Disclaimer – Theirs, not mine.
A/N – Written for ChaosWolf's WitchKitty Contest, and based on fanart by Maxine Frank. Plays on my qualms about Mastermind's tricks in The Toad, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I mean, a whole life is not an easy thing to erase and replace. He has to have cut a few corners somewhere.
Historian's Memo – Mid Season Four, probably around (or just before/after) the time of No Good Deed.
Feedback – Please please please please...
Girl with the Broken Smile
By Scribbler
August 2004
Look for the girl with the broken smile
Ask her if she wants to stay awhile
And she will be loved
- 'She Will Be Loved' by Maroon 5
Wanda knew she'd made a mistake when the skin between Kitty's eyebrows twitched and her mouth did that thing that made her look like she had no lips.
"This isn't... Wanda, you don't..."
There was the sound of hidden fighting nearby. Someone splashed off the pier, and someone else went careening into a freight box, shattering it to pieces. Neither girl looked up.
They stood a short distance from each other, in the lee of a building that could politely be called 'derelict'. Smashed windows hung open like rotting wounds, and up and down the walls were strange scorch marks, like someone kept setting fire to the place and someone else kept putting it out. For unknown reasons, Wanda felt comfortable here, though she couldn't explain it if pressed.
Maybe that was the reason why Kitty was looking at her that way; because comfortable surroundings had a way of making Wanda say things she hadn't originally meant to. She came across them so rarely – things that made her feel comfortable. Oh, there were plenty that made her feel she ought to feel comfortable, but none of the real stuff – nothing that could provoke an honest-to-God reaction from her that she didn't second-guess or doubt. So when she did come across them, she relaxed and things kind of... slipped out.
Yeah.
Kitty rocked from the heels of her feet to her toes and back again, fingers wrapping around each other. She was never still, never content to just stand without making some sort of gesture. She liked using her hands to illustrate her words, drawing pictures in empty air. She started sentences and then stopped again, eyes sometimes darting to the invisible combat. The others, their teams, thought they were fighting. And in a way, they were.
Wanda found herself folding her arms, a vaguely pathetic expression worming its way onto her face. Some part of her wanted to change that look to anger, but again, it was more of an 'I should be' than an 'I am'. The backs of her eyes ached from thinking about it. She resisted the urge to scrub at them.
"What, is this the sum total of your reaction to me telling you I'm in love with you?"
For a moment Kitty looked angry, and Wanda wanted a piece of that anger because she felt like it belonged in her. But then it was gone, popped like a soap bubble, and Kitty just looked sad. She nibbled at her lower lip, a nervous habit Wanda remembered once asking her about.
"I dunno," she'd replied. "I guess I've always done it. I don't know why."
Wanda hadn't been able to understand. Everything in her life seemed to have a purpose, to be neatly ordered around her like library shelves. Facts and truths were her whole world.
Except that some days someone ran into the library and put books in the wrong places and stole others without checking them out first, and then she had to sit and try to make sense of them again, or go to sleep and not think about it when she woke up. She didn't like those days. Facts and truths were facts and truths. You weren't supposed to doubt them, or else what was the point of them?
Maybe that was why she'd said what she'd said – because things had to have purpose, have direction, and as far as she could see, there was only one inevitability to this.
"What do you expect me to say?" Kitty spread her hands wide, a sweeping motion that was utterly typical of her.
"I don't know. Something."
"Are you expecting me to say it back?"
Had she? Wanda tipped her head to one side, unsure. She hadn't planned to say it in the first place, so what the response would be hadn't featured in her overall plan.
There had never really been an overall plan to any of this, she reflected. There had only been moments, brief enclaves of sync that punctuated the wrong-shaped-jigsaw-piece feeling that made up a huge chunk of her life.
Kitty had been a feature of the Brotherhood House before Wanda got there... except that she'd always been there, hadn't she? Or maybe not. No, she'd been with Father. That was right. But Kitty and Lance had broken up, and for the longest time he'd been sad and sulky, sitting in the kitchen, often with a paper Pietro had swiped off someone's front porch, not replying when she said hello.
