Chapter 9: Broken Date

For the fifteenth time in ten minutes, Rachel's eyes bore into her alarm clock's digital display. Kurt was supposed to pick her up at her quarters at 7. Now it was 7:46.

Those forty-six minutes had been torture for Rachel. Every five minutes she confronted grave, spiralling doubts about her dress (Too revealing? Not revealing enough? What impression do I want to convey, anyway?), her shoes (Can I walk? Will Kurt think I'm a silly child if I get a blister and start limping?), and her hair (What is this length? This colour? Too brassy—what was I thinking?). At 7:51 she made the executive decision that she couldn't wait any longer. Throwing a hooded sweater over her dress and changing into a more walkable pair of shoes, she took off in the direction of Kurt's quarters.

When Kurt wasn't in his room, Rachel did a cursory mindsweep to locate him. Like all telepaths, she made a point of restricting unauthorized intrusions into people's minds. But she was—depending on the circumstances—either angry or concerned about Kurt's whereabouts, so she felt justified this once. She located Kurt's thought patterns quickly and close by. When she narrowed in on him, though, an overwhelming flood of adrenaline and emotion immediately told her that she had caught him at a very awkward time.

In just the second it took her to disengage, she inadvertently absorbed a staggering rush of sensation not just from Kurt, but also the mind that was, at that particular moment, at very close proximity to his. For one moment, she was inside two minds and two bodies. She felt a firm, velvet-coated abdomen sliding heavily against her own, her body tensing with exquisite pleasure at the rolling, twisting squeeze of a similarly velvet-coated prehensile tail encircling her upper thigh. Her fur spiked and shivered under the swirling currents of a centralized warm front and the tiny sparks of electricity emanating from delicate fingers that simultaneously soothed and stimulated wherever they stroked her. Her breath sputtered as a warm damp mouth at the junction of her neck and jaw heralded a gentle press of fangs, and in virtually the same moment she cried out inarticulately from somewhere deep within herself as electrified fingers pulled down hard on the base of her tail…

"Oh… my."

Rachel staggered against the wall.

"You okay, Rach?"

The friendly, ever-eager voice of Bobby Drake brought her back to herself and the hallway.

"Yes," Rachel pushed herself away from the wall and back onto feet that felt decidedly unsteady, despite her sensible footwear. "I'm fine. Just a telepath thing. Gone now."

"Are you sure you're okay?"

"I'm fine," she assured him. "Really. See you around?"

She continued purposefully down the hallway as a way of disengaging herself from further conversation; her ploy worked, as Bobby continued in the opposite direction.

Rachel walked quickly and briskly straight back to her room and shut the door, immediately leaning back against it to slide her suddenly exhausted body to the floor. She sat that way in a kind of stupor for several minutes, trying to process a response. Should she be angry? Jealous? Embarrassed? Or even, she realized, happy for two good friends for finding such a clearly powerful connection in each other's arms?

But what about me? It was a question that often burned within her, as she watched her one-time father Scott Summers coupled with the woman that was not her mother, as she watched X-Man after X-Man return from seeming death while Jean Grey remained so resolutely deceased. In her fractured memories from her own world, Rachel had grown up knowing Kurt and his wife Amanda as loving uncle and aunt; when she was very small, she'd had a plush version of Kurt that she'd hug during thunderstorms, and when she was a bit older, the real Kurt would tell her bedtime stories about the circus, the exploits but also the legends and, of course, the secrets behind all the most time-honoured tricks. She remembered being lulled to sleep by the sound of his voice, marvelling at the accent that seemed, to her at that time, so exotic, apiece with of the legends that thrilled her. Kitty was probably right—it was wrong for her to pursue a relationship with the Kurt of this world. Yet the idea of being close to him, of holding him and being held by him through the night even as she'd held his surrogate through the happier nights of her childhood, when the Grey-Summers' had been a proper family and before her world become a war-torn apocalypse—the thought still seemed so intoxicating.

"Oh Kurt…" she moaned as the tears began. But even as she cried she knew her tears were not really for Kurt; they were for herself, and this newest reminder of the seeming impossibility of her ever truly belonging in a world that was, literally, not her own.