Note from Darqstar: I did!

He stood under the street in one of the maintence tunnels for the city, peering up through a water grate that was half frozen. He'd had to poke a hole in it to see at all, but, being at ground level, the view wasn't too good.

He didn't mind. It'd taken him all day to travel underground from Westchester to New York, but it was worth it. He'd had no idea that the tunnels even went this far, until he came across a map of them near where he was living. Pretty much, he could live anywhere under New York and its suburbs that he wanted, but he'd finally decided to stay where he was. If he moved, he wouldn't have the advantage of being fed every day.

He'd lost track of how long he'd been living under the mansion filled with mutants, just as he'd lost track of how long he'd been a prisoner of Sinister, used for experiments. He could see a sign saying 1996 above him, and that disturbed him. It'd read 1994 the last time he celebrated Christmas.

Finally, the crowd thinned out enough for him to see the tree. It was beautiful. He stared at it for a few minutes, then dropped down away from the cold grate. Even with the warm clothes he'd been given, he could feel it.

Well, he'd done it. He'd travelled all the way to New York to see the Christmas tree lighting and nothing had gone wrong. He smiled. It was good to be able to do things for himself again. Then he sighed. Of course, now he had to travel all the way back, by lamplight.

Shrugging, he picked up his lamp and started back, listening to the faint sounds of Christmas Carols echo down to him from the surface. They were beautiful too, but he felt absolutely no desire to join them. Not now. Maybe not ever.

The sound came again, something he couldn't recognize. It was down the tunnel, which was the only one which would connect to the passageway he needed. A feeling of being trapped filled him and he had to fight not to bolt. It wasn't Sinister, he told himself. Sinister thought he'd been killed when the X-Men destroyed his lab.

With painful slowness, he inched forward. A foot in thirty minutes, three feet in an hour. The sound came less frequently, weaker. He still couldn't tell what it was and went closer.

Finally, he peered around the corner and saw something small on the ground, next to a river of sewage. He turned the light up a bit and looked again. It was a sack, one used to hold rice, and it moved slightly. A faint sound came from it. A mew.

Immediately, he went to the sack and opened it. By the light of the lamp he could see six tiny bodies, little frozen wet bodies and his heart lurched. Suddenly, one of them moved and mewed. Quickly, he pulled it out from the bodies of its siblings and found himself holding a little six week old tabby kitten, shivering and soaked, and no bigger than his palm. Without hesitation, he opened his jacket and put it next to his skin. It never occured to him not to help it. He knew far too well how it felt.

As always, there was a table and chair set up at the foot of the stairs, with a covered plate of food waiting for him. The X-Men seemed to think that the easiest way to win his trust was through his stomach. He wasn't entirely sure they weren't right.

He lifted the cover and saw what he'd been hoping for. Rogue's semi-singed fried chicken. And it was still warm.

Ignoring his own hunger, he took the kitten out of his jacket and set it on the table. It blinked up at him in confusion, wondering why it'd been ejected from its warm bed. Clucking to it, he ripped up part of one chicken leg into tiny pieces and put it before it. It looked at the chicken suspiciously, then fell to eating with gusto.

He grinned with pleasure as he watched it eat, wondering what he should call it. He finally decided not to bother, since he could barely speak at the best of times to call it, and from everything he knew about cats, none of them cared if they had a name or not.

So he kept her, taking her along on his frequent investigations of the tunnels, though partially that was so he could protect her from the huge sewer rats he'd seen. He had a map of the tunnels, but he still liked to explore, checking out bolt holes and just generally filling up the endless days and nights when he'd be awake with nothing else to do and no one he'd trust enough to talk to, even if he could. He also searched for things he could use, filling his pockets with anything interesting, from a bic lighter to an actual compass to a small roll of bright red ribbon he planned to use to decorate his room.

The kitten watched in dignified amazement as he stripped and leaped into the water. He had to leap. The water was far too cold for one to wade in. It had to be all or nothing. Shivering, he stood in the shallow end and washed his long hair and beard, splashing water over the rest of himself too. He didn't use soap in the water, not wanting to pollute it himself, but there was a pile of fine sand in a corner that worked really well as a shampoo replacement. Quickly, he scaped himself with a flat stick to remove the dirt and clambered out again, diving for the towels. The kitten mewed in complaint as he splashed her.

He smiled at her apologetically and climbed back into his clothes. He used to wash them here too, but now he dumped them at the foot of the stairs and the X-Men took care of them. He'd never been able to do a terribly good job on them anyway.

Scooping up the kitten, he cuddled her against him until she squirmed away and dropped back to the ground, not liking his wet beard. Sitting down, she cleaned her paw and watched him gather up the damp towels and head out the way he'd come. It wasn't until he was almost out of sight that she deigned to follow.

He froze, rooted to the spot, panicked. He hadn't left that candle there. Someone else was in the tunnels. The kitten rubbed up against his leg and he jumped, though he didn't utter a sound. Scooping her up, he tucked her into his jacket in spite of her protests. If he had to run, he didn't want to lose her.

