The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (NC-17)
Disclaimers Apply

A/N Goddess Foxfeather, Queen of Mad Plotbunnies, Kristen and Lucas are lurking suspiciously in the shadows...I'd check on Dodo if I were you. InterNutter, TC and Maxwell Pink make me all goosebumpy with delight because they archive! Readers/Reviewers: I know you're out there...The Killer Kitties(tm) reported your existence on recon... The platypi are still MIA, though.


Logan was, to say the least, not amused. He had seen Storm leave an hour before and idly wondered if she had to go to the store. _Should've told her to get beer...I'm all out andil Iil I can catch Remy at it, I'm gonna have to blame Hank. Huh. Back already? _ The station wagon swung into the garage with, if at all possible, an air of agitation about it. Logan smiled faintly at the idea of having Storm all to himself in the garage but a movement on the passenger side of the car caught his eye. "Half Pint, what're you doing home?" he asked even as she opened the car door. His eyes flew to Kitty's tear-streaked face, the waft of dried blood and fear mingling with the tang of depression and the saliearsears. "What happened?" he asked, taking her more gently than could be expected by the upper arm, following Storm's taut, silent form into titchitchen. Kitty slumped into one of the chairs ringing the table and sniffled once as Storm slammed cabinet doors open and closed, searching for the stash of tea bags. Logan looked between the two women, trying to decide if one's state of upset was caused by the other's actions or if it was a mutual distress caused by a third part"Kit"Kitty, start talking..."
Storm spoke before Kitty could even open her mouth. "She got suspended for the week, Logan. _Suspended! _ " She threw up her hands in a gesture of aggravated despair. "Bright Lady, what on earth made you do that, Kitty? What was going through your mind?"
"I was thinking..."
"I'll tell you what you _weren't _ thinking," Storm continued, startling Logan with her ferocity. "You weren't thinking about your status as a top student in ol, ol, you weren't thinking about controlling your temper and you apparently weren't thng wng when you got dressed this morning!"
Kitty's eyes threatened to spill new tears as she studied her hands with feigned interest. Logan did not say anything, merely waited for his charge to respond. Finally, she said, "I'm sorry."
"You're sorry? Is that all you can say? After attacking Patricia Garrison..."
Kitty's head snapped up. "What? I didn't attack her. I hit Duncan Matthews...who said I attacked Patricia?"
"Principal Kelly..." Storm paused and took a deep breath. "I'm sorry I overreacted. Please tell me your side of the story." Turning to Logan, she half-explained, half-apologized, "We did not speak on the way home and they had her waiting in the nurse's office when I went to pick her up...she had a split lip and a bloody nose."
Logan approached Kitty carefully, peering at her injuries and noting the bruise coloring one side of her face. "Unless this Patricia Garrison has huge hands, a girl didn't hit Kitty. Who was it, Half-Pint?"
Kitty's eyes darted to Storm briefly, but under Logan's direct gaze, she admitted, "Duncan Matthews. He...said some not-nice things. Kurt was going to hit him if I didn't!" she blurted by way of defense. At Logan's raised eyebrow, she sighed. "Fine, I'll tell you everything else..." She detailed Duncan's comments about her figure, her clothes and what he presumed to be her sexual predilections, all leading up to his slap across her face and her fist to his throat. "Principal Kelly made him and Patricia come in to sign some official form that I started it, but he didn't let anyone I knew come in and tell what happened for real."
"Kelly didn't let you have anycomecome to your defense? How many witnesses were there?" Storm asked, voice brisk.
"No...he said he was going to talk to Kurt but he still hadn't called him in before you came and got me..." Kitty touched the split in her lip carefully, wincing a little as she did so. "Can you guys talk to the principal? Get him to talk to some people who saw what happened?" She sat up a little straighter, looking hopeful for the first time since that morning. "At least, like a dozen people saw the fight...I mean, those that weren't watching Lance and Amara tear into each other!"
Logan groaned inwardly. "They're fighting now? Chuck really needs to build separate dorms for you guys...too much togetherness..." Passing a tired hand over his eyes, he said, "I'll call the school right now. Go see Hank and clean that lip up. You really should put ice on that bruise, help keep the swelling down."
"Thanks, Logan," Kitty said, somewhat subdued. She stood carefully, sudden movements making her head throb, and said just as softly, "I, um, told him what you told me to say..."
Logan's brows shot up. "You're kidding...you actually said it?"
Grinning suddenly, she said, "Yep! Loud and clear!"
"What, might I ask, was that?" Storm did not sound as if she really wanted to know, but felt she should.
"Um, I just gave her a little phrase to remember when people bug her."
