Chapter Ten

Kurt reappeared in an empty classroom some distance from the bustling gym. Hurriedly replacing his holowatch on his wrist, he raced down the corridor, nearly slipping on the freshly-waxed tiles as he turned into the packed room. Quickly scanning the crowd for a familiar face, his eyes fell on Scott, talking by the refreshments table with a pretty young girl with dark hair.

"Scott!" he called out, and waved.

Scott's head shot up, his features brightening with relief, more than happy for the distraction. Excusing himself from his conversation with the disappointed girl, he practically ran over to Kurt on his long legs.

"What's up, man?" he asked, curious.

"Something's come up and I must leave," he explained quickly, hoping he didn't sound too suspicious. "Will you tell Kitty I'm really sorry? And please, don't feel you have to wait up for me." He shot him a conspiratorial smile. "I have my own means of transportation."

Scott nodded his understanding.

"Sure, man. Don't worry about it. Anything I can help you with?"

Kurt shook his head.

"No, sorry. This is something I must deal with myself."

He turned to leave, favoring Scott with one last grateful smile.

"Danke, Scott," he said. "I owe you one."

"No, man, it's me that owes you! Your interruption may have just saved my life."

Kurt nodded politely, favoring Scott with an amused smile.

"Then I was glad to be of service."

Kurt chuckled as he turned away, remembering how Scott had always been running from the attentions of that dark-haired girl. What was her name...? It wasn't important. He had to get back to Mystique. He wasn't about to let this unexpected opportunity to learn the answers to questions that had tortured him all his life pass him by.

And, he couldn't deny, even if she told him nothing, even if she did nothing more than glare at him from across the table, it would satisfy him just to spend some real time with his mother. Sad as it seemed, that conversation they'd had among the trees had been the longest, most sincere talk they had ever shared. He wasn't ready for it to end so soon, not when she'd actually seemed willing to accept his offer.

Kurt strode briskly down the corridor, using his sense of spatial awareness to tell him when Scott walked back into the gym. The moment he was certain he was no longer being watched, Kurt dove back into the privacy of the abandoned classroom and teleported to the stairs where he'd left his mother.

She was gone.


"Kurt?"

"Hmmm?"

"Why have you never asked me what my powers are?"

Kurt blinked, coming quickly out of the pleasant, dreamy daze his thoughts had fallen into as he crouched on the railing of his balcony, his tail coiled loosely around Alice's waist and her head resting comfortably against his knee.

"What?"

Alice turned her head to look up at him.

"You're the only one who hasn't asked me," she said. "I was just wondering..."

Kurt shifted his position on the railing, his tail uncoiling to twitch nervously behind him.

"Well," he said at last, "you never seem to want to talk about it. After your sessions with the Professor, you always seem so exhausted. I know that, whatever your powers are, they trouble you a lot, and I didn't want to add to that by asking you questions you didn't feel comfortable answering."

He shrugged, turning his gaze to the full moon.

"I guess I just figured if you wanted me to know, you'd tell me on your own."

Alice smiled, then quickly turned away, rubbing at her eyes.

"Gnat," she explained, though by this time, Kurt knew better. Alice didn't like to show her emotions in front of others. The obvious ways she tried to hide them, however, were just another of her little quirks he found so charming.

"That's part of the reason," she said once she turned back to him, her eyes completely dry. "But another is that you didn't want to drive me away. Even though you may not fully realize it, you're deathly afraid of being abandoned. That's part of why you're such a show-off. You need to know that people like you."

Kurt's eyes widened at this unexpected analysis, then they narrowed into cold slits.

"What do you know about it?" he snapped, regretting his outburst even before he'd finished. "You've only known me for a month!"

"That's my power, Kurt," she said, her voice a flat monotone. "I can pick up on your worst fears. I know Kitty is terrified by the thought that, one day, she might not be able to solidify again after phasing. She doesn't want to spend her life as a living ghost. Storm has a very bad case of claustrophobia. Logan is haunted by the notion that we'll all die on him someday. And the Professor is deathly afraid of spiders."

