A/N: Thanks for the reviews! To the anonymous reviewer: I've written one small section involving Kitty's family, but there might end up being more. Who knows, this story has a mind of its own.
Also, I wasn't sure whether Colossus was Piotr or Peter-I've seen it both ways-so I compromised.
Disclaimer: I don't own X-Men, or Arrested Development, or anything really.
Winter break comes and some of the kids pack up to go home. The Professor and all the adults stay; so do a surprising number of students. Kitty knows that a lot of the students here have stories like hers, worse than hers probably; even the ones you wouldn't expect, the hyper kids, the ones who always look happy. No one really asks here.
The mansion isn't all that quiet—Kitty guesses that it never is—but it does feel emptier. Most of Kitty's friends stay, though, so she spends a lot of her time with them, playing in the snow or just hanging out on the sofa, talking and watching movies. The new girl, Rogue, hangs out with them too, and Kitty gets to know her a little better. Sometimes they all play pranks on the professors or the younger kids. They find that they can get away with a lot more than when classes are in session.
It's great, but without classes Kitty feels a little restless. She knows that makes her sound like a huge nerd, but apparently that's exactly what she is. She still reads a lot. Sometimes she wanders aimlessly around the mansion, phasing through walls or floors whenever she feels like it. If Kitty scares anyone, that's just an added bonus. While everyone is still getting used to her being around, they're delightfully easy to scare just by dropping down through the ceiling unexpectedly. Scott's reactions in particular are priceless. Of course, sometimes Kitty is just as scared by what she walks into, so eventually she cuts back on the phasing—mostly, anyway. She loves being able to walk through walls too much to just stop altogether.
Only a few days into the break, Kitty is building mutant snowmen outside with Rogue, Piotr, Bobby, and Jubilee—although the latter had bailed after five minutes, claiming the cold had gotten to her. The remaining four have already built a veritable snow army, thanks to Bobby's powers. Piotr waited half an hour before revealing that his artistic talents extended to snowmen, which led to a mostly friendly competition between him and Bobby for the most accurate portrait of Rogue. Pete won easily.
Kitty made sure to watch from safe distance, in case the contest ended badly. It didn't. Rogue managed to appease Bobby by fawning over the ice sculpture of her that he'd created, and pretty soon he'd forgotten all about his loss.
In the meantime, Kitty asks Piotr to teach her how to sculpt a face. He shows her how his hand glides smoothly over the contours of cheekbones, noses, chins, and pretty soon there's a decent replica of her face, staring up from the snowy ground. When Kitty attempts to copy his handiwork, she ends up with a shapeless lump that resembles an ass more than anything. Pete stifles a grin. He's patient, kind to a fault, and really great with the kids, but Kitty knows there's more to him than has a witty, almost childish sense of humor that has only emerged a few times around her, but it's enough to make her wonder what she'd find if she dug deeper.
Bobby and Rogue regroup before long, ready with new ideas for additions to their army. Kitty stomps over her barely recognizable snow face before Bobby can comment on it. They all start building with renewed energy. About halfway through their next project, though, Kitty realizes she can't feel her fingers anymore.
"I'm going to go in for a little bit, guys," she says, breath frosting, and laughs when Bobby flings a perfectly formed snowball at her. "Come on. Rudolph's looking great, you don't need me." Kitty gestures at their latest creation, which resembles a reindeer hybrid, for emphasis.
Pete shrugs good-naturedly at her. Rogue pats Rudolph's head and smiles. Bobby throws another snowball, but Kitty ducks inside just in time to hear it hit the wall. She peeks through the window and sees that in just a few seconds their snowman-making has dissolved into a full-on battle: Rogue is taking cover behind Rudolph, desperately trying to form a decent snowball as Bobby and Pete pelt her with ones from their giant, rapidly-formed stash. Kitty laughs and heads upstairs.
After changing, she decides to make everyone some hot chocolate. They'll probably need it. Distracted, she sinks through the ceiling instead of taking the stairs. Phasing has become so natural to her.
Kitty's halfway to the kitchen when she sneezes and unwittingly pitches forward through the wall, the momentum carrying her through two more walls before she finally stops herself. She lands harder than she intended. Groaning, she sits up, and only then does she realize that she has no idea where she's landed.
