A Nightclub Flower Chapter 31: Nuance of Decapitation, a x-men: evolution fanfic

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Chapter Thirty-One: Nuance of Decapitation

Something was happening down the hall, and there was no way she was missing this. Kitty phased her head through her bedroom door and looked down the long corridor, watching as Kurt left Nat's bedroom. He moved quietly but clumsily, completely unlike his usual self, and paused for a moment to close the door behind him with a soft sound of the door and jamb chafing briefly together. Obscurely, she noticed that his tail didn't look particularly cheerful, and even seemed a little droopy, like that of a defeated puppy. If it weren't for the current situation, it might have struck her as funny.

He cocked his head a little to catch her in his sights, and she noticed the uncharacteristic glimmer of moisture in his eyes before he glanced quickly away. She stared at him, unable to think of something appropriate to say, and he was gone in a puff of rose-tinted smoke before she could regain her faculties.

A mixture of irritation and guilt solidified like a lump of plaster of Paris in Kitty's chest, and she bit her bottom lip until it started to hurt. The scene wracked her with emotions, most of which were quickly pressed down and filed away for later consideration.

That certainly didn't look good, she thought, and slid mutely into the hallway. She stood motionless at the top of the stairs, leaning her elbows on the banister, her hair falling out of her ponytail and into her face. She absentmindedly flicked her hair out of her eyes and glanced one way, toward Nat's bedroom, and then the opposite way, toward Kurt's. He was probably in there at that very moment, upset and wounded because she'd been spreading secrets about his girlfriend. And Nat…Kitty didn't even want to think about what she was thinking. Remorse weighed heavily on her mind, but a sense of self-righteousness remained. After all, Kitty Pryde hadn't told Kurt about Nat's secrets. Nat had done that herself, and Kitty had only been telling what she'd heard because she was concerned about the safety of her friends. Right?

She had to admit, she wasn't entirely sure why she'd been so eager to tell. Part of her, the biggest part actually, was simply concerned, just as she was trying to convince herself. Really, she hadn't been motivated by much more than worry about the welfare of her surrogate family. There might have been a small part of her that had been playing with the gossip for fun, but she definitely never intended to cause a fight between Nat and Kurt.

The idea that concerned her was that she might have done it out of the tiniest shred of resentment, some deep-down, pathetic, twisted little spasm of jealousy. Since she had arrived at the Xavier Institute during her freshman year, she'd put up with, shrugged off, snubbed and occasionally blatantly insulted Kurt's modest attempts to impress her. Neither of them had ever initiated a relationship that went beyond a first-rate friendship, and both of them had been reasonably content with the situation, at least since Kurt's transparent adoration of her had died down after they had gotten to know one another better.

Kitty sighed and made her way down the stairs, her feet moving inaudibly over the carpeted floor.

When she found herself standing at the door to the professor's office, she took a few shaky breaths before she rapped lightly and was mentally beckoned to enter. She stared for a moment at the grain of the dark wood, but pushed herself on and entered the office, her body doing imaginary flip-flops in her nervousness. Her stomach felt fluttery and her mouth tasted vaguely sour.

Inside, Xavier was at his desk, his forehead furrowed slightly, and a stitch of regret stabbed at Kitty's midsection. Xavier's long-fingered hand was held to his temple, and sweat was beading faintly on his smooth brow. It gave her the fearful impression that he already knew what she was here to say, and was disturbed, even angered, by it.

Kitty swallowed hard, licking her lips in her unexpected nervousness. She wiped her hands on the seat of her pants as if to rid them of some invisible dust, like the traces of a crime. "Are…are you, like, too busy to talk?"

Xavier said nothing, but nodded for her to take a seat, his fingers still massaging just above his ear as if his head hurt terribly. He smiled lightly to salve her cramping pangs of assertion, knowing that he would have to ease Kitty's mounting sense of guilt before moving on to Kurt and Natalie. "Of course not, Kathryn. You know my door is always open to you. To you and to all of my students."

