INTERLUDE
Chapter 26: “Nostalgia”
Kitty walked precise, geometric zigzags across the ground floor of the mansion, phasing through any obstacles that stood in her way. She surprised relatively few people as she ghosted into different rooms on the sultry July morning. A quarter of the mansion’s population was away for the summer and others were out enjoying themselves on the grounds of the estate. Although the academic year was over, the population of refugees had increased to the point where it was necessary for the school to offer some kind of academic and leisure programming throughout the summer months. Furthermore, some students were keen to continue their powers training, and some were compelled to, as they were not in sufficient control of their abilities to live unsupervised.
Sam, Dani, Doug, Jones, Terry, Neal – all were home with their families. Kitty would have been back in Deerfield with her parents except for the fact that they were in Europe at a conference where her mother was speaking. In fact, it had disappointed and confused the Prydes when she had declined to join them in Amsterdam.
“But why, Kitten?” her father had asked. “Remember what fun we had in Portugal and Spain when you were 12?”
“I’m not 12 anymore, Daddy! I have… I have responsibilities here. Things I have to think about. You wouldn’t understand! I’m a mutant now. I-I have a different agenda.”
This impassioned speech didn’t make sense to Kitty even as she said it. Somehow, the thought of sightseeing with her parents was just unbearable. Especially while she should be… WHAT?! Something was holding her in Westchester; some sense of incompleteness. It seemed absurd to think that it was as simple as the fact that she hadn’t finished her paper on the Holocaust. The school term was officially over, but she was still rewriting, waiting for some elusive inspiration that she knew was hiding in some source text or behind some stubborn fold of cranial matter. Obsessing wasn’t working, so she was drifting instead — not only through walls but through her own history.
In the past week, she had found herself singing songs from favorite childhood CDs, songs about jelly beans and monkeys, and jingles from commercials for toys past. She remembered long-lost stuffed animals and the comforting feel of the red corduroy overalls she had worn when she was ten.
In this onslaught of nostalgia, the friends and relatives were inconsequential objects, babbling at the periphery of vision while she focused on what was truly important: the line of ants marching zigzags across her parents’ bathroom floor, the utter relief of the peach smoothie at Starkman’s as the first drop touched her palette on a hot summer day. She ached for the past with a longing that was almost sexual.
She flowed obliquely through the wall of the chemistry lab and almost collided with Bobby and Rogue who were walking, hand in glove, down the hall. “Shoot!” Rogue exclaimed, hand on her chest. Bobby looked embarrassed as usual.
“Sorry,” Kitty mumbled without stopping.
“You seen John Allerdyce anywhere?” Rogue called after her. “I want to invite him to go into town with us.”
“Sorry, can’t help you,” Kitty responded as she phased through the oak paneled wall into the gym. Kitty felt sorry for the girl, sweating in all those clothes on this hot day. She imagined how horrible it would be to worry 24/7 about accidentally touching someone with that hungry skin. It was so odd, Kitty noted, that she herself had kissed Bobby but his girlfriend could not. It had been nearly a year since Kitty and Bobby had been a kind of couple — really just two weeks of frantic making out. It had ended even before Lance appeared to turn her brains to mush. She had to admit, as she made a 90 degree turn at the wall and headed back across the gym floor, that there were times when she regretted the distance that had grown between her and Bobby after Lance left. She had wondered more than once that year if they might pick up where they had left off.
But all she had to do was remember the difference between Bobby’s passionless lip licks and the sheer transporting power of Lance Alver’s soul kisses to know that there was no relationship possible between her and Bobby. Maybe she wasn’t his type. More likely he just wasn’t mature enough to pursue a relationship — at least with a girl he could actually touch. Boys were usually not as mature as she was; she could accept that. Lance, of course, had been older, more experienced. His kisses weren’t the kisses of a boy. As much as his mutation could shake the earth, so his kisses induced tremors in her. Eight months had passed and she was still shaken.
She realized that she had come to a halt, leaning on a vaulting horse, her hand sweating on the faux-leather surface. It was one of the few times she had been totally solid all day. Tremors. There were always tremors whenever the Brotherhood attacked another military facility. It had been two weeks since the last incident and she hoped they wouldn’t resume. Or did she? At least when the news reported the strategic earthquakes, she knew Lance was out there somewhere.
