She juggled another box as she went through the door and, crouching down, put it next to the piles of others. She then stood and, looking at the piles of her belongings encased in cardboard, wondered how it was that she -- a person who had everything she owned blown up about five million times -- how it was that she had managed to accumulate so much stuff. She picked up her fountain coke she'd picked up at the local gas station and wandered over to the window where the sunlight was filtering through all of the standing dust that the small house had accumulated over the years. She sipped her drink as she glanced down the one story to the overgrown yet potentially beautiful garden below, and nodded in satisfaction. Logan had been right when he said this place would be peaceful as well as logical.

The small two-story house was far enough away from the city to be peaceful and close enough to the college to allow her to get where she wanted to be during the day. Yes, this place was as close to what she had envisioned as it could come.

It was the perfect place to recover.

She turned when she heard the slight whoosh of wind and motioned toward the other end of the room. "You can put the boxes there, Rogue. Thank you for your help."

The young southern belle merely smiled as she placed the box where Kitty had indicated. "Really, Kitty, it's not a problem." The smile faded a little as past and present concern entered the other woman's green eyes. "Are ya sure you don't want to be closer to home, Kit? Ah know your arguments and such, but...we're glad to still have you with us and all...but..."

"We're worried there might be some more problems in the mix that we're not sure of yet and we would be more comfortable with you close by us so that we can help to combat them. We're family, and family worries about its own." Scott Summers put a load of heavy boxes down, wiping a little sweat from his brow with his shoulder. As he picked up the bottled lemonade he had brought with him he added, "You know, I have more experience with this type of injury than others. And I tend to agree with Hank on this issue. I would feel much more comfortable with you closer to home."

Kitty sighed and put her coke on the window, petting the purple dragon landing on her shoulder as she did so with her free hand. "And I've told you guys why I don't want to be around you right now. I'm not ready for combat situations yet and...I need a break, Scott. There's no other way to put it. I need time." The words "...to heal and separate reality from delusions" were left unspoken but they all heard them. And reflected on the last year and a half.

Aneurysm. Kitty had never even thought of that word in any context that could include her. Blood vessels. The brain was full of them. Yet, mutants didn't get cancer, didn't get AIDS, and they simply did not get aneurysms and stuff like that. It was an unwritten rule. If you were a mutant you didn't GET a bad genetic quirk from your mother's or your father's side of the family that could potentially kill you. It just didn't happen. They had the Legacy Virus to combat. That was all they should have had to worry about.

But they had been wrong. When she had started to get headaches again it had been something she had not thought to bring up in conversations with the others. She had just figured that it was her mutant powers boosting again. She had not counted on how stupid that act of silence had become. Without Shiar technology after OZT and Bastion, they had no way of knowing that her regularly scheduled physical was anything less than her being healthy. She had actually been one of the lucky ones. The headaches had been her body's early warning system that something was wrong. If she had listened to that warning earlier... She cut off the train of thought and just counted herself lucky that she HAD told Kurt the morning of the incident that her head felt like it wanted to explode and after her morning shower she was going to go back to bed. He had been worried about her and gone looking for her. And found her passed out on her bedroom floor, barely breathing. It was his quick action that saved her life. She figured she'd remember that when his birthday rolled around, for the next forty or fifty years.

That fateful morning... she was glad she didn't remember the pain. She didn't even know what brought on the stress, if there had been any stress to bring it on, but she remembered the dreams and hallucinations afterward when she had been in a coma. Hank had said it had something to do with her mutant powers going askew when the blood vessel had burst. He had told her later it was like being on her own natural brand of drug.

Unfortunately, her trip had not been pleasant. The blood vessel had also hit close to the personality center in her brain, which had them all fearing she'd never be the same person when and if she woke up. And while she was in a coma, they had told her things. Some of them worked their way into her dreams and some her mind had warped and made into a mad little dream world. Some her mind kept very close to the truth. Like Piotr.

She still felt pain at his death, even though she had not been awake to witness it. He had developed a cold, she was told, in the days after her blood vessel exploded and had gone to bed for the evening. The virus had hit him much like Legionnaire's disease hit many. He simply went to bed with a cold, and within twenty-four hours he was dead. She still didn't know why she had been spared and he taken from this world, but she resolved to live life for the both of them. This time was, for her, also a time of mourning.

Then there were the things her mind had warped. Kurt read from the bible to her everyday, so her dreams made him a priest. Kurt still laughed about that, saying that he would not be able to give up women long enough to take a vow of chastity, although he was honored that he had a place of respect in her dreams. Logan had become Death under Apocalypse's care. Scott figured she must have some secret fear of Logan, which he added was healthy, and that had incorporated itself in that way.

