Chapter 17

It was dark. And cold. And clear. Kurt could feel his fur standing up all over him, to keep the air a little farther away from his skin.

"You ready?" Rogue asked.

"Yeah." He took a glance around to get his bearings. "Remember, just stay here . . . exactly here . . . okay?"

"Exactly right here. Ah know. And if you ain't back out here in ten minutes, Ah'm coming in after you, got it?"

"Fifteen?"

"Ten. The creepazoids are watching."

"All right, fine." He swallowed. "Here I go."

The bizarre other dimension through which Kurt passed when he teleported was as hot as the pits of hell, which right now was very welcome. When the split-second of flaming heat had passed, he found himself in the middle of Amanda's bedroom. He looked straight at the carpet, just in case she was, well, in there and in case she wasn't, um . . . this was why he didn't make a habit of porting unannounced into girls' bedrooms. He was blushing already, and nothing had even happened yet.

"Kurt? Oh, Kurt!"

Before he'd even worked up the nerve to raise his eyes, he heard a chair falling over and suddenly found himself with Amanda in his arms, her face buried in the curve of his shoulder. She was shaking, but without seeing her face he couldn't tell if it was because she was laughing, crying, or just scared.

All three, it turned out, when she raised her head. There were tears on her cheeks, but she was smiling, her breath coming in abrupt gasps. Kurt took her face in both hands and combed her long brown hair back behind her ears. "Are you okay?" he demanded. "Are you hurt?"

"No, I'm okay," she insisted. "Gaah, you're freezing." Despite the complaint, she hugged him tight again and pressed her cheek against his. "How did you get in here? They're still watching . . . there's a dark blue Taurus parked at the corner, and I've lived in this house my whole life and I know every car on this street and nobody has a car like that . . . if they saw you . . ."

"Zey didn't," Kurt assured her. He pushed her gently out of his embrace so he could look her in the eye. "But ve've got to get you out of here."

She nodded. "I'm ready. Just give me two minutes." He turned away from him and dropped to her knees, fishing under her bed. She pulled out a bulging backpack and a pair of hiking boots.

"You're already packed?"

"M-hm." Amanda nodded eagerly as she took a seat on the side of her bed and started pulling on the boots. "I'm not stupid. I watch movies. I know how things work when you're a superhero's girlfriend. If I wear high heels, I'm going to end up being chased by something. If I dress light, I'm going to be stranded someplace very cold. And if I wear a skirt, then at some point I will be dangling from something very high with a crowd gathering below." She finished tying the boots and pulled on the bulky down jacket that was hanging on her bedpost. "So I'm prepared. Ready?"

"Mmm," said Kurt abstractly. He'd stopped paying attention at the words a superhero's girlfriend. After the brief jolt of worry that she'd started dating somebody else in the last two days and hadn't told him about it, the meaning had sunk in, leaving him dazed and thrilled and with the peculiar sensation that he could jump out a window and fly if he felt so inclined. Amanda thought she was a superhero's girlfriend. His girlfriend thought he was a superhero.

Move over, Superman. Amanda Sefton thought he was a superhero.

"Kurt?"

Snap out of it. "Yeah. Vhat about . . . your parents?"

Amanda gestured to her desk. A plain white envelope addressed to Mom and Dad sat in the middle of it. "I left them a note. I explained everything. I hate to make them worry, but . . . I think they're going to be safer once I'm gone."

Kurt sighed. "Zey were right. I am a bad influence."

"You'll bring me home safe, Kurt. I know you will." She pulled her backpack on over the jacket and faced him, chin up. "I'm ready."

"Okay." Kurt approached her, very carefully, and put his arms hesitantly around her waist. "You need to hang on to me as tight as you can, okay?"

Amanda wrapped her arms around his neck. "Okay."

"Don't let go."

"I won't."

"And don't be afraid."

"I'm not afraid."

Kurt teleported.

He teleported straight up as far as his range could take him, well out of visual range of any human eyes watching from the ground. For one breathless fraction of a second, he and Amanda hung weightless in the thin, freezing, star-strewn air half a mile over her house. Then the weight of their feet started to pull on them, and with nothing to hang onto but one another, they fell.

Only for a heartbeat. The next second, Rogue hit them hard from the side, her disproportionately strong arms clamping around their ribs and holding them motionless, legs still dangling into nothing.

"Now I'm afraid," Amanda choked, her arms clamping like a vice around Kurt's neck.

"Don't worry. Ah gotcha," Rogue assured her. "Hi, Amanda."

