#i made a metaphor about the liberty bell and it was a mitski song and that's just the power of my brain

[chicagospryde-a]

The Liberty Bell is a Replica || Piotr & Kitty

---HOUSED IN ITS ORIGINAL WALLS. WHAT: Kitty visits Piotr ( @colossalguy ). They have a healthy and fun conversation. No one dies and everything is as it should be. WHERE: Exactly where they should be. WHEN: Exactly when it needs to be. WHO: Exactly who has to be there.  WARNINGS: death, suicidal ideation, gore, violence, carl, depression, internalized homophobia, nothing is wrong and everything is exactly as it should be. 

       PIOTR sits up, his back aches with all the bending and picking up. His boxes of things are not particularly heavy, not for a man that knows all about fighting and carrying weights, but there is something about moving in to a place that is always taxing on the body. He’s thankful that Carl is here. And also not so thankful Carl decided to upturn half a hot sauce bottle on his bean burrito. He spends most of the time in Piotr’s washroom as the Russian works to set up his furniture and move his things around. “I am glad they paid for housing, New York is not kind with rent,” Piotr laughs. He knows Carl will laugh too, which is the only reason he tells the joke. It is not funny to him. It is not funny to know he profits from this life, it is not funny to think of all the people he has hurt. He picks up an old framed photo of him and Kitty, smiling beside the liberty bell (after hours in a place they shouldn’t be) and shoves it back into the box. He kicks that box to the corner and moves on to the one with his plates. When the floorboards creak behind him, he tells another joke he thinks Carl will laugh at, “if you fart when we go out on patrol tonight, I may have to turn you in for crimes of stench.”

Piotr is an enforcer. The words rang in Kitty’s head like the screaming echo of a horror movie, played on repeat until the tape burned and the reel could only sputter the same sentence in discordant starts and stops. Piotr is an enforcer. And he’d done something so unfathomable that Kitty had to see for herself, had to know with her own eyes and mind that he could be a man capable of true horror. She’d believed Lorna when she said it, shaking with anger. But she had to know for herself. Piotr gave her an astounding lack of information about his whereabouts, and yet, he’d neglected to remember his ex-fiancee was a hacker by practice. She’d found out where he was supposed to be easy enough, and even as her computer screen flickered with the truth, she knew she had to see him for herself. She moved like a ghost, not simply through walls as if they were nothing but an illusion, but as fragmented pieces of herself strung together by the weakest of tethers. The world could take so much; when did it start giving? She stood in his apartment, watching decorations slowly fill the space. Her own apartment was barren. His was filling with trinkets and furniture. Did the world start giving, or did she force it to give? His words confirmed something she already knew, but needed to feel in her mind. The picture in his hands confirmed something else, something she couldn’t yet pull into words. “Did you know that the liberty bell is a replica of itself?”

He knows that voice. He had loved, swooned for, smiled and laughed for that voice. Piotr perks up and turns. When the sight of Kitty Pryde enters his vision, he stands to his full height; so much taller than her, he’d never noticed before how much she becomes dwarfed. She always seemed larger to him, so bright and powerful. It seems wrong to see her like this, small and surrounding by walls that don’t belong to her. His fingers twitch. He desires to pick her up and take her to a home she knows, a place she belongs. “Yes,” he answers, “I know. You told me then. You said it was sad. I said sometimes things that are lost can be replaced, anything can be made into a home. Then you said that was sad. Then I kissed you. I remember this.” He remembers it all. He remembers the feeling of being in a place he does not belong. It feels a lot like it does now. He doesn’t like feeling like a liar, but homes can not be built. He has tried so many times. In Kitty, for Kitty; nothing is enough. Nothing is how he wants it, how it should be. He knows without asking why she’s here and he wants more time. He thinks of falling to his knees and begging her to give him another day of pretend. “There is another enforcer in the washroom. He had beans and hot sauce. He will be there a while.” 

