Seems like every day is a new adventure WHO: Kitty Pryde and Doug Ramsey WHAT: Doug learns of their dream world, and there are confessions. WHEN: Recently WARNINGS: Mentions of deaths and blood. STATUS: Closed and Complete
Doug was nervous as he made his way to the meeting place and time, feeling that surely there would be things he would learn would be… unwieldy. He had been dreaming more of late, and he was not sure if he wanted to know. But he felt… he felt that he had to know. He was dreaming and becoming someone new. He was changing in ways he had not anticipated. And he wanted to know what else there was to expect.
So he arrived and looked around for Kitty, nervous, but sure he had to do this, that he needed to do this. Dreamer he was, and he needed to be prepared for whatever was coming.
God help him.
***
Mocha and a scone in front of her, Kitty waited for Doug. She’d been dreading this conversation since Doug had resurfaced in her life, but he needed to know. He needed to at least know what to expect and maybe brace himself for it, if he hadn’t already dreamed about it.
Spotting him, she waved. “Doug, over here!”
***
“Kitty!” He headed for her, collecting a coffee as he went, and smiled, warmly, settling opposite her. “How are you?” Delay, delay, delay. He wanted these answers and yet… did he want them? He wasn’t sure what to think.
***
“I’m good. Had an easy morning. No fires to put out or anything which as you know is a rare event for mutants.” She winked at him, and took a sip from her coffee. Kitty wasn’t much for getting right to it either.
***
“Very rare, from the dreams I keep having. Seems like every day is a new adventure.” And what adventures they were having.
"Started dreaming of new stuff recently, like these weird bird like mutants, who are but aren’t related to humanity. And some sort of bad guys? But it just started, so, I don’t even know what to think of it.”
***
“Mansion exploding? Sentinel attack? Magneto? Must be Tuesday.” Kitty toasted him with her cup and the sardonic manner of someone who was used to constant adventures and danger. The mention of the ani-mates made Kitty suddenly wish she had an Irish coffee.
“That new stuff. This….hoo boy.”
***
Doug raised his own glass, and hesitantly took a sip, feeling rather like the man who saluted his own doom. BUt then, he had felt oddly like that since getting these dreams.
“What about it?” He leaned forward. “Are they good guys? Bad guys? Evil necromancers?” He would believe anything, at this point.
***
“It’s complicated. Most of these things are. Their leader, definitely a bad guy, the others, not so much. It’s mostly what you all go through. And what happens to you.” Kitty frowned. She hadn’t been there, but she’d of course heard about it. “It’s all about what happens to you.”
***
Doug inhaled a breath, then as he watched her, curious. That gave him a really bad feeling. She looked… disturbed, and Kitty had never looked like that to him before.
“What happens to me, Kitty, there on that island?” he had an inkling, as he asked, and he paled.
***
How could she say it without sounding like a horrible person? Or without making light of it. There was a danger in that. She was so cynical she’d say something horrible about what happens to her as a joke and then cry alone later. But she couldn’t do that to Doug. Worrying at her drink, Kitty struggled to answer.
She settled on the truth, “You get shot. And you die. And we bury you at the school.” But like Jean, even Doug had eventually risen from the dead. Doug and Illyana and Kurt and Rachel. She’d seen them all die or become lost. But she’d also seen them all come back. The entirety of the X-men too, when they’d faked their deaths. She’d yelled a lot at them when they came back
“By the time I became an adult, there are… a lot of graves at the school, but you were one of the ones that hurt the most.”
***
Doug stared at her, and swallowed. “Shit.” As she explained further, he stared, and rubbed his face. “You sound like I feel. You sound like that life has become more real than this one, partially.”
He spoke on it because it gave him a moment to distance himself from death. His death. He was pale, and as he reached for his cup, his hand was shaking badly enough to nearly knock it over. Fuck.
He died? “Wait. Does that mean I’ll die here, too?” Because that had suddenly occurred to him.
***
In a lot of ways it was more real. Much more real. There were parts of it that had changed who she was and who she was going to be. Kitty couldn’t deny that, so she didn’t bother to any more. She reached over to take his hand and squeezed it. “No, you don’t die here. I’ve died in the dreams, though I got better there. Others have too.”
She supposed she should tell him the rest. “Maybe four years after you died, this powerful mutant, Selene, brought you and a lot of others back. A bid for revenge. She wanted to use you and all our friends that have died against us. We beat her, and when the dust settled you were one of the ones still around.” A happy ending, of sorts.
***
Doug was starting to feel that way, starting to feel like he was the Doug in the dreams more than he was the Doug he had been out of them. It was a weird, twisting way to think, but it felt right. Very right. When Kitty gripped his hand, he felt a flood of all the emotions Dream him had felt.