"Hey, Rogue," Amanda answered, her voice sounding like she was trying to talk around a popcorn kernel lodged in the back of her throat.

"Don't faint," Rogue ordered her sharply.

"I won't."

"Seriously, it is not fun hauling an unconscious person around . . ."

"I'm not going to faint!" Amanda insisted. "I might puke . . ."

"Oh, that's less fun. Please, faint. Help yourself."

Amanda took a second to gather herself. She kicked her feet a little, like a kid sitting at the edge of a pool, the toes of her boots bumping into Kurt's shins, getting used to the nothingness underneath . . . "Okay," she said at last. "No fainting, no puking. I just . . . have never teleported, or flown, or . . . anything . . . before. How do you guys do this?"

"It's easier for us," said Kurt. "Ve're used to it. You're doing just fine. You're doing great."

"Ready for the next thing?" Rogue asked. "Ah need you to let go of Kurt and get your arm around mah neck. It's hard carrying two people, so Ah need to get you two arranged or we ain't goin' nowhere."

"Can we land and do that?"

"Not really. We don't know where the feds are watching from, and we're kind of in a hurry."

"You can do it," Kurt assured her. "I'll help you." He wiggled a little, until one of his arms was free, and reached behind his neck to grab her wrist and guide it over Rogue's head. "See? Just like Twister."

"Just like Twister," Amanda repeated. "Right."

Once Amanda and Kurt were both situated so Rogue was carrying one of them with each arm and could see where she was going, she pivoted in the air and took off, slowly at first. "If you need to close your eyes, you go ahead, 'cuz we're gonna speed up."

"How fast are we talking?"

"Really fast."

She squeezed her eyes shut. "Okay."

Rogue stepped on the gas, as it were, and the three of them shot away through the cold black sky.

They were late. Kurt could tell by the urgent way Rogue flew. By the time she put on the brakes and eased them into a controlled drop over Finger Lakes State Park, the pickup was already underway.

It was a bigger affair than Kurt had expected. He and Rogue, for all their flying hither and yon, had only managed to contact about twenty people. The crowd gathered around the lake had to be at least twice that number, probably three times.

"Holy cow," Rogue breathed, surveying the assembly. "Where'd they all come from? Has the Professor been makin' calls, too?"

"Maybe," Kurt allowed. "But I sink vord just got around. Ze Professor doesn't know everyone . . . but I bet a lot of mutants know at least one other mutant."

"Is he gonna be able to carry everybody?" asked Rogue, gazing uncertainly down at the silver spheres parked among the people below.

Kurt felt Amanda's hand tighten its grip on his arm; she'd opened her eyes. "Oh, my gosh," she gasped. "Where are we going?"

"Outer space," Kurt told her. "Don't freak out."

"I'm not freaking out. Just keep me updated on what's going on, okay? I don't care how crazy it is. Tell me."

Rogue touched down on the grass. "Hold her," Kurt instructed quickly. Rogue obeyed, holding Amanda steady until Kurt came around to catch her. The first time he'd gone flying with Rogue, he'd hit the ground like a bag of wet sand. Amanda did about the same, pitching gracelessly forward into Kurt's waiting arms.

"I'm okay," Amanda assured him before he could say anything. "My knees just aren't working."

"I figured."

Rogue, whose body was equipped to handle G-forces and thus didn't need recovery time, was already scanning the crowd. "There he is," she hissed, half to herself.

Kurt raised his head and followed her gaze. Magneto, caped and intimidating but still bare-headed, was talking with the cluster of mutant refugees nearest to him. Perhaps sensing that someone several yards away was trying to lobotomize him with her eyeballs, he looked around and spotted Rogue. He excused himself from the conversation and floated through the crowd toward them.

"Showoff," Rogue muttered.

"You do ze same thing," Kurt pointed out.

"Who is he?" Amanda asked, her voice low.

"He's called Magneto," Kurt whispered back. "He's our ride."

"And if he recognizes you, we're screwed, so get behind Kurt and stay there," Rogue ordered. She flew out to meet him, keeping him from getting too close to Amanda.

"Where's the next drop?" she demanded.

"Does Charles teach anyone manners at that school, or just the useful skill of breaking things with their heads?" he inquired, glaring down at her with as much distaste as she was glaring up at him.

"Shut up and answer the question."

"MacCowell Park pavillion. That's in North Chicago. I assume you can locate Chicago."

"When?"

"Monday morning. Three a.m."

