Chapter 8: Storm Breaks

It was early evening by the time the television crew finally pulled away, and Kurt was exhausted. Not only had he had to spend more than half an hour unburdening himself before an attractive female stranger and a television crew—a crew that spent another fifteen minutes figuring out how not to get a glare off his light-refracting fur—but he'd also had to suffer, like everyone else, through the brutal micromanagement of Scott Summers. Kurt couldn't deny that Scott was a great leader, the best person to spearhead the X-Men at the current moment. But that didn't make him any less exhausting to deal with, especially where the media was concerned.

"Remember to smile, Kurt—that's your asset," Scott had told him no less than three times that day. "And by all means don't hit on her (unless she hits on you—then use it). And don't hide your tail but just… be modest. And you know I respect your faith but… try not to talk about God if you can help it. At least the swelling around your eye has gone down…"

Kurt was just wondering whether he would have time for a decent steam-blowing-off workout before his date with Rachel when there was a knock at his door.

"Come in," he called.

"Just popping by to make sure you're still alive," said Ororo as she entered his room. Like him, she was dressed in her uniform for the interview; for her, that meant skintight black unstable molecule pants and a black bustier. She had removed her customary headpiece and cape.

"Just barely," Kurt replied, half seriously. "I'm not sure if I smiled enough."

Ororo averted her eyes, a small, mischievous smile playing at her own lips. "Well, I understand you were with Ms. Mitchell for a long time, anyway."

"Yes I… actually sort of enjoyed the interview itself. We had a… good connection."

"Did she really ask you out?"

Kurt ran his hand through his hair, embarrassed. "Ja, but… I've had enough of reporters for the time being."

Her eyes were coy as she deadpanned, "I thought Scott told you to press your advantage."

"Perhaps I should have passed her along to Hank…?"

Ororo's face broke into a large laugh. "Perhaps. Though I'm not sure Hank has quite your litany of charms."

"Really?" Kurt mocked, feigning intrigued surprise. "Tell me more, Ms. Munroe, about these charms."

Throwing herself into the spirit of their teasing exchange, Ororo advanced slowly and at an angle, like a panther cornering its prey, checking his "charms" off thoughtfully on her fingers.

"Well," she began. "There's that smile."

"Fangs and all?"

"Rachel assures me that vampires are so hot right now."

"Please, go on."

"And the tail."

"Ah, to be adored for the sake of my own favourite appendage—a woman after my own heart!"

"And the fur."

"Of course."

"And I hear you're very flexible."

"Growing up on a trapeze will do that."

Ororo was standing—for Kurt—uncomfortably close by the time she finished her list. She paused there for a long, deliberate moment. Kurt's stomach tingled with the instinctual urge to teleport out of danger. He considered curbing the instinct by taking the almost equally awkward step of backing away, but the tip of his tail alerted him that his dresser blocked his escape route. Abruptly and mercifully, Ororo broke the moment with another burst of laughter as she stepped away to sit down on the edge of his bed. Tentatively, Kurt joined her.

"Are you really okay, though?" Ororo asked him earnestly once he was sitting next to her. "I knew it might be difficult for you. But I also thought it was important."

"For me or for the team?"

"Both. I want you to feel more confident. More than ever, we need you as a leader."

Kurt shook his head. "Leader," he repeated. "I wonder. There was a conversation I had with Scott once that I still think about. It was a long time ago, when we—our team—first got together. He was moping about Jean—it was after she'd first become Phoenix—and sort of complaining about being a mutant, about how hard he had it living every day trying to control his optic beams. He told me I might want to think life was all 'fun and games' but it wasn't like that for everyone. And I just felt so angry. He was doing that thing that he does, where he calls you by your codename to keep you at a distance. And I told him: I have a name, you know? And you think you've had it hard? We never really finished the conversation, someone interrupted us, I can't remember. But it was an important moment for me. Not just because it showed me that even great leaders can loose their way, but because it showed me that I might have something, some guidance or insight, to offer someone who I thought had it all figured out. It was the first time I ever considered that, someday, I, too, might be a leader."

