-:-
I promise, I will never let anything happen to you.
-Finding Nemo.
0. Existential Existence
He was not supposed to survive that trick between dimensions. He believed with all of his heart that what Dark Beast and the others said was true.
"If you close the portal, you will die."
Never more was supposed to be after he felt himself being torn apart (blood vessels turned to that of sludge turned jagged to form ice cracks under his skin; the roots of his fur and the skin all about him burned like he was being pummeled with boiled tea kettles and then bashed in the most sensitive places after that his bones wavered inside of him like shattered birdcages and bent in all the wrong places; he had gone blind and deaf before he'd felt the last 'Bamf' he'd ever thought he'd possibly make) between dimensions and closed the door between worlds that would have destroyed everything.
He hadn't felt his heartbeat again beyond the screaming agony of waking up in some quiet, lonely field that held grey skies suspended over his head, heavy with clouds and the smell of his own blood closing in and over the smells of dry, yellow grass begging for water and soon to be granted such as a roll of thunder called out to everything. Perhaps calling out to all of creation itself.
His eardrums were ruptured, he would find out later, which was why it had actually been his feeling the thunder, rather than hearing it.
After all, if he'd heard the thunder, then he would have remained conscious when Wolverine and Iceman and the brunette woman and those horrid little blue rats with tattoos found him as the rain fell to earth and began the dance to supply life to the plants and the lake twenty yards west and even the seven wild horses running far away from the mutants and their scent of blood to the north.
i. Rosary
She wore both a Star of David that she had received years and years ago from her best friend (he had seemed so eager to give it to her and had let out a breath she had the feeling he had kept in since coming to her, his bright yellow eyes hopeful and glad as she took the little packaged gift from his three-fingered hand and hugged him when she found the holy item under all the paper) and the rosary that had come into her possession when said best friend passed from the land of the living and into the ground.
Kurt Darkholme noticed this only because after three days of her taking care of him (what a dreaded thing, being taken care of by someone that would squeal and hug something that looked like him) in the Jean Grey Institute's infirmary, it was starting to actually bother him.
Religion was probably the most annoying thing he could fathom when it confronted him and the pair of opposing ideologies hanging from her neck made noise whenever she bent over to check his temperature or try and pry some more of his dried blood from his pelt without hurting him, so with mounting degrees, his patience was thinning out more and more the longer he was stuck in her presence.
There wasn't much he could do about it, however, until the tube stuck down his throat came out.
It wasn't that he wasn't grateful that she had brought him back to someplace with medical supplies instead of sprawled out in some empty field he'd woken up in after closing the space between dimensions to prevent the end of existence, because he was grateful. She had filled him in that the only reason she found him was because of the furry blue rats that were the Bamfs with her endless chattering to fill the silence of the medical room and she had—admittedly—kept him from having to just sit in the bed and watch endless hours of day-time television (oh the horror) with her talking and cleaning him up with clean water and a sponge… but the Star of David and the rosary were driving him crazy.
He made a point of this, finally, when she came in to remove the cast that had allowed his left wrist to heal and was tossing the plaster pieces into the wastebasket kept at the end of the bed next to the bookshelf with the potted daffodil he'd woken up to his first day there (he still didn't know who gave it to him, but would make bet that it was Deadpool).
When she'd looked up from the bin, dusting her hands on the grey slacks she often wore at the end of class hours, his now free hand had struck out and grasped the two pieces of religion that he didn't believe in, glaring his dulled red eyes at her.
She didn't understand his purpose and had phased out of his grip and through the floor. Something of a hurt look crossed her face for only a moment.
He was beyond trying to get better faster when the fucking Angel started taking care of him in shifts with fucking Deadpool after that incident. He actually played 'sleepy-time' when they came to check on him and quietly plotted revenge on Wolverine (who else would send the two lunatic kings of the school, honestly?) in tandem with still being curious of the Star of David and rosary on Kitty Pryde's neck.
ii. Star of David
Silence is golden, but quite frankly, it was almost entirely impossible to be quiet and headstrong and the headmistress of a whole school when Quentin Quire had set his mind to getting everyone to answer embarrassing questions and he'd honed in on Kitty with a doozey.
"C'mon, how much would someone have to pay you to get you to run around the block—that's a city block, a king sized block—in nothing but what you had coming out of your mother's ham wallet?"
The Bamfs hanging around her neck (actually sleepy and adorable and not malevolent at all) essentially looked affronted for Kitty as Quire continued to perch at the other end of the long library table Kitty had chosen specifically because it was in the very back of the section on the Industrial Revolution where none of the kids went even to suck each other's tongues in private. The pencil she was using to grade some papers touched its end to the table and shattered under the pressure she was putting against it in an effort not to say just how inappropriate 'ham wallet' was.