Kurt blinked.

"Spiders?" he asked, with a small, disbelieving smile.

Alice nodded.

"Oh, yeah. Big, hairy spiders."

She sighed.

"But that's not all," she confessed, her voice barely above a whisper. "I can make those fears become real, tangible, not just to that one person but to everyone. That's why the Professor's been working with me one on one. He wants to teach me control before I can start training with the rest of you."

She looked up at him, her dark eyes haunted.

"If I happen to get frightened myself, or sometimes when I'm really angry, it can get really bad."

"What happens?" Kurt asked softly, lowering himself to the floor of the balcony and closing the distance between them.

Alice squeezed her eyes closed and turned away from him, directing her words to the silent moon.

"It happened when my father died," she told him, her voice tight. "I suppose I blamed the doctor for not being able to save him. She was supposed to be a specialist for that type of cancer after all, and..."

She broke off, shaking her head to free herself from her lingering anger.

"Anyway," she continued once she'd calmed down enough to contain her tears, "when I saw them wheeling his bed out of his room, and I saw him lying there so pale and still, I sort of lost it. Without even knowing what I was doing I latched onto that doctor's mind so tightly that I actually lost myself. I woke up from a coma two weeks later to find our very own Professor Xavier sitting next to me. If he hadn't used his powers to bring me back, I might never have woken up."

Kurt didn't even think. Acting purely out of protective concern, he wrapped his arms around her, holding her in a tender embrace that she willingly melted into.

"What happened to the doctor?" he asked softly.

"She was pretty shaken up," Alice admitted guiltily. "It seems that as a graduate student she'd worked in a lab where they ran experiments on monkeys. By the time the Professor snapped me back to reality, she couldn't go anywhere without being followed by a small army of menacing monkeys."

Kurt struggled not to laugh as Alice held him tighter.

"You're not scared of me now?" she asked, her voice muffled but her worry very clear.

"Why would I be scared, Liebchen?" Kurt asked, stroking her back with his tail. He felt nothing but sympathy for her all too familiar fears.

"I have the power to make people's dreams come true," Alice said, pulling away slightly. "Even bad dreams. I can sense their innermost fears and fantasies and bring them to life. Most people find that frightening."

Kurt shook his head.

"No, I don't think your powers are frightening. But I am curious. When you say you can bring these fears and fantasies to life, just how real are they?"

"They're as solid as you or me," she said. "But they don't have minds of their own. When I first discovered my power, I used it to make my favorite characters from books and movies come to life. But, they could only behave in character, and they would fade away after a few minutes if I stopped concentrating on them."

She smiled slightly, a little embarrassed as she admitted, "My mum used to call me Alice in Wonderland whenever she walked in to find my room filled with imaginary people."

Kurt grinned.

"So, there is a good side to these powers of yours!"

He sighed theatrically, glancing at her with a hopeful, suggestive look.

"I would have loved to have the chance to play with Captain Blood. Or Zorro!"

Alice's eyes widened, then she gave him a playful push.

"There, you see!" she said accusingly. "That's why I didn't want to tell anyone! If word gets out about this, the other kids will never leave me alone!"

Kurt laughed, his grin broadening.

"I was only joking, Liebchen. If you want to keep your powers secret for now, you can trust me not to tell anyone."

Alice regarded him, her expression softening with affection.

"I know," she said. "That's why I told you."

She favored him with a mischievous smile.

"Come here," she said, gesturing him over to her. "I want to show you something."

Curious, Kurt stepped over to her. She took his hand, her dark eyes glazing over as she accessed her power.

"There," she said after a moment. "Look."

Kurt looked into his room, where she was pointing. He gasped, swaying slightly at the sight that met his startled eyes.

