Chapter 51:
– Blake –
First day of university, I'd already survived Introduction to Physics with Jean, a lunch where Peter talked my ear off about the cooking robots for forty straight minutes—again—and a foreign language class where I sat with Rias and Akeno. Rias talked my ear off enthusiastically the whole class since the three of us didn't have to pay attention.
We spoke ALL the languages already...
I did notice that my older sister, Akeno, was acting a bit more subdued—or looking a bit upset about something she didn't bring up even when I asked her. Rias just told me Akeno was on her period and was being pissy about it which made Akeno hiss at Rias about female devils not even getting those!
So yeah, it has been an interesting first day so far. My brain felt like it had been wrung out and hung to dry.
I was pulling my tablet from my bag when the air in the room shifted. Just that particular change in atmospheric pressure that happens when someone who commands attention walks through a doorway. I didn't even need to look up. I could feel her.
But I looked up anyway, because I'm not a goddamn monk.
Emma Frost walked down the aisle between the tiered seats like she was on a runway in Milan and every single person in this lecture hall had paid admission to watch. White jeans that could've been painted on, hugging every curve of her hips and the round swell of her ass with the kind of tightness that made you question whether they were custom tailored. They absolutely were. A fitted ivory blouse, top two buttons undone just enough to be interesting without being obvious, tucked into a thin belt that cinched her waist. Heels. Because of course she wore heels to an economics lecture. And those eyes, pale ice blue, found mine across a room full of people like I was the only person who existed.
There's no way this is a coincidence. Jean gets my first class, Emma gets my last. They planned this.
The thought almost made me smile. Then she was sliding into the seat directly beside me, crossing one leg over the other. She settled in, leaned back, and gave me that smirk. That infuriating, gorgeous, supremely confident smirk that said she already knew exactly what I was thinking and found it adorable that I thought I could hide it.
"So," she said, her voice low and smooth like silk being dragged across skin. "How are you enjoying your first day of university, Blake?"
Before I could answer, the murmuring started.
A girl two rows ahead turned to her friend, not even bothering to whisper. "Wait, isn't that Emma Frost? Like, THE Emma Frost!?"
"The billionaire?" her friend whispered back, louder than any whisper had the right to be. "Doesn't she own Frost International? I thought they just did that merger with the defense contractor last month."
"What the hell is she doing in beginner economics?" A guy to my left muttered, leaning forward in his seat to get a better look. "Isn't she literally a billionaire? Does she not already know economics? She is economics!"
"Maybe she's the professor," another voice chimed in, half-joking, half-genuinely uncertain.
"Oh my god, who cares about her bank account," a girl behind us hissed, barely containing herself. "Who's the hot guy she's cuddling up next to? Look at his arms. Look at his jaw. Is he a model? He has to be a model!"
"She's practically sitting in his lap," her friend muttered back. "Lucky bitch."
Emma didn't react to any of it. Not a single flicker of acknowledgment crossed her face. She just sat there with that easy confidence, one elbow propped on the desk, chin resting lightly on her fingers, those pale blue eyes locked on me like the rest of the world was white noise she'd muted years ago. Her smirk deepened by a fraction of an inch, daring me to be the one who broke first, who looked away, who got flustered by the attention.
I held her gaze. Let the corner of my mouth pull up. She's beautiful. She knows it. I know it. Half this room knows it. But what gets me is she doesn't care about any of them noticing. She only cares that I notice.
"It's been pretty fun, actually," I said, matching her casual tone, keeping my voice low enough that it was just for her. I turned slightly in my seat, angling my body toward hers, close enough that my knee almost brushed hers under the desk. I paused. Let the beat land. "But it's even better now that you're here."
Then she snorted. Actually snorted. It was the most human, unguarded sound I'd ever heard come out of Emma Frost, and it cracked through her ice-queen armor like a pebble through a windshield. "That," she said, composing herself with a slight toss of her hair, "was astoundingly cheesy. I want you to know that. Objectively, categorically cheesy. The kind of line that would get a lesser man laughed out of the room." She paused, and her smirk softened into something warmer. "Lucky for you," she continued, her voice dropping half an octave as she leaned closer, her lips near enough to my ear that I felt the warmth of her breath, "I can tell you meant every word of it."
My heart did something stupid in my chest. A skip. A stutter. Whatever you want to call it.
She's terrifying and she's beautiful and she's been more patient with me than I probably deserve.
Emma's expression flickered. She'd caught that thought too. Her jaw tightened almost imperceptibly, and she turned her gaze forward toward the empty podium, but not before I saw the shine building at the corners of her eyes.
