Voiceless Screams

TITLE: Voiceless Screams

AUTHOR: Jos Mous

DISCLAIMER: Not owning any characters, not making a profit.

UNIVERSE: X-Men Evolution

RATING: PG-13 to R

PAIRING: Kitty/Rogue

NOTE: After ignoring pretty much every X-person save Kitty and Rogue, I decided to change that with this fic. How long this change is going to last, I wouldn’t know.

Water splashed into the bathtub, going quickly from cold through lukewarm to hot. Rogue winced twice when she lowered herself into the bath. The first time when she realised just how hot the water was and the second time when the water reached the not-quite faded scar where one of Evan’s spikes had pierced her a few weeks ago.

Rogue let her head rest against the edge of the tub and closed her eyes. That was the nice thing about baths. There’s a very sudden lack of any kind of urgency, provided the telephone doesn’t ring. Soap and shampoo were within reach, but Rogue ignored them for now. If she’d just wanted to get clean she’d have taken a shower. Instead she spent a few minutes quietly thinking about nothing in particular.

After a while Rogue noticed that the water was very slowly losing some of its searing hotness, so she picked up the bar of soap and started washing her arms.

So she was seeing Kitty now, was she?

Not exactly how she imagined her romantic life to look like. For one thing, she’d never really expected to have a love life at all.

And certainly not one with someone who wasn’t of the opposite sex.

So this meant that she was really bi then, didn’t it?

It still didn’t sound right. Rogue could be very stubborn when she wanted to, and right now she wanted to be stubborn about being straight.

Rogue paused mid-neck and carefully put the soap back.

She wasn’t being fair, was she? Not with herself and certainly not with Kitty. She was pretty damn sure that she was more or less in love with the girl, even though she felt uneasy about it. But feeling uneasy isn’t the same as denying it. So what if that made her bi? Screw the labels! She loved Kitty, that was all.

Rogue paused again and did a double-take.

She wasn’t feeling uneasy. She was just feeling angry with herself. Angry for not being very accepting of herself. Still feeling pretty riled up, Rogue leaned back once again, closed her eyes and decided to take a shot.

I’m in love with Kitty, she thought deliberately.

Nope, no unease. Simple statement of fact. She was in love with Katherine Pryde.

Now wouldn’t it be nice if it was a case of courtly love? After all, courtly love is noble and pure and, most importantly, not physical in any way.

But Rogue wasn’t suffering from courtly love. She was in love with Kitty in a teenager kind of way, which isn’t very noble or pure. And a whole lot more physical.

And thinking of Kitty for an extended period of time made her sort of… well… in a way… kind of… warm. So to speak.

Professor Charles Xavier was a very good telepath. He was so good at telepathy that most of the time he didn’t hear other people’s thoughts at all.

Jean Grey, on the other hand, wasn’t a very good telepath. She heard other people’s thoughts all the time. But, unless Jean really concentrated, the only thing she heard was a kind of background noise. And this was because the normal state of a human mind is chaos. Sure, the conscious may only have room for one or two streams of thought at a time, but the subconscious is more or less infinite. It was like looking into a twister and trying to see everything it had swept up all at the same time. It just couldn’t be done. Only if you really focused might you manage to quite clearly see and follow one particular thing.

Of course, sometimes, a person could be really single-minded, when the conscious and a large part of the subconscious were all focused on one thing. When that happened, you got a kind of mental scream that lanced through the normal background thoughts.

As Jean casually sauntered down one of the mansion’s many hallways and passed the bathroom door she was assaulted by one such scream. It wasn’t a really big single thought. It was more like a lot of little thoughts banding together to form a group that couldn’t be ignored.

For a moment, Jean thought about a naked Kitty moaning in orgasmic bliss.

Then Jean’s mental blocks came up and the scream died down enough for her to realise that it wasn’t her doing the thinking about having sex with a girl. This came as quite a relief to her.

But even though she was no longer being overwhelmed by the scream, she was still very much aware that someone was… thinking about one very naked girl and that she was accidentally eavesdropping.

Blushing bright red with embarrassment, Jean hurried off.

It was a nice day, Jean reasoned. She might as well take a little stroll outside. Away from the mansion. Sort of very much out of reach of any… loud thoughts.

Having thus decided, Jean headed down the large staircase towards the large front doors.

And then jumped when she saw Kitty walking up the staircase in her general direction. The very first thing she noticed was that the girl wasn’t naked. In fact, she was wearing lots of clothes. A lot of very long, very concealing clothes that showed absolutely no skin below the jaw whatsoever.

“Hey Jean,” Kitty greeted.

“Hi,” Jean greeted back.

Kitty walked on. Jean decided that it probably wouldn’t be a very bad thing if she started walking a little bit faster.

After a nice, unexciting walk with lots of really dull grass to look at, Jean returned to the mansion. She couldn’t hear any screaming whatsoever. There weren’t even any echoes left. All thoughts were once again nicely on the background and completely incomprehensible.

Jean walked into the recreation room to see if there was something worth seeing on the television. Rogue, apparently, had had the same thought and was sitting on a couch, holding the remote in one hand and a can of coke in the other.

As Jean looked at her, she found her own thoughts going down one very disturbing spiral.

Rogue was wearing green clothes.

This morning, at breakfast, she had still been wearing black.

So, Rogue had changed clothes somewhere during the day.

And when did people tend to put on fresh clothes?

Jean blinked once. Then twice. Most of her mental processes seemed to have shut down, leaving room for just a single thought.

Oh dear.