Lock and Key

Posted on Fri May 16th, 2025 @ 1:00pm by Kurt Wagner & Kennedy Kelly

3,346 words; about a 17 minute read

Mission: Episode 6: X-Fernus Agenda
Location: X-Mansion | Connor's Lab
Timeline: January 13th, 1991 (early morning)

Kurt stood hunched over the central worktable, bleary-eyed with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up as he continued to puzzle over the delicate construct before him. The low whir of equipment hummed in the background of the otherwise silent lab, pale blue light spilling from the monitors across scattered papers and tool kits. His tail curled and uncurled behind him, flicking with mounting frustration. The artifact—assembled through trial and error with no small help from Connor’s brilliant engineering—rested at the center of the worktable like a sleeping puzzle box. Cold. Silent. Undefiant. Undefeated. Kurt scowled at it.

“Mein Gott im Himmel,” he muttered under his breath. “Du hast gesagt, es zeigt den Weg… warum schweigst du jetzt?“

His eyes wearily lingered over the overlapping plates, the inscriptions etched into its shell—text he still couldn’t translate but had started to feel. This relic... it wanted to activate. He could feel it, like a prayer half-formed on the lips of a ghost. But no matter how he turned it, prodded it, or even bamfed away and back again to test its response to spatial shifts, it remained inert.

Kurt had spent the entire night here, refusing to give in to sleep. His clothes were rumpled, hair askew, and the bags under his golden eyes had darkened into smudges that hinted at just how long he'd been awake. Connor had gone to bed hours earlier after a dozen mutual speculations yielded no results. And now, as the night hours turned to early morning, Kurt remained, alone with the mystery.

Until he wasn’t.

The soft thud of music pulsing from down the corridor filtered into the lab, followed by the familiar shuffle of feet and the occasional spin of slippers on polished floor. The gymnasium was awake. So was Kennedy.

Kurt sighed. He knew he should stop. He should eat. He should sleep. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was close. So close. He leaned against the table, rubbing his temples, eyes flicking once more to the strange relic.

"Zeig mir den Weg..." he whispered again.

Eventually the classical music that softly floated down the hallways stopped and Kennedy made her way back towards the mansion’s living spaces. She had noticed the laboratory lights on when she started her morning dance practice but disregarded it because Connor kept strange hours. It wasn’t until she heard the sound of muttered German that the lab actually caught her attention.

“Kurt?” Kennedy greeted him with inquiry as she entered the lab. She was dressed like she always was in the morning, a dancer’s leotard and a tight bun. Confirmation that she had been practicing ballet. “What are you doing here?”

Kurt blinked as if emerging from a trance. The voice—her voice—cut through his fog of frustration like morning light cracking stained glass.

“Ach, Kennedy…” He rubbed the back of his neck and straightened, only now realizing how stiff his spine had become. His tail gave an automatic flick of greeting before curling behind his legs. “I did not know it vas morning already,” he admitted with a tired smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

His gaze lingered for a half-second longer than it should have. The simple elegance of her form in the leotard, the flush in her cheeks, the slight glisten of exertion… Kurt felt warmth creep into his face and quickly turned back toward the table, his hand gesturing toward the center of the chaos.

“I... could not sleep,” he explained. “Not until I figured this out.” He pointed to the assembled relic with a note of exasperated reverence in his voice. “Connor helped me build it. All signs say eet is sort of ancient key or vayfinder. Every inscription claims it should ‘point ze vay to Kamar-Taj.’ But now zhat it is complete…” He trailed off and gave the artifact a look of disappointment that bordered on betrayal.

“It does nosthingk,” he said with a sigh, folding his arms and leaning on the edge of the table again. “No pulse. No light. Not even a vhisper. I hef tried everysthingk… motion, heat, veight. I even teleported it across ze country and back again, just in case space or velocity meant somesthingk.” He looked back up at her then, the frustration in his weary features softening. “But... it is good to see you,” he added quietly, a touch more vulnerable than intended.

“You should at least try to sleep.” Kennedy said with a frown, she wasn’t one to judge too harshly. She too threw herself into work when she was upset and had worked to the point of exhaustion more than once.

