TITLE: I Get By

SUMMARY: After being rescued by an unlikely classmate, things get complicated.

CHARACTERS: Bobby, Kitty, Emma, Peter

RATING: K+

WARNINGS: Mild to moderate language and discussions of infidelity.

DISCLAIMER: I, LithiumAddict, a.k.a. Percy O’Leary, am not in any way shape or form connected to Marvel Comics, Fox Entertainment, or any other related group. I therefore do not own any of the characters represented here. This is fan-fiction, and a labour of love on my part and in no way an intention to undermine the previously mentioned organizations or their intellectual property.

AUTHOR’S NOTES: It’s becoming something of a pattern for me to put off all the good stuff between Remy and Marie in this story to explore less interesting, but just as crucial stuff. Guess what folks? It’s happening again. No meeting on the front green . . . yet. Don’t hate me though; I have reasons. I felt that with Remy and Marie kind-of, sort-of starting to figure things out with one another, it’s time to take a look at another couple.

There were a couple reviews that finally convinced me a chapter dealing with Kitty and Bobby was necessary -- my thanks to Katt and Ms. Arano specifically for this. Kitty!Muse came out of nowhere and rose to the occasion brilliantly, reminding me that while cheating is never pretty, it’s rarely, if ever as easy as the cheater and the other woman are always assholes either. I suppose she deserves thanks for that. Both she and I are curious as to how all of you respond to this, and hope you enjoy.

Ethics now done and over with– another battle against that insipid Pryde girl lost and won at the same time – Emma left the classroom with every intention of taking it easy for what remained of the day. Since Ethics had been bright and early and she had no other classes today, this left a considerable amount of time between now and dinner. Plans were already developing to take off to town and shop for a while. The hour or so it would take her to get there would be a small price to pay for getting away from the mansion, and if she timed it right she’d even miss the brunt of the traffic on her way back.

Plus, she reflected while making for her room, she could use a new pair of shoes.

It was as this plot was running through her head that Katherine passed her, and Emma was reminded yet again of what a bitch it was to be a telepath sometimes.

She wasn’t picking up on any coherent words, just a general sense of frustration. This was unsurprising considering the class they’d just come from, and the near catfight that had ensued between the two of them over the use of the term ‘mutie’ within the mutant community and the concept of reclamation. The frustration was nothing. It was the underlying fear and nervousness that attracted Emma’s attention. For all the issues that she had with Katherine, she had to give credit where credit was due: the girl was confident by nature, which made this fear feel incredibly out of place. Focusing, she tried to tune her psychic radar so as to pick up a little more, but was met only with a thick wall of agitation and apprehension.

This roadblock only served to stoke Emma’s curiosity (in actuality, it was really just irritating her, and Lord knew she hated that, but claiming curiosity sounded a little less conceited), and the burning desire to know what the hell was going on grew only stronger as Katherine made a left turn at the end of the hall, heading towards the computer lab.

Emma glanced at the clock on the wall, wondering if putting off her shopping trip for a little while would be worth seeing what Katherine was up to. Lips twisting upwards in a smirk that could easily have been associated with sharks or other predators, she determined that she had time to be a little meddlesome.

A few moments walk brought Emma to the lab just as Katherine was going in. Emma wasn’t going to risk following the girl in to the lab itself, but something as small as that certainly wasn’t going to keep her from staying informed. Siding up to the door, Emma resisted the urge to press her ear to it. That would have been a little too gauche, even in the face of her current actions of questionable discernment.

“Hey,” Katherine said, barely loud enough for Emma to hear with her physical ears. No matter though; there were ways of getting around that. The thing about telepaths was that doors did little to keep them out if they wanted to get in.

Launching herself on to the psychic plane, things became much clearer. Swimming through the bad LSD trip of colour and sensation, she found her consciousness present in the room with Katherine. There was only one other person in the room with her, and a stray thought – what’re you doing here, Kit? – identified him.