And there was how she'd seen herself. She still couldn't figure out why she thought of herself as a maybe-alien psychopath in her own world. But, after asking Hank, she figured it was her brain's way of getting out her own personal brand of alienation that she had always felt, combined with her anger at the X-men for abandoning her and Kurt when they had supposedly died in Dallas. Why she had made herself out to be a woman who wanted to hack her hair off and pierce her ears and run around in really skimpy and ugly clothing, she had no idea. Maybe it was her mind's way of telling her she hated her hair. It made as much sense as any other theory.

There were many things that had been made different in the subconscious of her mind and she'd known that she had to get away when she had woke up. It seemed her personality was pretty much intact. At least that was what she was told, although she still had some blank spots for people -- blank in that she didn't know how she felt about them. But she was getting better every day. But when she had woke up, she had not known reality from the fiction her mind had created. And so this time out was also a time for her to get her ducks in a row, so to speak, and figure out what was real and what was not.

She had been told that Pete was dead. Pete she remembered in vivid detail. She still couldn't make it add up in her mind. To her, he was still alive and well somewhere. Even the thought of him dead made her choke on grief so thick she knew it would surely strangle her. She still hoped in some secret part of her mind that he was alive and that when they told her he was dead that had been part of one of her delusions. She had been a coward after being well enough to ask them if it were true or not, and had kept glaringly silent about that subject. Yes, she had broken up with him. And she still regretted it.

Looking back on the stupidity of the fight to begin with, she could have chosen a better means to break up with him. Yes, she had been worried about pulling him into her world, where he seemed to get hurt at every turn and seemed to be in so much torment with himself over doing right or wrong. He had tried so hard to be what she wanted him to be, so that he would earn her. And, she silently admitted to herself, she had enjoyed getting yanked into his world too much sometimes. She had enjoyed meeting the spies that she had dreamed of being since she was a small child. She had enjoyed letting someone see her violent side without getting screamed at for being that way or freaking them out that she had that bad of a dark side to begin with. Pete had seen that side of her and, looking into the abyss, locked eyes with her dark monster and said simply, "I'm not impressed." He had accepted and loved that part of her like it was nothing. Just a little thing that was part of the grander package. She had felt unworthy sometimes of that kind of acceptance, since she herself had found it so hard to accept the darker part of him at times.

But he had accepted that part of her as well. Her doubt, that she would be able to accept the killer in him. It was a shame, she thought to herself, that she could not tell him now that she could accept that part of him without doubt now. She had looked into death's face and was not afraid. She had felt him with her, pulling her back to the side of life. It was him she came back to. She had felt his hand pulling her back here. Not Illayana, who she had always thought she would see, not her grandparents, but him.

Glancing out at the oak tree on the edge of the garden, she just hoped that he was still alive for her to tell him so someday.

She looked at the surrogate family in front of her, or at least a few of its members, and saw as reality returned to them all in the presence of one blue furred and very energetic Beast. He looked at all of them, some looking sheepish and others still looking a bit concerned and shook his head. "My, my. What a bunch of sober visages I see before mine eyes. In the words of Jubilation, 'Lighten up, you guys.' Now than, Katherine, where would you like your chemistry books that are currently posing a challenge to even my Herculean physique?" Kitty grinned at the man nobody could ever really hate and pointed toward the room that had the best sunlight and floor to ceiling bookcases, the perfect place for a study, and said, "In there, Hank. And be careful. Those books are the future inheritance for my children. Who needs china?" She heard him laughing as he bounced toward the room with a flourish.

"Now, Katherine, you have your health instructions?"

Kitty nodded her head almost mechanically at Hank, "Yes Hank. For the millionth time -- YES, I have all the instructions." Hank studied her over his glasses, holding his clipboard before him like the Old Testament. He glanced at her still somewhat too thin frame and at the hollows beneath her eyes, showing the need for a full recovery, and said, "Humor me, please, Kitty. We're all very worried about you and this plan of yours to do research at Oxford, driving there with a 'reasonable' commute of an hour or so to get there, all the while somehow recovering from your injuries... we find it a little bit out in left field, so to speak."