She was grateful that she had awesome mental shields (something Logan taught her that really paid off, thank God) or else he would have heard her in the next county threatening him in the most wonderfully violent ways (how much would it cost her to get Toad to wrap the boy up in that tongue, carry him to the top of the Empire State Building and leave the brat there, she wondered?) that were very, very illegal.
Kitty opened her mouth to say….something, anything. But she stopped short, defeated and with too much of a headache and just scratched the two Bamfs behind their ears for the request as such that Hank would give in his bouts of loving Shakespeare to the root of all his greatest works, "Away. Steady and away, please."
Lint from her hair that had clung from looking for the seat in the faraway place in the library remained, as well as a heady cloud of purple and sulfur smell, but not the two Bamfs and not Headmistress Pryde. The papers remained as well, at that, and Quire made himself happy enough by looking over some of the pages—may he be frank in saying that the Shi'ar prince has the worst handwriting he'd ever laid eyes on, including that of a bi-lingual fifth grader who preferred crayons to pencils—and sharpening Kitty's broken pencil in anticipation for gaining something out of this loss.
The cave of X-Force was probably not what Kitty had in mind when she made request of the Bamfs for somewhere away, but they couldn't know that, so she settled on the cold floor where they'd deposited them, all three of them, and gave a lackadaisical sigh.
Leaning further back (and it was safe, she knew, as there was not the smell of cigars lit; the sound of Deadpool muttering to himself as he looked over his porn or practiced making pancakes for the millionth time was absent; Angel was off causing Bobby hysterics as he often did even with this new friendship between himself and Genesis; Betsy and Fantomex had left school grounds and would not return for a time,) Kitty's hair made nice for a silken blanket for the two Bamfs to muddle with and then settle as a headrest for her (living, breathing, warm) in sleep as she stared up at the ceiling. Her tiredness circling around her middle like a tight knot of steel in her gut, her fingers absently coming to trail along the Universal Offering Red rosary beads settled in the dents of her skin and bones of her neck; her thumb clinking the silver of her Star of David at the same time.
One of the Bamfs' tails cycled low in circles and played with the hair at the back of her neck while the other snuffed deep into her ear and shoulder to make her shiver as they got more comfortable in their sleep.
It reminded her, these bits of silence in-between missions and schooling, of days spent with Kurt on the roof of her apartment or in places of cold or warm weather when they just wanted to rest and not be bothered by either Logan or—God forbid, however one might worship Him—Scott on a power kick of being in charge. True, it wasn't exact in spirit as Kurt had often kept her mind wandering about in the directions of progress or humor ("See that cloud, how it looks like a pirate being brought down by a horse?" "No, Elf, it's a lion being taken on by a gorilla. See that curved tail and that fat fist?" "So it's a stout pirate.") and now she was alone with nothing but a pair of the creatures her mind had invested upon in his honor.
Her Star of David, her thumb tracing the design and feel of the metal with clean nail and soft skin, was forgotten in clutching a handful of the rosary beads, a stinging in her eyes forming and waving over the skin of lids and lashes to soak her cheeks with water.
The heated salt water produced from herself, her soul in anguish ("Die Tranen, Katzchen? Is something wrong?") from not being able to grieve properly for such a good friend, seemed to catch in the shell of her ear and a pool of shadow she hadn't noticed as her eyes wandered the cave and took up the sight of red eyes peering stoically over from the entrance. Kurt Darkholme holding German beer she'd been sure to stock the upstairs pantry with and what appeared to be one of the popcorn buckets (a grossly unattractive thing Bobby had kept after another of he and Kitty's failed dates, insistent that "Refills are half-price with these!") filled with not German cuisine, but some of Remy's spice cookies and a small helping of the leftover roast duck Hank had made the night previous.
Instinct kicked in and the hand not clutching Kurt's (her Kurt, not the man in the door she had tried—and possibly failed—to get to know despite herself) rosary covered her eyes as she jolted up and wiped away the tear tracks, brief scintilla of water on her eyelashes, "Oh, shit—I'm sorry! I didn't think anyone would be down here."
The older man (though "older' was a relative term for mutants as they lived—most of them—a great deal longer and with slowed periods of prime being than other people) said nothing and stepped, as in didn't teleport, down the stairs and over to the card table Deadpool kept in the corner as it was used considerably more for harboring food than playing the ridiculous games of Gin Rummy and Poker. He didn't stop looking at her though and she was unnerved, Bamfs still curled up next to her rump on the floor (lazy as cats, the both of them) and unlikely to help if he didn't take kindly to her after her avoiding him for little more than a couple of weeks.
He set his meal down over two queens (diamonds and hearts) and a variant of numbers and kings, looking back over his shoulder at her.
