Greenhouse (X-Men; SS for Enkidom!)

[Winged]

Happy holidays, @Enkidom! I was excited when I read "X-Men" in your preferred fandoms, because I am a giaaaaant X-Men dork and there are far too few fics for them on the forum. I picked Storm and Kitty Pryde because they're two of my favorite ladies. Hope you enjoy!

edit: ahh and thank you SO SO much to @Sen Beret for reading through this before I posted. They rock.

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“Kitty.” Ororo Munroe tapped the woman in the passenger seat, whose faint snores had filled the car for several hours now.

Rolling over, Kitty Pryde batted at Ororo’s hand before stilling and apparently going back to sleep. Ororo sighed. The drive from the X-Mansion had taken three hours, and Kitty had slept the entire way. There was no way she was still tired.

“Kitty, come on,” Ororo said, nudging her more firmly this time. “We’ve got to go.”

Finally, Kitty’s hazel eyes blinked open, fuzzy with sleep. “Are we here?” She asked around a yawn. “That didn’t take long.”

“Yeah, because you slept the whole way,” Ororo teased fondly. Even though Kitty was twenty-one now, most of the original X-Men team still treated her like their honorary kid sister.

“Oh.” Kitty yawned again. “So what’s this kid’s deal again?”

“Adam Ziegler, 19 years old. He showed up on Cerebro, and Professor Xavier wanted us to go speak with him about joining the Institute.” Ororo flipped down the visor and gave herself a quick once-over before getting out of the car. Kitty wasn’t far behind her.

“So he works at a…greenhouse?” Kitty asked, shading her eyes against the sun reflecting off the glass walls. 

Ororo nodded. “My guess would be that his mutation either has something to do with weather or with plants.”

“Or it could be something completely unrelated,” Kitty pointed out. “You couldn’t tell what my mutation was when I wasn’t, like, falling through walls.”

The edge of Ororo’s lip twitched into a shadow of a smile. “Fair point.”

The door of the greenhouse opened to an overwhelming, oppressive sense of moisture, like they were walking into a sauna. Kitty tugged at the collar of her shirt and made a face.

“Maybe he’s a plant himself,” she mumbled. “This is intolerable.”

“You get used to it,” a low, distinctly male voice said from their right, and Kitty jumped. A lanky boy with blond-tipped brown hair was leaning against a nearby table, a small bush and a pair of clippers in his hands. “Can I help you?”

“Ororo Munroe,” Ororo introduced herself, holding out her hand for the boy to shake. Kitty knew, like Ororo likely did, that this was their prospective student. A faint buzz of power hung in the air around him like a cloak, and the plants on the surrounding tables seemed to lean towards him like he was the sun. Plant powers, Kitty nodded to herself. He’d be a good addition to the Institute. Even just to help with the landscaping.

“Adam Ziegler,” the boy replied, confirming both their suspicions. “What can I do for you?”

Ororo pulled a small handful of leaflets from her bag and handed them over to Adam, who eyed them with skepticism. “I’m a teacher at a school for the gifted, and we think you would fit in very well there.”

Adam’s eyes tightened. “Why? I’m not smart or anything. There’s a reason I’m working here instead of going to college,” he said. Was it Kitty’s imagination, or were the plants nearest to him…bristling? A sharp prick against the back of her arm made her hop forward in surprise, and she looked back to see some sort of exotic flower showing way more thorns than it had been a second ago.

“Um, Ororo?” She ventured. Ororo ignored her.

“Adam, you have such a wide range of talents and abilities,” she continued soothingly. “Like what you do with your plants here. We,” she glanced at Kitty, “know that what you can do is special.”

The caution in his eyes turned quickly into hard defensiveness, and Kitty decided she would take her leave and let them talk. She wasn’t great with the angsty teenager type anyways, she wasn’t much far out of that age bracket herself.

Kitty turned and wandered further back into the depths of the greenhouse, eyes skimming over the wide variety of plants lining the aisles. Her dad had been an amateur gardener and had taught her a fair amount about botany, and she couldn’t identify a single plant here.