Wanda didn't know what to make of Lance. He made her nervous. Sometimes he was possessed of strange generosity, and she'd think him a decent human being, but then he'd go and ruin it all by doing something selfish and stupid. It was like he couldn't get his head around being him, and he should have been born somewhere else, as someone else, and he knew it but he didn't know, just like she knew things but didn't really know them.
"We are so fucked up, yo," Todd once said. Wanda couldn't agree more.
And then, in the middle of all the fucked-uppishness, had been Kitty. Sweet, innocent Kitty, who sometimes came over with care packages even though she and Lance weren't technically dating anymore. Kitty, who condemned the Brotherhood as thugs in public, then slipped them an allowance's worth of groceries on the side.
Lance liked to pretend he didn't know who had ordered all the stuff for them off the supermarket's website, but Wanda knew he did, really. He just didn't like accepting handouts – especially from his ex. Especially from the ex who had publicly humiliated him when he tried to make a stand for mutant rights.
Wanda had never been sure what to make of this when told about it. She couldn't remember where she had been when Lance, Todd and Fred went down to the school to confront the PTA, but she didn't envision any of the trio as political activists. So she had taken Lance's declarations of Kitty being a lapdog to the 'human oppressors' with a hefty pinch of salt. Bitterness hung around him like smoke around fire whenever Kitty was mentioned.
Which was why Wanda hadn't turned away when she found the girl sitting, crying under a tree at the school, when she wandered past on another of the aimless strolls that didn't quite fit with her reality.
Wanda remembered each detail of that meeting – the crunch of badly laid tarmac across the parking lot; the way Kitty looked up when the shadow fell across her, and the way she scooted backwards like she was afraid. Wanda hadn't been able to understand to begin with, until a memory of their first meeting at the mall popped into her head. And then she couldn't figure out why she hadn't recalled a minor detail like that before – it wasn't as if she just went around trying to hurt people and trap them in floors.
She'd felt an unwarranted urge to make up for that initial indiscretion, to apologise for it. So she'd walked right up to Kitty, plopped down, and thanked her for all the food she'd sent over. Kitty had boggled for a moment, then cautiously collected herself and taken up that slightly self-effacing look Wanda had come to know so well.
"I guess my powers of subterfuge need some work, huh?"
Wanda had shrugged. "I guess."
And there it was. Kitty was too puppyish and eager to hold a grudge if she could help it, and Wanda had seen no reason to kill off a potential friendship. Sometimes she got the feeling Kitty was keeping something from her, but it couldn't have been that important or she would have known it already.
The only reason they kept their friendship secret was because of Lance. Kitty didn't want to hurt him, and Wanda had to live with him. The Brotherhood had this way of oozing into places they didn't belong, so no matter where they went, both Kitty and Wanda knew it would get back to both them and the X-Men, and they'd both get in trouble for fraternising with the enemy. They had too much fun to stop for other people.
Wanda had some happy memories of borrowing the jeep and driving over to Ogdonville to visit the mall there because Kitty said their clothing line was just, like, to die for. They were real memories, nothing uncertain clinging to them. She could still smell the coffee from the Starbucks where she'd ordered Frappuccino and Kitty had plumped for the Egyptian Mocha Blend. She could even taste the pizza they'd shared – the Mean Green Extreme, which boasted a chilli pepper topping that made Wanda's belly burn, because Kitty was very strict about her vegetarianism.
Sometimes Wanda thought it must be nice to have that kind of exactitude in life.
She supposed that was why she kept going places with Kitty – because she could be sure that those memories were real. She could remember the beginning of their friendship, could remember all the things that had happened since it started. She could remember asking point blank whether Kitty was just hanging around with her out of pity, and the playful shove that answered it. She could remember learning that her favourite movie was Titanic, that she'd taken ballet lessons until she was eight, that she loved buttered popcorn and despised gum on the sidewalk.With Kitty, there was security. There was realness.
One day, the jeep gave out on the way back from Ogdonville, and they'd had to wait at a gas station for a repairman to come fix it. They had sat on a bench, drinking grape soda from a vending machine and playing the pants game until it got boring. The pants game was Kitty's idea: taking titles of famous films and substituting one of the words with 'pants'. Kitty had won with 'Black Pants Down', narrowly beating out Wanda's 'Jimmy Neutron: Pants Genius'.