"And where's everybody else? Why aren't any of the X-Men down here with you?"

"It's a busy night. We're spread thin."

"We," Rogue hissed back, sarcastic. She grabbed the mark on the shoulder of her uniform. "'Till you're wearin' one of these, you ain't one of us."

Amanda, still leaning on Kurt, observed under her breath, "Whoever he is, Rogue hates his guts."

"She's scared of him," Kurt whispered back. "She gets mad when she's scared."

Magneto was handing Rogue a piece of paper; the next list of people to contact. Rogue stuffed it into her leg pocket and turned her back on him.

"Everyone," Magneto announced, raising his voice to be heard across the crowd. "We're leaving in one minute. Be in a sphere or you'll be left behind."

Kurt nudged Amanda onto her feet and carefully let her go, making sure she could stand under her own power. "Time for you to go."

"You, too," Rogue instructed. "You gotta go with her, Kurt."

"Vhat?" Kurt demanded. "I can't! I'm supposed to stay vith you!"

"Ah kin take care of myself for a couple days, and there's somethin' Ah gotta get done anyway. Amanda's gonna need you up there when Magneto figures out who an' what she is, so that's where you need to be. Get in the thing. Ah'll see you on Monday."

"But Rogue . . ."

"Don't," Rogue snapped. "Don't let this mess split you up from her. Stay with her."

That was when Kurt got it. "Rogue . . . what happened with Gambit?"

The sudden flash of hurt in her eyes let him know that he was onto something. But there was no time; spheres were clanging closed all around them. Rogue shoved him at the nearest one, and he dragged Amanda with him. They scrambled inside, assisted by a few of the people already there, and the shell snapped closed around them. One of the other passengers was phosphorescent, which was all that prevented them from being shut into total darkness.

The sphere jostled a little, and Kurt felt himself pressed down as it moved up, fast. He reached out with one hand for the curved, cold wall and with the other for Amanda.

"Is she gonna be okay?" Amanda asked.

"Yeah," Kurt assured her. "She's got . . ." He paused, leaning on Amanda for balance as he felt for his pocket. "Oh, no."

"What?"

"I've still got ze credit card and ze phone."

Gambit's mind ran over and over the plans and diagrams he'd been cramming all day. Professor Xavier had encouraged Gambit to widen his knowledge base by going to college, even though Gambit, with his Mark on his shoulder, considered himself to have all the education he'd ever need. But he'd done it to humor the old man, and to be with Rogue, and because he couldn't think of what he'd do with his time otherwise. He was well onto his way to a bachelor's in electrical engineering. And however this mess turned out, someday he'd have to thank the Professor for that—he wouldn't have been able to memorize all those wiring diagrams that fast without the months of practice reading them.

And now he had ten minutes to kill the power to the Solitude 4 base. And, exhausted and angry and grim, if he ended up killing anything else in the process, so much the better.

There was an access hatch at the edge of the base, leading down into the work tunnels that connected the place's underground generator with the buildings it needed to power. It was locked, but he could manage the lock with his eyes closed. There was an alarm, too, but a decent knowledge of electronics and a pocketknife settled that as well.

He slipped inside, silent, invisible, unnoticed, and followed the right twists and turns through the unlit and pipe-woven corridors to the control junction. There as a monitoring station there, small and stark, staffed by one man who was obviously more technician than soldier.

Gambit kept the knife out; it would simplify communication. The first indication the man had that this was going to be an unusual night was the feel of the cold, sharp little blade settled under his Adam's apple.

"Don' move," Gambit ordered. "Don' speak, don' think, and don' kick dat alarm switch. You wid me so far?"

He could feel the man shaking, his breath coming too fast. Gambit met the man's eyes in their reflection off one of the darkened tv screens; his own eyes gleamed and burned, flaring with his anger.

"Y'know dose mutants dey been tellin' you about? De mean, scary evil ones, wid unstoppable powers, out to kill us all? You lookin' at 'em." He pinched the man's collar and charged it, so it glowed painfully bright in the dark. "If for any reason I let go of dis shirt . . . if my hand gets bumped, or I get bored wid you . . . den your head is gonna get blown off. No joke, no bluff. It will blow off an' roll away, an' I will kick it outta my way when I leave here. You got me?"

He felt the man's head nod awkwardly in his grip.

"Good. Now let's get dis settled."

He flipped the knife closed and tucked it into his pocket, to free up his hand for the re-wiring that needed to be done.