Kitty nodded, her face remained still. She thought her brows were furrowed in anger, that her mouth was twisted into a snarl---but hot tears ran down quivering cheeks and her mouth remained closed. So much of her life was spent trying to figure out who Kitty Pryde was; the dork, the hero, the mutant, the Jewish girl, the woman who just wanted to be loved. In so many years, she’d never found the answer. “I remember too,” she responded, memories of a cold night playing dimly in the back of her head, drowned out by the film of Piotr is an enforcer. It was sad, she wanted to argue it now, even after all this time. It was sad to know a copy of something could sit inside a home and trick people into pretending---and that its flaws would be its most famous feature. She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t be a copy of something that never was, and she never could really trick people. Her flaws rang loud in a way a cracked bell couldn’t. In so many years, she’d never figured out who Kitty Pryde was supposed to be. She was hoping someone would waltz in and give her the answer. There were days she felt close to knowing; huddled against Rachel, throwing popcorn at Bobby’s head, laughing with Kurt. There was a Kitty Pryde there, somewhere, inside a home. “Why?” She stepped closer to him, head tilted up to meet his impossible height. There was an idea of Kitty Pryde in his eyes too, she could feel it reflected back at her. He thought he knew her---wasn’t that funny? All these years and he thought he knew the answer to something even she couldn’t figure out. “Why?” She demanded again, apathy giving way to anger. 

There it is. Piotr had expected the anger, it doesn’t make him ready for it. “There is no answer that will please you,” he tells her, eyes shifted to the floor instead of into the intensity of her gaze. “I can not say anything that will make you happy, so I will not say anything at all.” So much of him is built around protecting others, protecting Kitty. What use is it explaining something he knows, just as well as she does, that can never be justified. A reason once existed, it feels like a lifetime ago that he thought this was his only option. There is some good he does, some mutants he has protected and some homes he has built...but homes can not be made. They can not be forced. The liberty bell is a replica and its walls aren’t and this makes Kitty sad and he does not know why. But he must say he does, he must know her. He must be the home she wants. He must have value in this way or else there is no value to be had at all. “There is nothing I can tell you, Katya.” And he does not like the feeling of lying. 

A marriage in the summer, Kitty suggested it. An open field, or a farm, Piotr wanted that. There were plans. They made plans together. There was a way that everything was supposed to be, a Kitty Pryde that married the first man she ever loved and grew a family up around him. A Kitty Pryde that could be happy and could be asked to believe in a world that offered light and hope. She reached her hand out and spread her fingers over his chest, the fabric of his shirt moved for her. Then she pushed, putting her hand through his chest until she could feel his heart around her fingers and she held it there, forced it to be steady for her. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, more to herself than to him. There was an idea of Kitty Pryde, something she thought she might be able to chase after. A truth she could feel on the days with her arms around Rachel or with her hand in Illyana’s, or the night with her lips pressed to Donna’s. But Rachel was dead, Illyana’s life was made worse with Kitty’s presence, and Donna was a tragedy of its own operatic proportion. For so many years she had hoped one day she might reach a goal she couldn’t yet form into words. Now, she threw it all away. Kitty Pryde could not be herself, and there was a liberty bell somewhere that understood the feeling. “I could squeeze,” she rasped out with a coldness that shocked even herself, “I could squeeze and you’d be dead again.”

Piotr looks at the woman he loved, and shakes his head. Breathing is hard with her hand around his heart, but the feeling is nothing new to him. He feels himself collapsing around her and it’s his thoughts that keep him from kneeling over. Kitty is angry, she is always angry. She wants a fight, she always wants a fight. Piotr will not fight her, he doesn’t want to. He knows her, partly because she is a hard woman not to know. She breathes life and radiance and it is hard not to look. She might call herself a ghost, but Piotr has always thought of her as a wall. There. Yet, not quite. Something he could press against. But not go through. There are years and moments between them. Years and moments of knowing and understanding each other and maybe these moments are not perfect, but they exist and they beg to be known. She could squeeze on his heart if she wants, she could kill him if so pushed. He knows this, he knows her, and yet he leans down a lets his breath wash over her skin, “squeeze then.” He tell her. He forces his hand up to grip her wrist and he holds her there. “You may squeeze then. You may kill me right now and rid this world of a terror it does not need.” He knows she will not kill him, not today. She does not have it in her heart to become a murderer, he knows this. 

