Chapter Text
“Kitty?”
Peeking cautiously into Med-Bay, Warlock eyed the empty beds and double-checked his scanners for nearby life-signs. The dim lights and crisp silence had transformed the room into a solemn, forbidding place, and nostalgia prickled at his circuits as he tiptoed inside. The science and medical labs had always been off-limits when they were children — the perfect hiding places for hide-and-seek. Utopia could’ve lived up to its name that way, as a labyrinth of unfamiliar rooms for games of exploration, instead of a prison where every room was all too real, all too needed.
Warlock had never been a very good seeker; he cheated every time. But this time there wasn’t even anywhere for Kitty to hide. Trying for heart and cheer enough to spare, Warlock tapped his nose against the glass of Kitty’s containment chamber and chirped, “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
No answer. Warlock could see her crouched down in the bottom of the chamber, her knees pulled tight to her chest, but unless she turned to face him he couldn’t read a word from her mouth. She probably didn’t feel much like talking. Though the signal was faint, there was no mistaking that same dark wave of grief that had washed over the entire island. Words weren’t enough.
Kurt was gone.
“…Do you want to watch?” Warlock asked softly. It wasn’t fair that Kitty couldn’t attend the funeral, but questions of fairness only twisted him into knots, so he’d turned his frantic misery towards solutions instead. Kitty came first. That was what Kurt would’ve wanted. “I left a spy-eye outside, so…we can watch, if you want.”
Maybe Kitty hadn’t even heard him; she felt as far away now as when she’d raced among the stars. Warlock raised his hand to knock again at her chamber, then dropped it silently back to his side.
He didn’t have any right to be there. Not on the beach with the others, where even those who’d never really known Kurt had turned up to mark the passing of such a good man. Not in Med-Bay, where he could hide behind old friendships and pretend to be useful. Not even on Utopia itself. Every time Warlock thought of his beloved teammate, a blood-slick whisper rattled through his heart: at least Kurt will never know what you did.
Just as his flight instinct kicked in, shamescripts running unchecked, Kitty rose to her feet. She wiped a hand over her face, tried to compose herself, and turned to greet him with a forced, wavering smile.
I’ve done this too many times, Kitty told him, shaking her head as she swallowed down a bitter laugh. The tears returned to her eyes, and this time she didn’t even try to rub them away. At first crying had been a rare outlet for her frustration and delight, but now she knew otherwise. The tears never stopped. There was no crying herself to sleep and waking up empty, yet somehow okay. No terrible sense of accomplishment in dry, red eyes. No end to her grief.
Warlock watched her in silence, unsure of what to say, how to connect. She was always the one pulling him back to earth, not the other way around.
You should go. Kitty tucked her head against her chest and motioned toward the door. Don’t miss it for my sake.
With a soft clatter, fragile as glass, Warlock’s crest slowly flattened back against his head. “I…” He wanted to be there. He hated funerals. He was wired and exhausted and could barely keep his scripts straight as it was. “…Don’t want you to be alone.”
Seeing the lie for what it was, Kitty gave a nod. Alright. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath that rushed straight through her, and opened them once more. Play it.
Warlock snapped his fingers. On cue, wings unfurled from his back and stretched themselves into a massive screen spanning the entire width of the room. One tendril of Warlock’s hair shifted into an old-fashioned movie projector, and a few others turned into speakers. He sat down in front of Kitty’s chamber and tried not to make a joke about their lack of popcorn. Even when his heart was broken, solemnity wasn’t his strong suit.
The stars were out in full brilliance, heavens shining bright to mock their loss, and Warlock refined the image until every pinprick of light had been mapped onto Med-Bay’s ceiling. The audio came in with perfect clarity as well, yet Warlock barely listened, trying to compartmentalize his thoughts from his live-casting. He didn’t want to know the words — empty wishes and lies about the heavendimension, one and all.