It was Bobby; no-one else shortened Katherine’s that way.

He was radiating a soft grey indifference as he played some mindless first-person shooter. Katherine, however, was a shifting rainbow of confusion that had Emma had a head right now, would have induced a headache of epic proportions.

Angry. Sad. Cold. Hot. Lost.

“Hey,” Bobby replied, a brief flash of bitter gall streaking orange through the grey. He had, presumably, lost a round of his game. It was either that, or Katherine’s entry to the room that had caused this, but Emma wasn’t going to place any bets just yet. That grey shroud of apathy was making it unclear, making either option quite possible.

“You skipped Ethics.”

It wasn’t accusatory. Just a statement of fact that hinted at a why Katherine chose to leave unspoken. Emma thought back briefly and realized that Bobby had indeed been missing from class this morning. She caught herself wondering at the reasons why just as strongly as Katherine was, if not more.

“Yeah. I know. I’m gonna get the lecture first thing next time for it too.”

“Can’t say I’m jealous.” There was a pause – give him a second or two and maybe he’ll tell me why -- before that why she’d been biting down on made its way out.

“Was there a good reason for it, or did you just feel the overwhelming need to pump virtual lead in to lovingly rendered 3D polygons?”
Based on Emma’s knowledge of Bobby’s character, this ought to have elicited a chuckle at the very least. What it got was nothing, which was curious enough in itself. Even more curious was his eventual answer.

“I just went to go talk to Marie. Her powers came back, and I wanted to make sure she was okay. It . . . ” a sigh accompanied him pausing his game, or so the sudden lack of background noise indicated. “It didn’t go so good.”

Katherine’s inner voice boomed across the psychic plane in a blast of cobalt blue melting in to steel grey.

Say it. Say it now or you never will.

“It’s kinda her I want to talk to you about.”

The grey around Bobby shifted to attentive white, and a cautious yellow wended its way through in response to something in Katherine’s tone.

“What’s up?”

Emma was distantly aware of the sound of a shifting chair being processed by her physical body. Bobby had turned his seat so he was facing Katherine now.

“Everything okay, Kitty?”

Textbooks were dropped on the desk and ass hit chair in time with a slow, steady uprising of discomfort, awkwardness, and dread on Katherine’s part.

“You said it didn’t go so good. What’s that mean?”

A degree of suspicion was present in his reply.

“I think we’ve broken up,” he said. That’s not an answer to my question, he thought.

“You think.”

“There wasn’t a ‘we should see other people’ or an ‘it’s not you, it’s me’, if that’s what you mean. She just kicked me out of her room and I’m pretty sure I’m not welcome there anymore.”

Well, well, well, Emma smiled to herself. This was news. She offered up a silent ‘atta girl on Marie’s behalf.

“So…” Katherine began carefully, a tiny swell of pale pink hope daring to rear its head. “You guys are through?”

“I guess. Maybe. I don’t know.” The sound of chair legs scraping along linoleum floor covered a strange, throaty sort of noise he made calculated to express anxiety. “I’m not really sure how this all works, Kit.”

“I know,” came her quiet response. “It’s just . . .”

That inner voice Emma had attributed to Katherine earlier spoke again, repeating itself even more loudly this time.

Say it. Say it now.

Katherine did.

“I never meant to be the other woman, you know? It just happened. I like you Bobby. I like you a lot. I don’t think any of this would have happened if I didn’t. But people are saying shit about us. About me.”

“What kind of stuff about us?” Bobby asked, far too concerned with the answer if Emma were any judge. Kitty, however, was far beyond hearing. On a verbal roll, she just kept going.

“And . . . and it’s so stupid, but I think I’ve got it in my head that maybe if you and Marie are done, then maybe what we’ve got, whatever the hell it is, can be sort of legitimate.”

A sensation of relief for having just having spat out the words washed outward from Katherine, and would have swept Emma off her psychic feet had it not been followed by a wave of self-depreciating silence. That Emma understood. That she could navigate with relative ease.

