by Berzerker_prime

Summary: Finnally past the cheese and getting into the story resolution!  Time travel havoc ensues with the space-time continuum leading the Morlocks to believe there might just be a way out of everything; Kitty!

AN:

Wow!  You like it, you really like it!  Thanks to all who have R/R'd my fic!  ^_^  Special shout-out to The Phantom who seems to be reading my mind!  ^_~
After this one, I'm looking at one, maybe two more chapters...
... unless that sequal idea pans out... ^_^;

Well, on with the chapter.  Enjoy, minna-san!

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 “I’m telling you, there’s gonna be another one in about two minutes!” Forge’s voice echoed out of the doorway to his tiny, disheveled lab.  “We gotta warn everyone so they don’t freak out this time!”

 “Like the last time we warned them and everyone freaked out for no reason?” Mylene bit back at him.

 Kurt made his way to Forge’s lab, Kitty following close at hand to make sure that he didn’t fall over or something equally desirable.  When he reached the door frame, he leaned on it, partly to steady himself and partly to hide the fact that he needed to.  Kitty was just behind him, looking in at the conversation going on inside.

 “Jack,” said Forge, “you know that I know what I’m talking about.  Talk some sense into her.”

 “Vhat’s going on here?” Kurt asked of the trio.

 “Nightcrawler!” all three exclaimed at once.

 “Forge?” Kurt asked.

 “Another space-time reality distortion is coming our way.  The probability is next to certain.”

 “Um… like, excuse me,” Kitty put in.

 “Sure, Forge, just like last time,” Mylene continued, then turned to Kurt, “the last thing we need right now is a panic.”

 “K, will you talk some sense into the both of them?” Jack chimed up, sourly.

 “Like… um… hello?” Kitty once again interjected.

 But it was no use, Kurt stood there stupidly as the three of them, Jack, Mylene, and Forge, all broke down into a free-for-all shouting match.

 Suddenly, everyone stopped.  Kitty was perplexed.  She stood there watching them all, each one seemingly staring off into space.  She was about to give Kurt a nudge, when they all came out of whatever trance they were in, moaning and holding their heads.

 “See?” Forge directed at Mylene.  “I told ya’.”

 Kurt took his chance to act his usual, cheery self.  “Why vasn’t I told about zis!?!” he snapped at the three of them, mainly at Jack.

 Jack and Mylene were staring at each other as though some giant weight had just been dropped on their shoulders.

 “D… did you see what I saw?” Jack asked her.

 “Y… yeah…” Mylene stammered back, “you and I… we had a…”

 Kitty’s face twisted into a rather irate looking scowl.  “Hey!” she exclaimed, finally commanding everyone’s attention.  “Like, what the heck are you guys talking about?  What just happened?”

 While everyone looked at her as if she’d just sprouted horns, Forge seemed to take a particular interest in her reaction.  He rushed over to a small pile of seemingly inane junk, dug around for a bit, and pulled out some small instrument.  He rushed back over to Kitty and waved it in front of her.

 “Tell me what you saw,” he said.

 “You were all arguing and then, like, everything just stopped and you guys all stared off into thin air.”

 “So, you didn’t see anything… unusual?”

 “What should I have seen?”

 “Hmm,” was Forge’s reply.  He brought the instrument up closer to his face and fiddled with it a bit.  “Aha!” he finally exclaimed.  “Something else I was right about!”

 “Do you ever get tired of hearing yourself talk?” Mylene bit at him before Kurt could send a scowl her way.

 “Vhat is it, Forge?” Kurt asked.

 “She doesn’t fully exist in our space-time.”

 “And, just, like, what does that mean?” Kitty asked.

 “It means you’re not affected by the space-time reality distortions,” Forge blurted out, extremely excited.

 Kitty blinked at him several times.  “Maybe you should, like, start at the beginning?”

 There was suddenly a great deal of commotion and at least one voice wailing about something from the Morlocks’ commons area.  Mylene rolled her eyes.  “Sounds like the natives are restless,” she said, “I’ll be back in a few.”