She's in a dark and narrow room—well, more of a hallway than a room. Kitty feels for a light switch, finds one, and flicks it on. Suddenly the hallway is bathed in light, and she can see a point in the distance where it slopes down. Kitty phases her head through the wall and sees one of the classrooms. So this is a random hallway next to a classroom…she grins. She's found a secret passage.
Like all the students, Kitty knows about the emergency escape tunnel hidden behind one of the wooden panels in the hallway. Professor Xavier has told all of them about it. When Storm led them all through the passage, she'd said it was in case of a fire, or some other similar circumstance. Everyone knew what she really meant. It was just one of those things, like the base hidden under the school, complete with a jet parked under the basketball court: one of those things that everyone knew about the school but nobody talked about. Everyone here was just waiting to be attacked, shunned, outlawed. They had to be prepared for everything.
That tunnel was common knowledge. The hallway that Kitty is in right now is something else entirely. Curiously, she follows the path. It slants down a few times, then rises, then curves around, seemingly endless. Anticipation rises in Kitty's chest. She's discovered a secret. Maybe everyone already knows about it, maybe not, but it's a part of the mansion that, for now, is all hers.
Finally, the hallway widens into a small, nearly empty space. A desk in one corner is the only piece of furniture in the room. Despite the bare light bulb that hangs from the ceiling, an old fashioned old lamp is perched in the corner of the desk. Everything except the desk is almost suspiciously clean. For some reason, the room feels impossibly far away from where Kitty stands at its entrance. It's so barren, but the atmosphere is full of someone else's emotions.
She crosses over to the desk hesitantly. Stacks of paper litter the surface, all of them covered in the same spindly, precise handwriting—she recognizes it instantly as the Professor's handwriting. So this is his secret hideaway. Guiltily, she backs away. Kitty understands completely the need to have a special space all to yourself, especially in a mansion this crazy. Her inquisitive nature makes her wonder what he's writing, but the respect she has for him pulls her away.
When Kitty steps out through one of the room's walls, she finds herself outside, somewhere on the side of the mansion. She phases back in and tries another wall, which leads into what looks like a storage closet. Kitty sighs. It takes fifteen minutes and a lot of wrong turns, but she eventually ends up in the kitchen, where she'd originally intended to go.
Rogue, Piotr, and Bobby are collapsed on the snowy ground when Kitty heads out to bring them hot chocolate. Bobby's moving his arms and legs to form an angel, somehow still lively, but Rogue and Pete just look exhausted. Kitty grins at the sight.
Pete accepts his hot chocolate gratefully. "You're an angel," he mutters.
"No, I'm an angel," Bobby pipes up, moving his limbs faster. "See?"
Rogue swats at him playfully, but it lacks energy. She sips at her hot chocolate. "That's better."
"Everything's better when Bobby stops talking," Pete jokes, and dodges the ball of ice that flies his way.
Gradually, snow starts falling again, dusting their hair and faces. No one moves. Kitty feels like her body is melting into the snow, like a frozen bed. Somewhere to her right, Piotr yawns.
"Bobby, when are you going home?" he asks.
"Three days," Bobby replies sleepily. "I'll be back after New Year's."
His response casts a muted shadow over the group. Kitty never asked him why he didn't just go home right after classes let out. She thought of plenty of reasons on her own: maybe he was nervous to see his family when he was lying to them about being a mutant, not knowing if they would accept him. Maybe they didn't all get along as well as she'd assumed. Kitty shouldn't have assumed anything. Now she wishes she'd asked.
Another answer to her unspoken question presents itself when she glances over at Rogue, who is biting her lower lip anxiously. Bobby seems to understand without even looking. His hand inches over to Rogue's, and Kitty marvels at his intuition.
The air is still and quiet for a while. Snow falls over their bodies until they begin to blend in, just another part of the endless landscape. Kitty lets the cold soak into her as she remembers the secret room, how it was so full of someone. How the Professor had managed to occupy a space so completely without even being in it. She wonders if she'll ever occupy a space that way. It seems impossible. Kitty feels too small in all ways.
The sky is darkening rapidly. Rogue, Piotr, and Bobby dig themselves out and traipse inside, shivering. Kitty waits as long as possible before leaving. Her body feels foreign, numb, like it doesn't belong to her anymore, like she's just a piece of something much larger. The thought calms her until she, too, succumbs and trudges indoors.
