Summary: Bobby chose Rogue over her and Kitty is having some trouble adjusting. But while she was falling for Bobby was she missing out on someone else?
Dedicated to: AlbinoMonkeyC, AGL, theshadowcat, Teroglahn, Raykura-Kura, and falcored. Thanks for reviewing!
A/N: No real plot here. This was supposed to be a one-shot, but it got a little long.
Disclaimer: the X-Men are the property of Marvel Comics and the movies belong to Fox. I am not a part of Marvel or Fox, so I own nothing.
What We Don't See (When We're Looking the Wrong Way)
Kitty frowned at her reflection in the window and then looked past it to the yard again. Bobby and Rogue - or Marie as she wanted to be called now - were sitting hand in hand on a bench, enjoying the nice weather, unknowingly torturing Kitty. It was her own fault for falling for Bobby when she knew he was devoted to Marie. Some part of her knew that it wasn't all her fault. He had seemed interested. He had led her on, only to leave her alone and forgotten.
I'm obsessing about it again, Kitty realized. She stood up a little too quickly and stalked off to get ready for their danger room session. She was dressed and ready to beat up some holograms before the rest of the team showed up, so she dropped into a chair in the briefing room to wait for the others.
No sooner had she sat down than Piotr walked in and stood stiffly and silently against the wall. Kitty didn't try to start a conversation with him. He wasn't the type to carry on a conversation. Logan appeared next and he was just as conversational as Piotr. Storm and Beast broke the silence, walking in smiling and laughing about something a few minutes before five o'clock. The group had to wait another fifteen minutes for Bobby, because he was late as usual. He was always late now that Marie was cured and not a member of the X-Men.
"You're late," Piotr said gruffly when Bobby walked in. This surprised everyone, since this was as close to confrontational as the big steel-plated Russian had ever gotten.
"Yeah, sorry," Bobby said, though he didn't seem very apologetic.
Kitty felt a twinge in her heart. It wasn't just the fact that Bobby had chosen Marie over her that ate at her; Bobby had been her friend and now he wasn't even that. He didn't talk to her anymore and he avoided being in the same room with her whenever possible.
They had started the Danger Room and Kitty was only half paying attention to the dangers around her when large metallic arms yanked her off her feet just seconds before a cannonball pulverized the ground she'd been standing on. Before she knew what was happening, Kitty had been set down and Piotr was striding forward, ignoring the obstacles before him. He jerked Bobby around and snatched a fistful of his icy shirtfront.
"What are you doing?!" Bobby yelled.
"You are trying so hard to disregard her that you almost got her killed! You are not doing your duty!"
Clearly oblivious to the near-death experience Kitty had just had, Bobby said, "What?!"
Storm had seen the commotion and was on her way over to separate them now. Kitty knew she should have tried to pry them apart, but she felt rooted to the floor. While it was true that the cannonball would have squashed her like a pancake in a real battle, the Danger Room had safe guards against actually killing anyone. It would have still hurt, but instead of killing her, it would have just stunned her and given her a major headache the next morning. Piotr's outrage seemed just a little unnecessary.
Storm reached the boys a minute later, but had some trouble reasoning with them and even more trouble pulling Piotr off of Bobby. Kitty finally decided to end the insanity and managed to shuffle over to them. She put a cautious hand on Piotr's steel arm, but didn't try to pull him away. Instead she waited until he looked down at her and then said softly, "Just let him go."
Slowly, reluctantly, Piotr's fist unclenched and Bobby stumbled backward. "What was that?!" Bobby demanded to know, brushing the wrinkles out of his uniform.
Somewhere up ahead Wolverine and Beast must have completed the objective, because the scene around them dissolved into a gray room again. Storm tried to get the story out of them, but Bobby was the only one talking and he didn't know anything anyway. Storm figured this out soon enough and turned to Kitty and Piotr for answers, but Piotr had returned to his usual stoic self and Kitty was in too miserable of a mood to try explaining it.
"Sorry Storm," Kitty apologized, her hand still on Piotr's arm. "We'll talk later?" She pulled lightly on Piotr's arm until he powered down and followed her out of the Danger Room. When they were back upstairs Kitty stopped him and said, "Ok, what was that?"
