Anonymous asked: I saw you were doing mini fics for Marvel and I thought you mentioned something about being a huge X-Men nerd in the past. Any chance you could write something short and fluffy for Kitty and Colossus? If not I totally understand but!!! Yeah!!!
All right, let’s fucking GO, Kitty/Piotr is everything to me, the dearth of fic is painful. Pertinent details are as follows. Movie-verse (and honestly FUCK the whole Kitty/Bobby plot, I do what I want) because otherwise this is gonna be obscure as shit. Timeline: right after the mansion is stormed by Stryker in the second movie, after Logan orders Piotr to get as many kids out as possible. For reference, he does, and takes as many students as he can get his hands on out into the forest, per the novelization. We’re going to pretend that they actually cast someone Russian for Piotr. Canon ages, so Kitty’s 16, Piotr’s 20.
Kitty sighed and leaned back against the tree, wishing that she could slide down to the ground. It was dark outside, especially almost a mile into the forest behind the mansion, and the adrenaline was making her hands tremble. She just…wanted to sit for a while, or go back to sleep and wake up from this nightmare. But, of the ten students she’d managed to get out, she was the only one who was a full member of the team, and the others needed her to be an X-Man.
“Shadowcat?” Rahne asked, tugging gently on her sleeve. Her eyes flashed in the moonlight, tossing back the glow like something wild. “Are you a'right?”
“Yeah,” Kitty said, taking a deep breath and setting her hand on Rahne’s shoulder. Tabby and Dani lingered behind the shapeshifter, shoulders pressed together and eyes fixed nervously on Kitty. God. They were awfully young, she thought to herself, and the others were even younger, kids abandoned by their families and taken in at seven or eight. She hadn’t thought of thirteen and fourteen as quite so young until just now–hell, she had been risking her life when she was the girls’ age. But they were new, mostly untrained, and she wasn’t trained as a leader or a teacher–she would give a lot just now for just one more older student, someone who had been at the school for more than a few months. “I’m good. We’re going to be okay,” she told the kids, reaching out to wrap an arm around a young boy with dark skin and a voice that could shatter concrete. “What can you guys tell me? Any telepaths or ferals with us?”
“Just me. There’s someone in the forest,” Rahne said immediately, head snapping around like a dog on a scent. “Sounds like a group, a little ways away. It doesn’t sound like the troops–no gear. Someone…who smells like metal? Wearin’ a suit of armor, maybe? Awful quiet, though.”
“Oh, thank God,” Kitty breathed. “Colossus. Can you tell me how many he has with him? Are they being tracked by any of the troops?”
“Sounds like…” Rahne’s face crumpled in concentration and Kitty made a mental note to strongly suggest more intensive training for the ferals. Maybe she could bribe Logan–he could tell how many people were in a group at a mile distance, using his heightened senses, and he could hardly argue with the rationality of her request. “I don’t know,” she said. “More’n five, less’n twenty-five. I don’t think the troops followed us near this far into the trees, and I don’t smell any gun oil.”
“Which way?” Rahne pointed deeper into the forest and Kitty nodded. “Okay. Come on, we’re going to join up with his group. Strength in numbers.”
“And in seven-foot steel Russians,” Tabby muttered, and Kitty felt a grin touch her lips for the first time since the night went to hell.
“That too.”
The walk wasn’t as long as Kitty had anticipated, but some of the younger kids were wearing out badly. The smallest, a girl named Sarah with spikes of bone protruding through her skin at every joint, had tripped, and Kitty had hoisted her up on her back, the cool plate of bone at Sarah’s cheek rubbing against the nape of her neck with every step. The girl was heavy, but Kitty was suddenly and intensely grateful for Scott’s Danger Room drills. She would never complain about having to carry a fifty-pound handicap through an obstacle course again–carrying a compliant six-year-old over flat terrain was a piece of cake by comparison.
They stepped through a line of trees into a small clearing shaded by a group of thick-leaved maple trees, and a crudely fashioned spear slammed through Kitty’s throat. She phased on instinct, the wood passing through her jaw and head harmlessly, and Sarah fell straight through her, onto the forest floor.