She takes a long hot shower until she feels sufficiently thawed. When she finally curls into her bed and sleeps, her mind maps out the mansion and creates secret tunnels and trapdoors and hideaways that are all her own.
The next morning Kitty runs into the Professor in the hallway on her way to breakfast.
"Good morning, Kitty," he greets her. His voice sounds a little more stern than usual, and Kitty steels herself from a lecture. She learned on her second day here that there's no keeping anything from a telepath.
"I see that you've discovered my other office," the Professor says, unreadable as always. "Kitty, that's my private space."
She bows her head, respectful, apologetic. "I'm sorry. I left as soon as I realized it was yours."
When she looks up, she's surprised to see the hint of a smile playing across his face. "I should have expected you to discover all of my secret passages eventually," he muses, fondly, then looks her steadily in the eye. "Everyone sometimes needs some time alone, to think, to get away from it all. Even me." Xavier pauses. "But I'll tell you what. If you ever need to be alone for a while, just ask me. I will make sure that my private office is empty."
Kitty can't keep the gentle surprise out of her smile. "Thank you, Professor." He nods to her and continues on his way, and Kitty turns and watches him go. Xavier never stops looking out for her, even when she can't give him anything more than words. It stuns her every time.
Piotr takes some of the students out to the mall and the movies that weekend. There's only room for six other people, so Kitty ends up getting left behind. She considers riding hidden in the trunk, but it doesn't seem worth it. Then she considers asking one of the professors to take a second car, but they've all been keeping to themselves lately so she thinks better of it. Kitty's not the biggest fan of the mall anyways, but it would have been nice to get out of the mansion for a little. She's feeling restless.
With most of her friends gone, Kitty tries hanging around John. He's good friends with Bobby, and the three of them have hung out together before, so she figures they could become better friends. It turns out that John is significantly more guarded around her without Bobby there. The few times she talks with him alone, she never manages to get past his deeply infuriating exterior. He draws back and her reaction is to draw back too, and then they're just two kids ignoring each other. Kitty gives up.
It used to be, when she met a challenge she would devote herself completely to overcoming it. Something about the winter and the emptiness has sapped her energy. She kind of hates it, but the tiredness won't leave her.
She goes to the library instead, curls up in front of her favorite big window, and reads until she becomes just another character living in a book.
The snow gets heavier and heavier. Soon no one ventures outside at all. Without the option of playing around in the snow, boredom starts to set in. The remaining students disperse around the mansion and only come together during brief periods of inspired chaos. Inspiration is rare, however. The school has never been so quiet.
Kitty takes to reading for long hours with television breaks in between. She's curled up on the couch watching Arrested Development, mind still on the book she had just finished, when Logan wanders into the room. She hasn't talked to him much, or at all really. It hasn't been that long since he arrived with Rogue, and she still gets the sense that he's just one thought away from leaving. It's clearly making Rogue edgy, and Kitty doesn't blame her.
Logan notices her on the couch. He gives her a grimace that only slightly resembles a smile, chews on his cigar absently, and asks, "Mind if I take a seat?"
Kitty shrugs, wary.
He sits at the other end of the sofa and stays silent for a while. Kitty follows his lead and doesn't say anything either. They watch for a few minutes before he says, "Come on, kid, you really watch this shit?"
She sort of looks at him from the corner of her eye. "Well. Yeah."
"Gimme the remote. I'll find something better."
She hands it over. Channels change at a dizzying speed, and she squeezes her eyes shut. "How can you even tell what's on?" she mutters, half to herself.
"Don't get your panties in a bunch," Logan grumbles from the corner of his mouth. His brow is furrowed in concentration, which Kitty notes with amusement. "There." He's found an older movie, some kind of cowboy/bounty hunter/international man of mystery film. Kitty snorts.
"What?" Logan peers at her. He looks so mystified that she laughs.
"Nothing…" He keeps staring. "Okay, it's just…" she pauses. "Exactly what I would have expected."
Logan frowns deeply, and Kitty shuts up. He's still staring at her and she tries to ignore it—she can't deny that she's a little scared of him—but she only lasts a minute before turning back into the line of his stare. "What?"
