Kurt and Adrienne - Reading Kurt's Rosary

[x-adrienne.livejournal.com]

After a chess match, Adrienne inquires about Kurt's faith and his rosary, which leads to her learning a little about the blue man's past.

The game was winding down to a close. Adrienne could see her loss coming up in six, maybe seven moves, but as usual, it was a great experience to learn a few new moves from the blue man across from her.


"Where'd you learn to play so well?" Adrienne asked Kurt with a friendly smile.

"Actually, from my priest", he answered with a grin in return. "Starting when I was twelve, not long after we met."
"You used to play chess with your priest?" she inquired with a teasing smirk. "What, didn't want to be an altar boy but still wanted to be a brown-noser or something?"

"I would have loved to be an altar boy." The smile turned a little wistful, though not unhappy. "But it was not to be. And he has always been my friend and teacher."

"That's encouraging to hear. It seems like not many priests these days have reputations as favourable as your friend's," she pointed out wryly. "I thought you'd been fairly nomadic throughout your childhood, though?"


"There was nothing like that", was the firm response. "And those men do not deserve the name of priest. As for being nomadic... I was, but Bavaria is not so large. Or if we were too far away, I could write to him, and sometimes collect his letters."



"He must mean a lot to you for you to have gone to those lengths to keep in touch, and you must mean a lot to him as well," Adrienne commented with a smile.
Kurt had gone back to studying the board, but looked back up with a smile at that. "He means as much as family, to me. I have never doubted him."


"Kurt," she asked, voice taking on a tentative tone, "you seem to be a man of great... not really religion so much, but... faith, I guess? Is it because of your priest friend, do you think? Did he... inspire your faith? Or do you think people who have faith are born with it and the reason you have a priest friend is because you both share that faith?"
He considered that for a moment before answering. "I am sure I would have found faith in something, if I had never met him, if only in my people's traditions. But as it was... he did inspire me. I was just a boy when we met, as I said, and it was a difficult time for my family. And then, he was one of the few I had ever met outside my clan who accepted me on sight."



"So do you wear that because of him, then?" Adrienne inquired, gesturing to the rosary the blue man had around his neck.

"I wear this because my faith is important to me. But then, he gave me both the faith and the rosary... so, yes, I suppose I do." His hand had gone unconsciously to the beads as he spoke.



"Would you mind terribly if I...?" she waggled her fingers at him, although after she had Adrienne had doubts about whether or not Kurt knew what her powers actually were.

He looked at the gesture curiously, then realized. He'd heard, somewhere along the way, roughly what she did. "You wish to do a reading?"



"Well, not exactly." The chess game forgotten, she leaned her elbows on the table. "More like, I wish to work on powers control. I'm trying to get to a point where I can turn my powers on and off when I'm touching something. And I've had this idea to work with peoples' personal items, the things that normally I'd be uncomfortable reading, because then I have more incentive to keep my powers turned off, if that makes sense? If I don't really want to read it in the first place, I'll try harder on keeping control?"

Kurt considered this, then nodded and reached one hand up to take the rosary off. "If you think it would help, of course you can. I think there is nothing in this I would need you not to see."



"Thanks!" Adrienne took the rosary from him with one hand as she reached into her handbag for a wetnap with the other. Frowning in concentration, she poised the clean hand over the rosary and tried to clear her mind and get into her meditative state, searching for some sort of indication of her powers within herself and how to block them from working as she touched the rosary.



The first thing she saw, for whatever reason, was Kurt's getting the rosary. A short, skinny, instantly recognisable teenage boy, accepting it with a smile from a kindly-looking man in his fifties. The younger Kurt was wearing a baptismal robe, black hair sticking up in odd directions as if it had recently got wet and dried unbrushed.



Despite the frustration at her failure in controlling her powers, Adrienne watched the scene with interest before trying to pull herself out of the reading, not wanting to invade any more of the blue man's privacy.

She went back on the timeline, instead, to another boy buying - or being bought - the same rosary from a market stall. It would have been difficult to pin down the boy's identity... unless, perhaps, she had got a good look at the old man's face from the prior vision. The eyes were the same.



Borrrrring, Adrienne thought to herself as she watched the priest as a young man with the rosary, and instead of trying to end the reading this time she zipped forward along the timeline to try and find something more interesting before she left the object alone. It seemed Kurt had been right- there was nothing on it she shouldn't see.



And something more interesting she got, at least in its implications. Kurt was alone in his room, darkness showing outside the window, the rosary in his hands. The expression on his face as he looked down at it was... unreadable, but not on the good side. After a long few moments, he walked to a desk drawer, opened it, and set the rosary down inside next to a set of metal tags. The drawer was closed, and the next sound was the rush of displaced air common to his teleportation.



Interest piqued, Adrienne pushed forward again, promising herself she was going to get out of the reading as soon as she discovered whether the quiet, calm Kurt had actually been a soldier.



In a way, he still was. The next moment that appeared, he was facing off in a New York street against a woman with colouring just like his, who was holding Scott in a choke hold. The expressions on their faces were very clear - anger on his, something like hunted on hers.



Adrienne severed her connection with the reading as she struggled to return to the present so she could talk to Kurt about what she'd seen. Green eyes went wide when she realized she was still touching the rosary, but instead of lingering on the thought or the object, instinct had her letting go and dropping the prayer beads on the table. Well, it was a start.



"Who's the blue woman?" she inquired curiously, "the one who had Summers by the neck?"

Kurt had reached to scoop up the beads, but his hand stilled before pulling them back. "I had forgotten I was wearing this that day. She calls herself Mystique."



Snorting, Adrienne leaned back in her seat. "That's such a stripper name. It was real cute of the priest to give you his own rosary," she commented with a smile, gesturing at the beads.

"She is also my birth mother", he noted wryly, then relaxed, slipping the beads back around his neck. "I was something of his protege, by then. It was a nice gesture, yes."



"Protege? As in, you were going to be a priest? So the dog-tags I saw, that was a pretty big career change then?" She left the topic of his birth mother alone, not wanting to provoke him.

"Not quite that far", Kurt corrected. "I could never have given up the circus, certainly not at that age. Perhaps one day, I still will, but not yet." He smiled slightly. "And those were my X-Men tags."



"X-Men give out dog tags? Isn't that special? And here I thought the big draw was the sexy costumes." Adrienne gave him a smirk. "Monet probably wouldn't like it very much if you became a priest."



He grinned at that, leaning back in his chair. "No, she would not. And I think I am still too young for the life to suit me, even if I am not quite as spry as the twelve-year-old acrobat was."


"Okay, you can't talk about Monet and do the whole implications of priesthood meaning celibacy thing and then talk about how spry you are. Or lack of spryness. I don't need that image in my head, thanks," she teased. "Thank Christ you weren't wearing the rosary during any sex I had to see."

"If I had thought that was likely", was the mostly serious response, "I would not have given it to you. I do believe in privacy."

Adrienne turned her face to the heavens and clapped her hands together, laughing. "Thank you, God."