"I've always wanted a family of my own," he said after a long moment, his voice subdued and distant as he watched an image of himself get tackled to the carpet by two small children, a girl and a boy, both of whom looked remarkably like him. Nearby, a woman watched them play, laughing happily, her dark hair shining in the yellowish lamplight. "A real one, tied to me by love and by blood."

He turned to her, his golden eyes misted.

"I suppose it is the dream of every orphan, ja?"

"This is our shared dream, my love." Alice told him as she let the living daydream fade away.

Kurt wrapped his arms around her, and she snuggled up against him. Never in his life had he felt so warm or so loved as he did at that moment.

"Now I'm with you," she assured him, her soft voice filled with deep sincerity, "you need never fear abandonment again."


*Yet, here I am,* he thought bitterly as he swept his searching gaze over the dark, desolate school grounds, *abandoned once again by my own mother.*

He shouldn't have been surprised. To tell the truth, he really had been expecting this. Still, after all that had happened that day, this latest abandonment hurt him more than he cared to admit.

That morning he had been forced to come to terms with the loss of the man he had loved as a father. It had been difficult and painful to acknowledge the truth of his death, but he'd had his family and his friends to support him and to comfort him in his grief. By that afternoon, they too were gone. He had opened his eyes to find himself forcefully and unexpectedly separated from those he held most dear at the very time he needed them most, and now, with Mystique's latest abandonment, it was starting to feel as though his worst nightmare had finally come true.

Even when he had been captured by Weapon X, even through the months of torture and twisted experimentation he had endured, suffering treatment that would have brought Animal Rights activists flooding to Washington in a fit of righteous fury had he been a lab rat rather than a mutant, his only comfort had been his unshakable assurance that his X-Men family would never abandon him.

This time, however, it was different.

Kurt was trapped in the past, in a world that was now foreign to him. Thirty years separated him from his wife and children, and he had no way of knowing if he would ever get home. The fate of his family rested on his actions in this time. One wrong move and the life he had built with Alice, even his cherished children could vanish into nothing more than wistful dreams of what might have been, with no more reality than the living daydream Alice had shown him that evening so long ago - an evening that hadn't even happened yet!

Kurt sank heavily to the stairs, his head buried in his thick hands. He had never felt so completely alone. He shivered, suddenly cold as he wrapped his tail around his waist. Taking in a deep breath, he rubbed the fuzz of his cheek against the cool metal of his ring, all the fears and pent-up emotions he had been struggling to control all day threatening to burst from him. He couldn't hold them in any longer, and he didn't want to.

Tilting his head back, he let loose with an anguished yowl that seemed more animalistic than human. If the happy dancers in the gym heard it above the thumping baseline of the music, they gave no sign. The only visible reaction was made by a red squirrel, which caused a rustle among the treetops as it scampered warily to the ground.


Kurt had sunk so deeply into his misery that he barely reacted when a strong hand reached out to squeeze his shoulder. Slowly raising his head, blinking in the brightness of the moonlight, it took him a moment to register what his eyes were seeing. Once he did, however, his instinctive reaction shocked them both.

"Mutti!" he gasped, pulling Mystique into a crushing embrace. "I thought you'd gone!"

Mystique stiffened in his arms, taken completely off guard by the fierce hug. For the briefest moment, she allowed herself to close her eyes, to let her stony heart soften at the feeling of her son's strong arms around her as she slowly returned his embrace - the first real hug they had ever truly shared. But as quickly as it had come, the moment ended and she pushed him away, her eyes cold and dangerous.

Kurt looked stunned for a moment, as if unsure of his memory of the last few seconds. Then he sighed deeply, lowering his head in defeat and utter exhaustion.

"I'm sorry," he said, his accented voice low and thick. "I didn't..." He trailed off, shaking his head. "It's been a long day."

Mystique regarded him through cold, yellow eyes as she rose gracefully to her feet, superior and aloof.

"I did go," she told him bluntly, causing him to raise his wide, hologram-shielded eyes to her severe, blue face. "But your ridiculous howling was so deplorably pathetic I came back."

