Chapter Two: Redirection

All eyes watched as Pietro dragged a bruised and lifeless Kitty from underneath a pile of debris. They watched on in muted terror as he began calling her name and finally started to perform CPR. No one, not even Scott dared to breathe for fear that that small mince of oxygen they sucked in would deprive Kitty of vital breath.

Finally they heard a small shudder and Kitty began to cough and draw in large amounts of air. Pietro helped her to sit up and rubbed her back as if it could help her to breathe more comfortably. For a moment there he had been unsure if he had actually killed her or not.

It wasn't that he liked or even disliked Pryde, he just never got around to making up his mind, but he certainly didn't want to kill her. And when he had seen her lying there like that he had felt a panic akin to terror. That was an emotion he had never once felt in his life and didn't particularly want to experience again any time soon.

He looked over at the X-Men and the BoM. They all look like fish with their mouths hanging open like that, he thought and almost laughed, but he didn't seem to have it in him. He looked over to Scott. "Hey, Blasts for Brains, I'm going to take Pryde here to the mansion so your mad scientist can fix her up." And with that he and Kitty were gone, with only a rustle of the wind to tell that they had ever been there.

Cyclops, terrified that he had lost Kitty altogether, lashed out at Lance. "Ooh, you've had it Shakedown. That psychopath friend of yours just nearly killed one of my X-Men." He stomped over to Avalanche and grabbed him by the front of his battle suit. And when he talked it was with viciousness never before seen in him, that even Jean quailed. "Where. Is. He. Taking. Her?"

Rogue, who previously had been silent, standing transfixed as her old crush laid into her new crush, jumped into action. "Scott, he's taking her where he said he'd take her. To the Professor. Pietro may be a Brotherhood Boy and Magnito's son, but if he says he's going to do something, he'll do it, one thing Pietro doesn't do is lie, in fact he's brutally honest."

Scott sighed and let Lance down, who went over to stand behind Rogue, thinking she could protect him should Summers go crazy again, not that he was afraid, he just didn't want to hurt one of Rogue's friends. Scott stared at the ground for a few seconds, trying to focus his thoughts. Then he glanced up apologetically at Lance. "I'm sorry Lance, I'm just worried about Kitty. Watching her being her be buried under that mountain of rocks scared me to death. I'm just, uh, sorry. We cool?"

"Yeah," Lance sighed. "Look, don't worry about Kitty, most likely she's with the bald man himself right now, Pietro could get her there faster than any of you except for blue boy over there. And it's also likely that he didn't really mean to hurt her. Pietro just takes things a little too far sometimes. He gets carried away and doesn't realize what he's done until it's too late. He may not like Kitty, but he would never try to deliberately kill her."

Scott nodded. "I just hope you're right."

Professor Xavier looked up from the book he was reading when his mind felt someone, not one of his X-Men, enter the estate. He put the book down just as Quicksilver came to an abrupt halt before him. Pietro's face was frantic, but it was what he held in his arms that caught the good Professor's attention. His mind momentarily blanked.

For in Pietro's arms was a girl barely recognizable. In fact, if he hadn't seen the uniform, he might not know who it was. Kitty, his mind screamed. The sweet teenager had been turned into a riot of bruises and lacerations. I should never have sent her, he thought before his rational mind kicked in and he began to take action.

"I don't care," he said to Pietro, "how it happened, or whose fault it was. Right now we need to worry about Kitty. Please come with me and you can help me clean her up." Hank, he called out telepathically, meet me in sickbay, Kitty has been hurt severely and Pietro has brought her here just in time.

The Professor led Pietro to an elevator hidden in the wall which immediately took them to the underground pathways that belonged exclusively to the X-Men. The Professor's mind was in a rush, thinking of a thousand different scenarios in which he couldn't save Kitty. But he shifted those thoughts aside to make room for rational thought.

They came to sickbay where Hank was already preparing a bed for Kitty to be examined upon and healed. "Pietro, please place Kitty upon the examining table and step back, this may take awhile." Pietro did as he was ordered, and watched as Hank went to work on Kitty's bruised and battered body.

The Professor took the opportunity to study Pietro. He had given the boy a lot of thought throughout his life and was impressed that the boy hadn't turned out more like his father. Most people couldn't see it, they never tried to look past the badboy front Pietro put up, but he was a remarkable young man.

His father had abandoned him and his sister mere days after their mothers' death to perfect strangers and left, never giving any comfort to two lost and confused children who only wanted their father back. That had made Pietro the solitary person he was, he never let people get to close for fear of them leaving him someday.

Then he had watched his father put his twin in a prison disguised as a mental hospital for not being able to contain her powers, installing in him a deep and vicious fear of loosing control, thus making him work twice as hard to perfect his powers.

All in all, Pietro could have turned out a lot worse. But he had grown up to be an honest, sometimes reliably, intelligent young man who knew how to survive in the world today. Xavier hoped that Pietro someday found someone to redirect his mischievous nature though. Who knew, maybe after this, Kitty could talk him a world of good. He had come to realize that people who talked to Kitty tended to think more optimistically afterwards.

"Thank you for bringing her here," he said, watching the quiet mutant while he worked on Kitty, assessing her for broken or crushed bones. When Pietro opened his mouth to protest Xavier cut him off with a quick motion. "I don't care whose fault this is, although she might not feel the same, you owe it to her to talk to her when she wakes up. You're welcome to stay here until she does, so are the other members of the brotherhood, in fact, I hope you will, it's been very quiet around here lately and the training sessions haven't been as lively, plus I know that the bank is foreclosing on the Brotherhood House. Think about it."

AN: Now is that a good ending for a chapter or what? Please R&R.

Upcoming: The Brotherhood of Mutants make their decision and a new mutant joins the fray. Who is that man?