That was, until she turned a corner and almost walked straight into a table packed densely with lilies. Kitty immediately backed away, the back of her wrist automatically coming up to press against her nose. She wasn’t generally bothered by flowers, but something about the pollen of lilies had always wreaked havoc on her sinuses.

She gave a single, nervous sniff and went straight back the way she’d come. Anything to put more distance between herself and those devilish blossoms.

She could still hear Ororo and Adam chatting over the hum of the greenhouse’s fans. Adam’s voice was raised in what sounded like anger, but Ororo could defuse a confused and frustrated new mutant with the best of them. Best that Kitty still stayed away.

“I don’t even know why she wanted me to come,” she muttered to a nearby orchid, whose blooms were misted with tiny water droplets. A Phalaenopsis, if she wasn’t mistaken. Her mom had grown dozens of them during her childhood. 

There was a small crackle of thunder on the other side of the greenhouse, and Kitty rolled her eyes. So they’d moved on to power demonstrations. At least hers was a little less…destructive than Storm’s could be. She was about to head back towards her mentor when a sudden pressure surged in her sinuses, making her stop and shake her head like a dog coming out of water. 

“Hh — hiiiih — haaaaaah — ” She squinted and brought the back of her hand to her nose, trying to catch the sneeze before it could burst out. “hh’CHMPH!” She would have dismissed the tickle as a one-time event if a second and third sneeze hadn’t immediately pushed past her defenses to tumble out, half-stifled. “hmmchhHUH, mmphhchAAAH! Whew.”

She sniffled thickly and scrubbed at her twitching nose with her palm, rubbing it in furious circles that made her eyes water. It was the lilies, it had to be. And now that she had started, well…

Her nose was starting to run as she trotted back towards Storm and Adam, and she swiped at it with her wrist, grumbling to herself about forgetting to bring tissues to the damn greenhouse of all places. She had stifled two more sneezes into silence by the time she reached them, but her sinuses were beginning to feel full and congested, and she knew stifling wouldn’t be much of an option anymore.

“Uh, Stormb?” She asked, dropping the other woman’s code name before thinking about it. Oh well, at least she’d already shown Adam her powers. 

“Kitty,” Storm greeted her, apparently without noticing how her charge’s eyes were beginning to redden. “Adam’s decided to come back to the Institute with us.”

The news was enough to startle the next oncoming sneeze away. “Wait, today?”

Adam shrugged. “There’s nothing here for me. No one would notice if I left.”

“Not even your b — bahhh — b’upCHEW! Sniff, sniff. Your boss?” Kitty pinched her nostrils tightly between thumb and forefinger as if to keep from breathing in any more pollen.

“Bless you,” Storm offered. Adam pulled a crumpled tissue from his pocket and handed it over to her.

“Allergies?” He asked kindly as she massaged her itchy nose through the thin fabric, eyes half-closed as she hovered between relief and another sneeze. 

“Lilies,” Kitty replied thickly, and gave a long, shuddering inhale before the urge to sneeze crashed over her like a tidal wave. “huh’ACCHhuh—achhHYUU-chYUU! Oh mby god,” she muttered into the tissue, which had held its own against her tickly fit but was no longer going to be much use. Storm, looking slightly alarmed, put her hand on Kitty’s shoulder.

“Let’s continue this conversation outside, Adam,” she said. “I think Kitty and her nose would appreciate that.”

Kitty sniffled thickly and nodded. “Cand you also change your clothes before we drive three hours bacgk to the school?”

“Oh.” Adam blushed. “Yes, of course. I’ll go pack.”

“I’ll wait outside,” Kitty replied, and promptly fled the scene.   

Edited January 3, 2017 by Winged

[Enkidom]

Thank you so much Winged, I absolutely loved it, it had a bit of a Jos Whedon period vibe and, even as a fan of the comics since the Claremont's original run, I have a special fondness for that period as it's when I got back into X-men after a hiatus. You've got Kitty and Ororo pegged excellently!