 Forge whapped himself upside the forehead as Mylene left.  He dug around in another pile of invention parts and finally produced a CD ROM disk.  It was another few moments of scrounging that finally produced a computer to play it on.  “This is data I’ve been taking for the last fifteen years,” he explained, calling up a file, “the exact times of each and every space-time distortion aside from the first one.  Obviously, I wasn’t ready for that one.  Take a look.”

 Kitty looked over Forge’s shoulder at the data only to find that fully a half of it was written in Greek characters.  She sent Forge another funny look and he smiled nervously.

 “Take two,” he said as Kurt and Jack both sighed.  “You see,” he continued, “we’ve been having these odd interruptions in the course of time ever since you disappeared.  They were hardly noticeable at first, but the interesting thing about the first one was that-“

 “You vere still zere, in ze Cafeteria,” Kurt interrupted, telling Kitty.

 Forge nodded.  “’Crawler’s got it surrounded.  The first one of these things was just a few minutes after you got sucked up into the Chrono Hole.  As time went on, the interruptions became more and more noticeable.  There were more and more things out of place and just generally different about the world.”

 “But it wasn’t until about ten years ago that we figured it out,” Jack stated, “durin’ one of the damned things, I caught sight of a world where the Terra-Mutant wars never happened… an’ I spotted you.”

 Forge put his hands on Kitty’s shoulders, excitedly.  “It was an alternate reality, Kitty!  One where you never disappeared, setting off the Terra-Mutant wars!  Where Mutants and normals were living in peace together.  All because the world learned about us in the right way.”

 “Zis reality vas never supposed to happen,” Kurt said, “and time is reflecting it.  And ze key to it all is you.”

 “Whoa, wait!” Kitty exclaimed.  “So, you’re saying that if I can, like, go back to the moment I came from, none of this,” she motioned around the room to indicate the general world, “will have, like, happened at all?”

 “That’s the theory, anyway,” said Forge, “and I’ve been working on it as an assumption.”  He began to dig in his piles again.

 “Oh brothah,” sighed Jack, “here we go again.”  He crossed his arms and waited.

 Forge brought another CD ROM out into the room and popped it into the computer.  “I used the data I had on the space-time distortions and extrapolated what it would take to actually make a rift that we could send matter through and designed a device that could make a rift that size.  I haven’t been able to build it, yet, but it is possible.”

 “So you’re saying that you might be able to send me back through?” Kitty asked.

 “Bingo.”

 From Jack’s stifled chuckling, Kitty got the feeling that he was a bit skeptical.  She was hard pressed not to noticed the particularly frustrated glare Forge sent his way.

 “Oh sure, laugh it up,” Forge snapped at the ice thrower, “I’ve been right about the distortions, what’s your problem with this, now?”

 “Most of the distortions,” Jack corrected, “you can’t deny that there’s a risk involved.”

 “Of course I don’t.  That’d be stupid.  But I can tell you it’s pretty minimal.  ‘Crawler, say something to him.”

 Kurt took his cue and sent a rather nasty glare Jack’s way, causing the younger Morlock to cringe.  He made his way across the room and got right up into Jack’s face, despite the fact that he was a full head shorter.

 “Now, K-“ Jack began, backing up into the wall.

 “I told you to stay down here!” Kurt practically shouted.  “You disobeyed a direct order!”

 Jack finally collected himself and sent a glare back Kurt’s way.  He pushed on his shoulder and made his way past back out into the middle of the room.  “So, what’cha gonna do, K, flog me?  You shouldn’t have gone up there by yourself in the first place and you know it!  If it weren’t for the three of us, you and Lycanthrope would never have made it back!”

 “Zat is beside ze point!” Kurt snapped back, turning away as though preparing to leave.

 “Don’t you bamf away from me!” Jack demanded, grabbing Kurt’s tail.  “We’re not done yet!”

