i'm not sure what goes here

New Mutants vol. 1 no. 30, Chris Claremont, Bill Sienkiewicz, Joe Rosen, and Glynis Oliver

Even with so much of it limited to subtext, Katyana is the only soulmate themed romance that has ever worked for me, and I’ve been asking myself why that is. I've had Secret Wars II on my mind for a while now, and it's probably sending me into dangerously head-canon areas of thought regarding what might have come between them, within and without, to avoid the usual pitfalls that come with destiny and magic as romantic instruments. I don’t know if Claremont’s work resonated the same way with me as it did with other Katyana fans. Hopefully this post wont veer off into the ramblings of a complete lunatic.

The image above comes from the Gladiators/Shadow King arc of New Mutants, which, due to scheduling oddities, was strangely used to bookend Secret Wars II, the second storyline in which Marvel's heroes. This is notably the first time that Illyana's Darkchilde persona is revealed to her friends, and more importantly (for Katyana purposes), the first time in which the mystical connection between Kitty Pryde and Illyana Rasputina is openly displayed.

Illyana, temporarily driven out of control by the Beyonder, attacks Allison Blaire, Sam Guthrie, and Rachel Summers. In order to save her friends, Kitty disarms Illyana, and instinctively claims the Soulsword's power for herself. We immediately see it change from its corrupted blackened form, to the more traditional silver, where it is made of light. The Beyonder’s facade is removed, and Illyana’s soul has been restored to it's natural state, or at least to that which Kitty herself sees as the natural state of Illyana’s soul. Kitty defeats Illyana and restores her to normality by cutting her in half. The bulk of the scene is  narrated directly by Kitty Pryde,

I take Kitty's dialogue to mean that she definitely has no idea if what she's doing will even work, and paired with the  knowledge that Kitty 1) sees the Soulsword as a deadly weapon that's harmed her before, 2) knows it will kill magical things, and 3) she actually tried to cut Illyana in half, it's highly likely that Kitty was prepared to accept the possibility of her best friend’s death, if necessary, if her gamble didn’t work. And though it might read strangely, I say that as someone whose first online fan community was X-Men/New Mutants, whose first ship was Katyana, who thinks that they were important to one another's growth and sense of self. What it ultimately illustrates, I think, is the basic difference in Kitty's love for Illyana versus Illyana's love for Kitty, and what loving someone actually means to each of them.

Kitty's love for Illyana is, I believe, non-transferable and bounded to a specific point in time and space. Her love has limits, and it is a quantity that can be exhausted. In later issues of Uncanny X-Men, we see that Kitty's love for Illyana is so inherently self-centered, based so completely on Kitty's own conceptualization of Illyana as she exists in that moment, that even when the Beyonder erased Illyana from time entirely, Kitty was able to retain her memory of her. There is a repository of all things Illyana Rasputina that exists within Kitty, a construct of memories and emotions that belongs to her and not to Illyana herself or the world around them, that she will hold on to no matter the personal cost. To Kitty, the Illyana that she loves is characterized by this specific set of behaviors and traits that, if diverged from, would render her no-longer-Illyana. She would become, to Kitty, a different person--if not a stranger--and as we see in Secret Wars II, a circumstance can be formed where Kitty's inherent loyalty to classmates (and even a casual acquaintance like Allison) can take priority over one of the most important relationships in her life. Does that make her a bad person or a fair-weather friend? I don't actually think so, and if anything I think it's one-half of the set of dispositions that enabled her relationship with Illyana to form in the first place.

After Illyana's original kidnapping at Belasco's hands was resolved, we see Kitty having the shortest adjustment period of any of the Xavier School residents. She certainly adjusts faster than Piotr, who even at the time of Inferno still had not really accepted the changed, aged, Illyana for who she then was. Piotr's understanding of Illyana was linked to who he remembered her being, to his own desires to save her from Limbo, and to who he had once imagined that she would grow into before life sidetracked them both. Kitty, on the other hand, was able to dissociate her boyfriend's younger sister (that she used to babysit, look after, and read bedtime stories to) from her future roommate (her classmate, study buddy, best friend, and eventual soulmate). At the same time, when Illyana is de-aged again, Kitty is capable of immediately boxing up her feelings for the teenaged Illyana, and treating her again as an ex-boyfriend's kid sister that she cared about in a distant younger-cousin way, and grieving for the older Illyana while not unhealthily crowding her younger self. During the early days of Excalibur, Kitty had the Soulsword planted in the ground outside of the lighthouse, an active memorial to Illyana, allowing her to constantly visit Illyana's symbolic grave even while keeping up an overseas correspondence with Illyana's younger self.

And though I do not believe Kieron Gillen intended this, I think it made the narrative of Schism neater, where Kitty was capable of looking past the returned Illyana's appearance, or  her possession of the Soulsword and guardianship of Limbo, and deciding that Illyana's increasingly anti-social treatment of Piotr and the New Mutants had proven her to be a separate Illyana, and walking away from her entirely. Gillen's total destruction of the Kitty/Illyana/Piotr trinity of relationships, and the general disservice done to all three characters, rightly annoyed many long time fans, but this is an aspect of it that I think he got right. Kitty Pryde would absolutely have zero shits to give about a friend that abused and manipulated her other friends, and who threatened her life for calling her out. At the same time, it doesn't read as particularly strange or jarring when Brian Michael Bendis chose to repair their relationship--he just started writing Illyana more like herself, and it became natural for Kitty to accept her back.

I spoke earlier of Kitty's affections for Illyana being "non-transferable" and to that end I'll speak shortly on Illyana herself. Illyana is repeatedly shown as being unconcerned with how Kitty changes as time goes on, or with who she has become with time. She'll love her anyway. Unlike Kitty, who falls for people in the moment, Illyana's relationships are themselves without time or expiration. To Illyana, it is the soul of the person that matters, the inner potential of who they might be, or of who they once were and might become again with time, that is of significance. As a young girl, she had Kitty Pryde as an older sister, and was able to transfer that connection to Cat Pryde, and when it grew from a child's affection for an older sibling to a more specific friendship, she was capable of again transferring that same friendship back to Kitty Pryde. It's what made them work, in the early days, when Illyana escaped Limbo: Illyana didn't have to feel as guilty over what she did to Cat, because Cat was right there in front of her; and Kitty in turn received a new friend who understood her perfectly, like she'd known her for years.