Kurt would frown to hear him think that way, frown and curl his tail just so, and suddenly Warlock wished he wasn’t carnage and stardust, wished he too had silly liquids that could fall from his eyes. Even when he shut them and tucked his face against his knees, he could still see the picture, the roaring fire. Rahne told him you should bury people to keep them safe (and look how that turned out), but stories of heroes only ever ended two ways: a happily ever after or a funeral pyre.
He could throw himself upon it. People did that, sometimes, in mourning. He’d purged the very notion from his mindbank, but his sickness let every evil slither back in, and the dancing flames spoke to him of birthrights and monsters who swallowed suns for sport.
It wouldn’t burn the poison from his circuits, it wouldn’t even hurt. Warlock remembered when it did, when hellfire swept through his usurper and left him/them screaming their speakers to dysfunction. An innocent bystander, then. Not so innocent now. He could almost see it again through those foreign, disjointed memories — Kurt standing over him in judgment, malice in his eyes.
The memory glitched with longing, and instead of that gloating devil, he could see Kurt reaching through the fire to offer a hand. Warlock’s thoughts broke into a cloud of static, smoke blacking out the records that scrolled through his mindbank without end. He’d stolen the recruit list from the St. Louis dataset and tried to match names to split-second captures of screaming faces. It wasn’t enough. He could engrave every name in his memory, but the faces all blurred into the same ghoulish feast. His friends said the soldiers were monsters; Dani always said you are what you eat.
Warlock counted and counted the names, and still he saw Kurt reaching for him, still his stupid heart tried to pretend forgiveness known but never given could be enough.
On screen, Kurt’s real friends gave their farewells one by one. Something shifted in the air as Ororo raised her face toward the distant moon, palpable even in Med-Bay. The stars flickered. Warlock glanced back at Kitty’s chamber and found her slamming her fists against the glass, trying to get his attention as he drifted through waking nightmares.
Turn it off. Turn it off!
Kitty crouched down and pulled her knees to her chest, staring firmly away from the window so she wouldn’t have to watch the footage anymore. It was the same position she’d taken earlier, but now it was even harder to disbelieve. She wanted so badly for it not to be real. Her hands shook. Maybe even she wasn’t real, and if she wasn’t real then this was all just a horrible dream, and Kurt was still alive and all her friends were fine and—
A loud bang rang out from the tubes connected to the containment chamber, pipes clinking and clanking, and then with a hiss and a pop a stream of liquefied Technarch poured inside and reformed beside her. Warlock shivered, circuits righting themselves, and stubbornly curled up into a mirror image of her own pose.
What are you doing?! Kitty gasped, inching away from him.
“I’m not leaving you,” he told her matter-of-factly. “You’re on your own plenty. Everyone else has each other right now. Conclusion: Not leaving, nope, negative.”
You—you idiot. She hated when he used that voice, but loved him for it too, for a secret that made her feel wanted. You know what’ll happen if I touch you like this.
Warlock shrugged. There was barely enough room in the chamber for his long and lanky limbs, and his elbows clanged against the metal walls. “So? You’ve done it before.”
…I was having a bad day. A fist through his chest hadn’t exactly been the best welcome in the world, and Kitty had no intention of repeating it.
“You’re having a bad day now, too.” Warlock patted at his shoulder and gave her a hopeful look. His eyes were the warm, ruddy gold of honey, dark pools of it among the soft lines of his face, full of more melancholy than his usual beacons could ever manage. It was the way he’d looked when she saw him last, when he was lost and didn’t want to admit it.
Right now Kitty felt pretty lost herself. She scooted over to sit by his side, so close that their shoulders touched and his outline quivered from the interference. It must have hurt him, it always did, but his sad, gentle smile never faltered.
They sat there in silence for a long while. Without realizing it, they each did the other’s share — Kitty crying enough for two, Warlock wailing on frequencies none could hear.
I didn’t get to hug him, she sobbed. I didn’t even get to say hello.