Before he could smile, she cut him off with a sharp glare.

"My car is parked out front," she snapped curtly, her expression unreadable.

In as much time as it took her to turn sharply on her heel, the blue woman had once again become the imposing Principal Darkholme. She didn't even look to see if he was behind her as she strode briskly through the neatly clipped grass.

Still overwhelmed by his roiling, conflicting emotions, Kurt stood to follow, his heart pounding in confused, angry, delighted disbelief.


'The Box'* was a little hole-in-the-wall joint located at the back of a surprisingly clean alley. Even so, the corners of Raven's thin lips turned down in distaste as she followed Kurt to the bar's dingy door.

"However did you find this place?" she asked, stepping carefully around a moldering newspaper.

Watching her expression, Kurt suddenly realized that even though she appeared to be wearing expensive high-heels, in reality she, like him, was barefoot.

"Herr Logan took me here for my twenty-first birthday," he said, and grinned, reflecting back on the memory with affectionate amusement. "The owner is a mutant. I thought it would be nice to go to a place where we could just relax and be ourselves - no masks."

He gestured to the holowatch.

Raven narrowed her eyes, but didn't comment.

"And just how are you going to pay for this?" she asked, an ironic note creeping into her cold voice. "Do they still use money in the future?"

Kurt shot her a look.

"If you must know, I took the liberty of borrowing one of my old credit cards from myself - just in case of an emergency. I didn't think I would mind." He shrugged. "I'll leave myself a note later, and the receipt so I don't blame the credit card company when the bill arrives."

Mystique peered at him over her narrow nose, as though she were looking at a curious scientific specimen.

"I think the saddest thing about what you just said is that it actually made sense," she said dryly.

Kurt grinned and moved to hold the door open for her.

"After you, Mother," he said with a flourish, favoring her with a short bow.

Mystique glared at him.

"Don't you dare call me 'mother' while we're in there!" she hissed darkly. "What is the good of being able to change your shape if everyone around you thinks you're old?"

Kurt raised his eyebrows.

"Why, Raven," he said, keeping his voice light, "I didn't realize you were so vain."

Scowling deeply, Mystique's glare hardened as she brushed past him into the dimly lit bar.

"I'll leave it up to you," Kurt said easily as he closed the door behind them. "What'll it be, a stool at the bar or a nice, private booth?"

"If you want me to tell you anything, it had better be a booth." Mystique said. "And I'll have a double scotch, straight-up, no ice."

Kurt snapped his heels together and bowed slightly, politely tipping an imaginary hat to her.

"Your wish is my command, meine Dame," he told her, walking up to the bar to place their orders.

Mystique shook her head with a slight curl of her lip and strode directly for the darkest corner booth.

"Finally," she snapped when Kurt joined her barely two minutes later with their drinks. "Must you flirt with every girl you see?"

Kurt looked confused for a moment, then he realized what she must be talking about.

"Oh, do you mean the bartender?" He shook his head. "I was just complimenting her new nose-ring. She may not know it yet, but she and I go way back."

Mystique grunted and took a healthy swig of her scotch.

Kurt raised an eyebrow, twirling his frosted beer bottle between his hands before taking a long swig himself.

"So," he said, once she'd set her glass back down on its coaster, "who wants to go first?"

"Do you mean who wants to speak first or who wants to be first to dispense with the 'masks' as you put it?"

Kurt shrugged.

"Both."

When Mystique just glared at him from across the table, he sighed.

"All right, I'll go first," he said, pressing the relevant button on his holowatch. The bartender and the three other patrons didn't even bat an eye as the hologram that surrounded him flickered and faded out. Kurt grinned broadly, unabashedly displaying his pointed teeth.

"Your turn," he said brightly.

"Forty-seven years old and still a child," Raven muttered, her acerbic tone accompanied by a soft snort. Even so, the pale, spectacled form of Principal Darkholme was soon replaced by the striking, dark-blue features of Mystique.

