Quitting Time

[goawayleavemealone]

Pete wipes his face as he heads from his office down to the lab. After the day he's had, he's itching for a cigarette, but resisting; hesitant to break a three day streak without one.

He'd spent the better part of the day helping to place the hybrids safely, make sure each one was taken care of, while simultaneously keeping an eye out for something else out of the ordinary, trying not to be too distracted to notice something else in the works.

Leads had been a bust, which was equally frustrating.

He steps into the lab, finding that Alistaire had gone for the day, and that Kitty was still sitting in front of a group of laptops, slumped over, fast asleep.

Pete sighs deeply and steps over, kneeling down next to her chair and patting her knee gently. "Oi, Pryde."

Comments

[enduring_pryde]

"Wonderful." She takes her coffee and takes a sip. "I should have you know that I am still a cheap date." She still preferred the simple pleasures. "Do you ever think about what might have happened if you hadn't left Muir?"

[goawayleavemealone]

He freezes for a moment, caught off guard by the question, and opens his mouth, thinking it through.

"Sometimes," he admits. "But I know what woulda happened. We'da worked it out for a little bit longer. Tried to make it last, but...but we were a mess, Pryde, and you woulda wound up leaving to go back to the X-Men one way or the other."

He knows that's true. She had been too young, and he'd been too volatile. They hadn't been good for each other then.

He starts walking again. "We can catch a cab a few blocks from here."

[enduring_pryde]

"Me too. You're right. We both had growing up to do. I wasn't in a very good head space while we were together. I hit rock bottom when my dad died."

She runs a hand in her hair. "I used to have this reoccurring dream of you showing back up in my life. Having some business in New York. And you end up taking me back to England." She smiles. "The reality of it was way better than the dream." She raises an eyebrow. "We can also Uber."

[goawayleavemealone]

"Rather actually keep the cabbies in work," Pete mutters as they keep walking.

He used to think about what it would be like for Kitty to show back up in his life, out of the blue. He used to think about finding her and trying to pick up where they left off.

But the truth is that he never really know if that's what she wanted, of if he'd just be getting in the way of her new life.

[enduring_pryde]

"That's fair," she says with a nod and follows his lead for the few blocks.

"You know, I spent more of my adolescence in the UK than I did with the X-Men. It's kind of a place for the misfits of the misfits. Not just people who are Mutants, but people who don't know how to live normal lives, or can't live normal lives." They weren't at a time in society where someone like Kurt could live with humans. There was more anger and hostility toward them more than ever.

"I've known for a long time that I want more in my life than just a costume. It's seductive to so many of us. You can lose yourself in it. But never really me. I've always been the poster child for integration. An example of someone who had the Xavier education and can show people we aren't very different. I was brought up for this. I've seen a lot of different sides to the issue. I've talked with Magneto for hours about this very topic. And Logan. Ororo. Scott. Kurt. I only keep going back because I didn't find myself fitting anywhere else. But I did on Muir. I finally got somewhere."

[goawayleavemealone]

He lets her talk, and wonders what his life would have been like had he told his family he was a mutant before he left home.

The "I'm leaving now, thanks for all the bloody memories and oh by the way I'm a fucking mutant" thing he'd pulled before walking out the door of his parents' house had been...

Well.

"I never really fit in anywhere, either," he comments. "But I don't think it's a specifically mutant problem. Common among mutants, yeah, but...it always seemed more of a people problem to me."

He gazes at her. "Muir was good. You seemed happy there, for a bit."

[enduring_pryde]

"It's not strictly a Mutant problem but being a Mutant can exacerbate the problem. Not only do you have to deal with the normal changes everybody goes through, but oh look suddenly now you have the power to kill everybody you love if you don't learn how to control your powers. Or your ability is pretty mundane. You are a master at languages. You can create holographic matrix sculptures. You can talk to plants. Still. We really are different for our abilities but we have every right to live a mostly normal life if we choose to. And that's truly what I would like." She smiles softly. "A mostly normal life with ypu."

[goawayleavemealone]

"I don't know if you noticed, Pryde, but my life isn't even close to normal," Pete tells her. "I run the creepy division of British Intelligence. I was married to a faery from Avalon, for Christ's sake."

He turns to her. "To say nothing of the fact that you'd be dead bored if you lived a 'mostly normal life.' It may sound alright right now, in light of everything that's happened, but you-" he points to her with his coffee cup. "You are the biggest adrenaline junkie I know. You'd be happy for a bit, but you'd get restless, and I'd-"

Wake up one day to a note that just said 'sorry' he doesn't say.

"Anyways. Point is, be careful what you wish for."

[enduring_pryde]

"Well, then, I would like your kind of normal." She tilts her head. "Pete, what makes you think that you aren't enough for me? Someone, finally, who can actually keep up with me. I've never had to explain myself to you--or really have been left wondering about your feelings. You actually see me, as I am. I'm not some creepy, fetishized version of myself to you."

[goawayleavemealone]

"Because I wasn't for the last decade," he points out. "Because as much as I-" love you, want you, want this - "As appealing as this sounds, it just seems a bit too good to be true. I wanna help you, Pryde. I want you to be able to move past all this bollocks that's happened with Quill and Rasputin and whatever else, because I want you to be happy. I'm just not as certain as you seem to be right now that I'm the person who's going to make you happy. As much as I want to be."