After that there had been a lot of giggling, presumably because of the sugar in the sodas. And after that, Kitty had got this strange, cheerless look in her eye that just wasn't her at all. Wanda had asked what was wrong, and been surprised when happy, bubbly Kitty suddenly started crying in the middle of the forecourt.
It turned out Lance had called and, in a fit of male pique, had warned her off helping the Brotherhood anymore. It turned out his pride was wounded enough that resentment had taken the place of good sense. Names were exchanged, insults thrown, and Kitty had been left with a buzzing receiver and a broken heart – because as long as she was the dumper then she could only feel guilty, but as long as she was the dumpee she could only feel pain.
Wanda hadn't even thought about it. Deep in recesses of her mind she knew that a gesture of comfort was hugging, so she had hugged Kitty. She had let her snot and snort all over her shoulder while she cried herself out, because all the shows on television said that friends did things like that, and because she knew that even if the people at the Xavier Institute found out, they'd be secretly pleased at the block on contact.
A tiny part of her wondered why she'd learned all she knew about friendship from soap operas and teen dramas. Hadn't she had any friends of her own before?
What she hadn't figured on was how soft Kitty's skin would be. That minor brush of cheek on cheek, as the smaller girl fell into her arms... it sent shivers racing up and down Wanda's spine while spreading a fire in her belly. And suddenly she remembered reading somewhere that eating chilli peppers sparks the same chemical reaction in your brain as falling in love.
If there were few memories about friendship, then there were no memories anywhere in her about the social wrongness of girls kissing girls. Kitty had been surprised, naturally, because she'd those social constraints implanted deep within her all her life. She had tried to explain to Wanda why she'd slapped her, but Wanda had been too hurt to listen, and after the repairman arrived they'd made the trip back to Bayville in silence.
It was three weeks before Kitty got back in contact. Three very lonely weeks for Wanda, during which she took to sitting on the roof to escape Todd. He was a nice enough guy, but there was something about him that unnerved her. He was too intense, with his pet names and soft touches and accidentally-on-purpose always bumping into her. She didn't know how to deal with him. If he had ignored her, then she could have stood back and figured him out. However, he was always there, right in her face with a big goofy smile and yet another platitude. So she watched the sky and wondered whether that was how Kitty had felt at the gas station.
In a small way, she felt sorry for Todd. In an even smaller way, she was scared of him. She could tolerate him up to a point; maybe even enjoy being with him until he came out with one of those horrendous nicknames. Cuddlebumps. Sweetie-pie. Honey-bear. Snickerdoodle.
Well, okay, perhaps not the last one.
Thing was, when he got too close, when he brushed up against her that little bit too slowly, she got a flash of... something. The room turned kind of pink. Sometimes, she'd swear on her own life that he was wearing loose-fitting white shirt and pants, and she'd feel this undeniable panic that made her bolt from the room.
When Todd began leaping up onto the roof to be with her, bringing her 'gifts' that would have been sweet in a different world, Wanda retreated to the park. The leafy greenness was comforting. She spent many hours just wandering under the trees. She dabbled in the kiddie paddling pool. She sat on benches and watched the world go by. She even fell asleep when the sun was warm on her face, not so much confident nobody would harass or thieve from her, as just not considering the idea. Danger did not have much sting when most of your memories turn out to have impossibly happy endings.
And eventually, this was where she was cornered. Just a light tap on the shoulder that made her turn, and suddenly there Kitty was, and all the strange feelings in Wanda's belly were back. She thought she could taste chilli peppers.
She'd tried to get up and walk away, tried to still act hurt, but had stopped when Kitty caught at the sash around her waist and gabbled an apology.
"I... you never meant to, like, insult me or anything, right? Some people might even view it as a compliment. That you could be attractive to... y'know... It was just a shock. That's all. Yeah. A shock. Nothing like that has ever... I just never thought about it before."
Wanda hadn't said anything, just listened and watched with senses wide open.
