Carne Vale

CARNE VALE CHAPTER THIRTY THREE (NC-17)
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A/N Goddess Foxfeather, Queen of Mad Plotbunnies, Billy and Joaquin keep wanting to show me their tattoos...I think you should check Tim and make sure he has the same amount of ink he came to you with... InterNutter, TC and Maxwell Pink are wonderful people. Go to their sites and adore them properly. Readers/Reviewers: You people are wicked. I have a small list of mutants coming up in the next story and all I have to say is...you people really like smut based on the pairings! LOL...the ducks are hiding from me now, afraid I'm going to bring the Killer Kitties (tm) in to do a seek and destroy on them...


Saturday was like breath of fresh air to everyone at the Institute. No one woke early, no one got into a fight, and no one, absolutely no one, broke anything or kissed anyone who was not their significant other. Amara was actually feeling quite pleasant towards the members of the team that usually cheesed her off, including Jubilee. "Ever think of dying your hair?" the Nova Roman asked out of the blue as they stared at Saturday morning cartoons, only Jubilee actually paying attention.
"What's wrong with black? I like black."
Amara turned, looking at the girl with a practiced eye. "I can see you with pink streaks."
"Really?" Jubilee said, surprised. "I was just thinking of that yesterday! Like right here and here," she said, pulling two locks of her short hair forward to demonstrate.
"Or tips," Amara suggested. "Lots of little pink tips..."
Jubilee quickly became disinterested in the cartoons. "You think so? It's about time to cut it again so it'll be all spiky when I do it in the mornings...Oh! Let's go get some dye and you can help me!"
Amara, in her good mood, agreed. "I was thinking of blonde streaks myself..."
Jubilee, already up and heading to her room, with Amara trailing at a short distance, frowned slightly. "Honey, with your coloring, you should go for red..." The girls, discussing finefiner points of hair coloring and associated cosmetic changes, did not even notice Jean and Rogue heading down the stairs on their way to the Danger Room.
"Did you slip something into Amara's cornflakes?" Rogue asked with a smirk as they rounded the bottom of the stairs. "She's in a hellagood mood lately."
Jean rolled her eyes, twisting her hair into a loose knot at the nape of her neck in preparation for the Danger Room session. "I think Lance has been sneaking into her room again...Todd made some comment yesterday about being glad he didn't have to listen to Lance snore anymore..." Rogue snorted but Jean added, "That means Todd's in that room all alone at night you know..."
"Thanks for the clue, Sherlock," Rogue said, sighing. "It's really not anyone's business but his and mine, but we abstain until it's safe for me to touch him. Until then, we just do safe things like hold hands while I have my gloves on and stuff..." Jean made a noncommittal noise. "What?" Rogue said, wary.
"Just thinking that he must be very patient for a seventeen year old with a hot girlfriend. He doesn't try anything?"
Rogue groaned. "You know what happened in the hall, don't you?" The door to the Danger Room hissed open in front of them and Jean waved her ahead. "Look, Jean, there's a balance to things and I don't want to upset it. Todd and I are fine with things the way they are..."
"Speak for yourself," the teenager in question intoned somewhat sullenly from behind and above Rogue.
"Jean, you..." Rogue lunged forward at her friend.
"Now, Rogue," Jean said, ing ing up a hand and stopping the girl's forward progress with a twist of her mental powers, "be nice or I'll fiddle with the chore schedule so you're cleaning the locker room bathrooms for a month!" As an after thought, with a deep drawl affected quite poorly, she said, "Bye, now...y'all don't get into too much trouble, hear?"
The doors hissed closed and Rogue fumed. "She could've at least done the accent right," she said aloud after a moment.
There was a thump as Todd dropped from his perch on the wall and stood still, staring at the back of Rogue's neck, willing her to turn around as he spoke. "Don't get mad at her...I just sort of bribed her and she has a soft spot for hard luck cases."
"Hard luck cases? Todd, you're not a hard luck case."
"I didn't mean me," he said quietly, his tone forcing Rogue to turn.
"Who did you mean?" she asked thickly, something in the way he was looking at her making her very self- aware.
Instead of answering her directly, he began pacing, hands clutched behind his back. "You know what your problem is? You say you love me, but you don't trust me. Hear me out before you start squawking at me-I know a few things about not trusting people. I really don't got a reason to trust anyone 'side from you and Lance, but I do. I think you don't want me touchin' you unless it's absolutely, positively safe because you don't trust me. You think I'm gonna hurt you and I'll go all Pietro on you."
