A/N: Here it is: the final installment! I can't believe I started this over two years ago...and that I thought it wouldn't be longer than three chapters. I just want to thank every single person who read, followed, favorited, and reviewed. Your support means so much to me and I probably wouldn't have finished this if it weren't for you guys. This is actually the longest thing I have ever written and it's been an incredible experience, so thank you all! And I hope you enjoy this last chapter.
Disclaimer: I don't own X-Men.
The professor's essence is slowly fading from the hidden room.
Kitty feels him less and less every time she sits in there. When she first enters, it takes a few minutes for the vestiges of his presence to come to her, and each day that she descends into his room, she has to wait longer and longer to feel him there. Soon there'll be nothing left of him at all.
But Kitty knows it's okay. It's time. He stayed as long as she needed him to, until she learned to live without him. She knows now that this is just one part of him that remains, and she has so many more. She's not going to forget him.
When the last trace of his presence disappears completely from this room, she'll be ready to let it go.
Summer progresses: hours melding into days, days into weeks. Kitty and Bobby still run simulations some nights. Other nights they just lay out on the floor of the Danger Room and talk, and Kitty thinks about writing a program with a field of grass and a starry sky. She mentions this idea to Bobby once and he takes her outside, where they lay in a field of grass beneath a starry sky. "Sometimes you think too much," he tells her, only half-teasing.
They talk for a while before falling, gradually, into one of their collective pensive moods. Kitty takes comfort in Bobby's presence beside her as she thinks of the new school year approaching. Storm is interviewing new teachers—there's a seemingly constant stream of strangers marching from the front door to her office—and Kurt is due to arrive next month. Meanwhile, prospective students keep calling and sometimes visiting even though no one's been out recruiting in months. Kitty feels overwhelmed but also slightly amazed by all the activity: so many more mutants out there that they can help. So much more that they can all do.
"Kit?" Bobby asks.
She hums in the back of her throat, her mind still a little lost.
"What do you think you'll be doing?" He shifts a little next to her, and the rustling of grass tickles her ears. "When you graduate, I mean."
There's a pile of college acceptance packets on Bobby's desk, most of them from schools not too far from here, but he told her recently that he's decided to defer and take the year off. "I'm needed here," he explained, with a look in his eye that Kitty recognized. She'd be proud of him either way, but she wasn't ready for him to leave yet. Not so soon after everyone else.
He plans on starting college next fall instead. As for Kitty, no future has solidified as clearly for her as it seems to have for Bobby. She hasn't had any revelations or epiphanies yet—no startlingly lucid vision of the next step she should take. She relays this to Bobby and even saying it out loud doesn't really bother her at all. There's a world of possibility out there; she'll find her path.
There's another silence, but it's one of the more comfortable silences Kitty's felt: like being enveloped in a warm bath. The sky is an enormous dark bowl hanging over them.
"Promise me something," Bobby says, so faintly that Kitty almost thinks she imagined it.
"What is it?"
"If you ever…" he pauses, as if trying to find the right words. "If you ever want to leave here—for whatever reason. I won't judge you. Just, if you're leaving—will you tell me?"
Kitty sits up and leans on one arm so she can look him in the eye. "Bobby," she says, quietly.
"Just promise me," he repeats. "Please."
"I promise," she assures him, with as much weight as she can muster. He nods and lets out a breath, but Kitty can still feel the sudden tension lingering in the air. She knows who he's thinking about, and how it's plagued his mind. Sometimes she pictures fighting Bobby, not sparring like they do during training, but real fighting, fighting with intent. Would it be fueled by hate and anger? Or would it be calculated, deliberate, strategic—just a means to an end, just a barrier to break down? Either way, try as she might, she can't imagine ever fighting Bobby the way he had to fight with John.
"Do you promise, too?" she asks.
Now Bobby sits up, mirroring her. "Kit, I'd never do that to you."
"I know," Kitty says. And she does know—despite that rocky patch, that period when she genuinely didn't know, when she felt the strong possibility that Bobby might go out one day and just not come back. "I want you to know the same way I do." Impulsively, she extends a pinky out to him. "Pinky promise?"
"Seriously?"
"Come on." She waggles the pinky. "Make it official."
Bobby rolls his eyes, but he stretches his own finger out to link with hers. "Fine, pinky promise. Didn't realize you were still twelve, Kitty."
"Okay, Drake. That's enough." She lunges at him and starts tickling his sides; he swats at her hands and launches his own attack. Breathless, Kitty bats him away. "Now who's twelve?"
"Yeah, I'm not falling for that," Bobby says, with one eyebrow raised. "You started it."
She shrugs. "It was worth a try."
Bobby rolls over, away from her, but she sees him grinning. "Remember when you tried to teach me about the stars?" he asks, laughter in his voice.
"Yeah," Kitty says, amused. "Do you remember any of it?"
He shrugs, a movement made strange by his reclined position. "Um, aquarium?" He sweeps one hand broadly across the sky. "Vesuvius? Jupiter?"
Kitty laughs out loud and shoves his shoulder playfully. "Please stop."
Letting out a dramatic sigh, he flops back down. "Oh thank god."
The darkness of the sky presses down on them. Kitty squints through the constellations, tries to see the stars the way Bobby must. They blur into a mysterious web, a pattern of fairy lights. How long until dawn now? She's lost herself in this little pocket of space and time, the hours in between that feel separate from the rest of her life. Kitty thinks again about Bobby charting each floor of the mansion, mapping every corner with the pacing of his feet. She thinks about where she is.
That morning Kitty wakes wanting to be alone. She and Bobby had shared more memories, and laughed together, and when the sun had started edging into the sky they'd peeled themselves off the grass and gone back to their beds. Just a few hours later, this solitary mood has overtaken her—as it sometimes does, out of the blue.