"Don't you dare make me emotional in a lecture hall, Himejima," she murmured. "I have a reputation."
I reached over and took her hand. Laced my fingers through hers right there on the shared armrest, in full view of three hundred nosy students. Emma didn't look at me. She kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, chin lifted, posture immaculate, the perfect image of a woman who didn't care about anything or anyone.
But she didn't let go of my hand.
Not when the professor walked in. Not when he introduced himself. Not through the entire first lecture on microeconomic principles that she could've taught blindfolded with her portfolio as a visual aid.
…An hour later.
The professor wrapped up his lecture with a stammered reminder about reading chapters one through three before Wednesday, his voice cracking slightly when he made the mistake of making eye contact with Emma on his way out. She didn't even acknowledge him. Just closed her leather notebook with a crisp snap and tucked her pen away like she'd been sitting through a mildly entertaining performance rather than an introductory economics class.
Students shuffled around us, packing bags, trading numbers, doing the awkward first-day dance of figuring out who they wanted to befriend and who they wanted to avoid. A few lingered nearby, clearly working up the nerve to approach Emma. None of them made it past the five-foot radius.
A hand closed around mine once again. "Come with me," Emma said, standing and pulling me up with her in one fluid motion.
"Where are we going?"
"You'll see."
She didn't elaborate. Just turned and walked toward the lecture hall exit with me in tow.
The whispers followed us. "Dude, that guy walked in here single and walked out dating a billionaire in under ninety minutes. What the fuck..."
"Maybe he's famous? Like, in another country?"
"He looks Japanese."
"Half, maybe?"
"Do you think he's a model?"
"Nobody's jaw is that sharp naturally."
For eight years I'd been Blake Smith, nobody, the foster kid in secondhand clothes who sat in the back of Midtown High trying not to be noticed. Now I was walking across a billionaire's campus holding a billionaire's hand while strangers speculated about whether I was famous.
What a difference a year makes…
I bit down on a grin and glanced sideways at Emma. She kept her eyes forward but I could actually see her lower lip trembling like she was trying not to laugh. But her thumb was doing that slow circle thing against the back of my hand again.
A group of girls at a picnic table went completely silent as we passed. One of them had her phone out. Whether she was taking a picture or just happened to be holding it, I couldn't tell. Emma's eyes didn't even flicker in their direction.
A guy sitting on a bench with a textbook open on his lap did an actual, cartoonish double-take. His head swiveled, tracking Emma, then me, then our joined hands, and then he looked back down at his textbook with an expression that said life isn't fair and I'm aware of that.
"You know," I said, keeping my voice low enough for just the two of us, "if you wanted to mark your territory, you could've just peed on my shoe. Would've been quicker."
Emma didn't break stride. "I have infinitely more class than that, darling."
We reached the far eastern edge of campus, past the main cluster of academic buildings and dormitories, where the manicured lawns gave way to a quieter stretch of landscaping. I'd noticed this building yesterday during the orientation tour, but only in passing. It sat slightly apart from everything else, set back from the main pathways, partially obscured by a grove of trees that were clearly planted there to block the view on purpose.
Now that I was actually looking at it, really looking, the details jumped out. Fewer windows than the rest of campus, and the ones that existed were tinted nearly black from the outside, giving the whole structure a sealed, secretive quality. No signage. No logo. No directory listing by the entrance. No decorative banners or welcome flags like every other building on campus had for orientation week.
Emma stopped in front of the entrance and turned to face me. Her shoulders squared. Her chin lifted another fraction of an inch. "I own this building," she said.
I blinked. Looked at the building. Looked back at her. Looked at the building again.
"You... own a building. On Tony Stark's campus."
"I do."
"An entire building?"
I let out a low whistle. I'd known Emma was wealthy. You couldn't not know that. Her name was on Forbes lists. Her company made weapons and defense systems that competed with Stark Industries in certain markets. But there was a difference between knowing someone was a billionaire in the abstract and watching them casually gesture at an entire building they'd planted on another billionaire's property like a flag on conquered land.
"How did you get Tony to agree to this?"
Emma's smile sharpened. "Tony Stark is obscenely rich, but even he couldn't fund an entire cutting-edge university from scratch without outside investors. Construction costs alone for a campus this size are in the tens of billions. Frost International was one of the primary private investors during the capital raise." She let that hang for a moment, watching my face. "This building," she continued, "was part of my terms. Tony got the largest single investment commitment of the fundraising round. I got my own facility on campus grounds, exempt from Stark oversight, running my own security protocols, answerable to no one's board but mine."