Rogue glared. "Shut up about Pietro, for one thing. For another, I trust you just fine. If I didn't, I never would've slept with you in the first place!"
"It's easy to trust me when it's safe, though, isn't it?" He rounded on her, his long stride closing the distance quicker than Rogue could back away. "When it's safe, everything is normal and fine, we can kiss and hold hands and touch and just be normal boyfriend and girlfriend, but unless it's that one day, those few hours, you're like those lepers in India. I can't touch you, even through your clothes, you don't touch me...Rogue, get over it! You're a mutant and you're gonna have to deal with it!"
"I _am _ dealing with it!" she snapped. "I deal with it by protecting you, someone I love very much, from being hurt."
"You're trying to protect yourself from getting hurt," he said smugly. Leaning closer, making her wince with anticipation of a drain, Todd said softly, "And let me tell you, I'm getting pretty fucking sick of it."
"_Excuse me? _"
Todd did not step back as she had expected but rather, never breaking eye contact, reached up and trailed his fingers over her thinly clad breast, rubbing his thumb over his hardening nipple, before skimming his hand over her stomach and lower, pausing when she hissed, trying to recoil. He did not press but rather just touched her between her legs, letting her feel him touching her without flinching, without trying to exact some response from her. "I'm not dropping dead, am I?" he asked plainly.
Rouge blinked at him. He did not remove his touch and did not try and increase his attentions, merely looked at her as if waiting for some answer. Feeling indignant and a little ashamed of herself because her conscience was telling her that Todd was actually closer to the truth than he knew, the Southern girl drew herself up to her full height and said calmly, "Fine. You want me to trust you, you want me to show you something you should already know?" For the first time, Todd's eyes held a glimmer of nervousness and she realized with a twinge of guilt that he was expecting to be hit or worse. She grabbed his chin with on gloved hand and drew him as close as she could without touching his skin to hers. "How much do you trust me really?" she asked so quietly that he could barely hear her. "How do you know I won't just touch you one day on accident, or even on purpose, and that'll be it? You'll be stuck in my head forever and I'll be in yours. You'll die maybe...think of that? Ever think of what would happen if just one day, I was a little wrong in my timing and I became unsafe right in the middle of everything?" She let go of him roughly with a small shove, turning her face from him in self-loathing. "I can't be what you want if that's it, Todd. You knew that from the beginning."
He was very quiet for a long moment. "Anyone ever tell you that you're melodramatic?" he asked, smirking slightly. "You think too much. If it happens, it happens. One of the very few good things about my mutations is I heal pretty quick. I mean, I'm no Logan or nothin' but I ain't that easy to kill, ya know?"
Rogue raised an eyebrow, slowly turning her face back to his as his words sank in. _He really, truly doesn't care. I mean, I always told myself that and believed him when he said it, but he couldn't give a rat's ass that I could kill him just by brushing against him... _"What're the other good things about your mutation?" she asked by way of apologizing for her outburst.
"The slime thing is pretty cool," he said after a moment of pretend-thought. He leaned towards her again and smiled, "Wanna see?"
Rogue grinned and nodded, leaning towards her boyfriend and letting him spread a thin layer of slime over her lips, kissing him as soon as she knew that he was safe from her touch. They had barely touched lips, though, when Scott's voice boomed over the loudspeaker. "If you two are done sucking face down there, some of us have sims to run!"
Rogue made a noise of annoyance as they broke away from one another, but Todd grinned. "Remind me to show you the other cool thing about my mutation later..."
"What'd that be?" she asked innocently as they exited the Danger Room.