"Maybe... maybe it wouldn't be so bad..." Kitty had finally said, scuffing her feet and playing with the hem of her blouse. "I mean, better than being lonely, right?"
Because more than anything, Wanda learned, Kitty feared loneliness. She feared the emotional void that threatened to engulf her without someone to cling to. She'd sought out so many relationships, started so many connections that to go without an anchor and have no sign of someone new hurt her. And Wanda was more than happy to be that someone.
It started small. They finished up that walk in the park together and hugged awkwardly before saying goodbye. It was an innocent enough gesture. Lots of friends hugged. For a while Wanda even started to think that they had just sunk back into their old friendship, because all they ever did was go places, do what they'd always done, and hug at the end.
"Do you like me?" she'd asked at last. They had bought ice cream cones and a tub of Ben and Jerry's from the corner store on their way towards the intersection: one way towards the Institute, the other towards the Boarding House. Kitty held the bag, and the plastic crackled as she walked.
"Sure I like you."
"No, I mean really like me."
That had made her pause. The bag stopped crackling. "I... I guess..." There was something profound to the hesitation, as though she'd just been waiting for one of them to bring it up.
"Then prove it."
There it was. The challenge. It had squatted between them, goblin-like. It had pointed at the empty street. It had poked at their legs, their arms, and their faces. It had laughed, sounding almost like the gurgle of a blocked drainpipe. And for a second, Wanda had thought she recognised its face; thought she'd seen it somewhere before, a long time ago.
"This... I – oh, hell." Kitty said something in a language Wanda would later learn was Yiddish. Kitty's Yiddish wasn't great, but she knew all sorts of cuss words that you wouldn't think to look at her.
"You're afraid of me?" Wanda had asked, slightly anxious. "I won't hurt you. Promise. Just as long as you don't slap me again."
"Nu-uh, I'm not afraid of you." Kitty's voice had then dropped to a mumble. "Boy, like, how surreal does it feel saying that? No. No, I'm not afraid. I think. Sorta. But I'm kinda... I've never thought about kissing another girl before."
"Oh. Is it... is kissing girls a bad thing?"
Kitty had loosed a humourless chuckle. "Depends on your point of view. No. Okay. Right. Yeah, I can do this."
She'd stepped forward, but been too small, so Wanda had been forced to sort of bend her knees. It was a very uncomfortable position, and she was so busy thinking about it that their noses bumped and their teeth clashed, and they had to pull away again.
"Um, okay. You, uh, you go left. I'll go right."
"Like this?"
"Sure. Yep. Sure."
The second time went much more smoothly. Kitty's mouth was very soft – even softer than the rest of her skin. Wanda had wondered if Lance ever thought about Kitty's softness factor when he'd kissed her. Then she had wondered if it was wrong to think about something like that when you were kissing someone.
Kitty had pulled away first and looked up at her, mouth still open. Apart from their lips, not one part of them had touched throughout the entire thing. The ice cream cones were awkward and intrusive, the plastic bag incredibly loud.
"That was nice."
"Yeah," Kitty had agreed, quietly.
"Would you... would you like to do it again?"
"Uh. I... yeah. I guess so."
"Me left, you right, right?"
Kitty's eyebrow had risen, but she'd gone into the next kiss anyway. It reminded Wanda of mint toothpaste and strawberry lollipops.
And all of it led to this moment, this here and now. From there to here, with lots of in-betweens and subplots and side-stories, but none of which really mattered once you had the gist of a situation.
Wanda could hear the Brotherhood and the X-Men going great guns, but it hardly mattered. They fought because they needed someone to fight, not because they held any real antipathy towards each other. Fred and Lance hadn't even bothered to change into their costumes. It was a little surreal to have someone like Fred run at you in a dressing gown, but such was the life they lived.
Kitty was still waiting for an answer.
Are you expecting me to say it back?
"I don't know," said Wanda. "I was thinking maybe."
Kitty ran a hand through her bangs. "God, Wanda..." The she lifted her eyes. "Why now? Why this second?"
"Why not tell you now?"