Before he could continue, Kitty's hands rose to her lips, smothering a gaspy little groan. Her eyes were crestfallen and distressed but essentially free of tears as she flopped down in the chair. "I…I think I totally screwed up this time, Professor Xavier."

He sighed, a sound that seemed surprisingly weary to even his own ears. "This is regarding Natalie's…private history, is it not?"

Kitty's aqua-colored eyes shot upward, her mouth a tiny circle of shock. "You knew about that? Before?"

"I did." Xavier pushed his wheelchair out and away from the desk until he was facing Kitty's seat directly, so the two of them were only a meter or so apart. He folded his hands in his lap on top of the thick gray blanket that covered his legs, steepling his fingers into a strangely familiar shape, like the battlements in a picture book or the tower in a nursery rhyme. "She was hoping to reveal it to the others eventually, but…in her own time."

The girl's face fell. "I didn't…well…mean anything by it, Professor. Really, I didn't." She wiped her face suddenly, blinking hard. "I didn't mean for her to hear me talking, or for Kurt to find out. I just wanted to ask Jean what she thought I should do."

"Ah." He shook his head and rubbed the bridge of his patrician nose. "So Kurt does know?"

"Uh-huh," Kitty sniffled, nodding a bit.

"I suspected as much."

There was a long pause, and Kitty steeled herself for a lecture, letting her spine go rigid and refusing to meet the professor's gaze straight on. Xavier, on the other hand, was simply lost in thought. He could "hear" Nat and Kurt upstairs in their rooms, both confused and upset. Nat's thoughts were jumbled, almost frantic, but she was calm enough that he knew she wasn't in any danger of doing something rash. Kurt, as buoyant as his attitude normally was, was remarkably upset. The poor boy's heart had nearly shattered in one dreadful instant only a few minutes before, and the wave of emotion that cascaded down upon the mansion had left little doubt that some terrible secret had been revealed. The young German was hardly a judgmental individual, and he could more than likely have stomached Nat's revelation about her involvement in the fire at the school. His pain was not simply one of shock. It was one of betrayal. It seemed to Xavier that she must have shared more with Kurt than she had shared with himself, even under moderate psychic prodding.

He nodded, his brow creased and his expression resolute as a thought formed within his brain. "Kathryn—"

She didn't let him continue. "Oh, Professor! I can't believe how much trouble this has caused."

The girl sniffled again, beginning to cry softly to herself, and he wheeled closer to gently pat her thin, slightly angular shoulder. "I'm aware that you were concerned for the safety of all of us, and for the institute. Please, Kitty. Know that I understand." He squeezed her arm. "And know, as strongly now as ever, that Natalie would never bring intentional harm to any of us. She simply isn't that kind of a girl."

Nat leaned out past the edge of the windowsill, bracing her palms on the lip and peering out as far as she could. Her dark hair fluttered faintly in a gentle draft, but the curtains were to heavy to do the same, so they hung impotently and innately like heavy old men. The air outside was parched and summery, picking up the scent of grass on an arid breeze that did nothing to cool her skin as she leaned out farther. It was the kind of weather that was most dangerous for her, the kind when anything dry went up like tinder. Worse, when the weather was like this, it often seemed that the whole world was dry. In the distance, the hills on one end of the horizon and the ocean on the other looked peaceful and calm, so much separate from her world at the moment.

Just down the hall, she could imagine Kurt's room, and even Kurt himself. The room looked no different than usual in her head, with a few posters on the walls and the computer's screensaver flickering brightly colored images as it sat on the desk against the wall. There were probably shoes and dirty clothes scattered here and there, and the bedside table bore the plastic water glass that he always kept beside his bed, bearing an ancient, peeling picture of Batman, which had made her laugh wildly the first time she'd seen it. His stereo was probably on, turned up a bit so nobody could hear him. He might be furiously destroying every bit of evidence of her existence, of their relationship. He might be writing her a hateful, scathing letter, or even consoling himself by thinking of how horrible she was.

Or, most awful of all, most painfully, rawly, probable of all, he might be crying.

The idea that she had hurt him so badly wrenched at her insides, and made her think, fleetingly perhaps, of the possibility of leaning just a centimeter or two too far over the protective brace that the windowsill provided, and letting her body's own inertia do the rest.