Piotr waited in the woods well beyond the complex, just close enough to see the lights of the buildings, and tried to remember that emotional-detachment thing he'd gotten so very good at working for Magneto. He'd gotten so good at it that it almost felt like astral projection: taking the artist, the good son, the loving-older-brother side of himself out of any situation and leaving the human tank to deal with it alone. He'd had to. It was a survival tactic he'd developed to cope with desperate circumstances.

But in the few months he'd lived at the Institute, it had been different. He hadn't needed the detachment anymore. He'd gotten emotionally involved with everything—the team, the mission, the future that had opened up to him. And every day he'd found his attention lingering more and more on the bright little brown-haired girl called Kitty Pryde.

If anyone else had been taken by their enemies, he would have been upset. He would have been eager to save them, and worried for their welfare until that rescue came. But for Kitty to be the one lost and alone, for her future to be the one so uncertain . . . that fired every synapse in his brain and made his blood boil and his hands shake. He'd been lucky that he'd done no more than slug Gambit a few times when he'd heard the news.

The lights were the signal. Gambit had said. The lights would go out when he cut main power, and there would be a seven-minute window before the exterior electric fence and lights were fully charged, before the generator reset itself and warmed up enough to power them. He'd kill the backup generator, he'd said. Seven minutes to get in, find Kitty, and get out. Seven minutes for Gambit to draw fire and attention so he could get away unnoticed, and lie low until they were picked up.

Why weren't the lights turned off yet? They shone in the darkness, steady and immutable. Worry and suspicion circled in his head. Gambit would come through . . . probably. He might. Or he might turn. But if he did, it wouldn't be tonight. Not to the military and the oppressive law. Not at the cost of Kitty's life—for Gambit did love Kitty, who smiled when he called her Minou and who was utterly without guile. Gambit would never betray Kitty . . . would he?

How impossible it was to trust a man who didn't trust himself.

The lights must go off. Please, God, let them go off.

It was cold out here. Virginia was warmer than New York by a long way, and neither of them could compete with his hometown, but all the same he'd been out here long enough for the forlorn and persistent wind to raise goosebumps on the skin of his arms. He armored up; he ran more of a chance of being seen, covered in gleaming steel, but he was warmer and felt safer.

The lights went out.

Colossus ran. The ground shook under his feet, and bracken and smaller trees were pulverized in his path. Seven minutes to get in, find her, and get out. One shot at this. No room for error.

The powerless electric fence didn't even slow him down. He felt bullets from the guard tower pinging off his back. He'd been spotted, but with most of the base staff deployed to catch whoever had shut off the power and communications hampered by the outage, the mobilization wouldn't be more than he could handle. He turned a little to hit the outer wall with his shoulder instead of his face, spraying pieces of cinder block in every direction.

He didn't know where she was. Gambit had only been able to tell him that the lab spaces with the kind of power that containing Kitty would need were in the center of the bloc, ground floor. That was a lot of space, and possibilities, and uncertainty. He needed more information.

There were soldiers covering the building's main north-south hallway. They opened fire the second he came into view, the rounds hitting his face and chest with impressive precision and then ricocheting off in every direction. He heard someone call "Fall back!" as he came on without lessening his speed. They retreated, some even breaking and running off into other rooms and corridors where he'd be less likely to follow.

Colossus grabbed the first soldier he could reach, gripped him by the neck, and lifted straight up. "Where is Katherine Pryde?"

"I . . . I don't . . . who . . . "

"The mutant they are holding here. Where is she?" He tightened his grip a very little, changing the skin of the soldier's face to purple, then released it so the man could speak.

"B . . . B Lab. Right hand hallway."

Colossus opened his hand and dropped him. Then, because he'd been raised that way, he intoned a perfunctory "Thank you" before swerving right and taking off running again.

B Lab had large double doors that were clearly labeled. He shoved them off their hinges.

Kitty lay on an exam table in the middle of the room. She'd been stripped naked, and shaved bare. Monitoring nodes were adhered to the skin of her scull and across her chest. A clear plastic tube ran across her upper lip, feeding gray gas from a pressurized cylinder into her nose. A cuff around her upper arm was wired into a computer on a stand next to her head. And needles punctured the inside of each of her elbows, feeding into collection bags of bright red blood that hung on either side of the bed frame. And every inch of her skin was pale and blue-gray, the color so unnatural that for the longest and most horrific second of his life Colossus was sure that she was dead.