"Because... gah! I don't know! Because it's taken me four and a half months to fully accept what we're doing, maybe? Because I still have nightmares about what'll happen if and when my family finds out? Not to mention the X-Men. And the rest."
Wanda narrowed her eyes. "So it's all about public appearances, then."
"What do you think, Wanda? This isn't easy for me - "
"And it is for me?"
"It's not the same, and you know it!" Kitty looked a whisker from stamping her foot like a petulant child. She clenched her fists, spine ramrod, spun in a little half-circle to leave. Then she threw up her hands. "No. Y'know what? Just... no. I'm not dealing with this right now."
Wanda felt something blossom in her chest. Was this what betrayal felt like? "Why can't you deal with this now?"
"Not can't. I'm not dealing with it. Wanda, please..."
But Wanda would not be dissuaded. "No. You can't just let me say something like that, make a big fuss, and then pretend like it never happened. Not without giving me some sort of explanation. Life does not have a pause button, Kitty Pryde."
She nursed the idea that telling someone you loved them was this big important thing, accompanied by a soaring orchestral score and maybe a rose or two before the final credits. She hadn't really planned to say it to Kitty – at least not now – but she'd sort of hoped that when it did happen, the reaction would follow that criteria.
Instead, she got this. Not even flat rejection. It was like an insult.
It hurt.
There is a great belief in the world in the power of words. We read, we talk, we write, we have counsellors and therapists and even priests who are happy to listen to us and tell us what to do. Wanda had never seen fit to question this power of words. It was another ineffable truth. So it came as something of a shock to find that her words, her big declarations, might just as well have been bubbles. Kitty swatted them away and they popped, leaving no evidence they had ever existed outside her own imagination.
Wanda unfolded her arms. "Is it because you don't feel the same? I'm a big girl, Kitty. Don't treat me like a simpleton. If all I am is a good lay then tell me so. Don't let me labour on under any misapprehension."
Kitty's eyes shone with something. Wanda didn't know what. The exasperation fell away from her face. Suddenly, she seemed very small and frail. "I'm just not ready to deal with this at the moment," she said softly. "Please -- try to understand." It sounded like she was ready to cry.
Kitty rarely cried. She laughed, she shouted, she babbled, she screamed – but she didn't cry. She was sturdiness wrapped in candyfloss, and hearing that catch in her voice made the pit fall out of Wanda's stomach.
"But why?"
Kitty gestured, hand dangling like her wrist was too weak to hold it up. "Out there, there's so much going on at the moment. Especially with Apocalypse and... yeah. The big stuff. The stuff that's got the whole world up in arms and gunning for the nearest mutant to use as a scapegoat. My family, my teammates, my friends – they need me to be strong while this whole Mutant Menace thing is going down."
"Unless it's escaped your attention, I'm a mutant, too."
"Yeah, but..." Kitty hesitated.
"Is this about my father?" Wanda asked. "The fact that he's not around to go nuclear if I came out?"
Kitty didn't say anything for a second. When she did speak, her voice was barely above a whisper. "My mother has to take tablets just to get to sleep at night. She's losing her hair from stress. My cousin got beat up in the playground. The teacher couldn't help him because he's related to me, and so he's considered 'high risk' for having an X-gene. He's six years old. And you know what my Dad's boss said to him the other day? He said that he was working on getting him fired because he 'spawned a mutie', and there's nothing my Dad can do to fight back because no law firm will take his case. My family... they've been behind me in everything I ever asked of them, including when I wanted to stay here in Bayville when things got tough. They let me stay here after my home blew up and I was nearly captured by the military and smashed to smithereens by a giant robot; just because it was important to me. I mean, how supportive is that? Can you imagine me emptying yet another can of worms into their laps? They'd... I worry about them, Wanda. They're there, and I'm here, and it's totally backwards and stupid and I know that, but I still... I worry about them."
Someone yelled a battle-cry. It sounded like Fred. Someone else fell back into the bay with a loud splash.
"I'm a very public mutant, Wanda. Anything I say or do gets splashed across the front page of the National Enquirer faster than you can, like, spit. Which means anything controversial I say or do is magnified by, I dunno – a thousand, or something. A hundred thousand. A million?"