We approached the entrance. A panel embedded in the wall beside the glass doors hummed to life as we got within five feet, projecting a thin curtain of blue light that swept over both of us from head to toe.
"Welcome, Miss Frost. Biometric and psychometric scan confirmed. Identity verified."
A brief pause.
"Welcome Master Blake Himejima. Clearance level: Omega. Full facility access granted."
I raised an eyebrow at that wording? I had full clearance?
"Of course you have full clearance, we built this for you," Emma said, as if that was supposed to be obvious…
Wow.
We stepped inside. The lobby was exactly what I should have expected from something designed by Emma Frost. High tech, with white and silver accents on pretty much everything…
"It's very... you," I said with only a tiny pause.
"Thank you," Emma smirked at me.
"That was half a compliment."
"I'm choosing to accept the favorable half. Keep walking..." she grinned and led me further inside. I noticed the building was empty other than the two of us. But I noticed the cameras, small, dark, recessed into the ceiling at intervals too precise to be decorative. More of them than any building this size should need.
The windows disappeared entirely after the first turn.
"So," I said, glancing around as we walked, "are you going to tell me what this place actually is? You built it for me right? Or are you going to keep holding my hand and leading me deeper into your secret lair until I figure it out?"
Emma's smile widened. "Secret lair. I like that. Jean wanted to call it a 'base of operations,' which is technically accurate but painfully boring… I blame her former years with the X-men. That never happened in this timeline of course, but her mindset sometimes defaults to those years."
"Jean was involved in this too?"
"She handled the technical specifications for the medical bay and training equipment. I handled architecture, security, and funding." She paused at a junction in the corridor and turned left. "Consider this your headquarters for the foreseeable future, Blake."
I slowed slightly. "My headquarters."
"Costume storage and maintenance," she said, counting on her fingers without releasing my hand. "Equipment vault. Secure communications array. A medical bay with diagnostic equipment when Asia Argento isn't available to heal you herself, because your life involves a frankly alarming number of emergencies..."
I couldn't really argue with that last part.
"Come on," she said and led me to the next hallway. "You haven't seen the best part yet."
We stopped in front of a door that looked nothing like the others. This one was reinforced, visibly heavier, set into a wall that was thicker than the surrounding construction. Vault-grade.
"Place your hand on the scanner," Emma said.
I pressed my palm flat against the panel. Blue light pulsed beneath my fingers, and there was a mechanical sound deep within the wall, heavy bolts retracting, seals releasing.
The door slid open with a pressurized hiss, and I stopped breathing. "Holy shit, Emma…"
My finished superhero costume was right there in the middle of a room, currently draped over a manikin that had a very suspicious resemblance to me.
The sketches Jean had shown me in the cafeteria hadn't done it justice. Seeing it rendered in physical materials, real and tangible and waiting for me, was something else entirely.
The base layer was a deep, rich black. Over that, panels of midnight blue ran along the sides of the torso, down the outer thighs, and along the forearms. Silver accents traced the edges of those panels, thin and precise, almost like circuitry. I remembered Jean mentioning those silver threads were designed to channel and visibly glow when conducting holy lightning.
The chest piece was reinforced. Subtly, nothing bulky or ostentatious, but I could see the layered plating beneath the surface material. Built, specifically, to survive hits from something like Kokabiel.
A half-mask sat on a small shelf beside the mannequin. Black, covering everything from the bridge of the nose down to the jawline.
"Emma," I said quietly, still circling the platform, unable to stop looking at it. "This is..."
"I know," she said from behind me. Her voice carried a note of satisfaction so pure it was almost musical.
I reached out and ran my fingers along the sleeve of the suit. The material was unlike anything I'd ever touched. It flexed under my fingertips with almost zero resistance but snapped back to its original form the instant I released it.
"Put it on," Emma said.
I didn't need to be told twice.
I lifted the suit off the mannequin with a care that bordered on reverence. I stripped out of my campus clothes, and began pulling on the costume piece by piece. I didn't care that Emma was seeing me get naked. She and Jean had sent me plenty of nude photos of themselves at this point.
After getting everything else on, I finally pulled the half-mask from its shelf and lifted it to my face. I adjusted it, feeling the material settle across the bridge of my nose and along my jawline, leaving only my eyes and the upper half of my face exposed.
I look like Kakashi. The thought hit me immediately. As long as that troll never finds out about this, we're fine. The last thing I need is Kakashi accusing me of stealing his aesthetic. He'd never let me hear the end of it…
But the mask was necessary, and I knew it. I didn't want to hide my face. There was nothing about my identity as a fallen angel, as a half-blood Nephilim, that I was ashamed of. But, I was trying to have a "normal" college life. However long that lasted, however impossible it probably was, I wanted to sit in lectures and eat in the cafeteria and argue with Peter about whether the cooking robots were sentient without every person on campus knowing I had superpowers.
