Disclaimer: The characters and environment depicted are the property of Marvel. This is a work of fiction set in the main Marvel universe (616) in May of 2012, before the events of Uncanny X-Force #24. The date and time elapse mentioned, as well as the details surrounding events are my own speculation, as they've not been stated in the MU.
The Bauers, the St. James family, Bianca Navarra, Karl Lange, and Jadzia were all created by me to fill in a few blanks and propel the story forward.
Chapter Two: A Different Light
Having decided to familiarize himself as much as possible with this world - the differences as well as the similarities - Kurt had requested, and been given, permission to visit the extensive library system of the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning. It was an enlightening experience in more ways than one.
He found the school's design in and of itself to be fascinating, though unorthodox. Traditional building design warred with space technology and it seemed every conceivable security precaution was implemented. Even he had been impressed. An extensive lawn encircled the property and offered leisure and recreational areas. He had been told that alien technology was also being used in the classroom setting, which allowed for a more interactive learning experience. Truthfully, he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to know what that entailed, but Eric would have loved all of this - such a place for shaping the minds and hearts of the future.
The library was equally spectacular. It was set up in an open center design with multiple floors and sections divided by subject matter. History was on the third tier, which is where Kurt chose to spend most of his time. The information was available not only in the standard format, but also in holographic form. He found enough material there of interest to last months, perhaps years.
His only complaint was occasioned by the interruptions to his study. The chatter and activity of students didn't bother him. The fairly frequent announcements over the communication system were beneath notice. No, his grievance stemmed from the disturbances caused by a most unusual vermin that plagued the complex. Astoundingly enough, for all the world they appeared to be small, irritating versions of himself. After several hours of losing his page or his pen when his back was turned, finding poorly spelled insults scrawled across his notepad, enduring an entire top shelf of books toppled onto his head and - most embarrassing - having a holographic presentation from the Humanoid Reproductive section of the Science department mysteriously start broadcasting at top volume from the table where he'd sat, Kurt decided to call it a day.
The librarian watched him coldly as he descended the stairs. "You're going to have to pay for that, you know."
"Pay? For what?" Kurt attempted an expression of innocence.
"Those gouges in the books, and what you did to the wall. What, do you think you can hack up my library with your little knife and not answer for it?" She tapped her green fingers impatiently on the front desk.
"But.." He dropped his pretense of ignorance and glared back at her. "You are aware this facility has a pest problem, ja?"
"I don't know what you're talking about." She shifted her attention to rearranging the paperwork before her. "All I know is that you've damaged school property and made a spectacle of yourself with that little holographic show. You'll be getting a bill."
Kurt stalked out of the library. It might not be so bad if I had actually managed to get one of the little Scheißkerle, he fumed.
After losing himself several times in the complicated building, he finally obtained directions from an unfriendly janitor and found his way to the cafeteria for a meal. That was an experience best forgotten. Afterwards, he retired to the lawns to relax and chanced across his team leader in the midst of a lecture. It surprised him that it was being given outdoors rather than in a classroom, but given the pleasant weather of the day, he could understand. Discreetly, he moved to listen in. It was apparent that this was an eyewitness account of world history. This should be entertaining, he thought.
*"So there we was in Soissons, feelin' beat, our backs to the wall. Ludendorf's troops just kept comin' - we'd fight off one bunch and another was right behind 'em. It never got quiet - never any peace from the guns and screamin' and dyin' all around. Bodies stacked up everywhere. An' the sky was never all the way dark - there was always flashes in the distance, like lightnin'." Logan dropped his voice as he spoke, commanding the attention of his listeners.
He is certainly the story-teller, Kurt mused.
Crouching now, Logan gestured broadly, "But we had one advantage - by then, the Germans was more worried about fillin' their empty bellies than killin' us."
A young woman piped up with a question, "But Professor Logan, if they were hungry, why didn't they just eat?"
"Good question Idie. It was 'cause they pushed too far and too fast. They didn't have the supplies to last. Ludendorf never expected things to work out the way they did - he was just tryin' to lure the French troops from what was goin' on in the north."
"If my people had been fighting, those miscreants would never have lived long enough to grow hungry," a tall thin and unearthly looking boy proudly boasted.
