctor," she responds, without tearing her eyes away from the game.
Kitty's relieved to hear it. They've done without Jean in the med bay for now—accidents are less frequent during the summer, thankfully, usually just scrapes requiring Band-Aids and Neosporin—but before long they're going to need an actual doctor around. "Do you know anything about him?"
"She. She's a woman. Wow, Kitty, sexist much?" Jubilee says with mock outrage—at least, Kitty thinks she's kidding. She opens her mouth to protest anyway, but Jubilee cuts her off. "I don't know much. He's gonna introduce her next week, I think. Supposedly she's got some experience working with mutants before, so she won't freak out when she takes Bobby's temperature or asks Artie to say ah."
With a laugh, Kitty leans back into the grass and cracks her textbook open. "Sounds like a keeper."
There's a silence. Her eyes are on a paragraph about South African apartheid, but she can hear the snap and whoosh of cards moving from one pile to another. There's a slight bristle of grass as Jubilee leans back, too. "So what's it like, being on the team?" she asks curiously. Her voice is wistful, and maybe a little jealous, and Kitty thinks she understands. It isn't easy to have your friends move on without you.
"It's like a weird club," Kitty says. She instinctively sizes up the girls around her: Rachael puts her mutation to good use in the classroom, noting down entire paragraphs before the others have finished copying even one sentence, but it's not a mutation that will ever get her on a team of superheroes; and Theresa—fighting isn't really her thing, right now, but maybe someday it will be. Jubilee, though…once she harnesses the full power of her mutation, figures out how to use it, she'll be a force to be reckoned with. She has all the bravery that Kitty lacks, and more. "You'll see when you join," Kitty adds, out loud, not really noticing what she's said.
"Yeah, right, girl," Jubilee says lightheartedly, swatting Kitty's arm. Her poker face is practiced and opaque and Kitty can't see past it.
"Just wait," she counters, a promise, a challenge. "You'll see."
There's groaning over at the card game; Theresa has her hands lifted triumphantly. "You're up, Jubes," she declares, and Jubilee shifts over to begin the competition.
One day the Professor comes in to Kitty's individual training session. Logan's leading her grudgingly through warm up stretches—the subject of an argument they have frequently—when the Professor appears. Both Kitty and Logan stop mid-stretch to turn to him.
"Excuse me for interrupting," he says. "Logan, may I borrow Kitty for a moment?"
Logan—looking a little uneasy, like his territory is being invaded—nods, but makes no move to leave. The Professor, accustomed by now to Logan's stubbornness, ignores this and turns to Kitty. "I've been thinking for some time about different techniques relating to your mutation," he tells her. "Nothing that involves fighting per se, but that may help you develop new skills which could be of assistance in combat."
To Kitty's right, Logan crosses his arms and raises an interested eyebrow.
"I was hoping," the Professor glances over at Logan, half addressing him, "to try this out with you today."
"Thought you said you'd just be a moment," Logan grunts, somewhat rudely.
"Forgive me. Though, perhaps this could be of some use to you when working with Kitty in the future."
Logan just shrugs irritably, though it's not an argument. Kitty looks between them before speaking up. "What did you have in mind, Professor?"
"Precision," he replies, in a way that suggests he's been musing on the word for a while.
For the next half hour, he has Kitty concentrate hard on her phasing, possibly harder than she's ever concentrated on her mutation since she learned to control it. She's focusing on it in a way she never really has before: seeing just how precise she can be in her phasing, just how much control she has in what she phases and how much. The Professor starts slow. First he brings out a rectangular object wrapped in paper and asks her to phase only the wrapping off of it. Kitty, unsure how to approach this problem, labors over it without success. The Professor watches her pensively.
"My train of thought, Kitty, was…well, I thought that perhaps your mutation comes with another sense. Similar to Kurt's internal map, except that in your case, it would perhaps allow you to see the makeup of objects, in a way. That perhaps, while phasing an object, you could detect its molecules. After all, that is how you phase your own body."
The idea behind this starts to coalesce in Kitty's mind, and she nods.
"Let me ask you a question. When you touch other objects, to phase them with you, how do you know how much of them to phase? For example, if you were to phase me along with yourself, how would you know where my body ends and my wheelchair begins, or where my wheelchair ends and the floor begins?
Kitty considers this, seeing everything suddenly in a new light. "I've never thought about that before. I just…sort of…"
"Know?" he finishes.
"I—I guess so."
"Then, in a sort of subconscious way, you can detect my chemical makeup, possibly on a cellular level, and you can differentiate it from that of the chair, or of the floor."
"So, what you're saying…" she pauses, mulls it over in her head. "Theoretically, I could go…deeper."
"Exactly," he says, with a proud smile. She's pleased that he's understood what she meant to convey with simply the word 'deeper'. "If you like, phase me first, and attempt to determine what makes you distinguish my presence from the objects around me."
Resolute, Kitty steps towards him, places a hand on his shoulder, and closes her eyes. This is a process that seems murky to her now that she's actually thought about it. But finally, when she focuses enough, she starts to feel it, to really feel what she is doing.
It's hard to explain because it's not an image, it's a sensation, like a small space in her brain reserved entirely for this strange, inside-out way of seeing. The space in her head is telling her flesh blood muscle bone, forming a shape for her, showing her human and chair and floor. It's hard to explain, this space in her head. She thinks of Kurt explaining his own space, his map, to her and feels a renewed appreciation for the effort.
Kitty steps back and picks up the paper-covered object and closes her eyes and pulp fiber cellulose paper and sand clay lime brick and she phases the wrapping off, just like that.