And he nodded, shivering, remembering some of those memories as if they had happened here. How had he never realized how pretty Kitty was? And smart? Well, he had always known how smart she was, but she was amazing. He smiled idly for a moment before he realized what he was doing. He tore his gaze away blushing hotly.
“Wow. So… I die, but I am resurrected by a bad guy?” He shook his head, amused and amazed. “I don’t know whether to be shocked or confused, or… what.” He chuckled.
***
“You die, and you resurrect. Death has a revolving door in that world,” Kitty told him. She took her hand back, shifting in her chair and smiling tightly. She didn’t want to have to tell him this, but it was definitely better than not knowing it was coming. All the trauma she’d gone through had taken her by surprise, each and every time. “If it was anything like mine, you’ll wake up in a pool of blood with pretty much a brand new body. My scars were gone and everything. Even the one on my knee from when I was four.”
***
“Wow. That’s… that’s wild.” Doug stared, then swallowed. “How do you deal with all of this?” He suddenly felt a surge of empathy for her.
“Who do you talk to?”
And how the hell would he deal with dying and being reborn? How did someone accept that?
***
“Well, you got me. Jean and Emma, Logan. Maybe Laura, maybe not. She has insight but she’s also the one you go to if you want blunt honesty without any of that fancying up of words.” Kitty chuckled, the sound a little dark. “For awhile I… well there was Xi’an. And some others, a couple of whom were wiped from this timeline or are missing. Other friends I’ve made who aren’t necessarily from our dreams. They have their own problems too, and some of them have died and come back. But honestly the only people that can understand what it’s like to be a mutant in our world is another mutant. Even the Avengers don’t really get it. The assholes.”
***
Doug nodded, feeling a little out there, for a moment. “Wow. there are a lot of us here.” He vaguely recognized a few of those names from his dreams. “Wait… isn’t Emma a villain?” He was confused for a moment.
The he nodded at her words. “It sounds like I really have a lot to learn.” her vehemence at the Avengers made him blink. “Why are the Avengers Assholes? And who are they? I don’t… think I recall them.”
***
“Reformed villain. She taught a school with Jubilee and some others for awhile before joining us properlike not long after I came back from my time in London.” Kitty and Emma in the dreams didn’t really get along. Oh, there were times she tried, and she could almost respect her, but she’d never quite trusted her. Here though, they were almost friends.
“Iron Man, the Hulk, Captain America. Those particular guys and the people they team up with. We always respond to help them, but when Mutants need help? They’re nowhere to be found. Genosha was a nation of mutants and when it burned they didn’t help. And when mutants try to deal with our own shit? They show up all high and mighty acting like they know better than us about our own people and start a chain reaction of bad.”
***
“Oh! I haven’t gotten to that part, I guess.” The part of him that was dream!Doug found that confusing, and hard to believe, but Doug shoved back that reaction. He shook his head. So much to come. So much to learn.
He listened as she talked about the Avengers.
He scowled as she finished. “Damn. Sounds like complete idiots and yeah, assholes. Do we at least get to kick their asses?” People like that totally needed to get their asses kicked.
***
“It goes back and forth. What’s worse is they’re supposed to be heroes. The Avengers, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, we’re all on the same side yet…” Kitty shrugged. Mutants got the short end of the stick, and just thinking about it made her angry.
“You won’t get to see Emma reform, not until you come back to life. Which ought to be weird.”
***
Doug shook his head. “So are any of them here? And are they the same, or different here?” He was curious, and felt like he was trying to catch up with a whole new world, which, he supposed, he was. He shook his head.
Then he focussed on her new words. “That… sounds like it. So, death, then resurrection, by a bad guy, but back to life, anyway.”
He blew out a breath of air. “Do we get to reunite, then?”
***
“Yes. Emma, Jean and Logan all dream of the same reality I do, and a couple of them dream of alternate realities I’ve dreamed of. Xi’an was our Xi’an. Laura you don’t know, but she’s from the same timeline.” Alternate realities sounded strange to most people but was just another thing to Kitty.
“When you came back I was….gone. Lost on a mission on space. I was phased inside a giant bullet and unable to get out. I didn’t come back for months after you returned. And I spent a lot of time stuck in a chamber and then a special suit until my powers got fixed when Haleena slit my throat and killed me temporarily. We didn’t really talk much. Too much was going on.”
****
“I feel a little lost, but, okay.” He rubbed his forehead. “It’s nice not to feel alone in this, at least. And that means Dream!me stays dumb. That me had a crush on you the size of a Sentinel.” And always had. And Doug, well, he was trying not to feel that way. Kitty was his friend. That sort of thing would be inappropriate.
Doug sat forward abruptly, anger flashing in his eyes for a moment as she mentioned someone slashing her throat. He almost growled out the next words. “Who is Haleena and did she get her ass handed to her?” He got control a second later, pulling back a little, and nodded.
