Tragedy (X-Men)
Genosha was once touted to be a 'Mutant Paradise.'
Though it was a tropical sort of island, located somewhere between Seychelles and Madagascar, that wasn't quite the paradise that people meant.
No, Genosha was supposed to be a Utopia, where everything was fair and right, a Tower of Babel where everyone spoke the same language and held the same mission of ascending to a higher level where they might live, forever, happily, in peace.
Of course Utopias only worked out in fiction, and like the real Tower of Babel, the language had been broken, and the mission was forsaken, and all that was left of paradise was rubble and ruin...and heartbreak.
Kitty had always thought of herself as flexible, both body and mind. It wasn't just about being able to walk through walls. She was adaptive. She took things in stride, and though she might phase through things, nothing phased her.
And then she watched her father die on film that was supposed to just be research material, and she had suddenly never felt more fragile, more vulnerable, in her entire life.
She knelt down beside broken stone, and pressed her hand to her head, feeling an oncoming headache, and gritted her teeth against it. It was ridiculous to be this upset, she thought. Yes, he was her father, but in the last six, eight years, whatever it was, she had seen him barely a handful of times, and heard from him sporadically at best. Was she really upset over his loss, or was she just sentimental?
Was she some sort of sociopath that she couldn't decide?
A patch of grass peaked out between rocks, proof that the decimation that had befallen the island had not killed it, and Kitty sighed.
She remembered one spring back home, she was maybe eight or nine, and the snow was just starting to melt. She had been fiddling with her old GameBoy, trying to boost it's CPU, and Carmen had been home for once; was it a bank holiday? Whatever the case, he tried to push Kitty outside, to "explore nature as it woke from its slumber," he said, and the first thing she did was step onto a patch of ice that hadn't quite melted and she fell on her ass.
She had been so mad, and he had been laughing so hard that her mom came outside to see what all the fuss was about, and then they had both been laughing, and Kitty called it a day and went back inside.
She had been so focused on her gadgets and studies back then. Rogue would have laughed had she seen that serious Kitty. Storm would have fallen down dead from the shock. And Lockheed...
"What would you have done, Lockheed?" she murmured, unsurprised to hear the reply, I still would have followed you home.
She didn't turn to look at the creature behind her. She didn't need to, to know that he was, for once, just as solemn and majestic as the being he appeared.
Just like you followed me here?
She had told no one she was coming, had left a note about personal business to Rogue, had barely said a quick "I'll be back soon" to Bobby...and she hadn't even thought about the dragon in her strange despair. She had needed answers. She had needed space. She had needed...something that she didn't think she was going to find here.
She rose to her feet and brushed dirt away from the biggest stone beside her. It appeared to be a cornerstone, made of a slightly more solid, slightly more refined stone than those around it, and though the destruction had done its job, she could still make out some of the inscription.
Madrigal and ... Associates ... Established this fine ... Summer of Genesis ... 17th, 1979.
It was probably a good, repectable company, maybe even a bank like the one Carmen worked at before. Or a legal firm, perhaps? Even mutants needed to have laws, right? Or how did that work in a Utopia?
It felt strange to quibble over such semantics when millions of lives had been lost. But if she could understand one piece of rock, maybe she could understand another, and another, and after all that, maybe she could understand why her father had been here.
After Japan, she knew he'd gone back home to Illinois.
But it wasn't long after that her parents had divorced.
Was that when he'd come here? What was he trying to prove? What was he trying to gain? What was a normal human doing in a mutant Utopia?
This wasn't your fault.
Lockheed had, as usual, followed her thoughts to their usual tragic conclusion, and she turned to look at him finally, glaring into those fiery golden eyes.
"WHAT THE HELL DO YOU KNOW?" she screamed at him, and then shut her eyes as the headache from earlier returned. She found herself on the ground once more, holding her head, except this time, it felt like she was trying to hold herself together.
...you're going to phase apart if you keep this up.
If she could have said something in that moment, it wouldn't have been very kind. She remembered Terri Pryde once telling her "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." It was such a pithy, stupid phrase. Why should she restrain herself?
Why shouldn't she say what she thought?
Why did she have to be the nice girl, anyway?
Being nice was for suckers. Being nice was for losers. Being nice got you taken advantage of at best, killed at worst.
Carmen had been nice, she recalled.
Stop, Kate.
She snapped her gaze back to his, and saw her reflection in those glowing depths, and felt her heart stop for a moment. Her dark curls were even more chaotic than their usual out-of-control curliness, and her uniform was smudged with dirt and grime from her initial walk through the rubble, and though her eyes were mostly clear, she looked like a madwoman, grieving and insane...
And slightly gaseous in form at the edges.
She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out.
It's not your fault, Kate.
Her entire being quivered, and she wanted to retort, but even her thoughts seemed to stall.
It's NOT your fault, Kate.
Third times the charm, was it?
Another stupid, pithy notion, and yet, she felt herself centering, felt herself realigning, and when she was fully solid again, she found a violet, cat-sized dragon with its claws against her chest, reaching forward with its snout to stop tears that she hadn't even realized had fallen. A slithery tongue slipped out, to taste or dash away, she didn't know, and didn't care as she started sobbing, and returned the awkward, yet so very, very welcome embrace.