A few short weeks earlier, when Warlock accompanied his selfsoulfriend on a perfunctory investigation of the compound, they’d turned a corner and found Kurt there speaking with a student. Warlock froze up. He didn’t know if his old friends and teammates knew what he was, and he barely had any explanations himself. There wasn’t any reason to expect a warm welcome when he wore such a different face — the New Mutants were even reluctant to accept his old one.
But Kurt’s face lit up when he saw them there in the hall, together, and he swept forward to shake Warlock’s hand and welcome him home with a fond, flashy smile. No one else had bothered.
“He lent me his image inducer once,” Warlock said suddenly. “He didn’t tell me it was stuck on Errol Flynn. The looks I got in town! I wasn’t nearly dashing enough to pull it off.”
Kitty slowly raised her head and stared at him in confusion. No one’s as dashing as my fuzzy elf.
“I did my best. Kurt even gave me lessons in Dashing Dancing, but I had two left techno-feet.”
…For the wedding?
“Yup. Moira found us waltzing in a storage room. She was still laughing at me a week later…”
The corner of her mouth twitched, and Kitty wiped at her eyes. Tell me, she said, lips moving so gently that it must have been a whisper. She laid her head against his shoulder and let her knees bump against his.
Warlock could never deny her anything. “Did you know he was the one who taught me to make peanut butter sandwiches? But the jam wasn’t colorful enough, so I had to…improvise a bit. And then Kurt said: Add whatever you’d like, but don’t expect me to eat it!” Pickles in his peanut butter, but no pepperoni on his pizza. A boy of truly refined taste. “That was the end of my brilliant culinary career.”
The stories tumbled endlessly onward. One time Kurt and Meggan had recruited him for some incomprehensible prank on Brian, only for them all to get locked in the lab as the sprinklers went off, a certain elf making a quick escape and leaving the rest to their soggy fate. Another time, after some field mission, Kurt had nagged him about his embarrassingly slow reflexes until he finally consented to a round in the training room. He’d spent the next two hours trying to shift a fully-functional tail, successes and failures all to Kurt’s immense delight.
If it hadn’t been for Kurt, Warlock had little doubt he’d have stayed down in the labs with Moira for good. He was useful there, the perfect worker bee. It was fun having movie marathons with Meggan, going out for malted milk with Rahne, and watching Kitty tinker with her newest tech, and he treasured those days above much else, but sometimes he’d felt like he was only on loan, a valuable piece of equipment instead of a friend.
“He always came looking for me,” Warlock said quietly. The grand hand gestures and expressive faces that had accompanied his stories were all gone now. “I mattered to him.”
Of course you did. We all did.
“Exactly! Everyone mattered to him, even me. I was someone.” Kurt never let him forget he was part of the team, and he never left him behind. It didn’t matter who got their claws into him — aliens, intelligence agencies, or the red-faced scum of the Earth — Kurt always led the rescue effort. “It was the first time I…I mean, the first time Douglock really believed it.”
Kitty scooted over to the other side of the chamber, leaned forward on her knees, and jabbed a finger at his chest, just enough to make his circuits spark and fizzle. Don’t ever stop believing it. Don’t forget Kurt’s faith in you.
Like a tin man without his oil, Warlock’s joints froze up in one jarring swoop. She didn’t know what he’d done. He bowed his head in misery, but Kitty reached out and let her hands crackle at his cheeks until he looked at her once more.
Promise me.
“…Self promises,” he hummed, soft enough to pretend he hadn’t.
The shift in his scripts signaled the conversation’s abrupt end. Kitty crossed her arms over her chest, far from resigned, and gave his stubbornness a moment of thought. Warlock, can you do me a favor?
“Query: Additional promises?” He tilted his head, eyes gone wide as saucers. “Promise supply running low…”
Scowling at his act, Kitty fought off the urge to shock him again just for the heck of it. It’s not a promise. I need you to find something for me.
“Scavenger hunt?”
I had this shoebox full of old pictures, but I don’t know where any of my stuff ended up. Can you track it down for me? Ororo might know.
Warlock nodded. Though it was a strange request for wartime, he knew she wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.