"So you can be a mutant, but not a gay mutant."
Kitty winced. "You do realise I've never looked at another girl the same way as I look at you?"
"What, not even that Rogue chick? Or Boom-Boom?" Wanda had heard tales of Boom-Boom from the Brotherhood. Evidently she was a high-maintenance case who liked attention of all kinds. It was stupid to think that Kitty had not noticed her.
Except that Kitty wrinkled her nose and breathed, "No. Never."
"Should I feel special now?"
"Wanda, I'm not telling you this for the good of my health. I'm telling you to try and make you understand."
"Understand what? Okay, so you can't tell all your friends and family that you're fucking another girl. Or that you're fucking, full stop. Never mind that you're sixteen years old and legally able to drive a car and start a family. So what? This isn't me asking you to do that. This is me asking you – in private – whether or not you feel the same way I do. About us." Wanda drew in a ragged breath. "About me." She felt angry, which was good. Anger was a paradox – both familiar and alien to her. It matched the feelings churning around in her stomach.
There was a time-lag between question and answer in which entire solar systems formed and died.
"I can't answer that," Kitty said at last.
Wanda snorted. "You know what?" she said accusatorily, jabbing a finger. "You're full of shit. You preach about human-mutant coexistence like it's some real possibility, but you can't even keep your own relationships in working order."
Kitty flinched. She knew many profanities but, as a rule, she didn't like cussing. Wanda noticed, and it made her want to cuss more.
So she did. She filled the air with blue language, venting herself and stripping her insides of their pent-up aggression. She might even have hexed the derelict building into rubble, except that seeing a building fall in the vicinity their teammate had gone would no doubt bring the X-Men running.
When she had expelled almost all the air from her lungs, she took another breath and started over, until she could think of no more combinations to say. Then she leaned forward, bracing her hands on her thighs and panting. A dribble of sweat ran down her temple. The backs of her eyeballs hurt.
"You done now?" Kitty asked quietly.
"What do you think?" Wanda's tone was jagged.
"I'm not trying to hurt you - "
"Really? Done a pretty good job anyhow. A pretty good fucking job of it."
She almost jumped at the soft hand on her shoulder. Kitty must have air-walked over, or something, because there was no way she could have gotten there without Wanda sensing it. She jerked away from the smaller girl, setting her feet and unconsciously taking up a defensive posture.
"Don't."
"Wanda - "
"Piss off, Kitty."
"Would it make you feel any better if I said it?"
That made her pause. "Would you mean it?" she asked after a moment.
"I don't know."
"Then no."
Kitty looked at her feet. Her boots moved, telling Wanda she was wiggling her toes, like she always did when she was thinking deep thoughts at double their usual pace. There was a reason she'd been skipped ahead to advanced classes in school, even if she had been moved back again when Mutantkind was 'outed'.
"You don't want me to lie to you. And I wouldn't, because that'd be, like, insulting."
Wanda snorted.
"But I can't tell you the truth because I don't know the truth, yet. You just dumped this on me out of the blue. I had no idea you felt so strongly." Kitty lifted her gaze. "To tell you the truth, it's a little scary."
"Seems like everything important thing I tell you is scary, huh?"
"You do have a knack." She shook her head. "But that's not the point. The point is, if you want me to say that I love you and mean it, then you have to wait until I know for sure myself. Six months ago, I thought I was in love with Lance. Four and a half months ago, I'd never even thought that there was more to loving than boys. I'm not keen on living a lie, Wanda – hypocritical as it sounds. If I have to fib to other people, I'd rather not compound it by fibbing to you, too."
Wanda arched an elegant blue-black eyebrow. "Fibbing? Now there's a contender for the Understatement of the Year Award."
Kitty smiled, but it was weak; a thin vestige of her usual glow. She sighed, and it seemed to come from the ground beneath her feet. "Do you understand now, or are you still, like, ready to tear my head off and stuff?"
Wanda's head felt thick. She rubbed at the back of her neck and let out a breath between her teeth. "No, I don't understand."
Kitty wilted.