Kurt's grin widened.

"So," he said conversationally, taking a pull of his beer. "How are things with you? My day's been simply atrocious, but I suppose you would have guessed that by now."

"Why don't we just cut the crap and get to the point," Mystique suggested coldly.

Kurt nodded his approval.

"An excellent idea. Let's do that. You can start by telling me just who my father was and exactly what happened to him the night you dropped me off that bridge."

Mystique grunted, her yellow eyes narrowing.

"I suppose you think you have a right to know these things," she said.

"Quite frankly, yes, I do." Kurt told her. "After all, he was my father."

"Why does that matter so much to you?" Mystique asked sharply. "You have a foster father in Germany who's been more of a father to you than Eric ever was. Then there's that deluded telepath and his pet Wolverine. I would have thought you'd have had it up to here with father-figures and male role-models living at that Institute of yours."

Kurt sighed, glancing down at his ring with an indefinable expression.

"Perhaps," he allowed. "But, even though all those you just mentioned loved and cared for me as a father, none of them actually were my father. There was no bond of blood to tie us together. We were a family, but we were not kin."

He sighed again, his voice deep and somber.

"It has been my experience that the bond between a father and his child is one of the most powerful, most rewarding connections a man can make in his life. His children are a part of him and he of them. There is nothing that can compare with that." He looked up at her, his golden eyes filled with emotion. "Surely, as a mother - even if you never were a very good one - you can understand what I mean."

Mystique found she couldn't hold his searching gaze. She turned her head to face the bar, absently counting the liquor bottles in a futile attempt to wipe the lingering image of Kurt's painfully sincere expression from her mind. The harder she fought them, however, the stronger her turbulent memories became, until, somehow, before she was even aware of it, she found she was speaking her thoughts out loud. By the time she became fully cognizant of what she was saying, it was too late to stop the painful confession from escaping her completely.

"His name was Count Eric Wagner and he was killed when he startled Magneto during an experiment. Magneto lost control of some piece of equipment or other and it fell, crushing Eric to death and ending the experiment before it could be completed. At least, that's what Magneto told me later. I wasn't actually there when it happened."

Kurt looked up. Mystique's voice had been so quiet that it had taken him a moment to fully comprehend what she had said. Before he could open his mouth to ask her a question, however, Mystique cut him off with a sharp, deadly glare.

"Now, I think I've said enough," she pronounced with a quiet menace.

Kurt could only nod, his eyes wide and his heart full. Somehow, he knew she had told him the truth. He couldn't ask her to reveal any more than what she had already so unexpectedly given him. His own contribution now seemed paltry and worthless next to her gift.

"My day started off with a funeral," he told her, watching as she drained her glass and set it down with a slightly trembling hand. "As the eulogy was being given, a young girl walked out of the crowd towards the speaker. I teleported over to her to find out what she was doing, only to discover she was being controlled by some unknown outside source. When I tried to teleport her away from the ceremony before she could cause any trouble, she was somehow wrenched from my arms. I lost consciousness, and when I opened my eyes I found myself at the Institute, some thirty years in the past."

He shook his head, half smiling at the sheer ridiculousness of the situation even though his expression was pained.

Mystique just watched him through narrowed, golden eyes.

"The Professor and I have come up with a working hypothesis to explain how this happened." he went on. "We think the electro-magnetic disturbances caused by Magneto's latest invention may have weakened the fabric of space-time. Apparently, this afternoon found me and my younger self involved in a simultaneous teleport at the same moment as one of these disturbances. As a result, we somehow switched places in time. As far as I know, this whole bizarre theory may be wrong, but I'm afraid it's all we have to go on at the moment."

Mystique's face remained impassive as she slid her empty glass toward the center of the table.

"If you're done with your beer, I'm ready to leave," she said, morphing back into her Principal Darkholme persona.

Kurt blinked in surprise at this, but obligingly swallowed another swig of beer.