“Holy shit,” she hissed at the boy wielding it. He pulled it back sheepishly and Kitty stepped out of Sarah, who had managed to land well and was scowling wearily at the boy herself. “What the fuck, Roberto? What kind of dumbass are you?” She stopped and turned a sharp eye on the younger kids. “If I hear you say any of those words, I’m telling…I don’t know. Everyone. Storm.” Ororo did an excellent disappointed face.
“Katya,” a deep voice said, metal clinking quietly, and Kitty almost dropped on the spot with relief.
“God, Piotr.” She brushed Roberto aside like an errant fly and threw her arms around her teammate’s neck. The steel melted away and he wrapped her in a tight hug, tucking his chin on top of her head. His heart was steady and loud under her ear, and the feeling of his strong arms did wonders for the shakes rattling through her chest and hands. “Are you all right?” she asked, pulling away and patting her hands anxiously over his chest. His thin white shirt had more than a few holes in it, but they didn’t seem to correspond with any actual damage to his skin.
“I am fine, Katya,” he said, catching her wrists. “It is very hard to get a dart through steel. Are you hurt?”
“Dart?” she repeated, and frowned. “Wait, they wanted to capture us?” An image of Logan’s claws, adamantium bonded to bone, flashed through her mind. “Oh. God. I have nightmares like this.”
“Kitty,” he said sharply, giving her a gentle shake, and she looked up in surprise. “Are you injured?”
“Oh. Uh, no. No, we’re all okay. Just exhausted.” Kitty waved forward the others and asked, “How many students do you have with you?”
“Fifteen, not including myself,” he said, releasing her wrists and gesturing as students melted out of the trees. “As many as I could. You?”
“Nine.” Kitty frowned. “Twenty-four between us–twenty-six including us–out of some forty-five or fifty total. That’s not bad.”
“I saw at least one other group make the treeline, but I couldn’t make out how big it was,” a young girl with dark hair and an appallingly yellow night shirt said.
“So if Jubilee is right, thirty or more,” Piotr said, breathing out a sigh. “Good.”
“Kitty?” Sarah asked, tugging on Kitty’s soft blue pants. “Are we going to stay here?”
Kitty looked up at Piotr and he tipped his head forward slightly. “Yeah, this is as good as it’s gonna get,” Kitty said. She turned to the others and said, “No fires, nothing that will give away our position. We don’t know how determined the troops might be.”
“Katya and I are the oldest,” Piotr continued, “so we will keep watch. Try to make yourselves comfortable, and stay in sight.”
“On the ground?” Tabby asked, sounding skeptical.
“Unless you have a mattress squirreled away in a pocket somewhere,” Kitty said shortly, rubbing a hand over her forehead where a headache was starting to settle. “It is what it is. Now, are you X-Men or not?”
The kids didn’t argue with her again. Within twenty minutes, Kitty and Piotr were sitting against a tree with a good view of the entire clearing, surrounded by quiet lumps of darkness. No one seemed inclined to sleep alone, friends pressed together in groups of two and three and four. Kitty sighed and dropped her head into her hands, and a hand came to rest between her shoulders.
“It will be all right, Katya,” Piotr murmured, and she huffed a laugh.
“I hope so,” she said quietly, raising her head. “I’m just…really sick of this.”
“I know,” he said. “I am, also.” He gave a lock of her hair a gentle tug and offered her a small smile, almost shy. “At least we are together. And we have more than half of the students here.”
“True,” she said with a small smile of her own. Something scratched past her ear and she reached up, pulling a leaf out of her curls and frowning. Piotr chuckled, a low rumble that eased some of her headache, and plucked another from the loose hair at the nape of her neck.
“I can braid your hair, if you would like.” Kitty hesitated for a moment, then nodded, and shifted into Piotr’s lap before he could do anything to stop her, her back just in front of his chest and her legs tangled with his. He went tense and Kitty peered back over her shoulder. “Katya, we have discussed–”
“Piotr,” she said in a stern whisper. “I know you don’t want to date me until I’ve…had the chance to date a dumb teenager or whatever. But we both know we have a fifty-fifty chance of dying in the next couple of days, and I’m not asking for that much. So for right this second you’re going to get over it, and you’re going to let me sit here and you’re going to braid my hair and you’re going to tell me where you learned, okay?” She leaned her head back against his shoulder, feeling his muscles relax slowly beneath her, and mumbled, “We can go back to normal tomorrow.”