"Nothing."
"Bobby didn't mean to hurt me," Kitty tried to tell Piotr. "He just wasn't paying attention. That's why we have training."
Piotr gave her a pitying look for some reason and walked away. Bobby brushed past her on his way back to his room and that was the last thing Kitty could handle that day. She ran. She ran right out the back door and past the bench Bobby and Marie had been sitting in just an hour ago and stopped at the fountain.
For a while she just stood there staring at it. Not really at it, but at the past. It was a day everyone would remember as the day they buried the professor, but Kitty would remember it as the day Bobby was at his sweetest. That was the day that she was hanging onto, more than any other day. That was the memory that came to her whenever she saw Bobby and Marie together, because that day it had been Bobby and Kitty.
Kitty sat down on the rim of the fountain and swirled the water with her finger. That day, the fountain had looked the same. When Bobby dragged her out there with her skates and a grin, the water had been liquid, like it was now. But just by dipping his finger in it, Bobby had frozen it solid.
"You're it Artie!" someone yelled, breaking through Kitty's thoughts. A second later someone crashed into her and sent her toppling to the ground.
"Sorry Kitty, sorry!" he apologized profusely while he helped her to her feet. "I'm really sorry!"
Seeing who it was, Kitty smiled. "It's ok Jimmy. I wasn't paying attention."
Jimmy narrowed his eyes at her. "You're not smiling right," he told her. "That's how the doctors used to smile, like they didn't really mean it."
Jimmy, or Leech, had the ability to cancel out the powers of those mutants around him. Because of this, Worthington Labs had snatched him up and had a team of doctors perform tests on him to come up with the now infamous "mutant cure."
Kitty stopped pretending to smile and dropped tiredly onto the rim of the fountain. "Sorry. I'm just not having the best day."
Jimmy sat down next to her, ignoring the shouts from his friends to come back to the game. "What's wrong?"
Kitty looked at the boy. Brown hair grew where the doctors had once shaved him bald and he wore a bright red shirt, when once he had only been allowed to wear white. Jimmy was adjusting nicely to life at the institute, which was considerably different from his life at Worthington Labs. There, he had lived in a bare, white room and worn clean, white clothes. His only visitors were the doctors and the occasional curious beaurocrat. He spent his days playing video games and staring out the little window at the world.
Now his room was overly colorful, with a rich oak door that he could lock and unlock at his desire. He wore bright clothes, like the blindingly red shirt he had on today. He had friends now who came to drag him out of his room in the middle of the day - where he was staring out his floor-to-ceiling window - to play tag or hide and seek.
"Is it Bobby?" Jimmy asked. Sometimes he was so perceptive Kitty wondered if he had telepathic powers too. She wasn't going to have this discussion with him though. She couldn't, not without crying. Jimmy realized she wasn't going to talk, so he soldiered on. "You know, I used to have a crush on you." Kitty's head snapped in his direction. "'Cause you saved my life and you were really nice to me when I came here and you're pretty and smart and you -" Jimmy broke off and grinned. "Well, you're just really nice. But you weren't interested."
"Jimmy," Kitty started to apologize.
"It's ok. Actually, it turns out that Jubilee kind of liked me, but I didn't know because I liked you."
"Jubilee, really? Good for you Jimmy," Kitty said with almost sincere cheer.
"Yeah, I guess sometimes you just get so centered on one person, you don't really notice other people."
Kitty thought about that for a second, but didn't take it the way Jimmy intended. Instead, she thought, Yeah, Bobby's just so focused on Rogue, he forgot I'm here. He'd at least be my friend if I reminded him. We could at least be friends again. Kitty stood up enthusiastically. "Thanks Jimmy, that's good advice. I'm gonna go find Bobby. I'll see ya later, k?"
"No, Kitty..." Jimmy protested, but she was already gone. "...that's not what I meant," he muttered to himself.
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A/N: K, so the story's actually all done (three chapters total) as of this posting, but since I'm so ahead of myself this time, I'm going to let myself be a little demanding. So, I'll post the next chapter of this fic when I get...five reviews. Or a week from now. Whichever comes first. Thanks for reading, even if you don't review. I appreciate it!
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