“Sorry.”
***
“The puppy crush was mutual,” Kitty assured him. Doug would have been a better choice than Piotr, if she’d had to make a choice. But that was in the past, and surrounded by a swamp of good and bad things and a life she’d tried to live to the fullest. She was just sad that Doug missed out on so much time. He’d deserved a lot better. “Rahne had a thing for you too. I don’t think she ever quite got over it as well as I did.” Granted, she’d phased into his grave to make sure Douglock wasn’t actually him but she decided to tell him about Douglock a little bit later.
Kitty touched her throat, eyeing him worriedly. “These aliens brought Piotr back after he died. Used him to lure us to their homeworld. Launched a bullet the size of Manhattan at the Earth. I was able to get inside and make it pass through the planet. After Magneto brought me back to Earth I was stuck in a phased mode. Couldn’t touch a thing, and no Dr. Doom to help me this time. She had some kind of dagger, and performed a ritual. The ritual needed a sacrifice, but it gave me a new body, basically. Let me stop her boyfriend from killing some of the others in an act of revenge. Lots of political crap. Still woke up in a pool of my own blood but it healed instantly.”
***
Doug was startled at that, and he wished, a little, that maybe that was something that could have been. He nodded to her, listening, and he blew out a long breath. He shook his head as he listened, angry but relieved that she would be okay.
“I’m glad you healed, and are okay.” He patted her shoulder, and nodded. “It’s weird. I feel like I feel the things Doug did, that Doug, I mean…” He shook his head again. “This is so confusing. I feel like… I’ve always liked you, but now I feel… his or my feelings for you.’” he rubbed his face, trying to not think about it, pulling back a little.
“I’m kind of worried now… when you died in your dreams, did it affect you when you awoke, not dying, but… like… elsewise?”
***
“You’ll get through it. Believe me, it’s hard to fight through feelings like that, but they fade.” Kitty gave him a knowing smile. Getting over Pete. All of them. It had been… “It’s a process. I…still like you, Doug. Just not that way.” She knew how much that was going to hurt, but she thought it would hurt him more if she wasn’t up front about it. She’d learned too many lessons about feelings and she knew what rejection felt like.
“What do you mean? The.. issue where my powers got stuck ‘on’ transferred to the waking world. The fix did too. I know my throat was slit open but I wasn’t conscious for that part as it healed up. But I’ve had friends who have dream scars. I had old dream scars that were erased when I died and new ones that have appeared since. At least one person on the Network has lost a limb.”
***
Doug nodded, listening, closing his eyes, and smiled sadly, hearing those words. He knew that the him in this world had never felt like that about her, but the Doug from the dreams did, a lot, and hearing her say that… it lanced right in. His eyes pricked with tears and he forced them down, forced them back, taking a long breath. ”Sorry.”
He started to speak, but she went on and then he nodded, waving a hand at her words, thankful for a distraction, but her words made him pale. That was a little serious.
“Like that, really. Really? Lost a limb? Holy smokes, Pryde!” He shook his head. What was he getting into?
He looked down at his hands and wondered if he would get dream scars. That would be… weird. And it was still better to focus on than the other thing.
“Okay. So, dream memories, dream scars or limbs lost, death and resurrection, time travel, and lots of craziness. What else should i know?” Just keep pushing and focusing on something else.
“Oh! And we should work on a computer soon, because my brain won't shut up about it. I got one, but you said something about tech that was more advanced a while back and… yes?”
***
"It's okay," Kitty said. She was sorry too. Kitty folded her hands on the table. She was pretty sure she covered the big stuff. Various events would be self-explanatory if and when they happened. She still remembered the tribbles.
"My dreams gifted me with Shi'ar tech. A computer, the Blackbird, some other things. There's also tech from other dreamers I've got to play with, though nothing as advanced as the control systems from the Institute."
***
Doug nodded as he shook his head. What a freaking insane life he had, here and in the dreams, both!
“Yeah? That is awesome! I have a smaller computer I am working with, state of the art, here, but… I would love to get my hands on that tech. I hated computers before, and now I can’t hardly pull myself away if I start working on one.” He shook his head again, mystified, confused, and not a little bit scared.
***
“I’ll get you access to it,” Kitty promised. “I’ve been working on replicating the tech, I think with your help we can make one just for you.” She was kind of possessive of her computer system. She’d had it for nearly as long as she’d been dreaming and it had proven to be indispensable in fighting the fights that she’d needed to fight.
“It’ll be fun!”
***
“Thank you.” He smiled at her. “It sounds like it. I can’t wait to get started.”
At least something in this life seemed fun. Sounded amazing, really. He looked forward to it, to what would be. What could be. It ought to be an incredible adventure.