Tony Stark had chosen to go public as Iron Man. That was Tony's call, and it worked for Tony because Tony Stark thrived on attention the way normal humans thrived on oxygen. I didn't want that. Not yet in my own homeworld.
Emma had been staring this whole time unashamedly of course. Emma's thighs pressed together. The white denim of those impossibly tight jeans shifted as her legs crossed and uncrossed. Her tongue darted out and traced across her lower lip, painting a wet line over the pale blue lipstick. She bit down on the corner of her mouth, and her chest rose with a breath that was just a little too deep to be casual.
I swallowed.
"God," Emma breathed, and her voice had dropped into a register I'd never heard from her before. Almost throaty. Her eyes raked over me from the mask down to the boots and back up again, lingering on my shoulders, my chest, my arms, my waist, with the kind of hunger that made my skin prickle even through the vibranium-polymer composite. "You look so fucking hot in that costume." She took a step toward me. Then stopped herself. Her fingers curled into fists at her sides, and she let out a long, shuddering exhale through her nose, visibly wrestling with her own self-control. "I want to rip it off of you," she said, and it wasn't just flirting. I could tell she was serious. "Right now. With my teeth if necessary." Another breath. She closed her eyes for a beat. "But I know that would be rushing things. And I promised myself I wouldn't do that with you."
The sigh that followed was so genuinely frustrated it made my chest ache with a complicated mix of guilt, affection, and a desire I was getting less and less capable of pretending wasn't there.
Emma opened her eyes again and shook her head, a rueful little smile playing at her lips. "Too bad Jean isn't here to see you put this on for the first time. She would have cried. She absolutely would have cried, and then she would have denied crying, and I would have had proof forever."
I chuckled and shifted my weight, adjusting to the feel of the suit, rolling my shoulders and flexing my fingers.
"Speaking of Jean," I said, "where is she? I figured she'd want to be here for this."
Something flickered across Emma's face. Annoyance. Her arms folded across her chest, the motion pressing her breasts together beneath the ivory blouse in a way that I absolutely noticed and absolutely refused to acknowledge out loud.
"Jean is dealing with an annoyance," Emma said flatly.
I raised an eyebrow above the mask. "An annoyance?"
"An annoyance that showed up on campus about an hour ago." Emma's jaw tightened, a tiny flex of muscle along her cheek. "It's nothing you need to concern yourself with. Jean can handle it. She's handled far worse than this particular pest." The word 'pest' came out sharp enough to cut glass. "What you should be focusing on is your first outing as a superhero."
She's deflecting. Whatever this "annoyance" is, it's bothering her more than she wants to let on.
I filed that away for later. I knew better than to push Emma Frost when she'd already decided a topic was closed. I'd circle back when the timing was better.
"The armor panels on your upper back are thinner than the rest of the suit," Emma continued, clearly grateful for the subject change. She stepped closer and reached around me, her fingertips tracing along my spine between my shoulder blades. The touch sent a shiver skating down my vertebrae despite the layers of advanced material between her skin and mine. "We reduced the plating density in that entire region. I know your wings phase through your clothes in some magical way that breaks every law of physics I've ever studied…" Her fingers lingered on my back. "But we just wanted to be sure nothing impeded them."
The care behind those words hit me harder than the engineering. "Emma," I said. My voice came out quieter than I intended. I turned to face her fully. "Thank you. Seriously. The suit is perfect. All of this is..." I gestured around the room, at the monitors and the equipment and the vault we were standing in. "It's perfect."
She started to respond. I could see the deflection forming, some quip about deserving only the best or her standards being impossibly high.
I didn't let her. I stepped into her space. Close enough that Emma had to tilt her chin up to maintain eye contact. I watched her pupils dilate, watched her breath catch, watched the subtle shift in her weight as her body instinctively leaned toward me even as her expression tried to maintain its composure.
My arm slid around her lower back. My hand pressed above the swell of her hips, and I pulled her forward. Emma's body met mine, the soft warmth of her pressing flush against the armored surface of my suit. Her hands came up reflexively.
I could feel her heartbeat. Even through the armor.
Emma opened her mouth. To say something sharp, probably. Something clever or deflective or dripping with that signature Frost wit that kept the world at arm's length.
I just kissed her. I pulled the mask down with my free hand and pressed my lips to hers, and the sound she made against my mouth was small and startled and so completely unguarded that it made my chest physically ache. This kiss was slow. Intentional. Full of every ounce of adoration and gratitude I could pour into it, full of the acknowledgment of what this woman had done.