 Several things happened, then.  Kitty, who had moved next to Forge to stay out of Kurt and Jack’s way, sensed Forge tighten up.  He seemed to have been bored up until that point, as though the same thing had happened over and over again between Nightcrawler and Blizzard.  Obviously, there was something different about it this time.  Meanwhile, Kurt turned back to Jack, whipping his tail out of Jack’s hand and glaring a glare that could flatten several small cities.

 “Vhat did you say to me?” he said in a disturbingly calm voice.

 “You heard me, ‘Crawler,” Jack responded in kind, grabbing hold of Kurt’s left hand in lieu of his tail, “I’m sick and tired of you ‘portin’ away off by yourself when someone’s got a point to make to you.  Wolverine never did that and if you ask me, he made a better leader anyway!”

 Kurt gritted his teeth and grabbed onto Jack’s arm so that they were both holding on to each other.  His other hand clenched into a fist.  “Don’t ever talk about zem like zat.  You don’t know anyzing about being a leader, you vet-eared, hormone ridden child!”

 “Go get a shave, you blue furred, angst ridden freak!”

 And they all heard Kurt do something they had never heard him do before; he growled, baring his teeth.  That was right before he pulled on Jack’s arm and followed through with a fist toward his midriff.  Jack managed to side step the punch and tackled Kurt with his full weight, sending them both to the ground.  Kurt kicked up with his feet, sending Jack over his head and crashing into the table, breaking several pieces of invention.  All the while, neither one let go of the other’s hand.

 “This is getting, like serious!” Kitty exclaimed.

 “You’re telling me!” Forge agreed.  “It took me a week to build that!”

 “Well, what’d it do?”

 “Dunno.  I was contemplating pushing the button to find out.”

 Kitty gave him a confused look, then shook her head as if to clear it. “N-never mind that!  Do something to stop them!”

 Kurt and Jack were still going at it, tossing punches, blocking, dodging and generally trying to pound each other without mercy.
 “No way, Kitty-cat!  I’m not getting into the middle of that!”

 “Oh, fine, I’ll do it!”

 Resolutely, she walked over to the pair of still brawling Morlocks.  They were both just pulling back a fist to throw when she stepped in between them, kicking in her phasing abilities just to be safe.  Kurt’s punch came to a stop just short of Kitty’s face and when she looked down she found Jack’s fist protruding out of her dark green chest plate.  All the action stopped, finally, and both mutants looked at Kitty as if having noticed she was in the room for the first time.

 “Do you mind?” Kitty sniped at Jack, tossing a look that spoke volumes over her shoulder to the ice thrower.

 Slowly, laughing a nervous laugh, Jack pulled back his fist.  He and Kurt let go of each others’ arms and they both sat down hard on the floor, puffing for breath.

 “Okay,” said Kitty, “if you two are done, like, hosing down the place with testosterone, I’ve got a bone to pick with the both of you.”  She turned around to face Jack first, getting right down into his face.  Startled, he backed up a bit.  “You need to stop acting like all the stuff that happened in the past doesn’t matter.  You’re his second, you’re supposed to help, like, keep things together around here.  So start, like, doing what’s gotta be done.”  She turned back to Kurt next.  “And you need to start acting like a leader and less like the tantrum throwing little kid I’ve seen since I, like, got here.  Why don’t you try, like, listening to people when they say you’re being an idiot, for a change.”

 Her own little tirade finished, Kitty stalked out of the room, slamming the door shut on her way past.  Forge carefully made his way around the room, avoiding Kurt and Jack and opened the door to leave.  Before he exited, he cast the two of them a shrug, then followed Kitty, closing the door.

 Kurt and Jack both sighed, still sitting on the floor.

 “Hell hath no fury…” Jack mumbled.

 “Like a voman scorned,” Kurt agreed.

 “Hairball.”

 “Brain freeze.”

 Kitty’s head phased in through the door again and she glared at the pair of them.  “I heard that,” she said, then phased out again.

 Kurt and Jack flinched at Kitty’s sudden re-intrusion, then looked at each other and sighed.

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Well, I still gotta write the next chapter.  I'll get it done as soon as I can, promise!  Till then, ja ne!
^_^