Setting down her gym bag she made her way over to Kurt and the key. If he wasn’t going to sleep until this was resolved, she would help him. Kennedy stood next to him as she stared at the key, she paused for a moment when she realized he had invaded his personal space without hesitation. She sheepishly smiled and took a step back before looking down at the key again.

“So what exactly are you expecting it to do? I understand it’s not doing anything but what is the desired result?” Kennedy reached out and touched the relic, it even felt old.

Kurt folded his arms across his chest again, his gaze fixed on the relic as Kennedy stood beside him. Her nearness was comforting—distracting, even—but not unwelcome. Still, it made it harder to hide the raw edges of his weariness.

“Zhat is ze problem,” he said, tail twitching as he spoke. “I do not know exactly what it is meant to do. Some of ze relics I found before—zhey projected light, showed maps, symbols, some even... hummed when handled correctly. But zhis?” He shook his head, the frown on his face deepening with helpless frustration.

“Ze texts say it ‘points ze vay to Kamar-Taj.’ But zhat could mean anysthingk. A beacon. A compass. A portal. Perhaps it needs a power source? Or a code... or it could already be active, und I simply cannot detect it.” He sighed again and ran a hand down his face. “Connor suggested magnetic polarization. We tested zhat. Nosthingk. Pietro zhought velocity might trigger it. Nosthingk. I even tried shouting to it.” He gave a self-deprecating shrug. “Still nosthingk.”

He paused, his eyes drifting over the lines of ancient inscriptions, flickering under the lab lights. “But it must lead to her. I know it. Vanda mentioned Kamar-Taj in her final letter. Zhis is ze only trail I hef left.” His voice softened then, the fire beneath his words giving way to something quieter, more desperate. “If I fail zhis... I lose her completely.” His golden eyes turned toward Kennedy, no longer veiled by pretense or distance. “Und zhat is not a future I am prepared to face.”

“We’ll figure it out.” Kennedy attempted to console him despite the pit his words created in her stomach. She silently wondered how long it would take her to stop feeling this way about Kurt, what else she could do to stuff down and ignore her unrequited feelings.

Kurt wanted Wanda back and because she cared about him, Kennedy wanted him to be happy, so she forgot her own wants and focused on him. “The answer has to be here, if each piece was a clue to the next whoever designed this would have told you how to make it work.”

Kennedy reached past him and picked up his notebook but his notes were all in German. She examined the lines of text and the clues that had already been written. But just like her inability to understand Kurt’s native language maybe there was more lost in translation. “What was the original language used to tell you all of this?”

Kurt let out a breath through his nose, more a sigh of quiet concession than any true relief. His eyes remained fixed on the relic for another lingering second before he turned his gaze toward Kennedy once more.

"Ze original language… is lost to time," he admitted, his voice low and gravel-worn from fatigue. "But at each location, I found pieces, symbols matched to phrases scratched beside zhem in local dialects. Shrines in Japan, Croatia, India. Zhere vas a vault under Sedlec vith a mixture of Latin und proto-Slavic. I cross-referenced everything I could, like… a broken Rosetta Stone. But smaller. Und less complete. Like a puzzle scattered across centuries.”

He gave a quiet chuckle that expressed more frustration than amusement. “I hef been using intuition more zhan anysthingk to get to zhis point.” His shoulders dropped, and he rubbed the back of his neck, sheepish but sincere. “But I fear I may hef run out of even zhat.”

“You aren’t the first person to find success through winging it,” Kennedy said while walking over to the desk and bringing a pad of paper and pen with her. She began to look at all the clues and text that were part of each piece of the relic. “But sometimes you need a little bit more.”

She stared at them for a long time before frustration knit her brow too. With a small shrug to herself, she finally said what she was thinking out loud. “The clues to the next piece of the relic followed some sort of order but the order in which you found them isn’t the order that Connor placed them back together in.”

Going back to her sheet of paper, she ripped it up and then reorganized the text in the order that the relic was placed together. The clues came together like some sort of nonsense poem but the pentameter was present even in translation. Kennedy focused on the Latin part for the longest amount of time, it had made the most sense out of all of them.

“It’s Dactylic Pentameter… a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables.” Kennedy tapped the words as she spoke, “Kurt, can you convert all of this to Latin?”

Kurt gave her an exhausted smile. “Connor already did. He said it helped him to zhink.” Shuffling through the notepads, Kurt found the right one. “I do not know how accurate it is because it is fragmented. Vhy? Vhat do you see zhat ve did not?”