She traveled through time for me. She built me a headquarters. She designed my armor. She sat in a lecture hall holding my hand like it was the only thing in the world that mattered. And she's been patient.
I kissed her like she deserved to be kissed. Like she was precious and powerful and infuriating and beautiful, all at once, all the time.
When I finally pulled back, her lips were slightly parted, her chest rising and falling with shallow, uneven breaths, and her pale blue eyes were wide and glassy with something that looked terrifyingly close to vulnerability. And what was left was just... Emma. A woman looking up at the man she loved with an expression so open it was shocking.
"Thank you," I told her.
A tiny sound escaped Emma's throat.
"Nhh..." A small, helpless, utterly involuntary squeak came out of Emma Frost's mouth like she wasn't a billionaire time-traveling mutant telepath—but rather an innocent schoolgirl being kissed by the boy she loved for the very first time.
Her hand flew to her mouth. Her eyes went impossibly wide. A look of absolute mortification flashed across her expression, followed immediately by a desperate attempt to regain her composure that failed so spectacularly it was almost artistic. "I... that wasn't..." she started, her voice cracking. She cleared her throat. Straightened her spine. Attempted to reassemble the Frost mask. "That sound did not happen. You didn't hear that.."
I grinned. The widest, most genuine grin I'd worn all day. "I heard it. I'm keeping it. It's my favorite sound in the world now."
"I hate you," she whispered, but the blush had somehow gotten worse, creeping up to the tips of her ears, and her hand was trembling slightly where it still rested against my chest plate.
"No you don't."
"No," she admitted, so quietly it was barely audible. "I don't."
She leaned forward and pressed her forehead against my shoulder, hiding her face. Her fingers curled into the material of my suit, gripping it like an anchor. I felt her take one long, steadying breath. Then another. Her shoulders shook once, silently, and I couldn't tell if she was laughing or fighting back tears or both.
"Hehe..." A muffled giggle vibrated against my collarbone. "Jean is going to be so jealous."
I rested my chin on top of her head and smiled. "She absolutely is."
"Good." Emma's voice regained a sliver of its usual sharpness, though the effect was somewhat undermined by the fact that she was still pressing her burning face into my shoulder. "She should have been here. That's what she gets for dealing with vermin instead of watching her man suit up for the first time."
She pulled back finally, and while the blush hadn't fully faded, the familiar glint was returning to those ice-blue eyes. She smoothed down her blouse, tucked a strand of platinum hair behind her ear, and fixed me with a look that was trying very hard to be imperious and mostly succeeding.
"Now then," she said, lifting her chin. "Pull your mask back up, Angel. You have work to do..."
– Shuri –
The late afternoon sun hung low over Manhattan, painting the towers of glass and steel in shades that reminded Shuri Himejima of autumn sunsets over Konoha's treeline.
Except Konoha's treeline didn't have thirty-story luxury department stores or neon billboards the size of apartment buildings or an endless river of yellow taxicabs honking at each other constantly.
Ufufufu. Look at them. My son's girlfriends. My potential daughters-in-law.
Shuri walked three paces behind Tsunade and Shizune, her hands clasped loosely behind her back, her violet eyes soft with quiet contentment as she watched the two women ahead of her navigate the crowded sidewalk. They were holding hands and it was adorable.
Baraqiel, you miserable, useless, abandoning fool of a man. Our son grew up to have multiple gorgeous women fighting over him. He certainly didn't get that from you.
The morning had started beautifully. Pepper Potts, bless her efficient, organized, surprisingly foul-mouthed heart, had joined them for breakfast at a place called Sarabeth's on the Upper East Side. The four of them had squeezed into a corner booth, and Shuri had watched with barely concealed delight as Pepper, Tsunade, and Shizune navigated the intricate social dynamics of women who were all sleeping with the same man and had decided, through some miracle of emotional maturity, to be civil about it.
But Pepper had to leave after breakfast. Stark Industries business. Something about a board meeting and quarterly earnings and a conference call with investors in Singapore. She'd hugged Shuri goodbye, squeezed Tsunade's hand with surprising familiarity given they'd only met that morning, and told Shizune that the two of them needed to have dinner soon because they were "the only sane ones in this entire circus." Shizune had blushed and agreed enthusiastically.
That left Shuri alone with the two other kunoichi. And Shuri had taken that responsibility very, very seriously.
She had shown them everything.
