xp_logs | Hand Me Down: Epilogue

Saturday evening: Jamie wakes up, and the medical staff kindly allows him a moment with Kitty before descending in force. Talk about Skippy quickly turns into a whole other conversation, and Jamie ends up trying, not wildly successfully, to help Kitty deal with one of her issues rather than the other way around.

With apologies to Peter David.

There was a roaring in Jamie's ears, and light was starting to filter through . . . yeah, those would be his eyelids, he was pretty sure. His eyelids. Always a bonus. For one thing, since they were his eyelids, he could move them. And he did.

As Jamie's eyes fluttered open, the roaring resolved into a familiar bass rumble, if a bit tinny coming through a too-small speaker.

". . . and have you heard the one about the gelding at the camel convention?" Guido was saying. "Still couldn't get a hump."

Kitty groaned at the joke. The cord on the phone didn't reach all the way to the bed, so when Guido had offered to stay on the line and keep her company she'd switched him to the speaker - she wasn't willing to stay even a few feet away from Jamie. "Honestly, Guido, you know the worst jokes," she said. But she was very thankful he'd been giving her other things to think about besides Jamie, pale and unconsious on the bed.

"He always has," Jamie managed weakly. "Hang up if he starts the one about the three archaeologists."

Kitty's attention snapped to Jamie. "You're awake! Are you... are you ok?"

Jamie smiled at her a little woozily. "Yeah, I . . . it was very weird, I think I'm gonna need some time to wrap my head around it. But . . . yeah, I think I'm okay. I feel . . ." He tested a few words in his mind, hesitating. "Whole, I think. In myself." He shook his head. "How long was I out, anyway?"

"Seventeen years," Guido's voice answered promptly. "The U.S. was bought by the Swiss. The national bird is now the cuckoo, but the chocolate's better. And somehow Kitty still hasn't agreed to run away with me to Tijuana."

"Well, she looks really good for thirty-three, just so you know what you're missing," Jamie replied dryly. He turned to Kitty and smiled. "How long was I out really?"

"Most of the rest of the day," Kitty said, standing to come closer to Jamie on the bed. "I'm glad you're... I'm glad you feel 'whole'."

Jamie reached for her, grumbling under his breath as the IV tube and the wires from the sensor pads Dr. Bartlet had festooned him with restricted his range of movement. "I'm . . . still me," he added, grinning wryly. "Just me. If you were wondering."

"Damn. Here I thought they were gonna fix that." Guido chuckled. "S' good to hear your voice, buddy, but I'm gonna hang up on account of not wanting to know any more about your love life than I do already. Nice talking to you, Kitty."

"You too, Guido. Thank you for keeping me 'telecompany'." And there was another reason to be thankful for speaker phones - you didn't have to move and hang them up, cause no way was Kitty moving away from Jamie right now. Instead she caught up the hand that had reached towards her, leaning down to kiss him lightly.

Jamie hummed happily into the kiss, scooting over to make room for Kitty on the bed. "Are you okay?" he asked finally. "I mean, the docs're probably gonna invade in a few minutes once they notice what you're doing to my heart rate, but I'm fine, really . . ."

Kitty pushed back his hair and smiled at him. "You're awake, so I'm wonderful. And yes, before you ask, I did eat something. I don't remember what it was, but there was eating involved."

Jamie smiled, looking as if butter was not only not melting in his mouth, it was being spontaneously generated there. "Now, how do you know that was going to be my next question? I might've been wondering if you taped Teen Titans for me, y'know." He leaned forward slightly, kissing her again, and when he pulled back his expression was more serious, although that irrepressible smile was still lurking around the corners of his mouth. "Thank you. For being here with me through all this. I appreciate it in ways I don't think I'll be able to express unless I try songwriting again."

"You never have to thank me for staying with you," Kitty said, a shy sort of smile on her face. "I want to be by your side. I belong there."

Jamie's smile matched hers. "And I belong with you. But I never, ever want to take you for granted, and part of not taking you for granted is thanking you for things you do for me, especially when they're hard, and this was. So you're just gonna have to get used to being told you're wonderful."

"I guess I can live with that, yeah." Kitty kissed him again, seriously contemplating crawling up on the bed to curl up against his side. However, he was right, the doctors would come by sooner or later... Shrugging, she decided she didn't care and slid carefully onto the bed, minding the IV.

"Good, 'cause I'm pretty likely to keep thinking you're wonderful." Jamie pulled the IV cart closer, giving himself enough slack to put his arms around Kitty, sighing contentedly. "It . . . wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. Feel kinda silly now, about being as scared as I was."

"Don't," Kitty said, settling into Jamie's arms with a smile. "It was definitely a reasonable thing to be worried about. Do you want to talk about what happened?"

"Yeah, I . . ." He blinked, a little amazed. "Y'know, I actually think I do? Strangest feeling, after trying so hard all this time not to have anything to do with that whole thing. I've got . . . maybe three, three and a half months of his memories, now. It starts getting jumbled when his genetics started to break down, and I don't have any of the really insane bits, for which I'm not sorry. Doc MacTaggart was right about that part." He smiled. "Just like bad sectors on a hard drive. And even the memories I do have, they're . . . fuzzy, there's places I know there are details missing. I wonder if maybe I'm remembering them the way people with normal brains remember stuff?" He shook his head. "The stuff I do remember, though, it's, well, it's bad. But even then . . . like, they put him in a sensory deprivation chamber a lot, that was one of the ways they broke him, but it's not the same for me, I've got all the memories of stuff that happened to _me_ while that was going on to stack up against it." He paused again. ". . . I really am stronger than I thought I was."