Her restless energy returned, and again she let go of the hard, unforgiving world of matter, pushing through the horse and the wall and into the hall again.
“Kitty!” David Alleyne called to her as she appeared. “Come on, they captured a mutant!” He was running down the corridor, undoubtedly towards the TV in the rec room. She followed. Scott and Jean were there, as were Clarice and Peter, and it was all over but the shouting. The TV showed helicopter shots of the aftermath of a scary battle. Troops with serious equipment. The reporter talked about green fire reigning down on the soldiers, about directed hallucinations and mutant-made earthquakes. One of the mutant combatants had been captured and as the cameras rolled, he dislodged the cloth sack on his head with a long, flexible tongue.
“Toad,” Jean said with grim satisfaction. “So it was the Brotherhood they were fighting.”
“Quiet, he’s shouting something,” Scott said.
“…Magneto lives, human worms! They killed one of us today, but a hundred, a thousand will rise up and…” The prisoner was hit with an electrical discharge weapon. He convulsed and fell still, and was quickly hustled away by the soldiers.
Kitty didn’t even hear the rest of the exchange between the reporter and the anchor. The scene had been horrifying, the destruction shocking. Scott snapped off the TV and Jean gently invited her to sit with them.
“He said they killed one of the Brotherhood,” Kitty murmured, remaining where she was. “Who do you think it was?”
Before the teachers could answer, David pushed his own question to the front of the line. “What were the Brotherhood after, Mr. Summers? This is like the fifth attack in the last two months.”
Scott shook his head. “I’m sorry, David, Kitty. I just don’t know the answers. We’ll look into the situation and keep you informed.”
“Yeah right,” Kitty said as a wave of anger ran through her. She turned and walked from the room. She hadn’t meant to be so rude, but honestly, asking the X-Men for information was like trying to get a straight answer out of a real estate agent. Is it about security, or do they think we’re too young to handle the truth? Whatever. In her experience, they always stonewalled. But she knew how to get the information she needed.
She marched up to her room and phased through the door. Why not use the doorknob? she asked herself. Maybe pushing between atoms made her feel that she had some control over her life. Rahne was sitting on her bed, wearing shorts but no shirt, flapping her hands in the air like they were on fire while she read something online. Probably the website of that pop star boy she was so hot for, the self-proclaimed virgin. She was wearing one the plainest bras Kitty had ever seen, as if a bit of frill would offend God or something. When she saw Kitty, Rahne gave a squeak and put her hands up to cover her semi-nakedness.
“Sorry,” Kitty told her as she went straight to her desk. “Didn’t mean to startle you.” She then realized what she’d seen. She turned back around to face her roommate. “Hey, did you color your nails?!”
Rahne froze and blushed as red as the lacquer she had just applied. “Yeah, does it look dumb?” She displayed her hands shyly and then began flapping them again. “They’re still wet. And I was scared about getting polish on my shirt.”
Kitty smiled encouragingly, forgetting the Brotherhood for a second. “They look awesome,” she enthused. The Rahne she had met at the beginning of last year would never have allowed herself to paint her nails, to act like such a harlot. Kitty felt a bit of pride in the girl’s corruption. “Good for you, Rahne!” Then she remembered why she had returned to their room. “Listen, I have to do something. Hold that thought.” She woke up her laptop and checked her friends. She saw, with relief, that he was online.
shadowcat says: Doug, I need info.
boweroftable says: Brotherhood takedown?
shadowcat says: Exactly. how ru?
boweroftable says: Alpha uno. Up at the lake with my ‘rents. Jones and his family are here 2. Nobody can get him to go outside
shadowcat says: let him b. he’s jones. What happened today?
boweroftable says: Army was ready for them this time. Intelligence? A mole? Can’t say 4 sure.
shadowcat says: WTF are the brotherhood after, anyway? Y attack army bases?
boweroftable says: I figure army is testing anti-mutant tech.
“Shit,” she muttered.
“What?” Rahne said. Kitty ignored her.
shadowcat says: They killed a mutant.
boweroftable says: I know.