Storm eyed Kitty's sudden blush. "That phrase wouldn't be "Please leave me alone" or "Go away," would it?"
"No..." Logan and Kitty answered as one, each looking very child-like under Sts pes penetrating stare. Logan shuffled his feet slightly and clearis tis throat. "I, uh, told her to say 'fuck off'."
Storm drew in a long, slow breath and closed her eyes. After a moment, she said, "Kitty, go see Doctor McCoy. Logan, go...do something. Anything. I can't look at you right now."
Kitty edged from the room slowly, phasing through furniture in the rec room to hasten her departure. Logan sighed wearily. "Storm, don't get all high and mighty...Kitty's heard worse language and besides, I'm pretty sure she knows the phrase already..."
"Logan! These children are our charges! Kitty, especially, is your responsibility! You are her _father _ , for all intents and purposes, and you encourage profanity and confrontation? No wonder she got into a fight!"
"Now just a minute, Ro, Kitty's her own person...if she was going to talk back to Duncan Matthews, she was going to do it. She just used different words than usual."
Storm narrowed thstanstance between herself and Logan and said in as calm a voice as she could muster, "I know you don't like being responsible for these students all the time, but it's a fact of our lives. We are essentially their parents and, like it or not, they need boundaries sometimes. Telling Kitty to use that phrase to make people leave her alone is only encouraging her to negative behaviors..."
Logan pressed his finger to her breastbone, his face bare inches from hers as he said dangerously, "I don't know when you decided to be an armchair psychologist, but you need to back off a few steps here, Ro. I'm not going to be Father Knows Best, but I'm not some monster turning 'em into delinquents."
"I never said that," she sighed.
"No, you didn't have to. Don't you trust me?"
Storm leveled her gaze at him and nodded slowly. "Of course I do...It's just that lately, I'm feeling confused."
"About us?" he asked softly, changing the pressure of his finger against her sternum to a soft stroking motion, traversing the valley between her bre as as she swayed slightly towards him. She shook her head, barely enough of a motion to be detected but he saw it. "About what then?"
"About me...about what I am doing." She closed her eyes, her hand coming up to hold his still against her pulse. "Logan, I love you. There is no doubt in my mind about that."
He felt his breath catch in his throat. "What are you talking about?"
"I don't think I'm what you need." Her words fell like rocks on water, loud and crashing, sending ripples through his entire being.
"You're not thinking straight," he said quickly, turning his hand to twine his fingers with hers. "You're tired and it's already been a long day..."
"No, Logan, listen to me. I'm not breaking things....whatever things we have going on...off. I just need to," she paused and looked around vaguely, "consider my options. Consider if what I am, who I am, fits in with your life." She disentangled herself from his grasp and smiled weakly. "It's okay, Logan. Just thinking." She moved away from him and walked from the room without looking back.
Logan, for his part, could not take his eyes from the sink. One word rose to the forefront of his brain, one word that summed up his feelings in a single, harsh syllable that could be used for any occasion. "Fuck."

Remy sighed in absolute contentment as Jubilee worked his zipper. Tilting his head back as she freed him from the constraints of his jeans, her slender fingers tracing paths of pleasure up and down his length even as her warm breath teased beads of liquid from his arousal, her tongue darting out to lap them up. They had more than twenty minutes left in her lunch break and they were making the most of it. Her bra was somewhere in the backseat and purpling love bites were already showing against her olive skin, peeking out from under the collar of her shirt and trailing to her breasts. Remy twisted a lock of her silky hair around his fingers as she closed her mouth over the head of his member, scraping her teeth across the sensitive skin just enough to send chills down his spine but not enough to cause true pain. He could feel her smile around him as she took him further in, her tongue tracing the vein running along the underside of his length before he felt her enclose him nearly entirely. It was almost a struggle not to press into her, arch his hips to meet her warmth, a fair imitation of other parts of her, what he knew he would feel later but could only think about now. Jubilee withdrew almost all the way, leaving him feeling bereft until she covered him with her mouth again, sucking harder than before, squeezing him as she did so, making him moan softly in the confines of the car. He swore he heard her chuckle before she repeated the process, increasing the pressure with each pass, rubbing her breasts against his upper thigh as she moved against him, drawing more moans from his throat. Dimly, he heard a knocking sound and wondered what she was kicking against. Only when she sat up suddenly, yelping first as she banged her head on the steering wheel then again as the knocking sounded once more did Remy realize someone was trying to get their attention. "Merde!" he growled. Scott, Kurt, Lance and Todd were standing in a loose semi-circle on the driver's side of the car, each looking off in a random direction. Scott raised his hand to knock again but Remy threw open the door, covering himself with the tail of his shirt in the process. "What you want?"