When you find it, you have to take out Doug’s pictures. Those damn tears were welling up in her eyes again. And put in one of Kurt. A nice one, okay?
“Affirmative.”
*
Nobody slept that night. When Warlock tracked down Ororo and asked about the box, a deep sorrow passed over her face, realization and resignation all in one. She knew exactly where it was, safe on her shelf, and she even helped him track down pictures from everyone’s photo albums. Most people wouldn’t have given him a second glance if Ororo hadn’t been there beside him.
“Did she tell you what this is?”
Their quest complete, they sat down together on the floor of Ororo’s room with the box between them. She smoothed her hands reverently over its worn cover, just as she’d done time and again since it came into her possession, then pushed it towards Warlock. “Open it.”
Inside was a thick pile of photographs, all of them happy, some going back nearly a decade. Illyana’s smiling face greeted him first off, and as Warlock reached into the box to pull all the happy photos out, a half dozen floppy disks spilled free. Each one was sealed up tight in a clear case, taped shut for extra securitty, and marked with the same name.
Warlock startled as Ororo laid a hand over his, internal chronometer skipping a beat. It took him a moment to remember to breathe, a moment longer to remember it wouldn’t help. Wires coiled in his chest in place of lungs.
Ororo helped him pick up the floppy disks, then gently closed his fingers over them. “I don’t think these belong here anymore,” she told him with an understanding smile. She spread out the photographs on the floor next to them and sorted through as if playing a card game — a pair of arcades, a full house of golden swoops and cheeky grins. Doug’s photos went in a neat little pile by Warlock’s knee.
“And these…” Ororo glanced at the ones of Kurt that they’d gathered. Their beloved elf was smiling and laughing in every single one, and photo-bombing with a sudden burst of brimstone in more than half. “These don’t belong here at all,” she murmured to herself, tears threatening to fall once more.
Her alien companion had drifted away, thumbing absentmindedly at the stack of photos and floppy disks as he stared at another picture he’d borrowed from the box, so Ororo tidied up herself. In went Illyana, in went Kitty’s father, in went Kurt. It was lighter now than a few years prior, and she tried to consider that a hopeful tiding.
At last the only picture remaining was the one in Warlock’s hands.
He’d talked Piotr into handing that one over, and the man had given him the strangest, saddest smile as he went to fetch it from a book on his shelf. Warlock hadn’t looked at it until now —an Excalibur team photo with all of them in attendance. He even remembered the day it was taken, since he spent a good ten minutes fiddling with the camera’s timer and threatening to overwrite it with Phalanx tech if it didn’t behave. But they got it in the end, the simplest team mission they ever accomplished, and now it could stand for all of them, for Kurt and for Moira and for the spirited little subscript that never should have been.
Ororo nudged the box towards him. “I’ll keep it safe,” she promised.
That was what you did with the people you loved. You put them into boxes, and tried to keep them safe when it was already too late. Warlock laid the picture in the box and watched as Ororo closed it up tight. Before she could take it away, he put Doug’s pictures and the disks on top. They couldn’t go inside, but they still belonged to Kitty. Sort of.
“Self does not possess storage location.” It was a feeble excuse. He’d become accustomed to lying, yet never got any better at it.
Ororo rose and carried the box over to a shelf filled with tokens and framed photos of the dead and living alike. As soon as her back was turned, Warlock made for the door, eager to leave her to her grief — he’d bothered her enough already.
“Warlock?”
Her voice stalled him in his tracks, and her warm hand on his shoulder made his knees wobble. He didn’t protest as Ororo pulled him into a hug, his head drooping against her shoulder.
“Don’t be a stranger,” she told him, smoothing down his tired crest. “There are no strangers in grief.”
Warlock didn’t answer her. From her window, he could see dark clouds moving in to mask the brilliant heavens from earlier. He waited for them to pass, for a break in the shadows, for one little light to wish on. For a moment the clouds parted just enough—
And all the stars were gone.