A large video window suddenly filled her screen. From it, Doug stared out with a sunburnt nose, wet hair and a towel over his bare shoulders. “Are you worried it’s Lance?” he asked, his voice squeezed thin by the little speakers.
She tried to sound calmer than she felt. “We have no way of knowing, right? There could have been a dozen mutants fighting. Anyone of them could be… the one.”
Doug rubbed his peeling nose. “We know he was there. All the news reports talked about earth tremors.”
With what seemed an act of excessive digital roughhousing, Doug’s video window was shoved up into the corner of the monitor by another containing the pale face of Hayward Jones. “Hi, Kitty!” he enthused.
“Uh, hi Jones,” she responded. “How’s the lake?”
“Wet probably. Listen, I’ve been thinking about the security system at the mansion,” he said. “There’s a big hole in it if someone with a half a brain were to —”
“Do you mind?” Doug said with annoyance from his now postage-stamp-sized window. “Get off this screen, Jones. Me and Kitty are trying to talk here.”
“Well, where do you expect me to go, Doug?!” he asked as if it were a reasonable question. His eyes went wide. “Oh hey, I got it.” His window collapsed on itself and Doug resumed control of Kitty’s screen. Across the room, Rahne shrieked. Kitty spun around and saw Jones’s face on her monitor. “Hi Rahne! Hey, you’re not wearing a shirt! Whoa…”
“Kitty!” Rahne called in distress, not knowing how to escape her cyber peeper.
“Cover your cam,” Kitty called. “Doug, make him go away!”
“Jones,” Doug cried in the kind of excited voice you use to get a dog’s interest. “My mom has coconut brownies out on the porch!” Jones’s mouth fell open and his window blinked out of existence, revealing again the undisguised sexual hunger of Rahne’s virgin pop idol.
Doug dried his hair with his towel. There was sweet birdsong around him and the distant sound of a woman’s voice. “Kitty, I gotta go. Mom’s calling us for lunch. I’ll ping you right away when I find out more.”
Kitty wandered outside disconsolate, her backpack heavy with texts. She would focus on her essay, finally get the damn thing done. She had been reading and reading, but nothing seemed like the right source text. Holocaust memoirs, accounts of the Wannsee Conference where the so-called “final solution” was hammered out. She came upon John Allerdyce with a pile of books of his own, sheltering from the sun in the shade of an enormous oak tree, his back to the trunk. She dropped to the ground beside him without a greeting, knowing he hated to be interrupted. Silence was just fine with her, too.
After a minute, she remembered something. “Rogue is looking for you.”
“Then let her look for me,” he said without raising his head from his book.
Kitty turned to check out what he was reading. ‘The Motorcycle Diaries.’ She bent to examine the books in his pile. “‘The Writings of Mao Zedong,’ ‘Malcolm X Speaks Out.’ Feeling revolutionary, John?”
He looked at her over the top of his book, unknowingly mirroring the familiar image of Che Guevara on the cover. “I suddenly realized that poems about sunsets and bunnies weren’t going to change the world,” he said.
“Maybe not, but there’s less innocent blood spilled at a poetry reading than a coup d’état.”
“There’s always blood spilled, Pryde,” he explained as if she was a child. “Maybe if you’re not willing to fight, that blood will be yours.”
She squinted at him. “You really believe that?”
“I’m entertaining the concept.”
“We all need entertainment, I guess.” She realized she had missed a thinner book at the bottom of the pile. She pulled it out. “‘The Coming of Homo Superior.’ Magneto? You’re reading Magneto?”
“Excuse me for being relevant.” John mumbled, dropping back into his book and turning away from her.
Kitty picked up the Magneto and wandered around to sit on the far side of the tree. She flipped through the thin tome, reading whatever bits and pieces happened to catch her eye.
What kind of base cowardice would lead our people into voluntary submission to humanity?
She flipped forward.
Feel the power course through your veins, young mutant. It is yours to glory in, yours to use, however you see fit. For who can stand in judgment over us? Who occupies a lofty enough summit to write rules for our kind?
Kitty sneered in disgust. What a self-important windbag. Flip.
The Americans opened wide the gates of the camp and we stepped out into a world without limits. How did my fellow prisoners react to their newfound freedom? They cowered. They had grown used to the walls of their cage. Imagine their relief when they ended up in the DP camps, not so filthy as Auschwitz, but just as much a prison.