Ororo squeezed his hand, encouraging him to continue.

"The other conversation I always come back to," he said. "Was many years later, after I'd rejoined the team following Excalibur. I'd asked Scott for more responsibility and he set me up as the head of his second squad—Warren, Bobby, a rotating group of others. We ran into some trouble with a kind of religious cult and it turned out that my team hadn't properly communicated the info we had about the group on to Scott's team and… Anyway. I tried to brush it aside—I actually told Scott that it wasn't my fault, that I'd just 'assumed' Warren would handle it. Stupid. And Scott took me aside and let me have it. He told me that my problem was that I wanted to be everybody's best friend, but being a leader is not about being liked. And that if I was serious about leading I had to be willing to make people angry with me, no matter the consequences. And he was right, Ororo. I value friendship above all. And I do need to be liked. It protects me from being hated. It's been such a long time but I still dream about it, the look in that man's eyes as he was about to drive a stake through my heart. I couldn't talk him down, I couldn't smile at him and make it better. None of that mattered. He didn't even care that I was a mutant. He just saw me and knew, was certain, that I had no human rights. I was not even an animal to that mob. I was just an aberration that deserved to die."

"I don't think even I have encountered that level of hatred," Ororo admitted. "But as a woman, and especially as a black women, I do know what it is to have your rights stripped away by a look, to have your body claimed and commodified by the enemy."

"But how do you balance that fear with your responsibilities?" asked Kurt. "How can I be the moral person I need to be so that I'm not the monster those villagers thought I was, and still make the difficult decisions a leader sometimes has to make?"

"Leadership starts in morality," Ororo told him. "But it does crystallize in a willingness to set aside the immediate and see the bigger picture—the greater good, the future world in which we will all have the human rights we deserve. I've seen you do it before."

"Yes," Kurt agreed. "I did it best back in the final days of Excalibur, but it also changed me. Maybe more than I wanted."

"Is that why you cut off all your beautiful hair and grew a goatee?" she joked, touching the edge of his hair's blue-black waves where they spilled over his forehead.

Kurt smiled playfully. "Are you sure you want to go down that road?"

"I didn't say I didn't like it—you looked very… Contemporary." She pushed all his hair off his brow to mimic his past look.

"As did you in your leather bra and mohawk," Kurt returned.

"You're right…" she dropped her hand, letting his hair fall back into place. "We really shouldn't go down that road."

"I definitely didn't say I didn't like it."

Ororo felt the room fading to black beyond Kurt's glowing eyes. She consciously forced herself to blink, and stood up.

"Well I'm glad everything went well. The special is supposed to air in two weeks. They said they'd send us a copy beforehand."

"Sounds good," said Kurt. He felt cold without her body next to his so he stood up, too.

"Maybe it's not the time," Ororo started, hesitatingly. "But we should talk about Logan."

"What is there to talk about?"

Kurt had taken a step closer and her pivot to face him closed the gap, their uniform-clad bodies separated by a paper-thin forcefield of decorum.

"There's… Logan and I are just friends, Kurt."

"I know. Like you and me."

"Yes. Exactly."

Through no manipulations of her own, Ororo felt a strange surge of temperature within the proximity of Kurt's body. His heartbeat pulsed through the warm air, consuming her own.

"I should go," she intoned.

"Yes."

"I have…"

"Ororo…?"

Their faces were barely inches apart, Kurt looking up slightly into her greater height. All he seemed to see were her blue eyes that—did he imagine it?—seemed to be swirling subtly with talons of white energy. He felt his fur buzz under a gentle static charge, and his body froze even more surely under the terrible concentration it took to remain still. His fur seemed to stand on end over his whole body so that all he could think about was getting out of his uniform. Getting out of his uniform and being stroked everywhere at once by this beautiful woman.

"Yes, Kurt?"

