Down down baby, down in the center of this town. [AU & RW]
It was mid-afternoon when Kitty woke up. Groggily, she stretched out on her bed and rolled over onto her stomach, toes curling out from the bottom of her blankets as she peered around the room. God, how late had she stayed up last night messing around on the internet? Waaaay too late. Molly was nowhere to be seen. Probably off implementing her complimentary buddy system, which would be her son -- Deacon was as good of a guard as any, and from the hard stares that Kitty had gotten her way whenever she followed Molly into a room, much preferable to herself. Oh well. The system wasn't a bad idea, but so far Kitty wasn't convinced of its effectiveness. People were still disappearing periodically, and if sticking together prevented them from getting snatched into the ether, the fact remained that no one could be with another person one hundred percent of the time. Quite honestly, Kitty was already enjoying the few minutes alone. Sometimes a girl just needed a little bit of breathing space.

Closing her eyes, she inhaled deeply and smiled to herself. Peace and quiet was always a nice way to start her morning. ...day. Whatever.

It took a few seconds for Kitty to notice that subtle sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She opened her eyes just in time to see the mattress rising slowly past her chin. It caught her by surprise -- this sort of thing used to happen to her all the time when she was younger, but it had been years since the last time she'd accidentally phased. In the early days, she'd start off with a blinding headache and suddenly find herself downstairs, or in the basement, without any warning. Her powers had been weak and erratic then, too new for her to control. Things were a lot different now, though. Kitty had long since mastered the art of staying solid when she wanted to be solid. It wasn't easy to slip between the two states, tangible and intangible. She was moving her very molecules, yet somehow remaining contained at the same time, and it had taken her a lot of practice to figure out how to turn on and off. How to move while her body met no resistance from the air around her. Sure, from time to time it was almost an unconscious response on her behalf, but that was due to her training and experience, not some random trigger in her brain. When people asked her if she was afraid of falling through her bed in her sleep or forgetting how to change back, she usually smiled at them. That sort of thing just didn't happen, she'd explain. It wasn't very likely.

But it was happening.

She was suddenly looking at the stuffing inside the mattress, and then the floor beneath her bed, cluttered with shoes and -- was that a dust bunny? -- and Kitty sighed to herself, internally. Might as well wait until she fell to the next level unless she wanted to get a sneaker in the stomach. The hardwood and carpet passed quickly, and she twisted her body gracefully in the air so that her feet were aimed towards the ground below, the second floor. Resident's wing. Well, maybe this was her body's way of telling her to get out of bed already. It was so strange, though. She hadn't even felt the switch. No headache, no unexpected shock, nothing that would have sent her into a defensive reaction like this. She definitely would have to talk to her advisor about this after she got dressed and got herself some coffee. Or not Aurora, she amended, maybe Cal or Xavier. Someone who could poke around in her brain to make sure everything was okay. The floor was swiftly approaching from below, so she braced herself to phase back into solid matter and touch down...but her feet felt nothing as they passed seamlessly through, and she felt a spike of alarm. This wasn't good. Assuming there really was something wrong with her brain, she -- well, how was she going to stop herself? She couldn't slow down. If anything, she was speeding up, gathering momentum as she fell through the staff floor. No one else could stop her descent. She was untouchable in this form. Speedsters couldn't lay a hand on her, no kind of barrier or change in the atmosphere would disrupt her molecules, and all kinds of energy were worthless against her. Maybe, maybe a telepath could trigger the change in her head for her, but even Xavier had expressed difficulties accessing her mind when she was in this form. A phaser on the exact same frequency as her could maybe catch her, sure, but she'd never tried that and there was no guarantee it would work. In fact, the only force that had any effect on her at all when she was intangible was gravity. Maybe Kate... "Hey!" There was no one in sight to hear her, but she spoke up out of desperate instinct. Shouted. "HEY! HELP, someone! Someone get --" but there was no point going on, because she had fallen through the residential wing and concrete didn't project voices very well.

Helplessly, she watched the pipes that sped past her beneath the building. Some went right through her body, undisturbed by her presence. Like she wasn't even there, which as far as tangible objects were concerned, she wasn't. The sub-level was a bright alternative, but she only saw the metal corridors for a moment before they were gone, having flown past in a heartbeat. Underneath was bedrock. Solid, compressed layers of foundation meant to withstand decades of mutant teenagers with unstable powers, all-out warfare, the jet engines of the Blackbird. It was vast and dark and Kitty knew, better than anyone, devoid of oxygen.

And she continued to fall.

How long had she gone without breathing? How long would it take her to get back to the surface? There were hundreds of feet of rock above her head and every second that number was growing. If she went tangible now -- if whatever switch in her brain that had gone off suddenly came back online, with as little warning as it had before -- she would be crushed. No, not crushed: encapsulated in the earth. Buried alive. No one would know that she was down there. She would be trapped without air to breathe, suffocated within minutes most likely, cold and alone somewhere deep in the upper crust of the earth. How far down was she now? The sensation of falling had ceased. No light meant that she couldn't see the blur of colors in the gradations of earth, and she wasn't sure which way was up or down anymore. Turning made no difference. It didn't matter whether she was sinking feet-first or swan-diving. The end result was going to be the same either way.

Kitty was going to die. Either she was going to run out of air while falling and pass out, or she was going to become tangible again and run out of air, or she was going to simply fall the until she hit the solid core at the center of the Earth. Nearly four thousand miles of rock and molten lava, the mantle and outer and inner and she wasn't sure she could handle that. Falling through fire and the blood of volcanoes, her molecules mixing with liquid metal and so much pressure from all the weight of it, how was she supposed to keep it together through it all? What if it was too much for her and she simply disintegrated, her body spreading into billions of tiny atoms indistinguishable from the matter around it, lost forever in the heart of the planet?

She felt the heat before she saw the light streaming through the cracks in the rock, and she twisted up in a little human ball, holding herself together with every single ounce of will left in her body. Katherine Anne Pryde was going to be the only person to ever see the center of the Earth, and she was never going to survive to tell a soul.

When Kitty woke up, it was with a shriek that could be heard through her hallway and the one below, because the instant after she shot upright in bed, she fell through. Rahne would find himself with one very shaken teenager in his room.
[ NARRATIVE ]