"Nothing."
They actually watch quietly for a few minutes. The movie kind of sucks though. Kitty instantly hates the main character, which for some reason she decides to point out to Logan. Usually she goes along with anything to avoid a conflict, but something about Wolverine kind of makes her want to start an argument with him.
"Seriously, kid?" he grunts in response. "Better than the shit you were watching before."
"Arrested Development is a satire, and it's actually funny. The characters are more interesting and complex and the plot isn't tired, recycled garbage."
Logan's glare is enough to make Kitty want to go back to being invisible. "You wanna fight me, kid?"
She flashes him a lopsided, slightly nervous grin. "Over a movie?"
Slowly, he leans back into the couch, pointedly inspecting his knuckles. Kitty shifts away. She's never seen his claws, but she's heard stories from the other students and it's enough to make her jumpy. Logan turns his attention back to her, makes a show of looking her over. "You're too scrawny to fight me anyway," he observes. "It'd be over in a second."
Kitty makes a noncommittal noise.
"What's your mutation anyway, half pint?" he asks.
Instead of explaining, Kitty sinks one arm into the sofa. To her delight, Logan's eyes widen. "Right, you're the kid from that first day. In the Professor's class," he remembers, talking more to himself than to her. "You an X-Man?"
She shakes her head.
"Well, in that case," Logan concludes. "You'd definitely get your ass handed to you."
The only answer he gets is a shrug.
"You disagree, half pint?"
So far, arguing with Logan has been relatively more entertaining than dangerous, so Kitty figures there's no reason to stop provoking him now. She tilts her head, smirks. "Well, you never know."
"Bullshit," he pronounces, but Kitty catches the vaguely incredulous look he gives her. Then he relaxes back into the sofa and with that the discussion is over.
Thankfully, only five or so minutes go by before Kitty is rescued by the arrival of some students around her age. They hop over the sofa to settle between her and Logan. Fortunately for them, Logan is sufficiently distracted by Rogue, who trails behind the others; she smiles sweetly at him and eases the remote from his hand. The entire operation is so smooth that Logan hardly seems to notice what's happened until suddenly he's sharing a couch with six other mutants, watching MTV. Kitty grins to herself at his reaction.
She and the other students soon find themselves running for cover into the kitchen, but it's definitely worth it.
Logan takes off not long after.
No one thinks much of it. He hadn't been around long enough to make an impact on anyone besides the professors, and Kitty suspects they know his reasons, knew he was going to run off. Then there's Rogue. The day Logan leaves, she starts wearing a pair of dog tags around her wrist. She covers up so much that they aren't easily visible, but Kitty, in her quietness, notices things like that, the same way she notices Rogue beginning to pull away under the surface. It's subtle, but it's there.
In the end, Jubilee and Piotr manage to draw Rogue back out. Kitty watches from the sidelines and doesn't know why. Not for the first time, she calls herself coward.
Bobby comes back after the New Year a little more solemn. He leans closer to Rogue, who leans back on him in turn, and Kitty tries to figure out when she became the third wheel. The snowmen they all built are still standing, but they've been reduced to mere lumps poking out of a sea of white. Kitty starts to feel far away.
Then, two nights before classes resume, she wakes unexpectedly from a blank dream. She heads downstairs and into the kitchen to find Jones blinking furiously at the microwave, trying to heat a Hot Pocket, as Bobby watches with a spoon full of ice cream hovering halfway to his mouth.
Kitty tries to memorize the scene for future reference.
Bobby's spoon has almost made it to his mouth when he sees Kitty, jolts, and misses completely. "Oh, hey, Kitty," he says, ignoring the ice cream coating his chin.
She suppresses the urge to laugh. "Hey," she replies, and smiles at Jones, who eyes her suspiciously as he retrieves his Hot Pocket and leaves the room.
"Want some?" Bobby offers, digging his spoon back into the container.
Kitty crosses the kitchen to find a spoon of her own. "Figures that you would eat ice cream even in the winter."
"Hey, you're eating it too."
"Well," she takes a bite, "you are a terrible influence."
"No arguments there," Bobby grins.
It's as easy as ever to talk to him. Kitty realizes then that nothing's changed. Not really, anyways, not really and not yet.