Times Square first, because Shuri was a firm believer in the philosophy of shock and awe. Tsunade had stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, craning her neck back to stare up at the cascading walls of light and motion, her mouth slightly open, her honey-brown eyes reflecting neon in a dozen colors. Tourist-trap vendors selling knockoff handbags had shouted at them in three languages. A man in a bootleg Elmo costume had tried to hug Shizune, who'd reflexively grabbed his wrist and twisted it into a joint lock before Shuri gently reminded her that the giant red monster was not, in fact, a threat.
Then Central Park, where Tsunade had marveled at the audacity of preserving that much green space in the middle of a city this dense. "In Konoha, this would be a training ground," she'd muttered, eyeing a jogger with the analytical gaze of someone calculating how quickly she could close the distance and drop him.
Fifth Avenue, where Shizune had pressed her nose against the window of a bookstore and made a sound so longing it bordered on erotic. Shuri had dragged her inside and bought her seven books on human anatomy, modern surgical techniques, and pharmacology. Shizune had clutched the bag to her chest like it contained holy relics.
The Brooklyn Bridge, where Tsunade had leaned over the railing and stared down at the East River with an expression that Shuri recognized instantly. It was the look of a leader calculating infrastructure, logistics, and engineering, the gears of her Hokage brain turning behind her eyes. "How long did this take to build?" she'd asked..
And through all of it, through every block and every borough and every new overwhelming spectacle this impossible city threw at them, the thing that struck Tsunade hardest wasn't any single landmark. It was the sheer excess of everything.
"There's another one," Tsunade said flatly, pointing at a restaurant they were passing. Its windows were draped with red velvet curtains and a gold-lettered sign advertised a prix fixe dinner for $400 per person. "Four hundred. For one meal. Shuri, the most expensive restaurant in Konoha charges maybe eight thousand ryo for a full course, and that's considered criminal."
"Welcome to New York, Tsunade-sama," Shuri said pleasantly.
"Stop calling me that. We're practically family."
Ufufufu. Practically family. She said it herself. I'm framing that sentence in my mind!
Shizune, who had been quietly absorbing everything with her characteristic thoughtfulness, looked up from the bag of books she was still cradling. "The scale is overwhelming," she admitted softly. "But it's also wonderful, isn't it? So many people, all just... living. Not fighting. Not preparing for war. Just going about their days."
Tsunade's expression softened slightly at that. She glanced at Shizune with a warmth that made Shuri's maternal heart squeeze. "Yeah," Tsunade said quietly. "I noticed that too."
Shuri felt her throat tighten with an emotion she quickly swallowed before it could reach her eyes.
"Shuri-san," Shizune said, turning around to face her with that gentle, earnest expression that made it physically impossible to deny her anything, "do you think we'll have time to come back? There's so much more I want to see. The museums alone could take weeks. And the bookstores." Her dark eyes darted briefly toward the distant outline of a Barnes & Noble they'd passed four blocks ago, like a woman stealing one last glance at a lover before boarding a ship. "I saw a medical library listed on a directory. An entire building dedicated to nothing but medical texts. Can you imagine?"
The longing in her voice was so pure and so intense that Shuri felt a pang of genuine sympathy. Shizune was a healer to her core. A scholar. A woman who had spent over a decade wandering the countryside with nothing but Tsunade's gambling debts and her own encyclopedic knowledge to keep them alive. And here, in this city, there was more accumulated medical knowledge in a single university library than existed in the entirety of the Elemental Nations.
Of course she doesn't want to leave.
"Shizune," Tsunade interrupted gently, squeezing her hand. "We do have to go back. You know that."
Shizune's shoulders dropped. "I know. I know we do. The village needs us. The hospital staff can barely function without supervision, and there are three post-operative patients I need to check on personally, and Naruto's training schedule..." She trailed off, then let out a small, wistful sigh. "I just wish we had more time."
The sadness in her voice was quiet but real, and Shuri couldn't stand it.
She stepped forward and placed a hand on each woman's shoulder, positioning herself between them with the practiced ease of a mother who had spent years comforting children. She squeezed gently. "Listen to me, both of you," Shuri said, her voice warm and firm in equal measure. "My son can open a portal to your world whenever he wants. That power is his now." She looked at Tsunade first, then at Shizune, holding each woman's gaze long enough to make sure the words landed. "I will personally make sure Blake visits you as often as he possibly can. More than weekly, if I have anything to say about it. And you are welcome in this world anytime. Both of you."
Shizune's eyes brightened. Tsunade's jaw relaxed from the tension she'd been holding.
"Although," Shuri added, her grin returning in full force as her voice dipped into a teasing lilt, "just don't break him, you two."
Shizune's face ignited. "Sh-Shuri-san, we would never... I mean, we don't... it's not like we're being... excessive..."