I did not follow them to their new cage. With food in me and a day of rest, I became aware of how much my powers had grown since I first entered the camp. The soldiers could not stop me as I walked away. I made an example of one, impaling him with a spiked bar from the very gates he had opened for us. I raised him high in the air and considered his gutted corpse as it turned in the sun. For the first time, I realized I was not the same species as the humans.
I swore never to be imprisoned by them again.
Kitty found Professor Xavier enjoying the sunshine on the back patio of the mansion, listening to music on his mp3 player with his eyes closed, a look of perfect peace on his face. “What can I do for you, Kitty?” he asked, eyes still shut.
The metal patio chair scraped loudly on the flagstones as she pulled it beside him and sat down. “Professor, you know how I’m still working on my history paper?”
He smiled, but did not open his eyes. “Yes, we all fervently hope you will hand it in before you leave us for college at the end of next year. Please don’t block the sun, my dear.”
She leaned back and her shadow retreated from his face. “See, that’s just it… I’ve been looking for something, but I didn’t know what it was. And now I do.”
The Professor reminded her of a cat as he basked in the warming rays. He practically purred. “And is this ‘something’ something I can help you with?”
“Yes, I want to interview Magneto.”
Xavier’s eyes snapped open.
It was two days before he approached her to say arrangements had been made.
“Where is the prison anyway, Professor?” she asked, her heart pounding.
“I’m afraid I’m not allowed to divulge that information, Kitty. National security and all. However, it won’t take us overly long to reach him. Please retrieve your interview questions and meet me at the sub-basement elevator in fifteen minutes.”
She was there in ten, binder under her arm, wondering where they would be going. Xavier arrived in his wheelchair a few minutes later and they entered the elevator. Clearly they were taking the jet, so one of the other teachers had to be going. She hoped it was Ororo. Maybe they have Magneto in a super prison somewhere in the wastes of Alaska! she thought. But the Professor didn’t tell me to bring a jacket or anything.
As they descended, Xavier spoke to her. “I am trusting you to keep your wits about you, Kitty, and to remain unruffled if he goads you. Erik— Magneto likes to push people’s buttons, as psychologists say these days.” She nodded seriously, feeling an odd combination of dread and excitement.
As she followed him through the lower levels, she became confused. Unless she was turned around (which she knew she wasn’t), they were heading away from the hangar. They came to a door she didn’t recognize. She jumped back as a beam of light shot out from the center of the door’s ubiquitous ‘X’ design and lit up the Professor’s eyeball. A retinal scanner!
“Welcome, Professor,” intoned a robot voice, female as these things usually were.
The door slid open and Kitty’s jaw dropped.
Xavier smiled at her reaction. “Welcome to Cerebro, Kitty.”
Kitty wandered onto the bridge in a daze, trying to take it all in. “It’s huge, Professor!”
“Yes, it certainly is bigger than I would wish. I’ve had some interesting discussions with Forge about how we could someday build a more portable version. Luckily, we aren’t running the Institute out of a studio apartment in the City. Please have a seat.”
He indicated an old-fashioned wooden chair, simple but well-made, to the right of the control panel. It seemed singularly out of place in the room of steel. She sat on the woven cane seat and placed her binder on the floor beside her. As Xavier put the control helmet on and activated the mammoth machine, something horrible occurred to her. “But… don’t you use Cerebro to find mutants? Did Magneto escape?!”
Xavier smiled again and in that smile, she saw something of the showman. He was trying to impress her. “I use Cerebro to enhance my own psychic abilities. I can find mutants with it, but there is much more I can do.” Overhead, the various panels of the sphere were shifting and pulsing. Watching it made her feel oddly dizzy. “Please prepare yourself, Kitty,” Xavier said.
For what? she wanted to reply, but she couldn’t feel her lips move, couldn’t feel the breath escape from her own lungs, couldn’t hear the sound reach her own ear… because she was gone.
