“Kitty, stop!” Rogue’s voice finally broke through her panicked haze. The other girl pulled her roughly around a corner and sat them down, forcing Kitty to meet her eyes. “If you keep phasing like that, you’re gonna lose control.” Kitty swallowed, and then swallowed again, nodding mutely. 

“What-” Her hands were shaking, but Rogue was still cradling them gently, running her thumb over the backs of Kitty’s knuckles. “What was that thing? How did it know that we were mutants?” Kitty saw a hint of hesitation in Rogue’s eyes, and Kitty gripped Rogue’s hands more tightly as she sensed Rogue start to slip away so that she could hide the truth. Kitty glared, but there wasn’t enough heat behind it for it to be even a little bit threatening. Her lower lip was wobbling and she was fairly certain the reason Rogue was going a little bit blurry was that she had tears in her eyes.

She hated crying in front of other people.

And crying in front of Rogue? Forget about it. She held the tears in. 

“I’m not supposed to know this, Kitty.” Rogue murmured, her voice softer than Kitty had ever heard it.

Of course, Kitty hadn’t really been the kind of friend that Rogue could show a quieter side in front of. What with Bobby, and all. But she and Bobby were done, and Rogue was-

Rogue.

She was fantastic. Beautiful, kind, just funny enough for Kitty to wonder how she hadn’t seen it sooner, and finally her friend.

Which, of course, made things suck that much harder when Kitty realized that her feelings of friendship for Rogue weren’t exactly feelings of friendship.

Kitty waited and Rogue slid her hands out of Kitty’s grasp, settling against the grimy alleyway wall with a sigh. Kitty joined her, their proximity more than accounted for given the fact that they were hiding from what Kitty assumed was a giant, mutant killing robot.

“You remember that last mission we went on?” Rogue said, pulling Kitty out of her thoughts about how nice it was to be this close to Rogue, pressed against her side, given the nature of Rogue’s powers meant that physical proximity was a constant ‘no-no’. The mission was a bit of a blur to Kitty, honestly, but she remembered when Rogue had been hit, a well timed bullet finding it’s way straight to her side and dropping her to the ground. Kitty remembered an anguished scream ripping out of her lungs as she rounded on the gunman.

No one could really prove she’d done anything to him, but the man had a serious case of indigestion for a few weeks, if you caught her drift. He’d recover, though. Probably.

Bobby and John had backed her up though. She’d just phased through him, if something had gotten caught along the way then it wasn’t really her fault.

Her scream had echoed with Logan’s, and she’d turned around in time to see the wound closing up, Logan’s healing abilities doing their job perfectly.

“I got a dose of memories from Logan, and they didn’t make sense, Kitty. Not at all.”

“What happened?” Rogue laughed bitterly.

“’S not what happened. It’s what didn’t happen. There was a future that doesn’t exist now, where Mutants were rounded up and killed by giant robots called Sentinels. Logan was able to go back in time and stop it, bring us a future where we can be happy. Where we can be free to be us without fear of persecution. But Kitty, what they did- what the sentinels did...” Rogue shook her head. “And now he’s gotta live with this other history in his head, like no wonder the Prof transferred him to being a full time trainer instead of a history professor.” Kitty reached out and brushed Rogue’s hair out of her face, careful to avoid skin contact.

“You’ve gotta live with it, too.” She whispered.

Rogue looked at her, and it could have been the lighting, or it could have been Kitty reading too much into it, but she thought that Rogue looked like she wanted to be able to touch Kitty just as much as Kitty wanted to touch her. If Rogue looked, Kitty knew that she’d be able to see Kitty’s feelings written all over her face. She turned away, cheeks burning.

“We should get back, we have to tell the Professor-” Gloved fingers on her chin turned Kitty’s face back to Rogue. The other girl regarded her silently for a moment, and Kitty knew that she knew. She didn’t know how, but Rogue had figured out how she felt. One of Rogues fingers brushed against Kitty’s bottom lip as she pulled away and stood.

“Thank you, Kitty.” She said, reaching down to help Kitty to her feet.