Fractals

Fractals Chapter Sixty Nine (NC-17)
Disclaimers Apply

A/N Goddess Foxfeather, Queen of Mad Plotbunnies, BUSIEST WOMAN ALIVE ™, Prophetic Muse, Hamster Witch and Uberbeta…*kicks sleepy time* Too much of a good thing… InterNutter, TC, Maxwell Pink and Dracena are loverly and wondermous for archiving/hosting. :) ProPhile: Two more… Morgan: *GLOMP * Readers/Reviewers: Hopefully, this’ll be done by New Years. Cross your fingers on that…

It was not as basement-like as Kitty had expected. It was more like a giant rec room, gutted to the walls, with really scary carpet. “Nineteen seventy nine called… it wants it’s floor back,” she muttered to Paige, who laughed weakly. Scott, on her other side, kicked her ankle. His collar had been re-attached, locked firmly in place and blatantly obvious. “Sorry,” Kitty breathed. “If I don’t talk, I’ll scream.” She vented a sigh and folded her hands primly on the low table before her. They had been lined up like UN delegates, facing a room full of people in torn and otherwise ruined formal wear, some clutching cameras and voice recorders, others holding scraps of paper and any writing implements they could find in their sweaty, shaking hands. She looked down the table to see Storm and Sean, conferring sotto voce, anger snapping in their eyes. Forge was strangely silent, looking almost cadaverous at the farthest end of the table. The door hissed open and he stood, finally becoming animated. Magneto crossed directly to him and smiled, despite a swollen nose and traces of blood in the creases of his face. Every one at the table stared as Forge and Magneto seemed to share a deep heart to heart talk in low tones, then the older man patted him on the shoulder. “What the Hell?” Kitty growled, shoving away from the table only to find her chair shoved back under her knees, forcing her to sit down. Jean did not comment but she glared sideways at Kitty, letting her know who did it. “Jean!” she whispered loudly. “Did you see that?”
_Shut up Kitty, _ Emma’s voice slipped through her mind. _It’s not Forge. It’s Incubus. He can’t help it and until we’re out of this knot, neither can we. Treat him as the enemy. _ Emma did not take her eyes of Magneto as she spoke to Kitty, focusing on the man as he positioned himself in the front of the room.
Smoothing his hands over his jacket and surreptitiously checking to make sure his hair was not doing something odd. “I apologize for the inconvenience,” he began, pausing as all attention turned to him. “But the, ah, culprit has been detained and we will hear no more from her or her companion. Thankfully, my future daughter in law is fine. Shaken, but fine.”
“His what?” Kitty hissed to no one in particular. This time, Paige kicked her ankle. “Ow!”
Magneto glared quickly at them and continued. “As you have already seen to disastrous effect this evening, mutants are indeed real and are certainly among you. Mutants look, usually, just like everyone else… they look like a mother, sister, friend, brother, father, neighbor…”
“Fuzzy blue rat,” Fred muttered from his spot in the corner, earning him a pointed glare and a rustle of soft commotion in the room as the media types looked down at their feet for vermin.
“What the young man means,” Magneto pressed on loudly, “is that some mutants do not have the luck of looking ‘normal’ per se. They are, however, just as advanced and maybe even more so than mutants who look like regular humans. Homo Superior has arrived, ladies and gentlemen…”
“About time someone acknowledges we are…” St John trailed off under the weight of assembled gazes. “Right. Not joke time. Got it.”
“Ladies and gentlemen of the print and digital media, I would like to introduce you to someone very important…” Magneto nodded to Mystique, who was manning the door. She opened it with a jerk, frowning, obviously displeased. Kurt was brought in, hands bound behind his back but the bonds hidden by Nathaniel Essex’s hand over them, as if he were simply ushering in a shy child. Kurt, in all his blue glory, stood, blinking, shaking so hard he seemed to blur around the edges.
“Kurt! No!” Kitty was on her feet and across the table in a leap no one suspected she could make. Flashbulbs did not pop as they had in her worst nightmares of this moment but there was the distinctive clicking and whining of digital cameras and voice recorders as the moment was marked for posterity. She felt hands grab for her but she phased, ghosting through anyone and everyone in her way to get to Kurt. It took less than ten seconds to get across the room but it felt like an eternity before she reached him. She grabbed the collar around his throat and pulled, phasing it off of him and rendering it dead in the process. “Go!” she shouted, turning to face the reporters.
“Liebes,” he began, but she elbowed him in the ribs. “Danke,” he breathed, vanishing. A moment later, the overhead lights popped and windowless room plunged into darkness.
“Not again,” someone groaned in the pitch black, but Kitty was already moving. The advantage, she thought, of being incorporeal was that you didn’t have to say excuse me. She was not quiet sure if she were back with her friends or not, just that she had followed the same path she had taken to reach Kurt, but in reverse. “Jean?” she hazarded. The chaos was building, people panicking already. Kitty reached out and grabbed someone’s arm. “Scott?”
“No,” Magneto purred. “You really are an irritating granddaughter, you know that?”
Kitty gasped and twisted free of his grasp, unable to truly see him in the dark. _Kitty, stand still, _ Emma ordered. _Don’t try to fight. We’re getting out of here… _ Emma frowned. Someone was near, someone frantic and it was not one of the reporters. _Damn it! _ An array of brightly colored sparkles illuminated the room like fireworks, some of the larger ones hovering in the air, not dissipating.
“Have a party and don’t invite me! Fine, I see how it is!” Jubilee said loudly, sulkily. “Oh, well. Guess I can make my own fun…”
“Where the Hell did she come from?” Magneto snapped at Mystique, appearing from the oddly lit shadows to stand at his elbow. “She’s supposed to be dead.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you have a severe Bond villain vibe?” Rogue backfisted him, sending him sprawling against Mystique. “Jubilee, come on! We’re getting out of here!”
“What? I just got going!” Jubilee sulked, oblivious to the fact some people were still recording the scene in pictures and sound. “Belladonna,” she began, then froze. The woman was no where to be seen. “Shit…” The glow snapped out as if by a giant hand and Jubilee joined the darkened melee.
“See,” Scott snapped somewhere near Kitty’s right shoulder, “this is why we don’t let her be in charge of things…”
“Oh, shut up!” Jean sniped. “This way…” She grabbed in the dark for Kitty and Scott and dragged them to the wall, through bodies vying for space and frantic voices making dire imprecations about the state of the human race. “Kitty…”
“On it,” she said, biting her tongue about if only they had let her do this earlier… She shoved Scott and Jean through first and grabbed randomly for another wrist. “I really hope you’re a friendly,” she breathed, shoving them next. Somewhere across the room, someone screamed. “No pressure,” she muttered. “And it’s only Wednesday…”

A/N Sorry. Thought I could get to Remy… he’s waiting in the next one…