Chapter 12: Rachel and Remembrance
Kurt's body recognized even before his mind did that he hadn't ended up where he'd intended to. Instinctively assuming a crouched, battle-ready stance, he surveyed his surroundings. An essential aspect of Kurt's mutant ability to teleport was innate special orientation. As such, having a teleport go astray was nothing short of a terrifying experience; because he accessed his ability with the speed of thought, materializing from a 'port at the wrong place was like suddenly losing control of a primary motor function, as though one's usually reliable legs had suddenly become insensible and useless while performing a mundane action like climbing the stairs. Of course, for Kurt there was the added peril that mistakes could very easily prove deadly; the thought of materializing inside a solid object, or even a person, was a constant, underlying fear, kept at bay only by the rarity of anything going amiss. Only extreme weather conditions and hostile magical or technological manipulation had ever managed to disrupt his 'ports in the past.
A quick visual survey, however, confirmed that he had materialized in the dormitory hallway, in no instantly apparent danger. Relaxing his body, Kurt tried to piece together what might have caused him to end up there. He barely had a moment to consider the issue before his attention was distracted by a muffled crash behind the closed door at his left.
That's Rachel's room, Kurt realized instantly. His reluctance to confront her immediately overcome by the fear that his teammate might be in some sort of danger, Kurt wrapped lightly on the door.
"Rachel?"
No response.
"Rachel?" he tried again. "Are you alright?"
He was greeted with another crash followed by a loud "thud."
"Rachel?"
When Rachel still didn't respond, Kurt took a deep breath, swallowed it, and teleported inside. The room was a mess. Articles of clothing, books, and personal items were scattered everywhere, and several picture frames were shattered. A kind of prickly energy seemed to permeate the space, a sure sign of telekinesis at work; only Kurt's lightning reflexes saved him from a flying tennis shoe that instead whizzed by him to collide with the wall behind his head. In the midst of the chaos, however, Rachel, seemed unharmed, though obviously highly agitated; wearing nothing but a set of uncharacteristically fancy undergarments—no doubt a remnant, Kurt thought with a pang, of their aborted date—she was curled up on her bed in a twitching foetal position, as though under the influence of a particularly disturbing dream. Kurt approached her cautiously and laid his hand on her shoulder.
"Rachel."
Crouching next to the bed, he massaged her upper arm as he repeated her name, louder this time; while he was anxious for her to awaken, he was wary of how potentially hazardous it might be to startle a telekinetic/telepath in the middle of a nightmare. Gradually, though, his voice and touch seemed to have some effect. The energy in the room began to dissipate as the movement of Rachel's body calmed, her twitches stopping completely by the time she finally opened her eyes.
"Kurt…?"
"Ja," Kurt smiled, genuinely relieved. "Are you alight? You gave me quite a scare."
"What… What are you doing here? What happened?" Rachel rose into a sitting position on the bed, surveying her scattered belongings with confusion and a touch a fear.
"I don't know," Kurt admitted. He was beginning to feel vaguely uncomfortable now that the immediate danger had passed; he really hadn't planned on confronting Rachel that evening, especially in such a state of apparent emotional turmoil. "I heard a commotion inside your room, and when you didn't answer I teleported inside and woke you up. I think you were having some kind of nightmare."
"Yes," Rachel agreed listlessly, her eyes matching her voice as they clouded over into a kind of vacant stare. "A nightmare."
"Do, um… Do you want to talk about it?"
"I know," she said. "I know about you and Ororo."
Kurt didn't bother to ask—nor did he particularly want to know—how Rachel knew. While he regretted nothing about what had happened between himself and Ororo, that fact didn't erase his sense of guilt about how he'd treated Rachel.
"Oh Rachel," he pleaded, reaching for her hand. "I am so, so sorry. I should never have mixed you up in all this… I've been so confused, lately, about just about everything. I never, ever intended to hurt you."
To his surprise, Rachel responded to his apology with little emotion of any kind. "S'okay. It's not your fault."
"Um… It isn't? I mean, I really think at least some of the blame—"
"It's my fault," Rachel intoned in her emotionless voice. "I should never have…"
Her face spasmed, and she covered it with her hands as the tears began.
Once again acting instinctively, Kurt moved to sit next to her on the bed, wrapping her shivering form in a hug. "Shhh…" he soothed. "It's okay, it's okay…"
"Oh fuzzy," she sputtered between sobs. "You don't understand…"
"That I freely admit," said Kurt, smoothing her hair. "I am not so conceited as to believe I'm the cause of all this. What is it really? What is going on?"
"I just…" Rachel removed her hands from her face and regarded him earnestly through her tear-filled eyes. "I've told you, right, about how I used to know you growing up? In my world, I mean."
"Briefly," he said. "I remember you said I used to tell you stories—about the circus."