***Kitty realizes her eyes are closed. She opens them cautiously and peers around the gloomy space. She is no longer in the huge, echoing room that smells of technology and lubricating oils. The air here is close and warm and redolent of pine. She is still sitting on the same chair of cane and wood, and when she looks for Xavier, she finds him occupying an identical seat. She almost falls out of hers as the man rises on legs miraculously cured of their paralysis. He smiles and holds out a hand. “Shall we go and meet Magneto?” he asks.
She takes his warm hand and allows herself to be helped to her feet. “Don’t forget your notes,” he says. She looks down and is surprised to see her binder by the legs of the chair. They walk across a well-worn, braided runner towards the unfinished oak door. Xavier pauses a moment with his hand on the door, as if relishing the feel of the wood under his fingers, before he swings it wide and holds it open for her.
The man is inside, dressed in simple white coveralls which emphasize the whiteness of his hair. He seems older and more vulnerable than he looked the night of the attack on the Turcott clinic. Dressed in his elegant costume, with his cape and boots, he had been a striking figure. Invincible. Now he’s just an old man. Eyes closed, he is seated on yet another of the elegant little chairs, as if that is the default starting point for each of them in this adventure.
They are all together in a cabin in the woods. The floor and walls are rough-hewn and sturdy. Through the windows, she sees the pine forest. The day is sunny, and though she knows it is early July back at the mansion, here there is the melancholy of early autumn in the angle of the sun and in the chill wind that makes the trees shake. The room is spartan, but the few decorations are clearly expensive. There is a fire in the hearth and a kettle on the wood stove that is just beginning to boil.
Magneto seems to be asleep in his chair, and he is so still, she wonders if he is even breathing. Kitty looks at the Professor in confusion as he walks to the stove and pours the boiling water into the Limoges teapot that sits on the counter. “Will you have cream, Kitty? Sugar?”
“Just cream, please,” she hears herself say automatically. Xavier pours cream in one empty cup and puts two sugars into a second cup. The third he leaves alone. “Please have a seat on the couch.” She sits. This can’t be real! she concludes. But the crinkle and creak of the furniture beneath her seems to belie that conclusion.
“Erik,” Professor Xavier says gently and Magneto takes a sudden, gasping breath. His eyes open. He is not confused; he is alert and curious. His eyes narrow with interest as he notices Kitty and then widen when he looks around at the room.
He laughs. “A veritable parade of nostalgia, Charles! You are getting sentimental in your old age.” He picks up a porcelain horse from a doily on the rustic table beside his chair. “Ha! You remembered everything, didn’t you?”
The Professor seems somewhat abashed, something she has never seen before. “I wanted us all to be comfortable, and I thought a familiar setting might…” He clears his throat. “Katherine Pryde, I’d like to introduce Erik Lensherr.”
The white-haired man gives him a caustic look before rising to shake her hand. “Magneto is my name, child. Pleased to meet you.”
She reaches for it cautiously and then retracts it in confusion, jumping to her feet and circling the room in agitation. “Professor! What is this? Where are we?!”
“Please be calm, Kitty. It was not possible to bring you to the prison, so I have brought us together here in my mind.” He taps his temple, as if that gesture could explain everything.
She stares at him and then turns to face Magneto who seems terribly amused at her reaction. She gives him a caustic look of her own. “Is he even here? Is this really Erik Lensherr, or a… a figment of…?” She has no appropriate vocabulary for what is happening.
“I assure you, my dear, I am who I say,” Magneto answers. “Your Professor…” He says the word with the smallest curl of sarcasm. “…has become very clever with Cerebro. In the real world, I appear to my jailers to be enjoying an afternoon nap.” He moves to an armchair whose upholstery matches the couch. “Now why don’t we sit down. You have some questions for me and, while I welcome this distraction, my time is limited.”
“Is it?” Charles says as he pours the tea. “I can’t imagine you’re going anywhere, Erik.”
“Apparently someone else is terribly anxious to interview me. Someone military, is my guess. I hope he is at least slightly amusing.”
There is no choice. She has to accept the situation at face value: they are inside the Professor’s head, and though the warm and fragrant tea he hands her (“Be careful, it’s hot.”) does not exist, this is indeed Magneto.
Having accepted the quasi-reality, she is suddenly nervous to be interviewing the dangerous, fascinating mutant. She picks up her binder and begins flipping through to find her questions. “Okay, um, lets get going, then. Did you know you were a mutant before you arrived at the… at Auschwitz?” She looks up and finds him staring at her levelly with a penetrating gaze.