"Ever see my tongue?" KittKitty did not like going to temple Saturday mornings as much as she did Friday evenings. It always felt like she was running late for something, like she should have been there earlier or somewhere else sooner. _And why can't people take their kids to the cry room? It's worship, not daycare! _ She glared at a family in the row in front of her, the kids coloring in the synagogue bulletin and arguing over which cartoon character was cooler, Yu Gi Oh or Ash Ketchum. From the sound of things, it was going to come to blows rather quickly. Kitty slid down in her seat and nudged the mother through the space between the back and bottom of the bench, quickly sitting up straight and staring at the rabbi raptly, feeling only a little guilty when she realized that she had no idea what part of the service they were at. The mother turned and glared at Kitty, who studiously ignored her until she turned back around. The children were still bickering, layering over the sounds of a baby snuffling several rows back and to the left and two teenaged girls snickering one row up and to the right. _If I kill someone in temple, is that bad karma? _ Belatedly, she realized everyone was standing to leave and she had spent almost the entire service sulking. Between her still-aching nose and her irritation with the juvenile population of the synagogue, Kitty had not noticed the end of worship. Waiting until the mother and children before her were out of their row, she slid out into the main aisle and joined the throng heading out into the crisp Bayville morning. She had been in a good mood until that morning, waking up to find Kurt gone save for a few blue strands of hair on her pillow and a hastily scrawled note on her desk-_ * Sorry, Liebes...temptation was too great. I had to leave. _ * Kitty sighed wearily as she stared through the windshield of the station wagon, procured after a great amount of begging to Logan. The deal-breaker had been when she pointed out that he could have the time that would have been spent waiting for her at the synagogue to sit around the house and read the sports section before Remy got to it or worse...Scott, the infamous paper-crumpler. _If temptation was too great, why did he lay there and let me do what I did and not stop me or leave then? How is me being asleep so much more titillating than me doing* that *? _
Kitty started the car and pulled out into the sparse Saturday traffic, turning Kurt's note over and over in her mind, looking for some hidden meaning that she knew in her heart of hearts was not there. Rolling to a stop at a red light, she looked over and saw the sign for the only Roman Catholic Church in Bayville. *Services Wednesday-7 pm, Saturday-5 pm (3 pm en espanol), Sunday-7 am, 9 am, 11 am, 12:30 pm, 5 pm Confession-Saturday 11 am or by request. * She stared so intently at the sign that missmissed her green light, only one car behind her and he merely pulled around her and drove on, thinking her stalled or just stupid. _Confession...he's always up here so that priest must not be all bad. I don't need to confess, just figure whatwhat's going on in that Catholic brain of his... _ Kitty was in the parking lot and standing in front of the car before she was quite sure what she was doing. There did not seem to be anyone else at the church save for a black car in the spot marked "Clergy," so she was fairly certain the priest was in. Steeling herself against who knew what, Kitty marched to the double wooden doors of the narthex and paused, tucking her star of David inside her blouse, before entering the building to a blast of cold air and the heady aroma of incense. Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the dim light and dark wood décor of the church, light seeming to sink into the fixtures and never reflect. _Okay. I didn't bursto fto flames, no one came running out, screaming "Unbeliever," now what? _ As she stood uncertainly, biting her lip and transfixed by the large wooden crucifix at the front of the church, wondering how anyone could not find it to be just a little morbid, a soft-faced older woman wearing staid shades of dove gray and navy blue, a brief wimple covering her snowy hair, bustled out of a room Kitty had not noticed to her ri

"Are you here for Confession, young lady?" she asked kindly, laying her hand on Kitty's arm as if she were blind and needed guidance.
Seeing the large silver cross around the nun's neck, Kitty's hand went automatically to her throat, making sure her star was hidden. "I would like to speak with Father Dominic," she said, congratulating herself for remembering the name of the priest Kurt had mentioned.
"Oh, I'm sorry...Father Jacob is hearing confession today. Did you have an appointment with Father Dominic? I can call him if you like," she said worriedly, already heading towards the room she had emerged from, obviously intending to call the other priest.
"No, no!" Kitty cried, her voice echoing terribly in the empty Church. "I'll see Father Jacob."
The nun turned back to her and smiled uncertainly. "Well, if you're sure...he's in the confessionals. You just go on in-no one else is here right now. You're the first of the day!"
Kitty nodded as if she did this all the and and walked confidently into the main body of the Church, aware of the nun's eyes on her the whole while. _Crap. How do they do this? Damn it! Oops. I mean...darn it! Where's the confessional? Does it have a sign or something? I need to do something quick... _ Remembering her few trips to this church with Kurt, Kitty remembered something she had seen almost all the Catholics do when they entered the place. She bobbed one knee to the ground and made a vague cross over herself, feeling more guilty than ever, wondering what sort of punishment there would be in the hereafter if she imitated Catholics badly. She sank down into a pew and made a show of drawing down the kneeler, stopping when she heard the nun's footsteps echoing away, then the door to the office close. Sneaking a look behind her, Kitty saw that she was indeed alone. _Okay. If I felt a need to tell some stranger my deepest darkest secrets, where would I do it? _ Her eyes lit on pair of closet-like doors, one open halfway and the other closed tightly. _ Well, why not?_ She walked quickly and quietly to the open door and peered in. All she saw was a small bench, barely wide enough for one person to sit on, a red velvet covered kneeler, a Bible and a stack of index-card sized pamphlets. An ornate wooden lattice took up half of one of the walls, letting in the light from the next closet-like room.
