.Hope in a Darkened Heart
Kurt/Ororo
PG-13
Summary: After X2, Kurt and Ororo talk in the library.
"Within the walls of concentration camps, people lived their day to day lives. Nazi officers laughed with each other over dinner each night, the commandants children worried about whether they were popular at school or not while his wife fretted about the housekeeping and the cooking, the same petty preoccupations filled their heads as ours. While, all the time, just over that fence people starved, were brutally beaten and killed, degraded and humiliated by men who went home at night to worry about whether they were putting on weight or their hairline was receding. And other people lived in the villages near these places seeing the people going in, seeing the smoke from the chimneys yet never truly seeing. Carefully blinding themselves to what was going on. It's amazing how little people see when they choose not too. How little they'll let the suffering of others effect their lives."
She closed the textbook with an audible snap.
Somehow they both knew she wasn't just talking about the persecution of the Jews.
It was late on Saturday night and she was supposedly helping Kurt plan his lesson on religious persecution for Monday. But their discussion had too many painfully obvious echoes of their own situation.
Their own persecution.
"Maybe this time people will choose to see, ja?"
Even though he was sitting directly opposite her she could barely make him out in the dimly lit library. His natural ability to blend into the shadows was still startling at times but she was growing used to it. At the moment she wished that she too could blend back into the darkness so he couldn't see her face.
"Do you really believe that Kurt?"
His sad smile flashed white amongst the shadows.
"I have to liebchen, I have to."
For a long moment the silence between them was broken only by the muffled noises from outside the library, the stifled pounding of a dance track in the rec room, the sounds of the cold raindrops on the window. Then quietly she said,
"I hate them."
He reached out and covered her clenched hands with his own and looked into eyes that seemed less their natural vivid blue than a gleaming haunted grey. She barely seemed aware of his touch as she continued,
"Sometimes I hate them so much it scares me. They scare me Kurt and I can't forgive them for that...does that make me evil?"
Gently uncurling her hands, he held them in his as he answered gently,
"Nein, Ororo, it does not."
He couldn't help noticing the bruise coloured shadows under eyes, testaments to the fact she'd hardly slept since their return from Alkali Lake. It marred her beauty almost as much as the hard cynicism that had become more apparent in those eyes lately.
"Why?"
"Was?"
"Why doesn't that condemn me as evil? I hate them...maybe I haven't killed any of them but that just makes me a coward. I truly believe they'll exterminate us all yet I won't do anything about it. I can't accept what they do as part of human nature like the Professor tells me too; or forgive them for it like you do. Doesn't that make me evil?"
He reached across the table, tentatively touching her cheek. It was a 'safe' movement; he'd done it before and knew she wouldn't pull away.
"Nein, liebchen, that makes you human."
She was silent for a long moment after he sat back in his seat, looking down at his hand atop hers mostly to avoid looking at his face.
"I feel sometimes like I have a huge gash inside me, and all the goodness, all the humanity in me is getting pulled into it. That every time someone is cruel and prejudiced the wound gets bigger, hurt's more. I'm worried that one day everything will get drawn into it and there'll be nothing left of me but my mutation...that I won't even truly be a person anymore. That I'll simply become what the world seems to want to believe I am."
Pausing to take a shaky breath she looked up into his eyes for a moment, but that was all she could take. Her heart caught at the gentle compassion she saw there and she had to look away.
"But maybe that would be a good thing...if I wasn't a person anymore then nothing would hurt. The hatred wouldn't hurt, Jean's death ...maybe that wouldn't hurt anymore."
He reached for her, stroking her hair then her cheek again. Nervous apprehension tingled on the surface of her skin as he softly ran his fingers over her cheek, just brushing the corner of her lips. His touch was light, still tentative but less so than it had been before.
"But if you couldn't hurt anymore then maybe you couldn't feel anything, is that what you would want?"
She didn't look at him, couldn't admit that the way he had been looking at her just then had suddenly made her think that not feeling would be the worst fate in the world.
Instead she sighed and dropped her head back into hands.
"Why do you try and help me Kurt? What have I ever done to deserve your friendship?"
"Liebchen I was your friend from the moment you came to me in the back of the jet and opened a little bit of your heart to me, however briefly...it's not a question of whether or not you deserve it. You have my friendship and now you are stuck with it, verstehen?"
His grin was teasing but his voice was deadly serious.
Looking up into her eyes he noticed again how tired she was looking lately. Her eyes were heavy with the terrible aching tiredness that came from spending nights awake because to sleep meant to let the dreams take you. He knew all about that tiredness, all about those dreams. The only difference was his dreams were made up of looks of terror, and the flash of a knife while he imagined hers must be of a feeling of helplessness, of loss.
She hated to feel helpless, he knew that much.
Reluctantly he reached over and plucked the book from her. She frowned at him, reaching out to take it back from him but he held it away, shaking his head.
"You're tired. We can finish this up tomorrow."
For a moment she looked like she might argue with him, but the fight seemed to drain out of her. She sagged in her chair for a moment, wearily acquiescing with a small nod before taking the hand he offered to pull herself up. He began to clear away his books oddly conscious of her eyes on him. As he put out the light and turned back to her he couldn't help admiring her for a moment. In the silvery half-light she looked oddly inhuman. She stood with a queen's posture, a dark, exotic woman with her hair luminous in the moonlight, her mouth a deep rose red and her eyes a clear cold blue. Impossibly beautiful and impossibly powerful.... and for a second it scared him. The world had hurt this woman, had been trying to break her since she was five years old. For now she remained strong but the cracks were already started to show, and what would happen it she ever truly broke he didn't want to think... she was probably the most powerful woman in the world and who would stop her if she decided to exact a vengeance on the world that had treated her so cruelly?
Would you stop her, 'Nightcrawler'? he asked himself If Cyclops or the Professor ordered you to kill her would you? Could you, even if she was a threat to all of humanity?
He watched her as she walked toward him, tucking a wayward strand of hair behind her ear and he honestly couldn't answer that question. He shook his head, clearing the morbid thoughts and pushed open the library door with a flourish.
"Come...put the hatred away with the books tonight, ja?"
She looked at him with a kind of hopeless affection, and a faded smile touched her lips as she took his arm.
"I wish it was that easy Kurt, I really do."
They had stopped their slow walk towards the door. The weariness evident in her every move made his heart ache.
"It could be..."
"No."
"Ororo..."
She pulled her hands from his, bringing them up to stroke his hair gently like a mother soothing a child. Then she leant forward and kissed him on the lips, cutting off his argument before he could even truly begin.
"No Kurt, not for someone like me."
When he managed to drag his voice and mind back into the conversation he answered firmly.
"I don't believe that Ororo...I won't believe that."
"Why?"
Her eyes were the lovely incandescent blue of the twilight sky, deep and rich with feeling and he very nearly let himself tell her the truth. Because I am falling in love with you..."I don't know. But I know in my heart that you are not evil, that you could never be evil. You have spent your life fighting for this cause...at Alkali Lake you saved countless human lives. You didn't have too Ororo...you could have walked away, let Jason kill all the humans that you say you hate. But you didn't. You went in there and you fought with everything you had to save them...those aren't the actions of someone who is evil."
Her voice was strangely choked
"Do you believe in me so very much?"
"Of course..."
He brushed away the single tear that had fallen from her eyes, fingers lingering a moment on her cheek.
"Things will seem brighter tomorrow. I promise you."
As he began to drop his hand back to his side, she caught it and held it against her cheek a moment. When she spoke her voice was so soft he could barely hear it
"Maybe they will..."
He took her hand gently in his and together they walked out of the library.