Kitty sighed a little and settled onto the frame of a nearby window, "I know you guys don't understand, and I have taken into consideration your concerns. I know that you're worried about the stress I might put onto myself which could act as a catalyst for any other type of brain thing I might have ticking in my skull. I know that I won't be able to use my mutant powers without very careful buildup so that I won't put unreasonable stress on my body, thus making it potentially discorporate, and all the other arguments. BUT... Hank, you guys have to understand my point of view. I look at you all and see the people from the trip I was on. I'm worried I'm going to snap back into psycho mode and start hacking into you just to prove how tough I am or something. Being around you all was just confusing me worse. I have got to separate myself from you, and heal. Then I can return to working as an X-men and also be a part of the family again. And I had the money for a nice place since my mom found a way for me to access my trust fund, so I can live comfortably here. And... well... this was a good opportunity to take the Queen up on her offer of basically a free degree, if I want it, from Oxford for everything I've done for the British after being a member of Excalibur. I can do research into chaotic physics and the effects of that on...well, you read my beginning research."

"Yes, and it was quite good, but at the same time..." Hank didn't get a chance to continue as Kitty plowed onward. "AND I've got Moira on Muir Island if I need help and Brian and Meggan and all the other European heroes that might be around. Don't worry. I'll garden, I'll relax, and I'll be the best silent patient you've ever had. I'll be fine."

Hank locked eyes with her and looked at her hard for a few minutes. Then looking down at his chart he muttered, "I hope so. Kitty. Good luck. If you need us you know where to find us." And with that he left the room, leaving the tremendous stack of instructions she was to follow to the letter on one of the boxes that lined the walls of the spacious kitchen.

A couple of weeks later, Kitty tucked a stray strand of hair back into the haphazard ponytail she'd managed to force her hair into, and once again attacked the weeds around the rosebush she was trying to liberate. She tugged. She pulled. She saw the shadow of a person coming out of the woods and went into a fighting crouch without missing a beat.

Once she had realized who it was, she didn't relax her pose much as she said, somewhat shocked, "Jardine... is that you?" The somewhat geeky looking head of the British spy group Pete had been involved with took a step closer in his immaculate suit and cleared his throat, "I come in peace, Ms. Pryde. You can relax." Kitty shook her head at him as she closed her fist a little bit tighter. "No way Jose. You are supposed to be dead."

He smiled slightly, his eyes crinkling behind his glasses like he had done that a lot at one time but had since forgotten how. "Ah, Kitty. I have missed your particular brand of youth. Actually, tales of my death have been greatly exaggerated. I had a dupe set up as soon as that woman came into the picture. I'm no fool." Kitty thought about it for a moment and then she stood, feeling a little bit silly crouching there like an idiot, "Okay... that I believe. How did you find me?" That question was of some import to her, since she had thought that she was almost impossible to find.

The man before her held up a hand at her defensive attitude. "Do not worry, Ms. Pryde. I assure you, you're almost impossible to find here. The only reason I knew where to find you was that Mr. Wagner told me where you were when I called. He thought you might be glad to know that I was alive and, once I told him my reason for tracking you down, he agreed to give me your position. I was also very careful coming here to make sure that your privacy would be kept."

Kitty felt her first genuine smile of the entire conversation light her face as she jogged the distance between them and threw her arms around a man she never thought she'd see again. She felt him stiffen for a moment and then slowly his arms closed around her. "It's good to see you again, Jardine. I'm glad you're alright."

A bit later, Kitty put down the glass of iced tea she'd been sipping somewhat half heartedly and concentrated instead on the man in front of her, putting her sizable will into her stare to try and make the little man talk sooner. He just smiled. She sighed again in frustration and took another sip of her tea.

Finally, it seemed he decided to have mercy on her, and throw her a bone. "You're probably wondering what I am doing here."

Kitty looked at him and raised an eyebrow as she took a more leisurely sip of her tea. Now that the man was willing to talk, she figured, she could take her time a bit. "Why, yes. That had crossed my mind a time or two. Just in the area and decided to say hi?"

The slight sarcasm wasn't lost on the older gentleman and he smiled. "Actually..." Suddenly the smile was gone, replaced instead by an intently studying look. "How are you Kitty?"

Kitty blinked at him a couple of times and made a sweeping downward motion with her hand, encompassing her whole body in the sweep. "I'm fine obviously. You're sitting here talking with me, aren't you?"

Jardine didn't relinquish his stare for a moment. "Yes, but you still don't look well. I had heard that I was not the only one that was supposed to be dead. Although yours was to be by natural causes. It seemed your friends made you disappear off the face of the planet. I had feared the worst, so I did some checking and found out basically nothing, which in my business means many bad things. So when I looked up Mr. Wagner and he told me you were alive and doing relatively well, I had to see for myself. We were worried about you."

Kitty blinked at him as she got up to pour the rest of her unwanted tea into the sink, freezing about halfway across the kitchen. "We?"