For all the good there was in Kitty Pryde, there was bad too. For every ounce of love, there was anger. For every bit of bravado, there was cowardice. Kitty doesn’t squeeze; there was so much of her that was more than one thing, more than she knew how to explain or express. She was more than pain, more than the choked sob she felt bubble up her body. More then the tears that lined her face and the way her brows pulled together in pain. These parts made up a woman she wanted to know, a woman she wished she knew and loved. She could feel his heart under her fingers and it would have been so easy to close her fist, phase his heart out of his chest and watch the damned thing bleed and throb on the hardwood flooring. She could almost feel it, and then she felt his hand around her wrist, easily held there. Did he want her to squeeze? To cross a line she’d never dared to before? To throw away all ideas of a woman she might one day know and love? She looked up, asking him silently. She didn’t want to be that Kitty--the one that could tear a heart out. She wanted him to prove to her that she could be something else.

Kitty could crush his heart in a way she hadn’t already and Piotr would not blame her. This is the nature of love. He knows Kitty, but he prays that she knows him just as well. That she knows that for all his own pain and anger, he does not want to leave this world, not until it is a better place than when he’d found it. To die dirtying Kitty’s hands with his blood is not the way he wants to go. But the choice is hers. “You will take care of Illyana,” he tells her; demands if this is the path she wants to tread. “You will forget whatever separates you two and you will grant me the wish of knowing she will forever be by your side. You will protect her in my place.” He closes his eyes and remembers laying with Kitty in open fields, beside a fake liberty bell, in beds that were theirs and some that weren’t. 

“Woah, woah, woah! What’s going on here?” Carl blinked, his mouth agape. He’d just finished his fourth bout of digestive-based regret, hands still wet from washing them thoroughly. He was happy to get started on re-assembling Piotr’s bookshelf, instead he found his friend talking to a woman who had her hand through his chest. It took him a moment, but the oddity of the scene caught up to him. Hands don’t go through chests, lucky for Carl, he didn’t need to be a genius to figure that one out. “This ain’t right! This ain’t the way things should be.” His momma taught him weird people don’t belong with the rest. Weird people like aliens and mutants and whatever fancy word there was out there for the folks with blue skin or glowing eyes. Piotr was a mutant, and he wasn’t so bad. It was a shame his momma wasn’t around anymore to learn that not everything was bad. But this, this was bad. Carl ran to his bag, digging around until he found his Enforcer-issued gun. “Oh, hey, wait-a-minute...I know her!” There was a mutant that gave him grief a while ago. Grief and a scar on his face. She looked normal, she was anything but. “Let my friend go, mutie!” He leveled the gun on her as her hand retracted out of Piotr’s chest. 

“Carl,” Piotr holds up his hands. He moves once Kitty pulls away from him and he stands between the two. “Carl, please. Put that away.” Carl doesn’t know Kitty, not really. Not like Piotr does. This could go bad. This could go very bad. “Please,” he asks again, growing a little more desperate with each word he has to repeat, “she’s okay---she’s okay---” He knows what Carl is going to say, and like clockwork he spouts out crap about unregistered mutants and the law that they need to be upholding. He starts on how she had been trying to kill him, how he knows exactly what she’s capable of. “You don’t know her,” Piotr begs, “please. I know her.”

It was so funny, so impossibly hilarious that Kitty knew it had to be a scripted joke somewhere, that people could know her. She hardly knew herself and there was a liberty bell somewhere that she could tell all about it---something that understood what it was like to be made and re-made and cracked and flawed. She laughed, clutching her stomach and throwing her head back. A different kind of tear came to her eye and she stepped through Piotr and towards the shaking Carl. “You want to shoot? Shoot! You can see what happens when you try to kill a ghost. Or should I show you?” She smirked between her anger, reaching out with ease to flip him on to his back, his gun clattering lamely out of his hands. “You get haunted, Carl. That’s what happens.” Kitty bent down, picking up the gun in her hands. She’d fired only a few before, she didn’t like them. Now, she aimed it right back at him. “I know you, Carl. You like to rough up the mutants before you condemn them into that hell hole. You like to hear them scream.” She tossed the gun aside with the flick of her wrist, tongue clicking. “You’re the worst kind of person.” She didn’t need a gun anyway. She phased her hand into his skull, lips pulled into a snarl. “Do you know what happens when I make my hand solid?”