Tsunade, standing beside her sputtering apprentice, did the exact opposite of blushing. The Fifth Hokage planted her feet, squared her shoulders, and thrust out her chest with the shameless confidence of a woman who had absolutely zero interest in modesty. Her massive breasts strained against the fitted top she was wearing, the fabric pulling taut in a way that drew involuntary glances from no fewer than three passing pedestrians and caused a bicycle messenger to swerve into a mailbox.
"Break him?" Tsunade repeated, her grin wide and wicked and dripping with pride. "Your son has the stamina of a war horse and the recovery time of a teenager who just discovered what his dick is for. If anything, he's breaking us!"
"TSUNADE-SAMA!" Shizune shrieked.
"What? It's a compliment! His mother should be proud!"
"You can't just say that to his MOTHER!"
Shuri threw her head back and laughed. This! This was what she had missed for ten years. This warmth. This chaos. This family, unconventional and sprawling and ridiculous as it was.
My son. My beautiful, ridiculous, overpowered, horny fallen angel of a son. You chose well. Both of them. All of them, honestly. I'm so proud of you I could burst!
Shizune was still hissing at Tsunade about appropriate topics of conversation in public when the air above them changed.
Shuri's eyes suddenly snapped upward.
A figure shot across the sky above them, maybe two hundred feet up, cutting through the open air between Manhattan's skyscrapers. The silhouette was unmistakable although the outfit he was wearing was a new one. Shuri thought it looked dashing on her son as she sensed and saw him flying overhead with his eight black wings!
Tsunade and Shizune looked up as well and both smiled.
Around them, the street erupted.
"WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!"
"Oh my God, oh my God, do you see that?!"
"Is that a person?! Is that a person with WINGS?!"
"Someone call 911! Or... wait, do you call 911 for flying people?!"
"GET YOUR PHONE OUT, GET YOUR PHONE OUT!"
Dozens of smartphones materialized from pockets and purses with a speed that would have impressed even a trained shinobi. Pedestrians stumbled to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk, necks craning back, mouths hanging open, fingers jabbing at screens. A taxi screeched to a stop in the street as the driver leaned out his window to stare upward. A street vendor abandoned his hot dog cart entirely. A woman holding a Starbucks cup let it slip from her numb fingers and didn't even flinch when it hit the pavement and exploded across her shoes.
A teenager was already uploading shaky vertical video to social media with the caption: "YO THERE'S A FUCKING ANGEL FLYING OVER MIDTOWN???"
Shuri exchanged glances with Tsunade and Shizune, all three women suddenly had the same thought at once. Human eyes couldn't track any of them as they Body Flickered. All of them landed on top of the nearest building and they quickly began roof hopping after Blake, mostly just to keep an eye on him and see how interesting his first time going on patrol would turn out.
– Akeno –
The SIT campus was quieter now that the sun had started its descent toward the Manhattan skyline, most of the first-day energy burned off and replaced by the exhausted shuffle of freshmen dragging themselves back to their dorms. Akeno Himejima walked alone down a tree-lined path between the engineering building and the west dormitory quad, her long black hair swaying gently with each step, her violet eyes fixed on nothing in particular.
Her conversation with Rias was still ringing in her ears. Every single word of it.
I thought I was hiding it. I really, genuinely thought I was hiding it.
Akeno's fingers curled around the strap of her bag, tightening until her knuckles ached. The talk had lasted almost two hours. Two hours of sitting cross-legged on Rias's bed in their shared suite while her King, her best friend, the crimson-haired devil princess who knew her better than any living person, had systematically and gently dismantled every wall Akeno had built around the thing she refused to name.
Rias hadn't been cruel about it. She never was, not with Akeno. She'd started softly, circling the subject with the political grace of someone raised in devil high society, asking about Akeno's mood yesterday, about why she'd gone quiet during their foreign language class, about the look on her face when she'd seen Blake walking the campus promenade with Tsunade and Shizune on his arms.
"You weren't jealous of them specifically, Akeno. I've seen you jealous before. This was different. This was you being upset at yourself for feeling something you think you shouldn't feel..." Rias's words.
And Akeno, who had lied to herself about this for months, who had buried it under layers of sisterly affection and protective instinct and righteous fury at anyone who threatened her precious otouto, had sat there on that bed and felt the lie crumble to dust in her hands.
Because Rias was right.
The thought sent a complicated shiver through her body. Shame and desire and confusion and longing, all tangled together into a knot she couldn't begin to untie.
And then Rias had smiled.A knowing smile, warm and just a little bit wicked, and she'd said the thing that made Akeno's brain short-circuit entirely.
