InsaneJournal

Who: Kitty (open)
What: Watching old home movies
Where: Third floor common room
When: A little after five, Thursday
Rating: G


Early Thursday morning, earlier than she usually woke up, Kitty Pryde took up a post on in the third floor common room. Curled up on the couch, she sat so still that in the darkness of the room, she could almost have been sleeping. She had piled her damp hair on top of her head and dressed in fairly comfortable clothes--jeans, a cardigan, and a slightly faded shirt that read HELP ME OBI-WAN KENOBI! YOU'RE MY ONLY HOPE in big block letters. A movie played on the tv screen opposite her, providing the room's only illumination since the shades had been drawn when she arrived and she hadn't bothered to open them.



In the same moment, she yawned and pulled her sweater more closely around her, but then she became perfectly still again, blue eyes trained on the tv. On the screen, her father was squinting against the sun in a Parisian cafe, answering her flurry of questions as he sipped a glass of wine and picked at a salad. A smile fleetingly crossed her face when her dad pointed to the left and the camera swung in that direction, only to return to her father's face as he ate one of her fries.

The volume was so low that she couldn't hear what anyone on the tape was saying, which was just as well since she knew it mostly by heart anyway. When the French part of the video ended, the screen blinked suddenly onto a German city. Another trip, another visitor, another string of happy memories.

She didn't need the tapes to remember those things, but sometimes it just felt good to watch them--especially when she woke up too early, her mind primed for the day but her body screaming for rest. It wasn't nightmares that woke her, it was a feeling that she'd left something undone, that there was more she could be doing. But she was too tired to be DOING anything right now, especially after her failed attempt to run a few miles and go back to bed. All she wanted to do was watch these records of the past. To see that the people she'd known, people she'd loved, were happy once. Sometimes it was more to revisit all those familiar sights, places she might never see again--and certainly not as they were when she visited. And other days, when she felt cabin feverish, it was nice to be able to hear the noise of a city, the sound of cars and people and motion. Today wasn't a day she'd wanted that--she'd chosen (and muted) the tape carefully.

A shoebox on the coffee table held the rest of them, labeled in a jumble of names and dates and locations...museums, streets, small towns, big cities. And underneath a few layers, there was the stack of tapes marked JAPAN and only dated, bound together with rubber-bands like they were being punished. It used to be that the shoebox rarely made it out of the closet, but it appeared more frequently than ever now that Scott was gone. And it wasn't like she was unique in her struggle with unconsciousness--she knew that every single other person in the mansion needed a solid night of sleep as much as she did now.

Kitty tugged the band loose from her hair and it fell around her shoulders, mostly dry now and giving off a fresh herbal smell, as she grabbed the remote and fast-forwarded through a long sequence through a German castle, hitting play again only when she and her companion stepped outside into the castle garden. With a sigh, she curled up a little tighter and watched herself get lost in the wet tangles of leaves and trees, day-dreaming about a time when she'd once again get a solid night's sleep.