Rachel nodded. "I loved those stories. And I loved you. I mean, not in that way… not in the way we kissed the other day. I was just a kid. But things are so different in this world; you're not my 'uncle Kurt' anymore, you're my teammate, and my mom is…" Kurt squeezed her gently as she shuddered, needing a moment to collect herself before continuing. "Anyway, I don't really know how to explain it. I had never thought about you, not really, in that other way before we kissed. But afterwards, I had this feeling… I mean, things are so different here, but I still have these ties to my remembered past, in Scott, in you… I just suddenly had this sense that there might be a way to recapture something of that past, something of that happiness and security, through you, through a physical connection with you. Oh God…" she shook her head and buried her face once again in her hands. "I am so, so stupid."
"No, it's…" but in truth, Kurt wasn't quite sure what to say. He was surprised by how apparently seriously she had taken their dalliance. For him, it had been fun; he didn't neglect the potential consequences after the fact, but he had always had a kind of "come what may" attitude where sex and relationships were concerned, partly due to the complications of his body but also because of the romantic disposition imprinted on him so indelibly by the adventure films of his youth. He never went out of his way to pursue casual sex, but he was also not above capping a dramatic rescue with a passionate kiss or, on occasion, something more. Indeed, his inability to fully curb the sexual desire that was so inseparable from his romantic disposition had been a major factor in his rejection of the priesthood. A thirst for adventure was at the core of his nature, and Kurt followed a long line of romantics in regarding love as perhaps the greatest adventure of all.
"It's okay," he tried again. "We are all, all of us, looking for somewhere to belong, someone to belong to."
"No, no, no," she moaned. "You don't understand. It's worse than that."
"Worse? I don't understand. Nothing you're told me is—"
"I had a toy," Rachel blurted out, removing her hands from her tear-soaked face but keeping her gaze slightly averted. "I toy version of you. I don't know if you gave it to me, or my parents, or… Anyway, I'm sure they all thought it was really cute, God knows. But I… I would hold that toy while you told me those stories, and I remember… I remember holding it… holding it and feeling safe as long as it was there. And it was soft, like you… velvet, like your fur. And I think, subconsciously, I thought about that after we kissed, that part of the physical attraction was that idea of security that I associated with… I… oh…" Her sobs started again in earnest, consuming her voice.
A chill crept up Kurt's spine as his mind unwillingly digested what Rachel had said, her words uncomfortably illuminating the primal fears underlying his recently resurrected premonition about being the X-Men's mascot. He knew some people, including friends of his, took quite a literal approach to the "problem" of his physical characteristics by thinking about his mind and body as separate entities; they felt they needed to "look past" his demonic or bestial appearance in order to appreciate his human soul. Yet, as is ultimately true for everyone, Kurt's mind and body were not separate entities. Because he had fur, for instance, Kurt enjoyed, even craved, being petted and stroked, and his tail, as Storm and several other paramours had discovered, could be an erogenous zone in its own right.
Kurt didn't hate or resent his body—that wasn't the problem. The real root of his psychological dilemma was that the very physical characteristics that frequently threatened to unman or even dehumanize him were not something he would part with for anything in the world. Sometimes he wondered: Did the fact that he liked his strange, bestial, demonic body, that he coveted not only the athleticism but also the animalistic pleasures it afforded, mean that he cultivated his own dehumanization? Did liking his fur because of how nice it felt to be petted actually make him more animal than man?
Rachel's face was turned away from him as she cried, softly now, but with no sign of stopping anytime soon. Whether though telepathy—which he had no doubt was responsible for his mistaken teleport—or just through the deep empathy of friendship, Kurt felt suddenly sure that Rachel appreciated the complicated nature of his fears as few did, and that her deep understanding was a crucial aspect of her own current turmoil; she intuited that what she craved as comfort for her pain was something that would hurt him too deeply to give her, hating herself for the things that she wanted. As he held her, Kurt felt Rachel's pain churn within him, colliding and struggling with his own. But the battle proved short lived; he realized quickly that her pain was greater, realer, more immediate, his own distant and semantic. Rachel's desire wasn't pure, but it was also desperate, and ultimately nurtured by what he knew was a genuine, deep down love. So he acted like a leader, and made an executive decision.
Momentarily disengaging himself, Kurt removed his gloves. He then unzipped the top of his uniform and pulled his arms out of the sleeves. Taking Rachel's hand in his, he laid it against his chest. Rachel stared vacantly at her hand where it touched him under his own. Kurt squeezed her hand.
"It's okay," he assured her.
Slowly, tentatively, Rachel started to run her hands over his chest and abdomen, carefully following the grain of his fur around the curves of his muscles. Her touch wasn't erotic; instead, she was almost like a child trying to convince herself of the reality of the body before her. After a few moments, she slid her hands around his sides and rested her face against his chest, closing her eyes. Kurt felt tears dampen his fur, but just a few, more like an afterthought. Slowly, he eased their bodies into a reclining position and then, shifting slightly, he allowed Rachel to spoon him, curling his tail around his own leg and out of the way of any potential misunderstandings. Burying her face in his shoulder blades, she continued to softly, slowly run her fingers through his fur. After a few minutes, she began to relax against him as Kurt, too, was soothed by her touch, guiltless, happy victim of his animalistic physiology.