A wretched, aching lump had returned to her throat, and she longed for something to drink. Pulling her body back into the room, she slunk slowly into the bathroom and turned on the faucet with throbbing fingers, letting the cool water drape around her hands like a liquid cloak, splashing her face a bit and letting a few of the precious droplets glide over her tongue. It was like a present to herself, and she would allow herself no more than a little of it. She let herself descend gradually to her knees, keeping her hands wrapped around the edge of the sink so she wouldn't drop too quickly, and pressed her forehead, which was feverish now as the frenzy of fire spread from her hands and into the rest of her body, against the steamy chrome cabinetry.

There was a weight that was gone from her spirit that had been dropped onto her head a thousand times heavier. It was as if speaking to Kurt of her dishonesty, her terrible lie, had lifted a part of her from the dirt at her feet, only to be flung back down again and trampled by the unbearable results of her own confession. He had taken her admissions of past wrongs, the accidental deaths, and taken them with comparable ease as a sick man takes a pill. She had hurt him, and hurt herself in the process. With a lie that had become truth without losing the memory of its duplicity, it was as if she had lost a part of her.

Alone on the bathroom floor, wet and smoky-scented with thoughts of regret raging between her ears, Nat Fairbanks felt the ache of a sudden self-decapitation.

It was relatively easy to get past the security system, as it had always been. Of course, the X-Geeks periodically changed the setup of the precautionary technology, moving this camera here and that sensor there, but it was little more than a meager challenge to someone with his talents and abilities. Tiny mechanical eyes buzzed and blinked, watching the grounds, but he shot past without causing so much as a blip in normal operating procedure.

He crouched at the edge of the mansion, against the wall where there was less of a chance of being spotted by anything, man or machine. The bushes prickled at his skin as mosquitoes droned in a tiny horde around his head, and he swatted at them in irritation. Perspiration drizzled along his spine as if he were trying to marinate himself, making his hair cling to the back of his neck in sweaty white tendrils.

He rubbed his palms together and glanced up at the house, and at the sky behind. The white-curtained window on the end, open to the warm evening air, was Nat's bedroom. He saw her leaning out over the edge of the windowsill, and then she disappeared inside. His eyes lingered on the dark room for a moment longer than he intended, wondering why the lights were off when she was obviously present. He had to stifle the desire to either chuck a brick into the open window or climb up the ivy-covered wall to hop into the room, so he instead pulled his backpack off of his shoulders and unzipped it quietly, still dodging the angry jaws of the insects.

Licking his lips, which were suddenly drier than they should be, he pulled out the necessary tools for the job. A few more minutes, and he could do what he'd come for and hightail it out of the area as quickly as possible.

Shivering slightly, and trying to pass it off as a chill from the cooling air as night began to fall, the lean-bodied young man in the bushes quietly rattled the small box to make sure that none of the miniature sulfur wands had fallen out. Taking a deep breath, he crouched beneath another open window, this one on the ground floor, and licked his lips again in preparation for the upcoming spectacle.

He pulled the first of his tiny tools from the backpack, and splashed it lightly, little more than a few drops, into the window. A strong, foul odor wafted into his nostrils, and he fought the urge to sneeze or cringe in disgust. His booted feet were sinking slowly into the soft, dark soil at the roots of the roses, but the dirt only a few yards away was dry and hard, making him snicker. The lawn had apparently been neglected for a day or two by that damned weather witch. He wondered only a few moments too late if he'd been careful enough not to spill any of the substance on the dry grass, but the thought, brief as it was, was almost instantly swallowed up by his own anxiousness and forgotten.

The second step was the harder one. His entire body was tense, and sorely protested his crouching position, but he scolded himself for his silliness and blinked the salt of sweat from his eyes. This was it. Only a few seconds more, and the task would finally be over and done with. Nat was as good as ousted from the X-Men, and back onto his territory. Just the way he liked it.

Biting his tongue in harsh, jittery anticipation, Pietro Maximoff pulled out the match.