Prompt: Sunflowers

Timeline: Post-X3

Sunflowers

The walls of the visitation room were cold and grey. There were no cracks or crumbles or dingy corners like she'd imagined, just cold flat walls and cold flat fluorescent lights that were giving her a headache.

Then the guards brought him through the door, and Kitty's blood went as cold as the room. He sat down on the other side of the table and glowered at her, trying to make his hands as comfortable as they could be when they were weighed down with handcuffs and chains.

"I asked to see you," she responded to his unasked question. "I wanted to tell you that I forgive you."

"I don't need your forgiveness," he said, mouth curling around the syllables of the word as though it tasted bad. "Not gonna do me a whole hell of a lot of good in here, is it?"

"That's why I wanted to tell you," she replied. "You should know there's at least one person in the world that cares if you live or die."

He stared at her with a peculiar expression on his face. "Why do you care?"

Kitty closed her eyes, letting the memory carry her through the hurt. "Because," she whispered, "one day I wore a dress with a sunflower print and you told me I looked beautiful."

There were no more cutting remarks after that, just a fuzzy gaze from eyes that blinked at her vacantly.

"Time's up," the guard said, and John rose to his feet obediently and shuffled to the door.

Just before he walked through it, he turned to face Kitty again. "You still have that dress?"

She nodded. "Yeah. I do."

"You should wear it next time," he said, and finished walking out the door, the sound of the shackles around his arms and legs fading into the emptiness of the corridor as the door closed behind him.

"I'll do that," Kitty said to no one, and smiled for the first time since she'd arrived through the razor-wired gates.