Exhausted as she was, Rachel soon fell into a deathlike slumber. Kurt, though, lay awake, thinking and remembering. He remembered his first awkward kiss with Amanda, what seemed like an eternity ago, how she'd first laughed at him and then empathized with him due to his poor technique, the result of what turned out to be a foolish concern about accidentally hurting her with his fangs. And he remembered, too, the afternoon at the lake when they'd first made love, with each other or anyone else.
Well aware of his dislike of getting wet in cold water when he didn't have to, Amanda had of course pushed him in. It was getting dry again, though, that stuck in his memory. He'd been drying his too-long hair with a towel, naked except for his underwear and trying to ignore the cold, sodden, feeling of his fur when she'd come up behind him, pulled the towel from his head, and started to use it to rub his wet body. Her own body was still wet but her hands had felt so warm, as had her breath on his neck and her naked thigh where it brushed against his tail…
He'd been in heaven for a full minute before he realized what was happening. He seized and stilled her hands, turning to step out of her embrace.
"Stop."
"It doesn't feel nice? I thought with your fur—"
"That's not the problem."
She closed the distance between them, smiling calmly, knowingly, as her hips fit themselves against his and his tail began to curl instinctively around her, being wet no longer seeming to matter.
"Then I don't see that we have a problem. Do you?"
Back in the present, and not for the first time, Kurt knew he missed Amanda, not just as a lover but as a sister. The problem, of course, was that the former category had inevitably and irrevocably complicated the second. Quite simply, Kurt and Amanda were good at having sex with each other, theirs being the kind of physical relationship that only grows and gets better over time. Kurt often felt that Amanda knew his body better than he did himself—but then, she was his older sister. Even with the not infrequent emotional tension of their long years of on-again-off-again dalliances, their physical kismet was always reliable; on more than one occasion, it had been the cause of abortive attempts to formally reunite. During his last visit Amanda had point blank asked him why he didn't come to see her more often. He'd dodged the question but they both knew: the intensity of their physical connection made it impossible to ever go back to being just brother and sister.
Which of course went a long way toward explaining Kurt's long years of hesitation approaching Ororo. For now, though, it felt good, like another cherished level of an already unbreakable bond. He only prayed she could forgive him for not rejoining her as quickly as he'd promised, fully intending to return as soon he was sure Rachel was okay. After all, there was still plenty of time before morning…
But as the minutes ticked away, it became more and more difficult to think of a viable way of extracting himself from Rachel's embrace. She was sleeping soundly, but her arm and one of her legs were still wrapped firmly around his body. Kurt was afraid that any attempt to disengage himself might awaken her, and she was so clearly, critically in need of rest. As he pondered his situation, Kurt grew increasingly drowsy, a series of half-awake dreams that the body next to his was Ororo's distantly alerting his cloudy mind that he was about to fall asleep. Yet his very last thought before succumbing to his own exhaustion was not of Ororo but Logan. Had he been even slightly more alert, Kurt might have wondered at his thoughts taking such a turn, but in his consuming drowsiness he merely accepted it.
Kurt's sleep-clouded mind drifted back to a specific memory his conscious mind barely remembered. It was during the time of his psychological manipulation by a religious cult, back when he was working toward becoming a priest. He'd been having such terrible dreams to the point where there had come a night when he knew he couldn't sleep alone. So he went to Logan's place. When he'd woken up on Logan's couch from his feverish nightmare and knew he was going to throw up, he hadn't even been able to focus his mind enough to teleport to the bathroom. But Logan had been there and had known what to do, helping him up and even holding his hair while he emptied the runny liquid contents of his empty stomach into the toilet bowl. The memory was something of a blur but he knew Logan had helped him out of his uniform and into something else, something soft—he remembered trying to laugh as Logan used his claws to tear a hole for his tail in a pair of sweatpants. But mostly he remembered Logan holding him, sitting on the floor of the bathroom, Logan's back against the tub while Kurt was held fast between the cage of Logan's arms and legs, shivering and slipping in and out of consciousness. Even subconsciously, Kurt didn't remember most of the details, couldn't piece the whole night together. Yet one specific memory pierced the haze more surely than any other: the warm, comforting sensation of Logan's nostrils flaring, breathing, against his neck, smelling deeply into his fur as his stubbly face burrowed into the space behind Kurt's ear.
Though he would not consciously remember thinking it by the time he awoke in the morning, in that moment Kurt knew that as good as it felt to be in Ororo's arms, for better or worse, he was safest and warmest in Logan's.