“No!” Piotr screeches, cringing as he watches the scene unfold. He runs to Carl’s side, kneeling on the floor. He’s begging her now, like he thought he might a while ago. “Please, Kitty, you must calm down and...” he winces at his words. He knows she doesn’t like being told to calm down. It tends to make her angrier, but what else is he to say? He doesn’t know how else can he ask her not to go down a road he knows to be dark and lonely. It is no place for Kitty Pryde and his fingers twitch. He wants to carry her away to a world that is bright. A world that will not know this anger. “You don’t want to do this. You don’t want to kill him. Please, Katya, I know you.” Carl whimpers under her. He whispers nonsensically about a family and a daughter’s birthday. He does not realize the irony in having robbed other men of that privilege. Piotr can feel it now, but Carl is not a bad man. Just a misguided one. When they’d first met, he spat at Piotr’s feet. Now he shakes his hand and buys him lunch without asking. He is growing, and the world might too, if given the chance. He does not deserve to die. 

He was right about one thing at least, she doesn’t want to kill him. But anger surged through Kitty regardless and she spat in the man’s face. What of all the families he broke apart? Of all the horror he was responsible for? “You don’t know me. You have no idea who I am.” She growled, snapping her attention to Piotr. “Illyana is a demon. How do you expect me to deal with that? How can I take care of her? Of anyone?” Ghosts; they didn’t have the capacity to hold and love---and likewise, they could not be held or loved. “You don’t know me,” she thought of solidifying, watching Carl’s brain explode into pieces around them. Piotr’s new walls could be painted with red, and wasn’t red such a nice color? Instead, she stood up and released him, eyes narrowed on Piotr as Carl breathed out a sign of relief. “You know,” he started with a nervous laugh, “I really thought I was a goner there. Guess she’s really not capable of murde--” And then he screamed out in blood-curdling agony, clutching the place where his hand once was. As Carl droned on, Kitty had shifted, phasing her foot into his palm. Then she became tangible once more. It wasn’t his brain, but bits of his skin scattered around and red soaked Kitty’s shoes. “You have no idea what I’m capable of.”

Bits of flesh and blood spray in Piotr’s face. He’d been right about one thing, at least. She wasn’t a murderer. It didn’t bring him any comfort. “Carl,” he blinks, glancing between his screaming friend and the woman he thinks he knows. “Kitty, you...” he rubs his face, smearing more blood and skin. Everything is messy and nothing is as it should be. Where did they do wrong? “He is going to bleed out if he do not get him to a hospital!” He collects himself and looks back up at Kitty. He cradles his crying friend in his arms, he whimpers still about a family and a birthday he wants to see. “I understand you are angry, Kitty, but this is not you. This is not...” he swallows. She said something about him not knowing her. He had to admit it was hard to follow along between the screaming and the blood. “Kitty,” he begs again, he feels like all he’s done the past few minutes is beg. He doesn’t know what else he can do. “Please, Katya...” He remembers a liberty bell and a cold night. He remembers a Kitty that tells him that she does not feel like a real thing; she is making and re-making herself. She is cracked too and he remembers kissing her instead of trying to figure out what it means. He tenses. He doesn’t know her. He never has. She is capable of murder. She can kill. Piotr also remembers a job he has to do. Urgency fades from his face and he looks up at her with true understanding. “You have changed,” he says calmly, “tell me, would you have killed him?” He frowns, “Did you ever love me?”

His question rang unanswered. Kitty turned her back and left through the same wall she phased into. Her thumping heart drowned out screaming, and the memory of the look on Piotr’s face chased away feeling of her shaking body---replaced instead with cold terror. She had claimed to be a ghost, but she didn’t know what this meant. All these years, and she still had no idea who Kitty Pryde was. She’d wanted to give way to anger, turn down a path and accept a new identity. Yet, she couldn’t even do that. She stood between two ideals, caught between all that she was and all that she was simply trying to be. For Piotr’s questions, she couldn’t answer. But she knew there was a landmark somewhere that could tell him a thing or two about being a dim echo of all the once was, the mockery of all that could be. A vision grew further and further apart and a shattered identity blew away at the first sign of turbulent winds.  Her shoes were red now, she couldn’t remember what color they were before.

----Everything is not as it should be. Nothing is right. “Okay” laid broken.