Jardine didn't even miss a beat. "Yes, we. You made an impression on the spies you met, Kitty. I haven't seen that type of outpouring of worry in a long time."

Kitty tried not to let her disheartenment show. She had hoped... She cut off the train of thought, and got back to what was important. As she dumped the rest of her ice tea down the drain, studying the drops of water as they fell like they were the most important thing on the planet, she said, "Yes. Well, you can assure them that Kitty Pryde is doing fine and will continue to do fine. And thank them for their concerns, would you, Jardine? It was really sweet of them to care."

Hours later, long after Jardine had left with a smile, Kitty cleaned up the dishes from her small dinner and, as she put them into the sink to later be put into the dishwasher, she found herself wondering why she was depressed. She had seen one of her old friends again and she was slowly recovering from her ordeal, so why should she find herself depressed. Because he didn't mention his name and reassure you that he's still alive.

Kitty almost told the voice in her head to shut up, but she knew that the miserable bugger of a voice was right. She took a bottle of wine down from the rack next to the counter and wandered into the spacious living room. It had such a nice view of the garden this time of night she mused, and, wandering over to the entertainment center, she set the CD in the stereo to a certain number and hit play.

As the distinctive voice of Frank Sinatra flooded the room from the surround sound, Kitty popped the cork on the bottle and, pouring some into a glass she had snagged on the way out of the kitchen, found herself singing along.

"You go to my head,
And you linger like a haunting refrain,
And I find you swimming around in my brain,
Like the bubbles in a glass of champagne..."

"You've got to get better locks on these doors, Pryde. Any stupid bloody evil yank could just walk in, find you half lit and catch you off guard."

Kitty yelled and spun around, she was so surprised, instinctively doing something stupid. She was so close to the sofa that, when she spun to counter attack whoever it was, she just did something she'd done thousands of times before. She phased through the couch. She hadn't been counting on the resounding pain that spiked through her head due to the strain of phasing through that much matter after such a bad head injury. She felt the room swim as she grabbed the side of her head, the glass long forgotten that she had thrown out of the way to keep both of her hands free, and felt the blackness closing in fast. As she was getting sucked in she heard a curse and what sounded like running feet and, as she lost consciousness, some part of her wondered why an attacker would care whether she died smacking her head off the coffee table or not.

She woke up later with a sense of lethargy that she had not had in quite a while and her vision not up to what it should be. But, she had to admit that she was just glad to be alive. And when she chased that thought down she started to curse herself as ten times the fool, some of which leaked out of her somewhat chapped lips.

"My bloody thoughts exactly."

Kitty couldn't believe it. Now she was hallucinating. Maybe she was in a coma again, she thought, and on the verge of death. As she opened her eyes and looked into a pair of blue eyes she'd never thought to see again, she figured it was only right that she died in this hallucination. She liked it a lot better than the others.

"Hi, my hallucination of Pete. How are you doing today?"

The man before her blinked at her choice of words and then scowled. "Great. Now she's gone loopy on me." He leaned over her and she realized that he had been holding her hand. Yes, a nice hallucination indeed. She rather liked it here.

"I've got a couple of questions for you, Pryde."

Kitty nodded, happy as a clam to be even with an imagined image of the man she loved. "Sure. Hit me with your best shot, love thug."

Pete blinked, a baffled look on his face so real she almost giggled. "Love thug?" He shook his head as if to clear it and then muttered, "Fine. Play along, Wisdom. She's crazy, but at least she's still alive." Looking down at her he said, "Fine for the first question... WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED IN THE BLOODY LIVING ROOM?!?"

Kitty grabbed the side of her head, feeling the nasty headache she was coming down with. "Would you PLEASE not yell? As for what happened in the living room, any hallucination worth his salt would know what happened. I, in all of my great stupidity, when I was taken by surprise by an intruder...,phased."

The illusion before her looked even more baffled, if that were possible, "So? What the bloody hell does phasing have to do with the way you passed out and tried to crack your bleeding head open?"

Kitty sighed. "Because the aneurysm scrambled my brain good and hit my mutant center too." Then she scowled almost comically at the being in front of her. "And why would I want to explain this to you even in my most subconscious mind... especially being on the verge of death. Oh well, sometimes things don't make sense, I guess."

Pete held up a hand to stop her weird tirade before it could fully start. "Wait a minute. Aneurysm? My sources assured me that you were fine. You didn't hit the bloody floor like you were fine, dammit!" Kitty felt her eyes widen at the vehement tone of voice. It seemed that she wanted to know that Pete cared before she died. Well, that's bloody well and good, she mumbled to herself silently, but he could just kiss me or hug me instead of cussing at me to show it.