He had to go forward, to get back to the tunnels he lived in. Grimacing at his luck, to always end up being in a cut off tunnel anytime he heard something, he braced himself and crept forward, his own lantern turned off.

The candle wasn't the only one. Every ten feet along the passage, another candle glowed, melting slowly to the floor. They went into darkness in one direction, but in the other, they turned a corner into a room that just glowed with light. He knew that room. It was a natural, sloping cavern, filled with the graves of all the Morlocks that had been killed by Sinister's Marauders.

Luckily, his way home was in the other direction. Grateful, he hurried that way, but he kept finding his pace slowing and finally he stopped and looked back. Why would anyone light candles for the Morlocks?

Cursing his curiousity, he went up to the enterance to the cavern.

The cavern was full of light, so much so that he found his night adapted eyes tearing and blinking. The kitten took one look and ducked back into his jacket. Finally, he could see and looked inside in amazement.

The cavern was filled to brimming with candles. Big ones, small ones, fat, thin, all glowing, all white. It was even warm in the cavern, where normally it was cold. A man knelt in the room before the pedestal which explained who killed the Morlocks. He was half turned towards him, though his eyes were closed and he was fairly sure he didn't know he was out there.

The man was older than him by a great many years, with short white hair and a proud face. Almost too proud. He was dressed entirely in red and black, with a long red cape and a helmet beside him that bore some resemblance to a bucket. He looked familiar somehow, but he couldn't place him. He wondered if he was one of the mutants who lived upstairs, and nearly ran when it occured to him that he might be a Marauder. It was the man's talking that stopped him.

"Forgive me for not being able to save you," he said, his voice thick with an accent he couldn't identify. "I should have protected you and I did not. I will carry that failure to my grave." He sighed and placed a gloved hand on the pedestal. "You suffered far too much, forced to live down here by petty humans and then murdered for no crime more telling than being helpless. How many of my family did I watch die the same way?"

The strange man bowed his head as he watched and listened, fascinated. He'd never heard anyone talk like this and he felt a connection to him, an understanding. He'd never thought anyone else could know how he'd felt, locked 'in a cylinder in a lab for a crazed geneticist to experiment on, never knowing if he would be the next person to die or if it would be the person next to him. And, after a while, no longer caring.

"My poor people. I have failed so many of you who suffered at the tyranny of others, who wept and died, unmourned. I have sworn to defend you and avenge you." His voice dropped to a whisper. "But there are so many of you and I am alone. Even my Acolytes cannot know how I feel. Even they betray me." He stood. "I am tired, Morlocks. Every year I come here, masked so that Cerebro and Xavier's pet telepaths cannot detect me, and every year I leave feeling emptier. I could not even save you, and you lived right under me. How can I save anyone when I failed even you?"

Suddenly, his head jerked up, his body straightening proudly, eyes hard. "Who is there? Come out, I can sense the metal in your blood from here."

He fought panic. He wanted to run, but he understood so much. The helplessness, the aloneness, the not knowing who to turn to. But, still, he was too wounded to go out there and tell him so himself. In his jacket, the kitten squirmed, wanting out.

In the cavern, the man turned towards the doorway and the helmet rose from the ground to seat itself on his head. The air crackled with power. "I will not ask you again."

Hidden in the shadows, his eyes locked on the older man's, he pulled the kitten out of his coat, along with the ribbon he'd found. Quickly, he bit off a strip, tied a bow around her neck and kissed her nose. She pawed at his face playfully. After a quick, last hug, he tossed her gently into the light.

"Merry Christmas," he whispered, not sure if he'd heard him.

He had. The man stared at the little kitten as she looked around, then sauntered over to him, with an undefinable something in his eyes. The power in the air faded to nothing as she rubbed up against his leg, purring, and he picked her up, cradling her against him. She batted at his nose.

"Thank you," he said simply.

He just smiled and went home.

"You shh. Ah wanta get this done sometime t'night."

"Behave, children."

"Bite me, Scott."

"Excuse me?!"

He sat up in bed with a start, listening to the voices echo in the tunnels. Instinctively, he reached for the kitten, and his heart lurched as he remembered he'd given her away. It felt good, what he'd done, but it hurt too. He felt so lonely now.

The voices faded away and he went out, cautiously creeping to the foot of the stairs to see what they'd been up to. Then he stopped in stunned amazement. There was a christmas tree there, a real christmas tree with lights and tinsel and decorations. Lights were strung on the walls with wreaths and garlands and the table was set with a tablecloth. He could smell the turkey from here. There were even presents under the tree.

Slowly, he stumbled over to the tree and dropped to his knees before it, reaching out a shaking hand to touch one of the lower ornaments, a little decoration of a cat curled up in a basket. Not knowing the reason, since it surely wasn't sorrow, he buried his face in his hands and started to cry.

The End**********