"Told you," Kitty muttered, laying her head on Jamie's chest. "I'm glad you don't have to remember the... well, the really bad bits."

"Me too," Jamie said fervently. "Me very much too. The real thing of it is . . . I still don't understand how there can be people like that in the world, how they can do the things they do. I mean, Sabretooth . . . he likes killing. I think he'd rather kill people than do anything else. And Mystique, she twists people around, and I dunno if she even really cares about anything. And then there's Magneto. He's . . . the worst of all, I think, because he's so . . . he never has any doubts. He believes absolutely that his goals are right, and he'll do absolutely anything to reach them." Jamie shook his head. "I don't get them. Weeks of memories of them and I'm no closer to understanding them than I was when all I knew were the names."

"Some people are just crazy," Kitty said. "I mean... Sabertooth, he's crazy. There's no trying to understand him, I think. But, while he's scary and I never want to meet him in person, you're right, he's not the worst. Because, you know, everyone can look at him and go 'oh, well, he's crazy.' Nobody looks at a guy like that and goes 'yeah, him I want to follow'. But Magneto... People who believe, especially intelligent people who believe are dangerous. Take John, for example. He's not stupid, but he got pulled in because, well, I guess because Magneto is passionate and articulate and so on. Throughout history there have been evil men who got people to believe that what they were doing were right. It's... it's terrifying."

"He's got charisma. Magneto does. Loads of charisma. You can go in knowing exactly what he is, knowing he tried to kill--what, eighty, ninety percent of the world, and he still--he makes it sound like the only reasonable thing to do." Jamie shivered. "He has to be stopped. All of them--they can't be allowed to do what they do."

"Yes," Kitty agreed simply, because it was just that simple, even though the magnitude of the worry that came behind the idea was daunting. Because if they must be stopped then the question comes up of who is going to do it, and she still didn't know how she felt about any of it. Damn Essex.

"You remember," Jamie said awkwardly, "I mentioned before, how I was thinking about maybe training for the X-Men?"

"Mm-hm," Kitty said with a little nod. She sighed softly. "You'd be good at it, I think."

"Heh. Not without a lot of work." He scootched down so he could look her in the eye. "But I won't even start, if you're not happy with it. What's wrong, love?"

"It's not that," she sighed. "Not really. I... I used to be so sure of myself, you know. I was going to grow up and be a physicist and a reasearcher and I'd have a secret identity as an X-man. I'd save people's lives, and then I'd join Dr. Grey and Dr. McCoy and campaign for mutant rights and save even more. Now... Now I don't know what I think. I think you would be an excellent X-man. You're smart and quick and you care and you believe. Anymore... anymore I think the only thing I really believe in is you." By the end of this she wasn't meeting his eyes anymore but was biting her lip as she played with the cuff of his sleeve.

"You can still have all that, though. I mean . . . you can do anything, Kitty. Anything you want. You're so . . ." Jamie gently brushed the hair out of her eyes. "I look back at when we met, when I first got here, and it doesn't just feel like a year and a half, it feels like a whole lifetime. I barely recognize myself-- this dumb, cocky, lonely kid, never been this far away from home before, willing to do just about anything to be noticed. I've grown up a lot, and sure, some of that is just surviving everything that's happened since then, but so much of it was meeting you, wanting to be the kind of person you could fall in love with. You said I'm strong--when I'm not strong enough, you're the one I lean on. You believe in me--well, when I don't believe in myself, I can still go on because I believe in you. If you think I can do this, be an X-Man, then I know I can. Someone as amazing as you, alongside me? I feel like I can do anything."

"You can do anything," Kitty said, looking up again. "It's me I don't know about. I mean... I don't know what I want to be anymore, and I don't know if I could be it, even if I knew."

"You can. Whatever you decide, you'll find a way to make it happen. I've spent the last year and a half paying more attention to you than I've ever paid anybody in my entire life, and this is something I know about you. You don't know what you want to be right now--well, that's okay. You're sixteen. You have time. Someday, you are going to decide, and you're going to go after it with all the brain, all the heart, all the passion, everything I fall in love with every day. And I'll be with you every step." Jamie nudged his head down and kissed her. "And don't you dare chalk all that down to me being biased. That wasn't me being biased. Biased is when I tell you that whatever you end up doing, you'll be the best there ever was."

Kitty laughed softly. "Wait, you mean, I don't have to know what I want to be forever just because I know who I want to be with? What an idea." She kissed him again, simply because he was there and he was wonderful. "Be an X-man if you want to and I will support you, even if I worry about you, too. And I... I'll think about things. I'll work on thinking that maybe I'm half the things you think I am."

"Well, half is a start." Jamie grinned. "Actually, half is probably good enough, since if you thought you were everything I think you are you'd have a giant ego and that's just unattractive. I'll hang around and supply the other half as needed. And, you know, other things." He went in for another kiss to demonstrate some of those other things, but broke off short at a pointed-sounding tapping on the door. "Damn. Looks like it's pokey-proddy time."

"Well, hold that thought, then, love." Kitty grinned, then slid of the bed to go open the door.