"Come in, child," a male voice said, making Kitty jump.
Easing the door closed behind her, Kitty sat on the bench and waited. The priest cleared his throat, hinting that she should begin. "Um, I have to be honest here...I've never done this before."
"Ah, a first timer! Wonderful! Well, there's a little guide to your right. Just follow what's written and this will be almost painless!" he laughed, making Kitty more than slightly uneasy.
"Uh, okay..." Picking it up, she read the first lines on the paper. "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned...it has been...um, never, I guess, since my last Confession..." Here she stopped and just stared balefully at the lattice.
"Go on, child...it's okay." A shadow fell across the light and Kitty knew he weanieaning forward. "I won't bite!"
Kitty dropped the pamphlet and sighed. "Can I just talk? Ask some questions? I really don't have anything to confess..."
"We all sin, child," he said patiently.
"Well, I'm not here to talk about my sins, whatever they might be," she said, a touch exasperated. "I just need to ask someone about some Catholic stuff and I figured, who better than a priest?"
Father Jacob seemed to think on this for a moment before saying, "Well, that's fine, I should think. What seems to be preying on your mind?"
"It's my boyfriend, Father. He's been coming to Confession a lot and I was a little worried about what went on, what he said and what he was told because he's been kind of...tense lately."
Sternly, the priest said, "I can't reveal what I'm told under the seal of the Confessional."1
Kitty rolled her eyes in her side of the booth. "I don't want you to. I was just worried and wanted to ask some things about the Catholic Church's stand on sex. Premarital sex," she clarified as an afterthought.
"You didn't take Catechism?"
"I'm a little new to this," she said, not really lying.
"Oh, I see!" The priest sounded less insulted and more amenable then. "Go on ahead then..."
"Well, what exactly is _wrong _? Is masturbation wrong?" Inside the closet-like booth, Kitty knew she was blushing. Even though she was not Catholic, it felt wrong to say the word to a man of the cloth.
He cleared his throat a few times and said, "Well, technically, it is still a sin, considered self abuse. In the Bible, it was a sin to spill your seed without the express purpose of creating Life."
Kitty frowned. "I thought it was okay now, you know, like to prevent other stuff..."
"The current teaching," he sighed, "is that it should not be done frequently or at all, if you can help it. Overindulgence is abuse of the body and will lead to further sins."
"And women? They don't have...what's it?...seed to spill...can we do it and not get all sin-filled?" She was still blushing but less than before.
"Young lady, is there a specific problem you'd like to address here today?"
"Okay, it's like this...My boyfriend gave up sex for Lent and I feel kinda bad because he's been very tempted by me lately, even when I don't try to do anything and he said yesterday that he would amend his promise so that he could...you know...just nothing else, and nothing with me. I just wanted to make sure that me doing it wasn't violating some thing of his and he wouldn't be messing things up for himself by going with this..."
Father Jacob groaned, slightly embarrassed. "It is indeed admirable of your boyfriend to forgo transgressions of the flesh during this holiest of seasons, but it is also important to remember that the purpose of Lent is not to inspire feelings of annoyance or aggression. If it is something that helps relieve these feelings, then engaging in it moderately is no sin."
Kitty nodded to herself and said, "Thanks, Father. I was just worried and wanted to make sure things weren't going to be messed up if we...you know. By ourselves, not had sex or anything." She stood and opened the door, saying again, "Thanks!"
"Wait!" the cleric called out. "Do you have a confession to make?"
"Only that I'm Jewish!" she said, darting out of the confessional and into the narthex before the priest could emerge from his tiny room. She practically ran to the car and was halfway home before she was breathing normally again. _I think I just blacklisted myself from all Catholic functions in this town... _ Her nerves were touched with a sense of anticipation, though. _At least I don't feel so bad about what I have planned for tonight, now! _
1 True enough. There have even been a few cases where Priests could not reveal a murderer or even got killed for holding back what they were told in the Confessional.