He stirs his tea and takes a sip (he’s the one with the two sugars, she notes). “No, my manifestation coincided with my arrival.”
That piques her curiosity. Her mind fills with images of Jews arriving in cattle cars, already half-dead. Families separated, belongings confiscated. And in the middle of this nightmare, the boy Magneto underwent that horrible, wonderful transformation. She suddenly has dozens of questions for him, but they don’t feel appropriate. He is still giving her his full attention. Flustered, she looks down at her notes. “Um, and were you aware of any other mutants during your time there?”
“I had my suspicions about a few, but there was one who stood out. I believe now that he might have been a teleporter, unable to control his comings and goings. His mysterious transportations got him more than one beating from the guards when he was found in places he shouldn’t have been. One day he vanished altogether.”
“Did he escape?” Kitty asked, caught up by the drama.
“Possibly. Or else he was taken to the hospital and dissected like a rat by Mengele.” He is watching her for a reaction. She knows she is giving him one, her jaw slack, her cheeks coloring.
“My God, Erik,” Xavier mutters. “You never told me about him.”
Kitty is looking at her notes for the next question, but the text seems to be swimming in front of her. Get it together! she warns herself. She clears her throat, stalling for time.
“Yes?” Magneto says and smiles wryly. He is enjoying making her squirm.
This realization seems to center her. It doesn’t matter who he is, she decides; she’s not going to be intimidated. She finds the next question and looks him squarely in the eye. “How has your experience as a Jew and a Holocaust survivor influenced your politics?”
“I am not a Jew,” he answers coolly.
She quirks her mouth. “But, I thought… the Professor told me that you —”
“I bear no allegiance to any human tribe, nor pray to any human god. I am a mutant. Next question.” His face is cold, his pronouncement final. But she is not done.
“Wait a sec, you were born a Jew, right?”
“Yes.”
“Your parents were —”
“My human parents are unimportant. I was reborn the day I manifested.”
Kitty’s cheeks color again. She puts down her binder and crosses her arms, staring back at him. “That’s… preposterous. Sir.” She looks nervously at the Professor, but he just raises an eyebrow and gives a small nod.
Magneto doesn’t miss the gesture. He leans forward. “Come, child, don’t let Charles’s sentimentality infect you. Mutants are as cuckoos. We are born in the nest of homo sapiens and suffer them to nurture us before we come into our true selves; but we are not of them.”
Kitty is outraged. “Look, I may be a mutant, but I’m still Kitty Pryde. My faith has taught me to be a good person! And my parents helped make me who I am! Their values, their love —”
Magneto cuts her off with equal vehemence. “…are irrelevant to a talented young mutant such as yourself. Don’t you see it is your right to take the world they have prepared for you? When we no longer have to hide, when we breed among ourselves and raise our own mutant children with pride, then we will realize the true glory of the mutant family. When the human race concedes our right to rule, then will a new day dawn for this planet.”
She stares at him, unable to find a response.
He smiles in triumph. “Any more questions, Miss Pryde? Or are you off to the synagogue to chant Sh’ma Yisrael! and get the sour taste of my words out of your mouth?”
Kitty rises to her feet, ready to shout profanities at the arrogant man, but somehow, she catches herself. She releases the breath she has been holding and lowers herself into her seat again. “Yes, one more question, if you don’t mind. You were a boy when the Nazis took you and your family from your home and sent you to the death camp, correct?”
“Yes,” he responds, showing his boredom.
“Because you were a Jew?”
“Yes.”
She leans forward with a look of concern on her face, tilting her head in eloquent empathy. “Is your emulation of Hitler — read ‘human’ for ‘Jew’ and ‘mutant’ for ‘Aryan race’ — conscious? Or do you think it’s some kind of emotional displacement? A kind of juvenile revenge fantasy writ large?”
He freezes. His lip curls in anger and he raises his hand toward her with terrible authority. But there is no phantom metal here in Xavier’s head that will respond to his powers. Scowling, he lowers his hand again.
“Have you ever considered growing a moustache, Mr. Lensherr?” She delivers the line deadpan and now Magneto smiles coldly.
