“You okay?” Kitty called to Bobby as she slid down to join him, misjudging her angle just enough that she arrived half sunk into the ground. He didn’t say anything, but his look was eloquent: she knew the casual way she walked through walls really creeped him out.

“Yeah,” he replied. “You?”

“A little dusty.”

He reached out and brushed her shoulder clean. She’d invited the contact, and he’d responded, both operating on instinct. That was as far as either was prepared to take things. Now.

Still, he couldn’t help giving her a smile. It was clear he liked her. Problem was, while Kitty was a free spirit, Bobby already had a girl – Rogue.

She grinned and took off, and Bobby had to scramble to keep up. She was as dangerously arrogant as Wolverine when it came to getting hurt. She didn’t believe it was possible. Kitty didn’t even have to worry much about being taken by surprise, because for the most part her power was always “on”. Her natural state, according to Professor Xavier, was to be phased; she stayed coherent by an act of will.

Laser pulses sought them out, and Bobby blocked them with a wall of ice that was porous enough to allow them through but filled with enough impurities – namely dirt – to diffuse the beam to the point of harmlessness.

But those beams weren’t the only threat. A brace of rockets shot in from another direction. Bobby was only aware of them after Kitty suddenly grabbed him, crushing her body against his in a hard embrace that allowed her to phase them both so the missiles passed through them as if they were air. His insides tingled as they did, reminding him of a joy-buzzer-pen his brother had once blown his allowance for on Halloween.

Across the field, Rogue had also seen the approaching missiles – they’d passed her on the way – and in the moment before impact, when she saw Bobby so vulnerable and unaware, her heart stopped and leapt up into her throat. She was happy to see him survive unscathed, but a lot less so when she noted that it took way too many extra moments for him and Kitty to break apart.

“Keep movin’, kid,” Logan told her. He’d seen what she’d seen, damn him – he didn’t miss anything. “And keep your eyes dead ahead.”



Rogue sat at the end of the front row, Bobby beside her, Kitty beside him. None were shy about their tears. Seeking comfort, Rogue reached for Bobby’s hand, her eyes closing ever so slightly in her frustration and greater sadness at the necessity of only being able to touch him through a glove. Some instinct, perhaps a minimal shift in the way he sat in his chair, prompted a sideways glance and she caught her lower lip between her teeth at the realization that he and Kitty were holding hands as well. Only, the other girl’s hands were bare.



That night, some of them still found it impossible to sleep. Bobby Drake tossed and turned and fretted for what seemed like forever – but turned out to be less than an hour on the clock – before deciding to raid the kitchen for some soda and ice-cream.

Padding down the silent halls, he was caught by a low cooing from Kitty’s room, a note of such poignant beauty it stopped him in his tracks. He knew at once what it was, being one of the few who’d actually been introduced to Kitty’s dragon. He eased open the door after a warning knock. Bobby had no interest in Lockheed, perched watchfully up in the ceiling shadows, only in the slim, brown-haired, brown-eyed figure slumped cross-legged on the bed.

She waved her hands helplessly when she saw him, her eyes sunken and red from crying. She’d given up on tissues after the second box – they were discarded in piles all over the bed and carpet – and now had a bath towel draped across her lap.

Kitty muttered something incredibly rude, indicating her eyes and calling them “waterworks”. Bobby knew that she didn’t like being blindsided by emotion; taking her cue from her favourite teachers, Ororo and Logan, she much preferred control.

She wiped away her tears with her fingers, hen the hell of her hand, then the towel. Didn’t do much good – they just kept coming. He’d never seen her look so hopeless before and briefly considered making a joke, but then thought the better of it. Instead, he tried to offer comfort.

“It’s okay, Kitty,” he told her. “It’s okay.”

She muttered something even MORE incredibly rude.

Then, a touch more calmly, she responded, “Xavier came to my house. He was the one who concinced me to come to this school.”

“Me, too.” He sate besides her, gave her a guy-hug across the shoulder. She slumped bonelessly against him, and for a frantic moment made him think she’d actually phased into his body. When it had passed, he said, “We’re all feeling the same.”

She turned to him, her voice soft as she shook her head.

“No, Bobby, we’re not. You have Rogue. I have...” She trailed off into silence. He wanted to see her face but she was looking towards the window.

“I just ... I miss home,” she said. She was from a small town outside of Chicago, called Deerfield. “First snow, long winters, even the wind off Lake Michigan.”

“Hey,” Bobby said, a little defensively, “we get snow around here.”

She gave him a wry look, as though to suggest he made it all himself – which he sometimes did, in fact, when they wanted to go sledding down Suicide Leap.

“It’s not exactly the same,” she noted. He actually thought it was better, but kept that sentiment to himself.

“What’s so different?” he asked, meaning about home.