"But I'm willing to respect your decision. And you know why?" She opened her eyes, only then realising she'd closed them. "Because that's what you do when you love someone. Even if they don't love you back."
"Learn that from The Bold and the Beautiful?" Kitty invited.
Wanda faltered. Her spine was stiff, her hair full of grit, and she felt emotionally and physically drained enough that nothing would have pleased her more right then but to pack up, go home and have a long, hot soak in the tub. Provided, of course, that the Boarding House still had a boiler willing to cooperate where heating water was concerned.
Kitty must have seen these emotions ghosting across her face, because she reached out again with one of those feather-light touches that made Wanda think of chilli peppers and strawberry lollipops. Her fingertips brushed against the grime on her cheek – you couldn't be in a pace like this without getting dusty – and rubbed some of it between the thumb and forefinger of her glove. There was something almost hypnotic about the tiny movement. Wanda followed it with her eyes.
"I'm sorry," Kitty whispered.
Wanda suddenly felt like she wanted to cry, though there were too many reasons why to pick just one. The world turned blurry, and she only felt Kitty take her hand and rub the back with the pad of her thumb. She gulped, and dragged her free hand across her face. It made dark smudges on the torn red sleeve of her costume.
"Now I've messed up my make-up," she grumbled.
Kitty phased through the brickwork backwards, pulling Wanda behind her. Wanda wasn't exactly sure she liked phasing. She kept thinking she was going to fall right through the floor and keep going, into the centre of the earth. And there was the added thing about getting stuck halfway through a wall. Briefly, some distant part of her mind pondered whether it would hurt, solidifying inside an already-solid object. The laws of physics say two objects can't occupy the same space, but would it be all wall and no her, or would there be bits of her compacted between the granules? Would the walls bleed?
And then it didn't matter, because Kitty had a hand on her thigh, squeezing, and Wanda was intensely aware of how little light there was in this building. There was also something thrilling about having her tears kissed away, sliding to the floor and pulling Kitty onto her lap while their two teams fought so close by.
Kitty's mouth trailed across Wanda's cheek until she reached her mouth. Wanda tipped her head back, accepting the kiss and letting the tension smooth from around her eyes. It was impossible to be tense when kissing lips that soft. Kitty moved against her in a sybaritic dance that would have been worthy of Salomé on her best night.
Wanda's mind started to wander again. She remembered kissing Todd that one time, in the ski resort, and the movie she watched last night on the Boarding House's stolen cable, and the picnics she used to take in the park with her father every Spring, just the two of them, until she got too big for picnics. She remembered years and years ago, when she fell off a teeter-totter and fractured her arm in three places, and eating meals off a drab grey tray pushed under the door, and the pink room, and playing leapfrog with Pietro when they were young enough to laugh at crickets and dandelions and the word 'rectify'.
There was no linear context to these images. They were just snapshots – moments out of time. She had no real chronology to put them to, and so all everything seemed fitfully and equally relevant to the moment at hand.
Her hand found Kitty's belly and slid down, pressing against the fabric there. Kitty's mouth fell open, her hips lifting slightly. Wanda smiled against the bee-sting of her lips, holding her tighter, more possessively. Kitty responded by nibbling Wanda's lip in a semblance of her own nervous habit.
She tasted like mint toothpaste and smelled of ginseng shampoo. Wanda inhaled it, committing it to memory for the thousandth time. Once, she'd thought about asking the brand so she could use it, but then stopped herself because what made it special was that it was Kitty's scent, and Kitty's alone.
And suddenly Wanda didn't need chronology. All she needed was the present, the ever-ephemeral moment. She needed it with a passion she'd never felt before in her life, and it made her press herself against the vague contours of Kitty's body, summoning a cry from the other girl's throat.
She pushed Wanda's coat off her shoulders and down her arms, never breaking this new, forceful kiss. In turn, Wanda reached for the zipper at the neck of Kitty's costume. It seemed to echo in the derelict space. Had Wanda known she could feel such energy, such raw lust from someone, she would have fallen in love years ago.
Except that there was no 'years ago'. There was here. There was now. And there was them.
And for a short time, that was all she needed.
FINIS.