“She’s a sharp one, isn’t she, Charles? You’d better warn her, though; that mouth could get her in trouble one of these days.”
She looks at Xavier and realizes he is far from displeased. “I assure you, she has been told,” the Professor replies.
Magneto suddenly springs to his feet and looms over her. She squeezes herself back into the sofa which creaks in protest, but she can’t phase. Here in Xavier’s cottage of the mind, her powers are as useless as Magneto’s. “You’re very smart with your charming egalitarian fantasies, Miss Pryde,” he tells her in a low voice. “But you had better wake up and quickly. Your beloved American government has been working on anti-mutant weaponry. It is my Brotherhood who have been trying to stop them, not your Professor, nor his X-Men!” He twists the word in his mouth like a bitter root.
He brings his face closer to hers. “They killed one of us this week. He was brave and talented, fighting to save our kind. Are you so brave, or will you be like all those Jews who walked meekly to the gas chambers, stupefied, refusing to the last to believe that humankind could perpetrate such evil?”
He stands and wipes mind-dust off his mind-sleeves. He walks to the window and looks out at the forest. Her heart is pounding, and she wonders what he is feeling.
Xavier’s voice is quiet and serious. “Erik, I know you have no access to any media. How is it you know what is happening with your Brotherhood?”
Magneto turns to him and Kitty sees he has reined in his emotions. He is again the man in charge. “Her name is Message. She’s a psi-broadcaster. One-way telepathy, but very powerful and precise. My own little New York Times home delivery.” He looks around the room as if trying to memorize the details. He sighs. “Well, Charles, Miss Pryde, this has been delightful, though I don’t wish to do it again. Do you mind if I go out through the front door, Charles? The illusion might be… amusing.”
The Professor stands and Kitty thinks that Magneto is not the only one here seeking solace in illusion. Xavier’s voice is sympathetic and fond and she realizes how much he cares about his arch enemy. “Of course, Erik. Kitty, please thank Mr. Lensherr for his time.”
Magneto raises a preemptory hand. “No, don’t demand false words from her, Charles. She has no more taste for them than I.” He turns and walks to the front door, opening it wide to the woods beyond. Cool, pine-laden breeze wafts in, making the pages in her open binder flutter.
“Magneto,” she calls after him and he turns in the door. “Who was the mutant that died?”
“Avalanche,” he replies. “The one you knew as Lance Alvers. He was a passionate young man, dedicated to our cause. I mourn his passing.”
“Thank you,” she replies quietly. He nods and leaves, closing the door behind him.
She doesn’t know what to feel. There is something horribly unsurprising in the news, as if she has expected to hear it every day since he left the mansion. Anger. She is angry at Lance. Yes, that will do for now.
“Kitty…” the Professor says softly and moves towards her, but she can’t bear the thought of this walking phantom touching her and she raises a hand to stop him.
“Can we… just go home, please?”
***
“Thanks for the drink, Rahne,” Kitty said, enjoying the coolness of the soda can in her hands. It was another hot day, and the mansion’s outdated air conditioning was no match for the afternoon sun in their dorm. Despite the heat, the small room had been her refuge in the last few days, and in it, she had stayed resolutely corporeal.
“No problem,” her roommate replied, lingering. “You let me know if there’s anything I can… you know.” She leaned in and hugged Kitty a little awkwardly, though Kitty could feel the genuine affection in the gesture.
When she was gone, Kitty pulled out her cell phone and dialed. “Mom?”
“Kitty, honey? Is that you? How are you?”
“I’m okay. Did your talk go well in Amsterdam?”
“Yes, it was very well received. I was so nervous. I haven’t spoken in public in three years! Yes, well… Do you want to talk to your father? He’s right here!”
“Hey, Dad.”
“Hey yourself.”
“How was Amsterdam? You get stoned in one of those cafés?”
“No. Do you think I should have?”
“Heh, maybe.”
“Kitten, is everything okay?”
“Sure.”
“’Cause you sound a bit… off.”
“Dad? You know how I said I didn’t want to come to Europe?”
“Yeah, Kitten. That’s okay. We understand.”
“What I mean to say is… Is it too late? I could fly over and meet you in Paris. I-I think I want to. If you still want me.”