Today, as she's been doing these days, she heads outside instead of deeper into the mansion. She climbs that old tree, the one that holds just as many memories as the Professor's hidden room does. Here she spied on games of Mutant Ball, here she retreated from the wrath of Jubilee, here she hid from Logan and the X-Men and the responsibilities she didn't want to accept. Places like this let her be alone without being lonely.
Just minutes later, Logan destroys the illusion of privacy by walking under and looking up. "Still climbing trees, half pint?"
Kitty adjusts her position, balancing her book carefully in her lap. "Why would I stop?"
From this angle she can see the graves, three gray smudges in her periphery. They still draw her eye, tug at her vision. She's always aware of them, but she just lets them be there. Maybe someday they'll stop calling out to her; until then, she can't do anything more than let them be.
"Gotta cancel our session tomorrow," Logan says. They resumed their regular training almost immediately after his return, without a word about where he'd been and what transpired while he was gone. Kitty's thought a lot of angry things about him since he took off, resentful, unkind things, but she doesn't say a single one to him. Something's changed. She's not the same girl who picked a fight with him any chance she got. Whatever it was that made her act that way, it's gone now.
She felt it the second she saw him step outside, that day he returned. The dynamic between them has shifted. It's subtle, but impossible to deny, and Kitty's still testing the waters.
"Okay," she tells him. She thinks of asking him if he has a date, but the words never leave her lips.
Logan nods and turns to leave, but changes his mind abruptly. "I saw those new programs you made," he mentions casually.
Kitty stares at him—mostly because technology isn't his forte, and that's an understatement. He grumbles under his breath at her expression and adds, irritably, "I had Hank show me. Don't give me that look."
She shrugs. "Storm gave me the go ahead to make some new ones."
"Yeah," he grunts. "You know that's not what I'm getting at."
Kitty looks away, through the green summer leaves of her tree into the grounds beyond. "Yeah. I know."
He studies her for a minute. "A lot's changed since I've been away."
Kitty hums, quietly, in agreement. Her fingers tap against the spine of her book. She doesn't have any other response to the overpowering truth of his statement.
Logan looks like he's about to say something, but instead just shakes his head. Kitty thinks of the time they talked, really talked, and how rare it was. He's caught her in another vulnerable place and she doesn't know what would happen if he tried to go down that road again. She's afraid of what she might say.
She understands why he left. Maybe, in his place, she would have done the same. But these irrational feelings still reside in the dark corners of her mind, and the harder she tries to suppress them, the more adamantly they refuse to retreat. In any other situation, she'd know the only solution would be to just let them out. But Kitty doesn't want Logan to look at her and see that same petulant kid. She doesn't think she could stand to see that look again. Not now, after everything.
She's trying, though. She's trying to find a way to let these thoughts go.
They're both silent for a long moment. This has been happening a lot lately; Kitty gets the sense that they're both still feeling each other out. Whatever it is that's changed between them, it's changed because they've changed.
Logan, surprisingly, breaks the silence first. "Listen, kid," he says gruffly, his expression betraying his discomfort, "if you ever need anything—"
Kitty smiles half-heartedly, glad for the distance the branch she's perched on has put between them. "I know, I know," she quips. "Go to someone else."
His scowl deepens. "Be serious for a minute," he reprimands, in a schoolmarmish manner that looks strange on him. "I mean it, half pint. You can come to me." He pauses, considering something. "So long as it's not boy problems or—or lady troubles or any of that shit."
Lady troubles? Kitty has to stifle a laugh, but the sincerity of his offer strikes a chord with her. "Okay", she replies, serious like he wants. "Thanks."
Logan's walking out of her line of vision when she glances back down his way; she catches a flash of hair and the shuffle of his soles. As he disappears, his voice floats up to her, so quiet it's barely there: "I'm proud of you, kid."
The longer Kitty watches Logan and Marie, the more clearly she sees how similar they are. She sees them both itching, in their separate ways, for something new. She sees the uncertain way Marie moves, like she's still learning to fit into her own skin, like she's searching for something else beyond this place; she sees Logan's hesitation, the flexing of his animal instincts, the furtive glances he directs around a room as if wondering how he came to be here. She sees their traveler's hearts pounding within their chests and wonders how long it will take them to leave, if they've really both made enough of a home here to stay.
But days pass, weeks pass. New teachers arrive, new students, new textbooks. The mansion is growing strong again, fortified with each new addition. And months are passing, and the new school year is looming up ahead, and they're still here. Both of them.
From her vantage point in an upstairs window, Kitty watches students both new and old moving in. This high up, she can only see vague impressions of colored clothing and smudges of hair on the people carrying suitcases and greeting each other. She could be anywhere in the world.
But she knows where she is. She knows the meaning of here, knows it like the back of her hand, inside and out. Knows it in her heart.
Here is the setting, the backdrop for the twists and turns of her life these past few years. Everything that's changed, everything lost and everything gained, every time she's succeeded and each time she's failed.
Every time she's fallen, every time she's been helped back up. Every time she's helped herself back up.
She knows she can do it now.
Fear used to envelope her, define her. Now it lingers at the edges, waiting to flicker back into her, to possess her, same as it always has. But she isn't the same. She knows now that it will never fully let go of her. But she won't surrender to it anymore. From now on, she's the one in control.
Kitty is nearing seventeen when she decides not to be afraid of falling any longer.
There's laughter and shouting in the hallways, and Kitty turns away from her reverie to listen. She can pick out the sounds of Stevie and Jubilee bickering playfully, peppered with an assortment of new voices. Then Bobby's holler breaks through: "Hey, Kit! Want to come initiate the new students with a game of Mutant Ball?"
This sounds like a terrible idea. "Be there in a minute," she calls back, and lets herself fall through the floor.