She shrugged, her voice tired. “Well, for starters, no Mansion, no cool uniforms, no supersonic jet.”

“Yeah, I guess there’s that.”

“Don’t you miss it, sometimes? Normal life?”

“What do you mean by ‘normal’, Kit-Kat?”

That got him a sour look. She wasn’t thrilled with the nickname, which is why he used it now and then to bust her chops. Usually it worked great for knocking her out of a funk.

She gave his question due and proper consideration, then said, “I wish I knew.”

Suddenly, he found himself acutely conscious of how good she looked, still very much a work in progress but showing all the signs of growing into a major and lasting beauty once she emerged from adolescence. Her lips were very close, open just enough, her eyes half-lidded, to suggest that any advance would not be summarily rejected.

He decided on discretion and indicated her skates, still in the corner where she dropped them several months ago. “C’mon, girl. Up you get, on you’re feet, you’re with me!”

“It’s after curfew, Bright Eyes. Storm told everyone to stay in their rooms.

He gave her a look, saying with his eyes and a twist of his mouth, what, you never broke a rule?

Aloud, he assured her, “Don’t worry, we won’t get caught.” Then, with a soft and charming smile, “You can walk through walls, you know.”

Walk through walls, and, it turned out, on air itself, which unnerved Bobby a tad as she led him down an invisible ramp from her upper-floor room to the ground. Properly phased, her body has no coherent mass, but she could generate motion – very much like swimming. Suspending herself within a greater volume clearly worked the same whether applied to a solid, a liquid, or a gas.

Grateful to be back on terra firma, he led her to the ornamental pool out back. The swimming pool was too obvious for their purpose – too much chance of being caught. Here, hidden amidst the hedges, they were more secure. Both of them felt a measure of comfort to be under the watchful gaze of Xavier, even if it was only a representation of him in profile upon a pillar of stone.

“This place can be home, too,” Bobby told her, his voice reminding Kitty he hadn’t been home since the Stryker incident. No letters or calls from his folks, and everything he sent to them was returned unopened.

He touched the water, and just like that it began to crystallize.

Bobby held up her skates and in the second or so it took for her to pluck them from his grasp, the pond was solid ice, the air chilly enough to prompt a cloud with every breath. “I’m not every good,” she warned, taking the ice. In fact, she considered herself a major klutz.

Bobby didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to – she’d seen him skate. He was beyond gold in skill, he was platnium.

Tonight, though, he showed none of that grace and flamboyance. Instead he made plain that tonight was all about her, and she loved him for it. They skated around the little pond, which actually didn’t leave much room to be fancy, and they talked. As time gradually passed, the sorrow began to give way just a little. They weren’t up for laughter yet, but the ache inside wasn’t quite so bad.

She whooped in alarm as he twirled behind her, hands clasping her waist – it was all she could do to keep from phasing, her reflective response to any such surprise – pulling her up and around for a spin. She knew what was supposed to come next. The moment her blades made contact, she would allow momentum to pull her through a twist of her own and then grasp his outstretched hand, while still spinning, so that she’d end up with her arm fully extended. It was a maneuver pulled from ballroom dancing, and if she were wearing shoes she could manage it quite nicely.

But she didn’t even make it through the first rotation. She snagged her toe on his, thrust out a leg clumsily to keep from pitching flat on her face, felt her balance go all to hell, and crashed against Bobby, sensing him start to go too – but neither fell.

He caught her strongly and just like that she was cradled in his arms, their bodies tangled tightly together. He was grinning, and she smiled. It felt good.

“Thank you, Bobby,” she finally said, realizing their eyes had been locked a half-beat too long.

As he nodded agreement, she craned her head up to kiss him on the cheek. Kitty liked the way he smelled and let the contact linger longer than it should have, same as with their eyes. She didn’t want the moment to end.

__
Upstairs, another student who couldn’t sleep saw their heads move together. From Rogue’s angle, it looked like Bobby and Kitty were kissing on the lips. What was for them a brief but welcome interlude of peace and reprieve from the misery of recent days, was for her a spike in the heart, in its own way far worse than Xavier’s passing.
__


Bobby was the one who pulled back, but Kitty didn’t press. They were both conflicted. “I’m sorry,” Kitty began.

“No, no, no,” Bobby interrupted, “I just...” Both voices trailed off.

“Yeah, I know. Me too.” She bumped his shoulder very slightly against hers, a “buddy” thing. “C’mon, popsicle, we should get back inside.”

I'll admit it: I am a silly person, and as such the scenes with them in the novelization made me ship them SO MUCH. Enough that I raged when I realized they cut the kiss scene, anyway [even though in the movie, it looks like it was so much more than a peck on the cheek, which is WORSE for them to cut] and immediately declared them as OTP after reading it.