“They aren’t fragmented when you put them in the correct order, the order that the relic was rebuilt in. I’m by no means proficient in Latin, but I at least recognize the conjunctions.” She did the same thing with Connor’s translation, ripping apart the sheet of paper and lining up the clues in the same order as the pieces of the relic. “Look at how it flows now… they aren’t fragments any more.”

Fulgura tangunt alta per ardua montis iter,
Umbra secuta vocem, mens sine lege fluit.
Aetheris arces quaerit animus sine pace,
Tempora lenta meant, cor tamen ignis agens.
Verba magistri latent sub nece noctis inane,
Saepe dolor docet quod sapiens retinet.

Via per Indorum silvas, saevaque flammae,
Corque rebellat dum via dura trahit.
Saecula vertuntur, spatia non sunt in orbe—
Mystica portarum claustra tacente movent.
Quando aditum tandem praebet secreta fenestra,
Nullus ibi regnat nisi qui se novit.

Ex corde exsiliens vis potens agit altiliumque,
Flamma viam monstrat quae ducit ad Kamar-Taj.

It wasn’t the Medieval Latin that Kurt was most familiar with, but then Connor was hardly a scribe himself. Even so, the meaning became plain as day.

“Ja… I see it now…” Kurt slapped his forehead, wondering how it had been so elusive. “Ze reason it is so vague is because ze meaning assumes an activated key zhat vould illuminate ze vay wisthout need for more specific instructions.” He looked up at Kennedy and flashed her a tired smile of admiration. “You are amazing, Kennedy.” Then he quickly looked back at the rearranged transcript she had organized. “So ze crux of ze message is zhis part at ze bottom.”

Kurt read it again more closely and rendered his best translation. “A force leaping from ze heart, born of power, drives ze power source, zhat flame vhich shows ze vay to Kamar-Taj.”

Pacing now, Kurt began to toss the phrase back and forth in his mind. “Force from ze heart. Born of power. Flame ignites ze power source und lights ze vay.” His study of history and culture pushed all of that together in his verbal processing. “Ancient technology unknown today. Copious use of mysthology in ze shrines. Metaphors for scientific principles like naming ze planets after Roman deities. Energy from ze heart. Born of power...”

After a moment, Kurt’s brow arched. “Vhat if zheir priests and zheir scientists vere ze same? Ve hef ze same in Mosther Church, as did ze Persians vith zheir Magi und ze Egyptians vith zheir heka practitioners. In ze same vay mutant powers vere mistaken as vitchcraft, vhat if zhis calls for a mutant power to harness?”

“It’s a possibility, religion has been a way to explain the unexplained for a very long time.” Kennedy reached out and touched the key again. “And you’ve needed mutants to help you pass all the locations at the different shrines. It feels like a plausible theory.”

Looking at Kennedy, he could feel all the pieces falling into place. “Perhaps you are ze key, Kennedy.” She was born into the upper crust of American gentry. It seemed she was destined for greatness no matter the age she was born into. “If I am right, zhen you vould hef been trained as a priestess or curator of knowledge in vhatever lost civilization zhat constructed zhis. Your power may activate it, ze force of your heart, born of power, lighting ze flame.” His golden eyes burned in earnest excitement. Even if it was a flimsy hope, it was the only one he had. “Vould you… try to charge it vith your power?”

“You think too highly of me, Kurt.” Kennedy sheepishly replied. A part of her heart hurt over the idea of helping him find Wanda, it would mean the end to a lot of things. Despite Kurt’s promises that it would change nothing, she was no fool when it came to matters of the heart. But Kurt wanted this, he wanted Wanda back and had gone to the ends of the earth to do it. Because she loved him, she would let him go.

“Yeah, sure.” Kennedy agreed with more melancholy than she cared to express. “But maybe stand back a bit just in case it explodes.”

Placing a hand on the relic, she closed her eyes and transferred a pulse of kinetic energy into the key.

The moment Kennedy’s hand connected and the kinetic charge surged into the relic, a faint whine pierced the silence of the lab—a hum so high-pitched it was more felt in the bones than heard by the ears.