Scott, blushing as red as his glasses, cleared his throat and said, "Um, we kind of need to see you guys. We're having an impromptu meeting."
"Where're the other girls?" Jubilee asked with ill-disguised annoyance as she adjusted her clothing to cover the hickeys.
Lance, still averting his eyes, mumbled something about "bathroom" and "girls are weird," before Todd broke in with "Amara and Jean thought that maybe they could eavesdrop on Duncan's little girlfriend in the bathroom, found out if she's spreading anything new, so they followed her in there earlier. Rogue is lurking somewhere...she said something about kicking Pietro's ass but I think she's in the metal shop with Evan."
Remy sighed roughly. "Well, I gotta get...If'n dey catch me on school ground durin' hours, I kin get mah ass in all kinda trouble..."
Kurt nodded. "I'll fill you in at home." Remy nodded and made his goodbyes, Jubilee waiting until the last possible moment to get out of the car. As the Cajun pulled away, she turned to the assembled males with a glower fixed firmly on her features. "Now wait just a minute before you yell at me, Jubes," Kurt said hastily, holding up his hands to fend of an errant attack of sparklies should one arise. "Kitty got suspended for the rest of the week because of what happened this morning."
"Fuck me running backwards...you're fucking with me, right?"
"Could you _possibly _ use that word any more times in one sentence?" Scott sighed.
"My own record's ten times, yo."
"Ja, and Rogue just is all a-flutter about it..." Kurt blew his bangs out of his face with a short huff of breath. "Principal Kelly pulled me in to talk today but Kitty was already gone...that foreign exchange kid-"
"Paolo," Lance supplied, swigging from his can of soda to produce an almost impressive belch.
"Ugh. Thank you. Paolo. Paolo told Scott and me about it at the beginning of Lunch. Kelly told me I am to be in detention today for inciting the fight!"
"Inciting!" Jubilee _did _ let an errant array of pafs fly then, flinging her hands up in frustration. "Matthews fucking started the whole fucking thing! Fuck!"
Scott pinched the bridge of his nose. "Lovely...you kiss Remy with that...oh, never mind."
Todd snorted. "We was thinking, me and Lance, we was thinking that maybe we should let Matthews know how we feel about people fuckin' with our friends..."
Kurt seemed a little apprehensive, adding, "I was thinking more along the lines of getting the Professor involved, maybe having a conference..."
Jubilee waved off Scott's nod of agreement. "Pffft. Lookee here...just leave Matthews to me an' these two." She nodded at Todd and Lance. "We know how to get things done..."
Todd and Lance looked uneasy at this new alliance. "Um, sure..." Lance finally said. "For Kitty's sake..."
Scott sighed glumly. "No stopping you, huh?" One look at Jubilee's face told him all he needed to know. "Right...I'm going to go find Jean before my soul gets sucked out, too."
Kurt laid his hand on Jubilee's wrist to stop her from following the dispersing males. "Jubes, hold up..." When the others were out of earshot, he said, "I want Matthews myself. He hurt Kitty and I'm not about to let him get away with it."
Jubilee nodded seriously. "I understand...if anyone hurt Remy, I'd want to jump rope with their intestines myself."1
"Ugh. Well, that about sums it up, I think..." Kurt shuddered slightly at the mental imagery. "Just make sure, whatever it is you do, Duncan is mine."
"You got it, short blue and fuzzy." She smiled at him with all the charm she had. "I'll leave you enough to stomp on."
Kurt watched her go with a mix of excitement and fear. _Revenge is wrong...but this isn't revenge, is it? This is sort of like Karma, but Catholics don't believe in Karma like that...so what is this? Kitty was hurt and I have to make Duncan Matthews feel how wrong he was... _ His stomach lurched painfully. He realized then that he had not eaten lunch in the turmoil of the afternoon and the distant bell signaled the return to class. _Shit. _ Kurt bit his lip painfullys mis mind whirling. _If I go back to class, I won't have time to eat. I'll get sick and probably faint...If I leave, I can go by the Burger Barn and load up, then go home to Kitty...I'll just let Jean know where I am later so they don't wait for me after school... _ A few seniors pulled into the lot, piling out of their cars and running pell-mell to class. _A few tardies, no one will notice I'm not there until it's too late...hopefully Scott will cover for me in History, and Kitty's not there to cover in English...that leaves Art and Study Hall. I should be okay for the afternoon... _ Kurt walked backwards a few paces, eyes on the school for anyone who might see him flee, before ducking behind someone's truck and porting to the woods bordg thg the schoolyard. As he sighed to himself, relieved at not getting caught, Kurt had no idea of the chain of events he had just set into motion.


1 I know I got that from somewhere, I just don't remember where...so just know that it's not mine.