"Yeah well yer people weren't around Kid, so there ain't no sense speculatin' on that."
Kurt smiled to himself, intrigued. The man was quite good at this. Here was this gruff killer in a different light, and Kurt would never have expected such a thing from him. The children seemed enthralled and Logan was clearly enjoying his role.
As he looked at these seemingly well-adjusted young mutants, his mind wandered back to his own youth and how different it had been to this.
It wasn't that my childhood was bad, Kurt thought, not at all. He'd been his mother's only child, at least that was his belief at the time, and she doted on him. Indulged by his caretakers as well, he hardly had the harsh upbringing that some children experienced. The big house and grounds were his entire world, and he, like a little prince.
The entirety of the attic had been converted for his play room, with a built in jungle gym dominating one side. He had more toys and books than he knew what to do with. Every time his mother went on one of her extended trips, she returned with some unusual treasure for him. Cunning wooden toys from the orient, a painted spear from South America, a gilt coffer from Cairo - all these things he kept in his attic treasure room. His favorite things were probably the costumes, however. She brought him elaborate clothes from all parts of the world, perfect for his games of make-believe. After all, how many children could boast that they had an actual samurai kabuto helm? Kurt chuckled to himself. He fancied back then that he'd one day become a famous actor, and spent hours perfecting his performance before an adoring - but sadly invisible - audience.
No, his childhood hadn't been bad, just dreadfully lonely.
The Bauers had been kind, but with little energy to keep up with a growing boy and his games. His mother, even when she was present, was not exactly the playful type. True, she spent time with him; she started training him in combat from the time he could walk. She put a waster - a wooden training sword - into his hands by the time he was five. He also learned at an early age that the best way to gain her approval was to excel in her sometimes painful lessons. Show no weakness, give no quarter - he believed now that he'd drunk of these concepts with Mutti's milk. But she had no tolerance for his childish imagination or playfulness, which she referred to as "silliness".
Then, after Uta and Dieter died within a year of one another, his mother was left in a quandary regarding what to do with him. He was nine and still too young to be left on his own. Her other activities, of which he knew very little, still called for her to be often away. There was also the issue of his academic education to consider. Raven certainly taught him well enough when it came to self-defense and survival, but she hadn't the patience or the inclination to instruct him in the more sedate pursuits. He was an avid reader, and that helped, but it was far from enough.
Her first attempt to solve the problem had come in the form of Karl Lange, a young mutant from Berlin that she called a "special friend", and subsequently brought back to their house.
Karl had been well educated and personable with a sharp and sometimes biting wit. Athletically inclined, he even joined Kurt often in the normal childhood games of chase or hide-and-seek. The man was also heavily interested in pro-mutant rights, politics and history. Nor did his enthusiasm ever seemed to run low in regards to educating his young ward. Kurt loved having Karl there, and emulated him at every opportunity, much to his mother's amusement.
**(Translated from German)
"Well aren't you the little gentleman!" Raven exclaimed, laughing, after her son greeted her with a bow and a kiss to her hand.
Kurt grinned back, pleased with her reaction. "Yes, Karl says manners are one of the most important things for a man to learn."
"He does, does he? Well, Karl is certainly the charmer, isn't he?" She winked at Kurt's tutor then. "Though, I'm not entirely sure about the importance of courtly manners in the bigger scheme of things."
The arrangement had worked nicely for almost two years before things went sour. Karl grew disillusioned with Raven's frequent absences and lack of attentiveness when she was present. The isolation chafed at him. After a final argument, muffled behind a closed bedroom door, Karl left. Kurt had been devastated. It would be years before he understood that his tutor's departure had nothing to do with him. By the time he was eleven, his mother was stuck with no one to care for him again.
Raven's next solution was to hire a somewhat older woman from Poland who came on recommendation from a friend. The woman's name was Jadzia - Kurt couldn't recall her surname - she hadn't been around for long. The problem was the woman's cowering personality. Jadzia was intimidated by Raven, which was not exactly ideal but could be understandable. Unfortunately, she was even more intimidated by her young charge. That was a disaster for his mother.
