Moira's Rule Number One.
Thou shalt not Hurt Kurt.
Or she will hurt you. Badly.
They sit around the kitchen table, late into the night, talking, remembering.
"So, I start him an' Petey on basic self defence, 'cos the pair of them have the survival skills of a lemming, between the pair of 'em. An', damn me, you know, they're not half bad, they're young, but they're not kids, and I guess, if you're in a team of acrobats or on a collective farm, you have to work together? 'Cept Petey will keep apologising when he gets a good throw in."
Hank hides a smile behind his beer, this is high praise. He'd forgotten that when they started all this they weren't fighters, they were amateurs, all of them. Except Logan.
"And Pete's real fast and strong, even when not armoured up, Kurt ended up on the mat, can't even remember what he'd hurt?"
"Sprained hip." Ororo remembers, of course.
"There you go, twisted hip, and he's winded, he's used to taking a fall, but a bad landing, it can happen to the best of us. Petey is beside himself and Scotty cans the session, takes Pete off to talk him round. You know yourself, accidents happen, it's why we train.
I get the Elf down to the infirmary, you can tell he hurting, he's quiet.
And there's Moira, like one of the furies, waiting for us." Logan scowls. "No idea what the fuck she thought we'd been doing, we'ere wearing Karategi, fer Christ's sake, but she glares at me like it's all my fault anyway. An' she always thought the Elf was some kinda special..." he waves the beer can in the air. "I dunno, summat precious... treated him like he might break or summat."
Hank is smiling, Dr MacTaggert was indeed a force of nature and, frankly, terrifying. Except she seemed to have a soft spot for Kurt which ran a mile wide. Everyone had a soft spot for Kurt, who was indeed, Hank agreed, 'summat precious'. The smile is a bit harder to keep going now.
"So I helps him up on a bed an' she shoots him full of the good stuff, not much else you can other than dope and rest. An' that's the Elf out for the count so I turn to go an' there she is, 90lbs of fury, aimed right in my direction. She comes up to here on me." Logan marks the hight on his chin with offended dignity.
This, thinks, Hank, is going to be good.
"And her hand shoots out an' she's got me by the nutsack, with those sharp little nails. And there's nothing I can do about it."
Hank is seeing this so clearly in his minds eye; the diminutive doctor and versus the homicidal killing machine. But he still flinches in sympathy.
"An' she starts to squeeze an' then she says 'If I find a mark on him, if I *ever* find a mark on him that shouldn't be there, these are mine. Rule number one, no one hurts Kurt. Do you understand me?' Like he was some innocent kid that I was gonna have my wicked way with! Innocent? He'd fucked more..."
He shuts up, mostly because Hank is laughing so loud, he can't hear any more. Ororo's hand rests very lightly over his on top of the beer can, caressing his hard knuckles. And then he's laughing too.
That night, she's on top and she knows, when he comes in her, that it's not her face he's seeing, for a moment or two, not her body he's holding. And she lets him, just for tonight, tomorrow they will carry on, they always do, but they both know they've lost 'summat precious' and if she can give it back to him, however fleeting, then she will.