Chapter 9
Shadowcat
It was easy to imagine what a life with the handsome Russian boy asleep in the tent next to her would be like. His huge arms wrapped around her each night, the sound of her name whispered in her ear. She dreamed of it more than she cared to admit to her fellow classmates, especially to him. Dreaming about him was simple. The difficulty lay within transforming a secret love into something real, something tangible. But thankfully, tangibility was Shadowcat's specialty.
Kitty! Uh-Shadowcat! Wake up! Phoenix's voice protruded into her thoughts, Wake up!
Shadowcat's arms flailed wildly in the air, passing through the head of the unsuspecting victim trying to shake her awake, "I'll get up later." She said.
"No, you have to get up now!" Phoenix insisted further.
Shadowcat merely groaned in response, flipping her pillow over onto her head so that it covered her ears.
"Quit bein' so nice all o' the time, Phoenix," Rogue sighed, "there's a snake in yer bed, sugah."
Within what seemed like less than a second, Shadowcat had jumped onto her feet, leaving her warm nest of a bed a pile of blankets. She looked down, and sure enough, a snake slithered in and out of the delicate folds of the blankets.
"GETITOUTGETITOUTGETITOUTGETITOUT!" She screamed through a long mass of indistinguishable syllables.
"Well Ah'm not touchin' it." Rogue said with her arms crossed, her hair wildly tangled from her tendency to roll around at night.
"Not it!" Psylocke called from the other end of the tent where she had been thoroughly enjoying ignoring the conversation and instead flipped absently through a magazine, her purple hair shimmering slightly.
Phoenix sighed and pressed two fingers to her temple. The snake lifted in the air and flipped wildly in anger as it was removed from the ground.
Shadowcat let out another scream as she watched the creature dance through the air.
"Shhh!" Rogue hissed, thrusting a gloved hand over Shadowcat's open mouth, stifling her scream. "Do ya hear that?"
Sure enough, just beyond the thin, dew soaked material of their tent, two boys were laughing furiously.
"Idiots." Rogue crossed the tent with an angry stomp and unzipped the tent rapidly, nearly ripping the fabric in the process. She grabbed the squirming snake out of the air, clearly getting past her own reluctance to touch the thing in order to get back at the boys, and threw it in the direction of the two figures barely illuminated by the early morning sun.
"Eek!" Came the unbridled, high pitched screams of Nightcrawler and Iceman, causing the girls to double over in laughter.
Come to the picnic table, all of you, now! The Professor's voice rang angry and clear through the heads of the six teens like an air horn. At once, they all stopped making any noise and did exactly as the professor said.
Shadowcat picked up her newly snake-free blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders to minimalists her shaking in the brisk morning air. As she exited the tent, she watched smoke tendrils crawl from her mouth as her breath froze in the cool air. She walked silently in line with the others, feeling the wet grass beneath her feet. Having grown up in the suburbs with not-very-outdoorsy parents, she had never gone camping as a child, but she was beginning to grow fond of the feeling of being one with nature. It was becoming exceedingly difficult to find anything other than monotony in the concrete jungle of the city, and the campground was a welcomed change of pace.
"What on earth was going on over there?" The Professor demanded, still wiping the sleep from his eyes. His harsh tone shook Shadowcat from her thoughts.
No one spoke for a long while. They all did their best to avoid eye contact with the Professor, some of them with their eyes fixed on the ground, a few of them looked around sheepishly for some sort of distraction that would save them from answering.
Professor Xavier did not flinch, "someone tell me why I was woken up so rudely this morning, please." He finished, with the "please" as almost an after thought to soften the sentence. "I would prefer not to have to get the information my self if you don't mind."
Shadowcat bit her lip and then released it, and her words gushed out afterwards like a ruptured dam. "The boys put a snake in our tent as a prank so we threw it back at them because we heard them laughing outside but really it was their fault because they started it and they did it while we were sleeping and it could have like bitten us!" She finally stopped her long string of uninterrupted words.
"Would someone mind translating that into regular human words, please?" Cyclops said with the haughty tone that he had favoured for most of the weekend. He'd shown up behind the professor, just as he always did when there was trouble. Shadowcat presumed that the whole 'leader' thing was beginning to go to his head.
As Phoenix began to translate Shadowcat's words in a slower tone, could feel the rest of her classmates' eyes burning on the back of her neck. They had appeared when they heard the commotion, and we're watching the scene with a rather amused curiosity. Shadowcat looked around to see Storm and Wolverine, standing awkwardly together, and she realized that she had not seen her since the night before.
Her eyes then passed over Colossus and her heart fluttered, he was staring directly at her! He looked away quickly, but Shawcat could still feel her heart pounding wildly. Was he just staring at her because she was staring at him? Did he have feelings for her as well? She had to know right away.
The Professor's voice remained as background noise, as he rattled off something about how disappointed he was in their behaviour, how they would have to shape up if they wanted to continue the trip, and that there would be a punishment for their actions, but it all went in one of her ears and out the other. Shadowcat was fixated on more important matters.
The Professor dismissed them until he and Cyclops could come up with a suitable way to get them to work together, and Shadowcat was free to execute her plan of finding out whether or not Colossus had feelings for her.
"Wolverine!" She yelled quickly, "I need to talk to you! Now!" She added when she noticed his reluctant expression.
"This had better be good," he grumbled.
"I need you to talk to Colossus for me." She said the second they were out of earshot from anyone, her big brown eyes staring him down intensely. "I need to know if he likes me. It's eating me up inside."
"Look, kid, I got more important thing ta do than find out if the Ruskie's got a crush on you. Just ask him yerself."
"No! That's weird, you have to do it! And don't call me kid, I'm only like, two years younger than you."
"Three, actually. What's in it for me?" He negotiated.
"The adoration of one Katherine Anne Pryde?"
"Not worth it."
"Fine, I'll trick Jean into meeting you somewhere?"
He looked away for a moment, almost as if making eye contact with someone off in the distance, "nah, I don't think Jeannie and I will ever be a thing..." He trailed off.
"Fine, twenty bucks?" She sighed and held up a crisp bill.
"Deal." He said, snatching it out of her hand.