Kurt grinned wickedly to himself at the memory. That was a fun few months. He didn't learn a great deal, but he certainly enjoyed keeping that poor woman on her toes. A tormented Jadzia finally fled back to her homeland one day with no warning, leaving his mother furious with him for his behavior.
**(Translated from German)
"Kurt do you have any idea what lengths I've already gone to to make sure you're taken care of?" Raven shouted one evening.
Wounded by her tone, he shot back, "If you'd just act like a normal mom and stay home then there wouldn't be a problem!"
"If I were a normal mother then I'd have a normal son - not something like you!" She raged, throwing the magazine she'd been reading across the room.
He looked at her in shocked surprise, then stormed up to his room, slamming the door hard enough to knock paint from the frame. He stayed there brooding for the rest of that evening and half of the following day. She finally came up to find him after lunch the next day when he still had failed to appear.
"Still sulking?" She asked, standing in the doorway with her arms crossed.
"I'm not sulking, I just don't want to talk to you," he muttered.
She walked over to the bed where he was sitting and, shoving his feet out of the way, sat down next to him with her elbows on her knees.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean for it to sound that way. I was just angry. You know I have a temper!" She added defensively, "It's just that it's hard enough to find someone I can trust with you without having you go out of your way to sabotage things." She reached over to ruffle his hair and he flinched away, refusing to look at her.
"Kurt, look at me," she took his chin in her hand and forced him to meet her eyes before continuing, "I wouldn't want you any different than what you are. You're my son and I'm proud of you."
Unmanly tears filled his almost twelve year old eyes before he threw himself into her arms. He hated being at odds with her. She was surprisingly indulgent of his emotional display and held him close for a few minutes.
His voice muffled in her shirt, he said, "All right Mom, I'll be nice to whoever you bring here next."
And he had been - well, more or less.
It was a full season before she secured someone else for the position. During that time, he successfully fended for himself, which he didn't hesitate in pointing out to his mother. She was unmoved.
"No Kurt. You don't know what the world can be like. You have no idea at the things that could happen to you all alone out here. And I promised myself that'd you'd get a decent education, not like what I had."
He pouted and she stood firm, "I said no. Now I've found a woman, a Mrs. St. James. She's arriving at the end of the week. She's a retired school teacher, and she's American. Maybe she can improve your English." His mother winked at him, knowing his English was a sore subject - he hated speaking it. Raven also added, as an afterthought, "She's bringing her grandchild, a mutant about your age I think. You'll finally have a playmate." She continued, as if to herself, "that was one of the reasons she wanted the job, to keep her grandchild safe. It should make her trustworthy."
He was outraged. A playmate? He'd be thirteen on his next birthday; he was practically grown. His mother talked as if he were a little boy.
Kurt laughed to himself at the memory. Almost grown indeed!
So the school teacher had arrived as planned. He was unsure what he expected, but she definitely wasn't it. For one, the woman looked almost like a giant to him; she towered over his mother, who was tall, herself. She also outweighed Raven by perhaps 40 kilos**. Clara St. James wasn't fat, but robust, with a proud carriage.
She was dressed in a boldly patterned and flamboyantly colored dress. It had hurt his eyes to look at her. She wore golden rings on almost every finger and bangles stacked on both large arms. Hoop earrings dangled from her earlobes and the woman's salt and pepper hair was cropped close to her skull. Her skin was a light golden color and she had soft, broad features with cat-like, flashing black eyes behind half moon spectacles. She'd peered down at him with amusement.
"Have you gotten a good enough look, young man, or should I hold this pose a little longer? You know it's rude to stare so."
Her voice was low-pitched and sounded cultured. He took a step back and dropped his gaze in embarrassment. This woman would be no Jadzia, that was certain. He heard his mother laugh softly and looked over to see her standing with her arms crossed, looking satisfied at his reaction.
"Kurt, this is Clara St. James, she'll be your new tutor. Clara, this is my son, Kurt," she smiled. "Don't let his current silence fool you; normally he's a silver tongued little devil."
Clara raised an eyebrow at him with a small smile. "Is that so?" she chuckled at his obvious discomfiture, "Well I've taught boys of about your age for almost thirty years; I think I can handle one with a silver tongue."