He was on the verge of whimpering in anguish trying to keep himself from physically responding, though he was vaguely aware that their bodies seemed to move closer regardless of his resistance. He was, quite literally, victim of elemental forces beyond his control; and, predictably, nature won the day.

"To hell with it," he gasped, seizing her shoulders and diving forward into her lips.

The kiss had all the violent clumsiness of a collision, all stiff necks, awkward hand grips and twisted lips, too many years of longing trying to vent themselves in too small a gesture.

"Ach…" Kurt pulled away from her and tried to collect his spinning head. "I'm sorry, that was terrible. Is it too cliché to say that I am usually much better at this?"

Storm's eyes cleared along with at least a sliver of Kurt's mind as the electricity around them dissipated. "Would you like to try again?" she challenged.

Kurt grinned. "I have always advocated practice."

He moved towards her again and started slowly this time, stroking the side of her cheek with his thumb and threading his two fingers through her long silver hair. Ororo sank her face into his caress, grazing his gloved palm with her lips. Of its own accord, his tail began to wind its way tentatively around the small of her back, its pointed tip grazing her shoulder blades.

"Goddess…" breathed Ororo. "I have dreamed of you doing that for a very long time."

Emboldened, Kurt pressed his body closer. His tail swung around them both, pinning their bodies close as its tip resumed a gentle massage of Ororo's spine. He slid his other hand up into her hair so that he was holding the back of her neck and head with both hands as they brought their lips together a second time. While he was savouring her taste Kurt felt the electrical buzz return, this time localized within Ororo's fingers, which she slid down his ribs and up his back.

"Oh…" disengaging from her for even the moment it took to speak was almost painful. "If you're going to do that I need to be wearing fewer clothes."

"That can be accomplished," she smiled. "But first… Would you mind, terribly? My room can be so much more private."

Kurt's lips stayed locked with Ororo's between the two 'bamfs' that brought them to Ororo's room. Kurt wondered for a moment about the windows but he saw Ororo's powers work quickly to fog them over.

Slowly, reluctantly, but for the sake of the greater good, Ororo removed her hands from his back, pulling away just enough to access the front zipper of his uniform. Kurt gasped as she touched the metal zipper with her charged fingers. The charge seemed to build as it travelled down his chest and abdomen to where the zipper ended, just below his belly button. Ororo's hand continued where the zipper ended.

"Goddess…" Kurt agreed breathlessly.

Burning to touch while being touched, Kurt performed a whipping twist with his tail that swung her body around, his fangs pressing the back of her neck where he held her hair to the side as he unzipped her. "Are you sure you want to do this?" he panted against her ear. His own answer was telegraphed by the thunder of his heartbeat through his uniform where his pelvis wedged firmly against the back of her upper thigh.

She slid her body around again to face him, letting her unzipped bustier fall to the floor at their feet. "Are you?"

Kurt groaned in response as they thrust their faces and bodies together again, Ororo doing the work of pulling off his gloves to free his hands and shucking the rest of his upper body out of his uniform. She exhaled vocally as his newly freed hands pushed her naked breasts against his velvet-furred chest. Her own hands were working their way down his body again, enjoying the liquid shifting motion of the firm muscles beneath his impossibly soft fur, finding it impossible to imagine how she'd resisted such touching for so many years. As she worked to liberate his tail she encountered her first real surprise. Kurt's whole body went stiff and then limp; his reaction was so severe Ororo worried she'd done something wrong.

"Kurt…? Are you…?"

"Sorry," he sighed into her hair. "At the right moment that spot can be… very sensitive."

"Then I will be careful," she said, touching gently as she slid the last remnants of clothing from his reanimated body.

"Oh my lady…" the air combusted around them and she found herself in her bed, straddling Kurt's naked body beneath her, his tail making two firm coils around her waist, beatific indigo face smiling up at her. "… you may do anything you wish."

It wasn't long before they were both grateful they'd opted for the added privacy of Ororo's room.