The next test is a tangled mess of cords and yarn and Christmas lights that leaves Kitty wondering if the Professor had tangled them all together himself. He instructs her to turn only the yarn intangible; though this task takes longer, she manages it as well. With the more challenging tasks it's harder to attune her senses. The Professor jokes at one point that he's going to bring in test tubes and have her separate different chemicals and she thinks he's serious.
The Professor starts inventing more and more delicate tasks for her to complete—phasing a single thread out of a shirt that Kitty doesn't particularly want to destroy, or removing a specific part from the inner workings of a watch that she feels similarly about—and setting conditions: keep your eyes closed, or use your left hand, or try these two at once. This is all much harder, but Kitty's feeling tough as nails lately and just a touch invincible so she takes the challenge. If this skill will be useful to her later, she wants to hone it as much as possible.
She's so absorbed in this that she forgets Logan's still there until he clears his throat and shifts uncomfortably. Kitty looks up at him, shaken out of her concentration. He grunts, "The hour's up."
"Oh," she says, startled.
"Kitty, if you don't mind—" the Professor glances over, "and Logan, of course, if you don't mind—I would like to continue this session with you next week."
"All right," grumbles Logan, "but get your own time slot. This one's mine."
The Professor gives him the same kind of amused look one might give to a misbehaving dog, albeit one he is fond of. "Very well."
He and Kitty work out a time that fits with both of their schedules and Logan leaves without a word. The Professor peers after him and chuckles lightly. "Ah, Logan, tactful as always."
Kitty snorts unattractively in response.
"You made good progress today," he commends her. "But, Kitty?" There's a twinkle in his eye. "These lessons are not an excuse to walk around phasing with your eyes closed."
She flushes deeply because, to be honest, that is exactly what she was thinking of doing.
Logan is annoyed at having his class period commandeered and to make up for it, it seems, his next session with Kitty is twice as hard as usual. He won't let up. To make it worse, the exercises he's having her run involve phasing through her opponent, and since no one else showed up today, he's her opponent.
Phasing through Logan is harder than anything else because of the dense adamantium running through him. The first time she tried it, not knowing, she fell to her knees with her whole body burning, but over the few months of their sessions Logan has helped her find solutions around it. Her mutation is sort of like a muscle: if she loosens it properly, stretches it enough, phasing through adamantium just feels like a strain, like lifting a particularly heavy weight. But phasing through Logan without stretching her mutation first brings hot stinging pain, the sensation of being forcibly stretched apart.
Now that she knows how to go about it, Kitty's all right with practicing this: she figures she's going to run into any number of obstacles on missions, so she might as well get used to finding ways to deal with them while it's still only training and no one's life is at risk. But this? This is overkill. Finally, Kitty just stops mid-set. "This seems…unnecessary," she pants.
"You're gonna face enemies tougher than me," Logan grunts in response.
"Am I really, though?" she says skeptically.
"Does it matter? I thought you wanted to be ready for anything." His eyes narrow dangerously. "Get up. This isn't over until you beat me."
"That's never going to happen. You're unstoppable," Kitty complains.
Logan's mouth quirks briefly. "So are you. Just in a different way."
Kitty considers this. And then she gets back up.
Kitty is feeling kind of unstoppable lately. Dangerously so, she thinks. For one, she's discovered that she's actually pretty good with computers, and not just the maintenance work she used to do in middle school. As soon as her Computer Science class started learning to write code, it solidified into a language that she found herself using with ease. Recently Scott's started giving her assignments that are more advanced than the other students': writing programs, debugging lines of code. "I might run out of things to teach you soon," he confesses.
Kitty even starts to see code fitting into the list of simulations in the Danger Room, different scenarios that must begin with a string of letters and numbers. Between this new link and Bobby practicing with her, the Danger Room doesn't frighten her as much anymore. Kitty won't fool herself into thinking she's fearless suddenly, but piece by piece, she is changing.
Her newfound confidence starts to turn up in places she wasn't aware she needed it. In Mutant Ethics, their discussion runs off on a tangent, as they usually do, and turns to the mutant classification scale. Kitty's heard the terms before—alpha level, class three, just labels that meant nothing to her—but this is the first time she's seen them ordered and applied. As she listens to the explanation, reads the chart, hears the responses of her classmates, she's surprised to find herself indignant.
"But you can't judge all mutants the same way," she protests, cutting into the thick of the discussion. "I mean, how do you rank how powerful someone is when we are all powerful in different ways? My mutation doesn't work the same way as other people's. But just because it isn't about force or strength doesn't mean I'm any less powerful than someone whose mutation is."
The room isn't silent for long before students start throwing in their own opinions and arguing vehemently amongst each other. A hint of a smile graces the Professor's lips, though, and it's then that Kitty realizes what she's really said: that she is as powerful as anyone else.
That isn't something she believes. Not by far. But the fact that she's said it has to mean something, right?
The point, Kitty thinks then, is that she has the potential.
The Danger Room session ends and they all file out, the younger X-Men gravitating together. Kitty destroyed two robots on her own today, and despite her best efforts at modesty she's a little proud. She's not much good at disguising the private little smile on her face. Thankfully, all the team members have been new at one point or another and they all allow her this moment. She likes to think they've each experienced it, the point when they make their first valuable contribution, when everything starts to click into place.
"Nice work," Piotr says to her, and her small private smile becomes a little less small. Even Rogue (they've gotten a little closer recently, but Kitty senses they'll never be particularly good friends) nods to her. Kitty knows her accomplishment today was insignificant compared to those of the other members. She won't pretend that she's got it all figured out, that it was only a matter of weeks before she became brave and strong and important. She isn't there yet, and she probably won't be for a while. But for her, it's a start.