Then he saw her chest move, rising barely an inch and subsiding again. And the beeping of the computer registered in his mind: it was reporting a heartbeat. She wasn't gone.

"Kitty! Kitty, wake up!" He was moving even before he spoke, ripping the nodes off of her skin. He was rougher than he needed to be, hoping that the harmless pain of it would bring her around, but she didn't react. The breathing tube came off next, then the monitor cuff—the computer registered a flatline and wailed in response. The needles he was more careful with. He had no medical training beyond basic first aid and had never handled needles before. If she hadn't felt the nodes, then she wouldn't feel these, but he didn't want to tear holes in her skin. He drew out one, then the other, tossing them contemptuously to the floor as soon as they were out of her body.

He checked his watch. Two minutes to go. But naked as she was, the cold breeze outside could kill her. Colossus cast about for something to keep her warm and spotted a steel cabinet in the corner. He wrenched it open, leaving the flimsy frame twisted to pieces, and grabbed out the thin gray blanket he found on the bottom shelf. He shook it open and laid it over Kitty. He couldn't avoid looking at her . . . there was no time to be spared for that kind of propriety . . . but he did his best to avoid noticing those parts of her that he'd never seen before as he wrapped it tight around her and lifted her from the table. It might have must been that he was armored up, but she felt unusually light and fragile.

Less than a minute. Time to get out of here. With Kitty clutched close against his chest, he charged out of the lab and headed for the first green glow of an emergency exit sign. This certainly qualified as an emergency.

Once outside, he spared only a second to glance up at the stars and take bearings. The woods around Solitude 4 were thick; if he mistook the direction of the rendezvous, the Blackbird would never find him. Fortunately, the North Star was to his right, where it needed to be, and the lights and chaos were behind him. He ran, keeping to the darkest shadows to prevent any gleam of light from catching his armor and drawing attention to him.

There was the fence again. He kicked a hole in it and was out.

The breeze had picked up. It was colder than it had been, just a few minutes before. He felt Kitty shudder feebly in his arms. He didn't dare to hold her tighter—armored up, he could easily break a bone by accident, and holding her close to a metal surface would only make her colder. So he ran, flinching on her behalf, a mile and a quarter without pause until he reached the gap in the trees that was to be their rendezvous.

He lowered himself to the ground, taking Kitty with him, and sloughed off his armor. "Kitty? Katya, we've got you out. You're going to be all right. Can you hear me? Kitty, please, for the love of all that is holy, please wake up!"

Gambit could hear the generator whine as it struggled to reboot. He had two minutes before every light and alarm and defense in the place came blazing back to life. Time to go, and to hope that Piotr had done his job and that Storm would be where she needed to be.

He laid his hand flat on the control panel in front of him and charged it. It was hard to manage two different levels of charge, one in each hand, and the technician's collar glowed brighter as he loaded more power into it than he'd intended. The man could obviously feel or see the difference; he made a strangled, panicked noise and started to shake.

I could just pull my hand away. There was no one there to stop him, and no X-Man would ever have to know. He'd done it before. And this cruel, stupid creature had been sitting here for hours, knowing that a young woman was being held prisoner upstairs, not caring enough to lift a finger to help her, or even to absent himself from the place in protest. Legitimate military target. Revenge for Katherine Pryde. He could just take his hand away . . . and thanks to his precious telepathic immunity, Professor Xavier would never know.

But he decided not to. For now.

If you're gonna kill someone, Remy, let it be the big fish. Let it be Senator Creed, who gave the orders. Don't waste it on this thing. He doesn't deserve to be killed by you.

He drew the charge out of the man's shirt collar and let it rush into the computer panel. "I'd run if I was you," he advised, before suiting action to the word.

He was back on ground level and pelting toward the fence when the explosion blew. Flaming shrapnel rained down around him, and the air filled with the roar of hungry fires seeking oxygen. The darkness was lit up behind him, and bullets started zinging around his head. He veered sideways, away into the dark underneath the dead searchlights of a guard tower.

He'd reached the fence. He didn't care now whether it was charged or not; he pulled a hand of cards from his pocket and flung them out in front of him. They exploded as they hit the wire, striking back at him with blasts of hot, percussive air against his body, and he shot through the hole they'd made before the flames had even died away. It wasn't the most subtle way of making an exit, but subtlety wasn't the goal. The more people and armament he had chasing him, the less there would be chasing Piotr and Kitty.

A bullet caught the edge of his ear. He swore freely but didn't slacken his pace. He had to be fast enough or they were all as good as dead . . .