"I'm finished," he assured her, climbing to his feet and holding out a hand to help her rise. Mystique brushed past him as if he wasn't there and headed for the door.

Kurt shook his head, reactivated his holowatch, and waved a cheery farewell to the bartender. It seemed things were back to normal between them.


"We're here," Mystique announced, coming to a stop some distance from the gates to the Xavier Institute. "Get out."

Kurt opened the door to her convertible, but remained seated as he turned to her.

"Mother," he started, "I just wanted to thank you—"

"Don't," Mystique interrupted coldly. "We had an agreement, we carried it out. We owe each other nothing."

She shifted her gaze to face the front and, as she did, a sudden impulse came over Kurt, an impulse he just had to carry out before it was too late. He knew the fate that awaited her. Mystique would soon be trapped in stone by an ancient curse. Before he could save her, she would be pushed off a cliff, falling to her death as she was shattered into hundreds of stone fragments on the ground below.

Timing his movements carefully, Kurt leaned over in his seat and kissed her gently on the cheek. Mystique stiffened as she felt his velvety fur brush against her face, suddenly as still as the stone statue she would soon become.

"Gute Nacht, Mutti," Kurt said softly, and got out of the car. Before he closed her door, however, her strong hand darted through his hologram and caught his tail where it was wrapped around his waist, using it to pull him back to her.

"Why did you do that," she demanded, her dark eyes burning.

Kurt smiled through the pain her fierce grip was causing his sensitive tail.

"I always wondered what that would feel like," he told her, "and somehow I had the feeling you wouldn't give me another opportunity to try it out."

She stared at him, her head shaking slightly as she searched for a response.

Kurt's tail couldn't wait that long.

"Mother, please," he winced, "my tail..."

Mystique let go as though the twitching appendage had burnt her. Kurt rubbed it gingerly, then lashed it back and forth a few times to get the blood flowing again.

"I'm sorry, Kurt," Mystique said, her eyes focused firmly on the silent stretch of road ahead of her. "For everything."

Kurt smiled sadly.

"Don't worry about it," he told her. "I forgave you a long time ago."

Mystique looked at him, her dark eyes somehow softer than they had been.

"How could someone like you have a mother like me?" she asked.

Kurt grinned.

"Just lucky, I guess," he said.

Mystique didn't return his smile.

"I meant what I said before," she told him in a halting voice. "When I said I was proud of you." She cleared her throat. "I meant that."

Kurt closed his eyes, his heart swelling with bittersweet emotion. He couldn't count the number of times he'd dreamed of this moment. Before he could say anything, though, Mystique held up a staying hand.

"It was your legs Magneto changed," she said brusquely. "With that mutant enhancement machine of his. The night I took you and ran."

Kurt blinked, looking down instinctively but seeing only a holographic projection.

"My legs...?" he asked, not fully comprehending.

"You are digitigrade, like a dog or cat. You walk on your toes with your heels in the air. His machine did that to you. I'm sure you've noted how your children can stand with their feet flat on the ground."

"I had wondered about that," Kurt said thoughtfully. "Marta is so like me in every other respect, but her feet—"

He broke off, suddenly angry as he realized that Mystique had tricked him into revealing what she had wanted to know, but not dared to ask. His anger turned to concern, however, when he saw tears shining in his mother's eyes.

"Mother," he asked gently, "are you all ri—"

"Good night, Kurt," she cut him off, and pulled her door shut tight. With a roar of her sports car's powerful motor, she was gone.

Kurt stared after the rapidly diminishing lights, his mind awhirl with all that had been said and all that had been left unsaid. As he teleported back to the mansion, he had to admit that all in all, it had been a highly rewarding evening.

To Be Continued...


*As seen in Wolverine: 'So, This Priest Walks Into a Bar' Volume 3, Number 6, although I changed the location from New York City to Bayville. *shrug* Maybe it's a chain.

What happened to the younger Kurt? Stay tuned for Chapter Eleven! :)