He sighs and looks her in the eyes. "I love you. Always have. Never went away, much as I wanted it to. I love you because you're too smart for your own bloody good, and one time you changed your outfit seven times before you were ready to go down the pub, which was insane, and you have a terrible sense of humor that involves binary language puns I don't understand. Because you still do the thing with your feet from when you took ballet lessons as a kid when you're waiting in a queue, and you really like pickles, and you don't care if they give you bad breath. I love all those things, and to be perfectly honest, it scares the shit out of me."

He shuts up after that, looking down at his shoes.

[enduring_pryde]

She sneaks her hand into his. "I hit some lows in the last decade too. Done some stuff that I'm not proud of, but who I am now, having come out of all of that, I like the person that I am now." She blinks. "Why does it have to be too good to be true? Look at Meg and Brian and all the crap they dealt with to get to where they are now! We can have that too!"

She nods. "I am, for the most part. Quill made me realise I wanted something more serious than he could give me. And Piotr made me realise that I was settling for something less than what I actually want. You, you idiot, you make me happy."

She smiles at his run down of what about her he likes. "I love when you smile when you think nobody is looking. And the expression on your face when you tell me that you love me. I love when you get flustered and your eyes turn this darker shade of blue that I didn't know existed. I love that outside of Logan, you are the most determined motherfucker I have ever met."

She puts down her computers and her coffee and touches his chin, giving it a t little nudge to lift his head so he could look into her eyes. "Hi." She smiles.

[goawayleavemealone]

"Hi," he responds, meeting her eyes. "You do realize that if you keep goin' with all of this, you'll never be rid of me, yeah? I gave up easy last time, because it's what you needed, but if we do this...if we start this up again, I'm never, ever gonna leave you alone."

[enduring_pryde]

"I do realise that. What part of 'the most determined motherfucker outside of Logan that I know' that you didn't understand? And it isn't like in the last thirteen years you have really left me alone. Let's be real here."

[goawayleavemealone]

"I have," he defends, wrinkling his nose. "The occasional slightly drunk phone call doesn't count. To say nothing of the fact that you almost married two other men, and I said nothing. I was even babysitting the Braddock kid while they were away watching you leave the Tin Can at the altar."

[enduring_pryde]

"Butt dialing doesn't count. Drunk dialing does count. It was ten times in thirteen years. And usually around our anniversary."

She nods. "In a period of six months. Yes I did. But you're neither one of them. It's actually not a you or them scenario. That's what got Piotr so riled: he thought he was in some kind of completion with you. He isn't. Both of those choices came out of desperation. Pete, do you know why I broke things off with Quill?"

[goawayleavemealone]

"In my defense that's less than once a year," he points out. He doesn't comment on the fact that she's kept track of just how many times he's called and when.

Pete shakes his head, moving closer to her. "No. From all accounts you two seemed pretty bloody perfect together."

[enduring_pryde]

"That's still a lot of calls from one's ex. But I took most of them, didn't I?" And never mentioned their anniversary unless Pete did.

"There were trust issues. He wanted me to withhold information from Gamora and the other Guardians and it turned them all against him. I couldn't be in that environment anymore. I tried going back to Chicago but Ororo came back to convince me to join the X-Men again." She sighs. "I'm tired if dealing with toxic, narcissistic people and that's pretty much everyone in the X-Men."

[goawayleavemealone]

Pete grins wryly and gently brushes a lock of hair behind her ear. "How long have I been tellin' you that the X-Men were toxic wankers?" he asks, amused.

[enduring_pryde]

"For ages. There are some good people there, and others who have been corrupted. But there is no oversight, no governing board telling them what they can and cannot do. And it really isn't up to me to save everybody's collective asses from the fire." She presses her lips into a frown. "I mean, even when Excalibur wasn't government sponsored, we were still following the mandate of the Captain Britain Corps."

[goawayleavemealone]

He nods, not admitting that he'd worried about her being back with a group of people who had no checks and balances and basically felt they could do whatever they liked.

"Lucky for you, I've got the Home Office up my arse most of the time." He gives her a grin. "British Intelligence even has an HR department."

[enduring_pryde]

"The Guardians are scrapers but they have no oversight either. And then throw in running into cosmic-level beings at a greater frequency than on Earth." She nods. "I like structure. I like working within the confines of a governing body. I don't like Mutant Registration Acts but those have never been a problem here. There are plenty of private citizens who are Mutants here." And if you decide to be a hero, they can pull you for service at any time.

"Oh I know. I've ran into SHIELD's HR in the past. The structures aren't thst different." She was an engineer and a dancer. She loved how things got together.

[goawayleavemealone]

He nods. "Then I suppose you're in the right place."

[enduring_pryde]

She smiles. "Thank you." She puts her arms around him. "And look at you, the leader of this fine operation. You've come a long way since the angry and brooding spook I met more than a decade ago."

[goawayleavemealone]

He rolls his eyes. "Believe me, you don't need to remind me of how much of a bloody idiot I was back then. I was a mess."

He gazes into her eyes. "And you helped me. So thanks for that. From the older, wiser idiot, on behalf of the younger, much more broken idiot you used to date."

[enduring_pryde]

"You were coming off from Black Air. You still needed to get out of the clutches of the toxics." Michelle Scicluna was bad news with a capital 'b'.

"You're welcome." She reaches a hand up and traces his lips with a fingertip.