She glared at the man above her and said calmly, "I am fine now. I'm just supposed to watch my diet, contact Hank if I have so much as a mild headache, tell him if I have any slips back into the dream world I had going...like this instance here. And most of all, I'm supposed to work back into my full power as a mutant very slowly, so that I don't put too much strain on myself. So I have definitely broken the last rule that he gave me in his too thick bible there. But it could be worse. I could be dying with visions of psycho-me in my head, so this isn't so bad. At least I get to see you again, even if you're only an image my mind conjured up."

Pete was finally starting to catch on to what Kitty was thinking. "An image your mind conjured up?"

Kitty nodded, "You see, when I'm in a coma with this type of injury, my mind plays literal tricks on me. So, since you're dead in the real world and I didn't see you until after I phased, that therefore logically leads to the fact that I am in a coma again and you are my pre-death hallucination. Because, you see, there isn't anyone even around here right now that can save my life the way Kurt did the last time by finding me. So, since I'm dying, I'm not going to let the thought of dying upset me." She looked Pete up and down and smiled a little bit, looking somewhat joyful even in her still weakened state. "It's good to see you again, Pete. Even if it is only in my own mind. I regret that I didn't have a chance to say I'm sorry when you were still alive."

Pete leaned over Kitty, putting his arms on either side of her head, his hands sinking into the pillows, and Kitty realized for the first time that she was in her bedroom. A very very nice choice of place for a death hallucination, she thought proudly. Blue eyes locked solidly with brown, Pete caught her attention with his next words, "Alright Kit. Let's play a little game here of twenty questions or less. One: In your dream world, did you ever realize you were in it?"

Kitty blinked in confusion for a moment, and then replied, "No."

Pete looked somewhat pleased by that and then said calmly, "Two: Did you ever bring knowledge knowingly from the outside world into this hallucinogenic state?"

Kitty glared, starting to get annoyed, and snapped, "No."

Pete nodded, and then with narrowed eyes asked, "If you were almost dead right now, would you have a headache so bad that you're narrowing your eyes in pain?"

Kitty blinked in semi-wonder and semi-bewilderment, saying slowly, "Nooo..."

Pete then asked his last question, "And IF this were near death for you, WOULD you imagine me leaning over you with a damn filthy little purple flying RAT attached to me ankle trying to kill me?"

Kitty looked down over the edge of the bed carefully and, sure enough, Lockheed was letting out a low growl where he was attached to Pete's ankle. "I'd hope that I would have better taste than that for a hallucination." Kitty looked up at Pete, for the first time recognition and wonder in her eyes. Her hand slowly reached up to cup his cheek, sliding over the still familiar stubble and into the black hair beyond, "Oh my God. Pete...it's really you." The soft joy and love in her voice was worth the past year of Hell he'd endured, Pete realized in an instant. "How are you still alive?"

Pete shook his head. "It's not a big thing, love. Not anymore."

He never saw the fist coming, but he sure saw the ceiling when it was done. "You son of a bitch! How could you make me believe you were dead all of this time! You're as bad as the damn X-men were with Dallas. I MOURNED you, dammit! And I'm going to KILL Jardine, that evil little spy! He could have given me a HINT that he was your way of finding out if I was alone and who I said I was. The little four eyed jerk led me on!"

Pete looked up at Kitty swaying slightly above him looking like Hell, her anger the only thing keeping her upright, and had to smile. "It's good to see you again too, Pryde. Can you detach your rat from my ankle now?"

Later in her bed, Kitty rolled over and placed her face in her palm, looking down at Pete where he was laying there slightly exhausted. She smiled softly and ran her hand through his chest hair, feeling the beating of his heart under her hand reassuringly, "I'm glad that you understood, Pete. About why I broke up with you."

Pete shrugged from his position on his back, studying how the morning light lit up her hair, "It only took me a couple of months to figure it out. I wasn't born yesterday, and I just had to calm down enough to think about it. You're just not a very good liar, Pryde."

Kitty wasn't going to argue with the truth. They had called it even between them for the Hells they'd put one another through the past year. They'd both been assumed dead, or on the verge of death. Both of them had felt the power of separation from the one that they loved. It was hard not to forgive when you'd almost lost someone to something as permanent as death.

Kitty placed her head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat in comfort, and didn't think about tomorrow or the next day. For now, at this moment, the two of them were at peace and together. And for her, after all she had been through in this world, that was all that mattered.