She reached behind her back then and pulled forward a diminutive girl to stand next to her. "Kurt, this is my granddaughter, Sydney-Ann. She's just a few years younger than you are, and a mutant too." Clara smiled and looked between the two of them. "Your mother says you've never had another child to play with, now you do."
Kurt had looked at this unlikely playmate. The girl reminded him of the little mice that hid in his attic playroom with their watchful, oil-drop eyes.
Her features were sharp, with a pointed chin and upturned black eyes; eyes that watched him without wavering. That was where the resemblance to her grandmother began and ended, he recalled. She was short and weed thin with a tangle of black curls hanging down her back in a kind of tail. Her sweater and trousers hung loosely on her. The most noticeable thing about her, however, was her skin; it was pale and covered with patterns and swirls that were the same color as Uta's varicose veins had been. It wasn't exactly ugly, but it was unusual. As if he were one to talk. Sydney frowned at him, clutching her grandmother's big hand.
Clara had detached the little girl from her side, "Well, you children should go off and play while Ms. Darkholme and I discuss the final details of our arrangement."
With that embarrassing dismissal, his only childhood friendship started.
Even as starved for companionship as he had been, the two of them didn't immediately develop a rapport. As a matter of fact, by the time they finished the tour of the house and he'd shown her around the playroom, they were arguing. It started with a harmless enough comment.
She was completely silent up until that point, following - he assumed, obediently - behind him to learn what was what. He had just finished pointing out the various things in the attic she was allowed to touch (a particular pile of goods in one corner that he didn't want) and simply remarked on her name.
"Your name is Sydney? That's a boy's name you know."
She looked hard at him, then answered in a drawl, "Shows what you know, 'cause it looks to me like I'm a girl. And it's Sydney."
He eyed her, somewhat confused, "That's what I said."
"No, you said Zytney. You talk weird."
Glaring at her, he decided then and there that he was going to have to show this child her place in the scheme of things.
"Und you look like one of the silly little mice I put traps out for. That is what I will call you from now on...Mausi."
She took a threatening step towards him, hands on her hips, "I'm not a mouse and you better not call me that."
"It is my house, I'll call you what I want, MAUSI." He wondered just how much trouble he would get into for trouncing this upstart within the first hour.
A true fight was averted that day by the call to dinner, but they'd spent the next several months in a secret stealth war, kept just under Clara's formidable radar. There was a tacit agreement between them to fight this war without the interference of the adults - a kind of childish honor was at stake. So when the whiskers and paint that were added to Mausi's face, while she slept one night, failed to come off the next morning, she simply told her grandmother it was for a game. Kurt endured the bald patches in his fur for weeks without comment. They laid out traps, pulled pranks and hissed arguments, but the day when one of them was accidentally injured prompted a truce. The truce lead to tolerance and that, finally, to friendship. It had ended up being one of the closest friendships of his life.
Clara, herself, was speaking the truth when she said she could handle a silver-tongued devil; over the next years, Kurt received an excellent education. The woman was a veritable font of knowledge. He grew genuinely fond of her as well. When he was sixteen, and she died in her sleep, he was nearly as grieved as Mausi.
Her grief was borne of fear for the future as much as love for her grandmother. Clara had been her only remaining family. So it was with a great deal of relief that they learned she would remain, and this time, his mother agreed that he was indeed old enough to be without a live-in caretaker.
That last year at home had been surreal in many ways. Here they were, living in a tiny world within a world, cut off and only beginning to understand that fact. He was in the place between being a boy and becoming a man. He wondered often where his life would take him; wondered what else there was to the world other than that farmhouse. A certainty filled him that he would do something important in his life, he just hadn't a clue what.
Predictably, as his childhood friend grew into her own maturity, the friendship they had together matured as well, and developed into first love. As a result, Kurt felt very divided. On the one hand, he was utterly content in the snug cocoon of this secret world. He was content there with her. Yet on the other, Kurt was more restless to see the world than he could possibly put into words. As it turned out, the decision on the direction of his life had been taken from him, and the rest - as they say - was history.
German Translations
Scheißkerle- "bastards" (it has a variety of derogatory meanings in addition)
Mausi - "little mouse"
*Refers to the twin operations of Blucher and Yorck from WWI
**40 kilos is approximately 88 lbs