And then the relic shuddered. Thin, etched lines across its shell began to glow with a pulsing teal light. The petals of its iris-like design began to slowly rotate, clicking into new alignment, and from the center, a faint circular projection unfurled like a hologram made of liquid starshine. It revealed a map, but not one made of land and sea. It resembled a dimensional topography, a spiral of glowing ley lines and concentric rings interspersed with ancient glyphs. They twisted in impossible geometries that bent space itself. At the center of this luminous gyroscope was a glyph unlike the others—a glowing emblem Kurt recognized from early in his spelunking search.

“Kamar-Taj,” he whispered. “Zhat is ze symbol.”

Then the projection shifted, the outer rings slowly rotated until the central glyph moved, carried along an invisible path like a lodestone drawn toward a hidden current.

"Eet is pointingk..." Kurt breathed. "Not just showing ze destination, but also drawing a route, like a dowsing compass.”

The relic spun once more, then projected a shimmering trail—a beacon of pale light arcing through the air like a constellation. It pointed... southeast.

Kurt smiled, the breath catching in his chest. “Zhis is it. Ve haf found ze vay.” He turned to Kennedy, tears welling in his eyes from joy, gratitude, and exhaustion alike. “Danke schoen, Kennedy. I could not hef done zhis wisthout your help. I could never repay you but I hope you accept vhat humble gratitude I can give. You are amazing und I appreciate everysthingk you do.”

“You’re welcome, Kurt.” Kennedy forced herself to smile despite the feeling of foreboding that was creeping into thoughts. This was the beginning of the end. “When are you going to leave?”

“Ideally I should go as soon as possible,” Kurt said, knuckling his bleary eyes, “but zhere are osther zhings to consider. Pietro, ze rest of X-Factor…” He teetered to one side, uncharacteristically losing his balance and fell into Kennedy. “Verzeihen Sie mir! I must be more tired zhan I —” As he reached for the worktable’s edge, Kurt steadied himself against Kennedy’s shoulder. The sudden force put them both off balance and sent them crashing to the floor.

“S-sorry!” Kurt gasped, his golden eyes wide with horror at falling on top of her. “Are you hurt?”

“Ugh,” Kennedy grunted as she landed on the floor. They had fallen or collided several times during acrobatics training but this one hit a little harder. “Yeah, I’m fine.” She had just recovered from hitting her head on Christmas and she instinctively went to rub the back of her head.

Kennedy was quiet for a moment before she realized Kurt wasn’t moving, the weight of his body crushed her into the cold floor. “Are you going to get off of me?”

“Ja!”

BAMF

In an instant, Kurt was off her body and on his feet, face flushed but his hand extended downward to help her up. “Al-low me. Apologies.” If his head could’ve turned 180 degrees, Kurt just might have done it. The look on his face was sheer embarrassment. “Again, so sorry.”

“Thanks and it’s okay.” Kennedy’s mood seemed damped still, like a cloud had rolled in and she was shrouded in gloom. She took his offered hand and got back to her feet. “You should probably get some sleep, it’s not like you to be clumsy.”

“You are right,” Kurt said, shifting his eyes back and forth like he was unsure where to let it linger. “Zhat must be it. Clumsy me. I heft not eaten or slept since… I zhink it vas yesterday’s breakfast.”

At the mention of their routine, Kurt finally let himself look at Kennedy full on. “I might skip ze coffee today, but vould… vould you like to get somesthingk to break our fast?”

“Oh yeah, of course, coffee is kind of the opposite of what you need right now.” Kennedy felt like her heart was breaking as she continued to worry about Kurt leaving, her mornings would go back to a solitary affair. “I’m not really hungry, I think I’m just going to go take a shower. If you decide to leave for Kamar-Taj before I see you again, I hope you find everything you’re looking for.”

“Oh…” Kurt blinked strongly several times, unsure of what to say or even think. “Zhen… I suppose zhis is good morning, good evening, and good night.” The disappointment on his face couldn’t be more plain. He raised his hand in a weak wave. “Auf Wiedersehen… Kennedy.”

Without further warning, he vanished in another bamf. This one carried him out of the room and out of sight, but not out of mind.

“Goodbye,” she replied to the empty room as Kennedy wrapped her arms around herself in a sad attempt at a hug. Tears formed in her eyes but she tried to remain composed for her own sake. “I’ll miss you so much.”

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