She still hadn't left the floor when he spoke quietly, accent still thick, but a little pained after a long while of disuse with that oxygen tube down his windpipe to keep him from choking on his own blood and spit, "It's nothing. Technically I wasn't due for release until tomorrow, but a couple of your students got into a bit of a skirmish so Wolver-…Logan let me out early so they could line some beds together. I could leave, if you'd prefer?"
Kitty shook her head, perhaps ashamed of behavior Darkholme had this feeling she had no control over, and shrugged apologetically, arms folding under her breasts like a hug.
Silence hung for a minute, but not utterly so. The Bamfs made little snoring sounds together and made Kitty twitch when one's claws dragged against her hip before fitting snuggly in her pant pockets; lecherous grin spreading even as the bigger one and smaller one slept.
There is a look he gives her again, that of an incredibly large buck hare looking over a young rabbit doe before he looks as though he may say (sigh, languid and slow with that accent and manner so different from her friend) something and she goes first, a thought entering his head similar to a "Thank God" in an atheist German sort of way.
"I'm sorry, but I just remembered; how are you feeling? Logan said that getting almost torn apart by the Event Horizon probably hurt, like, a lot. A lot, a lot."
How did these people manage to be so damn nice? He had scared her—perhaps insulted her—by almost defacing that rosary and Star of David around her neck and she was still worried about his well being?
He sat down at the table and took a small sip of his beer—he would be nice to her, he decided, because of the beer at the very least—before answering, bland and emotionless, as was his proper way, "Eh, the drugs and sleep helped. I would have preferred your company to Wade and Warren, though. They are so disgustingly talkative and bright and nice," the word is spat with even thicker German accent that Kitty's lips can't help but move up without her permission, "That I think I would have gone through that ordeal with closing off a universe again if it would keep them away from me unless completely needed by Herr Logan."
"I could pass on that message," she offered, getting off the floor, but doing the Bamfs a favor by cradling them in her arms like kittens and rubbing her fingers against their ears when they twitched towards wakefulness. "If I threaten him with more of the duties he's actually supposed to take on as Headmaster, I think he'd get the two of them to leave you alone; if only for the sake of his own sanity when having to deal with the kids."
A twitch worked its way into the corner of the right side of Darkholme's mouth and he found himself smirking, not entirely unpleasant.
iii. MemorialVolume
It turned out that Darkholme really didn't have to ask miss Pryde about the rosary and the star of David; just being around the school provided enough information that she and his predecessor had been especially close—she was a Jew and he was a Catholic (going so far as to say that he had been a priest for some time; odd and disturbing to the tattooed man as that was) and when he'd gone from the mortal coil it was her choice to care for his that was sacred.
It still seemed odd to him, but not as odd as that he was getting to know the woman a little better as Logan decided that he wasn't letting Kurt off the hook quite yet for his traitorous act and submitted that he'd have to undergo a type of torture Darkholme didn't think the man dark enough to actually administer.
Wolverine had made Nightcrawler stay at the Jean Grey School and become a teacher of basically anything that was lacking when considered outside of Logan's abilities and time table.
Kurt didn't like it, but occasionally, when he wasn't working tirelessly to teach the children fencing, German language, timestream probabilities and survival methods (and he secretly hoped that one day Logan would assign Kurt something that would allow him to beat Kid Gladiator and Quentin Quire to death with a shovel) he got days off where he would find himself wandering around the field that he'd landed in after his release from oblivion.
There was no reason for him to walk around the empty field with its empty sky except that it was quiet and often nice enough that he could flick his feet and tail into that lake he'd landed near, eyes watching out for those wild horses that were still weary but tolerated him enough to meander nearby if he was near some prime green grass. Sometimes Logan accompanied him with beer (Canadian and German, what a gentleman) to sit and do nothing; sometimes Deadpool skipped around, annoying him and speaking nonsense until goading Kurt into a round of katana practice.
On a few occasions he could count on both hands, Kitty came with the Bamfs or the dragon (rare, though, that was as the pastel colored being was a teacher too, and didn't care for Darkholme one way or another) to come fetch him for more of his duties and he'd groan or huff at being disturbed. But he always followed her back to the school as the Bamfs teleported her and he followed by himself.
On those occasions, however, when he retired for the evening after dinner and dealing with the children and the adults, he would find—never did it fail—a tiny bushel of weed flowers and dry grass from around the area he'd been found bloody and near dead. Wrapped in ribbon or plain string, but always tidy and hung in his window with the colorful heads of the flowers pointed towards the floor so they would dry and not lose petals or fragrance for a good long time.
He returned the favor twice, but left them in her classroom in a vase; though, sometimes, he wonders if the Bamfs didn't eat them, because he never sees the flowers after leaving them and she never says anything about it.