They were falling behind. Running through thick woods in the pitch black was hard enough with mutant eyes; it had to be nearly impossible for the soldiers, burdened with gear and half blind. But they'd have heat seekers on him in a matter of seconds . . .

The trees thinned, and engines roared. There it was: the X-Jet, swooping down like a raven, a plane-shaped patch of starless sky. It didn't engage the VTOL engines, but the bottom hatch opened. Gambit grabbed out his staff as he ran, extended it, and vaulted. The jump would probably have won him an Olympic medal. The Blackbird scooped him up at the apex of his leap; he hit the back wall of the cabin, hard, and dropped to the floor in a tangle. The adamantium staff went skittering away under a bench.

"Got you," Storm announced, and he felt himself pressed into the floor as the Bird accelerated upwards.

Phasing was like diving into deep water with no guarantee you could come up again. Kitty had no idea how long she'd been under. Everything was blackness and cold . . . desperate, immobilizing, bone-crunching cold. It burned, and she hated it, trying to surrender herself back into the dark. She didn't know if it was unconsciousness or death, and she didn't care. There'd been no feeling there, and that was better.

But there were sounds. Someone was calling for her.

"Kitty, please, if you can hear me, please wake up . . . we've rescued you, Kitty, don't let it be for nothing . . . please, I can't bear it, please wake up . . ."

Peter was somewhere near. And he was upset. That alone was enough to drag her back into consciousness . . . poor Peter, worried . . .

She felt like someone had covered her in piles of the lead vests they used for taking x-rays at the dentist. Every inch of her felt heavy, even her fingers and her eyelids and the stomach muscles she used to breathe. It would be so much easier to lie still, unresisting, but she hated to know that Peter was upset. So she pushed the lead weight up off her stomach as far as she could, to get just enough air to exhale a single audible word. "Peter . . ."

She heard an exclamation, some rolling Russian word that was so sudden and loud and near at hand that she would have jumped if she'd had any strength to jump with. Then strong arms gathered her up, and she felt lips being pressed firmly and urgently to her forehead.

Her whole body lit up with warmth. It felt like sitting too close to the fireplace right after coming inside out of the cold, or like the last two minutes of any really heart-stoppingly good romantic movie. All of her concern and attention was abruptly focused on this one crucial fact, one she had to get across to him immediately or die in the process. She couldn't open her eyes, but she could coax another breath out between her lips. "You kissed me . . ."

The strong arms relaxed around her, letting her sag back down toward unconsciousness, and a broad hand brushed soothingly across her forehead and down her cheek. "Sssssh. Never mind. It's all right. Just forget it. Don't worry. You're safe. I'm sorry . . . never mind about it."

Kitty Pryde did not want to never mind about it. What she wanted was for the wonderful warmth to continue, to be held close and safe, to hear her name spoken by his voice over and over again. If she'd been strong enough, alert enough, to care, this overwhelming need would have embarrassed her beyond measure, but she just didn't have the resources to be embarrassed right now. All she had was the strength for one more breath with words in it. "Do it again."

For a long time, nothing happened, leaving Kitty afraid that she'd wasted her last breath on words he hadn't even heard. Then she felt his warm breath on her face, and his kiss pressing against her cheek, just under her eye. Even after he drew back, she could feel the imprint of his lips, and wondered if it was glowing.

A long, breathless moment, and the caress came again, just on the curve of her jaw. Then another, light and almost playful, on her chin . . . another on her temple, firm and slow . . . another that was barely more than a breath upon her quivering eyelid. Each kiss came so long after the last that Kitty kept worrying that he'd stopped, but he never did. There always seemed to be some spot, the bridge of her nose or the softness of her cheek, that still needed attention. But he never kissed her mouth—never asked her to kiss him back. And Kitty, as weak and helpless as her newborn namesake, could do nothing but lie passive in his arms and bask in the astonishing feeling of being suddenly and hopelessly and absolutely loved.

Then there was a howl of jet engines, and Piotr raised his face away from her, and Kitty tried to reach for him and blacked out.

Author's Notes:

These last scenes with Kitty and Piotr came to me on a hot, humid, rainy spring night in a tiny apartment in Pusan, South Korea. I'd been hanging in there for about two months with no one to talk to, and the enforced silence finally just kind of exploded in my head. Very rarely have I had story ideas sprung fully formed into my mind like Athena from the head of Zeus, but that's totally what happened. And I got to curl up in bed and listen to the rain and dream about being loved. It was a good night. :)