Bobby’s mouth in the meantime, started to open as the wheels in his head turned manically in his search for the right response to her confession.

Legitimate? What does she . . . what kind of trash are people talking about us? Oh, god, what am I supposed to say to her now?

Just as things were getting juicy, Emma felt another presence approaching. Of course, the heavy footsteps moving her way at an especially fast pace had been a bit of a hint too. She forced herself back in to the physical world only to take a few steps to the left and hide in a small corner. Slowing her breath down, and willing herself to go unseen, she watched as Peter burst down the hall and in to the lab. He left the door open, allowing Emma a decent view of what was going on inside. The two lovebirds both looked a little dumbstruck, like they were shocked to have been interrupted.

“Good. I found you guys. Storm wants you suited up and in the War Room yesterday.”

Bobby and Kitty both stood up, their conversation apparently forgotten with this recent development, whatever it might have been

“What’s the matter?” Kitty asked.

‘Sardonic’ was the only word coming to Emma’s mind that fully described what was happening on Peter’s face.

“It looks like Mister Summers might not be as dead as we thought.”

Now that was an interesting development. Safe in her corner, hidden by shadows and her own sheer will, Emma allowed herself a downward turn of her mouth. Though ‘Mister Summers’ had been before her time, she knew that he had been a relatively well-liked teacher who had ended up dead during what was referred to by those who had been around then as ‘The Phoenix Thing’.

What Emma knew of the whole debacle and in turn Mister Summers had been gleaned from stray memories and flitting thoughts from those with firsthand experience. No-one talked much – or at all, really; no point in beating around the bush – about what had happened or about those who had been lost. It remained a sore spot that people avoided so carefully that it had become obvious. Pictures had been taken down, starting a conversation on the topic was as large a taboo as one would find at Xavier’s, and the only concrete proof that anything at all had happened was the small collection of the memorial stones on the back lawn.

Of course, this whole don’t-ask-don’t-tell-no-seriously-don’t-you-dare mentality hadn’t stopped people from thinking about it, and quite a lot. Thought being Emma’s province of expertise, she’d been able to piece together a serviceable idea of what had occurred.

Doctor Jean Grey – a pretty, red-haired woman who had been the face of Xavier’s to the outside world (not to mention a geneticist, teacher, fiancé of a fellow instructor, and general darling of all who came across her) ended up sacrificing herself in a last-ditch bid to get her comrades to safety. Said sacrifice, however, ended up being less permanent than originally assumed. Back with a vengeance and possessed by an alternate personality known as the Phoenix, she came, she killed, and wreaked general havoc on the world. Among the dead at her hands was Xavier himself, countless soldiers, and her fiancé, Scott Summers.

(Pity, really. Summers, at least according to the pictures she’d formed from others’ recollections of him, hadn’t been half-bad looking, or even a half-bad guy. Emma conveniently ignored the age difference, his marital status, and the small fact that he was dead during this assessment.)

Stopped only by Wolverine and the grace of whatever god that might have been listening that day, the Phoenix and Jean Grey were no more. There was nothing left behind in the Phoenix’s wake. No bodies. Not even parts of bodies. Just knowledge that it had happened and memories of the fallen.

Back in real-time though, Peter was still waiting for a reply. Bobby, of course, stepped up to the plate right away. He was already leaving the room as he spoke, Katherine close behind.

“What’s the plan?”

“A briefing. That’s all I know. I think Storm’s trying to get a hold of Wolverine right now, wherever he is, and--”
By this point, the three of them were down the hall and their voices had faded with the distance.

“Hmmm,” Emma hummed to herself, mulling over all that she had just heard. A shopping trip truly was in order now. A lot of new and shiny information had just presented itself to her, and the drive in to town was just the thing she would need to work through it all properly.

That, and to get those new shoes she’d been thinking about earlier, but that was neither here nor there.