"Do you remember the pact we made? When we were fifteen? Lying on my bedroom floor in the Underworld during one of our sleepovers?"
Akeno remembered. Of course she remembered that pact. She honestly thought Rias had been the one to forget it.
She exhaled hard through her nose and tried to focus on literally anything else. Akeno was so deep in her own spiraling thoughts that she almost missed it.
A pulse of energy rippled across her supernatural senses like a stone dropped into still water.
Hot. Blazing hot!
This was concentrated, deliberate, and powerful enough to make the hair on Akeno's arms stand straight up.
She froze mid-step. Her body went rigid, every nerve firing at once, the instincts of a trained devil Queen overriding the lovesick fog in her brain with brutal efficiency.
Fire. That feels like fire!
Her first thought was that the Phenex clan had found where Rias had been hiding out...
Riser's family. Riser's clan. They'd found them. Somehow, despite Serafall's magical shielding and JARVIS filtering every camera feed on campus, a member of the Phenex clan had tracked Rias to New York and was here, right now, burning something behind a building less than two hundred meters from where Akeno stood.
Her power surged instinctively, holy lightning and demonic light crackling to life beneath her skin, ready to be unleashed at a moment's notice. She was ultimate-class now. She'd shattered her emotional seal fighting Kokabiel.
Nobody touches Rias. Nobody touches my family. Not again. Not ever!
But then the energy signature registered more clearly as Akeno focused on it, and her battle-ready tension faltered. The power was scorching, yes. Impossibly hot, like standing too close to a star. But it wasn't demonic. This was something else entirely. Something primal and ancient and vast in a way that made even Akeno's ultimate-class senses feel small.
Not Phenex. Not demonic at all. Then what...?
She moved. The world blurred around her as she crossed two hundred meters in under three seconds, her shoes barely touching the ground. She rounded the corner of the Materials Science building, vaulted a decorative hedge without breaking stride, and skidded to a halt in a shadowed alcove between two utility structures at the far eastern edge of campus.
The smell hit her first. Smoke. Burned flesh.
What she found made her tilt her head.
Jean Grey stood in a small service alley between the research building and a maintenance shed. The space was maybe fifteen feet wide, hidden from the main campus pathways by the building's bulk and a thick row of ornamental trees.
Seven bodies lay on the concrete at Jean's feet.
They were charred. Blackened. The kind of thoroughly, completely incinerated that left very little room for debate about what had killed them. Reduced to carbon and ash and the faint, crackling glow of embers still dying in the creases of what had once been tactical gear.
And in the center of it all, Jean Grey stood with her shoulders squared and her chin lifted, looking less like a college freshman and more like a goddess who had just finished passing judgment. Her red hair was on fire.
Then Jean sensed her.
The mutant spun around, and the transformation was instantaneous. The fire in her hair snuffed itself out in a single heartbeat, strand by strand. The cosmic intensity drained from her eyes, replaced by the warm green.
A blush bloomed across Jean's cheeks.
"Oh." Jean straightened up, smoothing down the front of her fitted t-shirt with both hands in a gesture so human and so awkward it was almost comical given the seven smoldering corpses at her feet. "Hello, Akeno. I wasn't expecting anyone to see this."
Akeno regarded her for a long, measured moment. Her violet eyes drifted from Jean's flushed face down to the bodies, then back up again.
"Oh." A blush crept up Jean's neck and across her freckled cheeks. Her hands came up in front of her in an instinctive, almost girlish gesture of surprise. "Hello, Akeno. I wasn't expecting anyone to see this."
This woman is terrifying. No wonder my otouto is attracted to her.
Akeno tilted her head, letting her signature smile settle into place. The one that made devil nobles deeply uncomfortable and made her peerage members check if she was holding anything sharp.
"Ara ara," Akeno said. She stepped delicately around the nearest body. "Not that I don't appreciate some occasional light murder, Jean-san. A girl has to stay in practice, after all." She came to a stop a few feet from the redhead and folded her hands in front of her, studying the scene. "But who were these gentlemen? They don't feel like devils."
Jean shook her head. The blush was already fading, replaced by something harder and colder behind her green eyes. "They're not devils. They're human. Operatives working for a man named Nathaniel Essex."
The name meant nothing to Akeno. She filed it away.
"He was... a problem. In my old timeline," Jean continued. Her voice had gone flat, the warmth draining out of it syllable by syllable. "He spent years manipulating my life from the shadows, engineering situations designed to push me toward breaking points so he could study the results." Jean paused. Her jaw tightened. "That was when I was weaker," she said quietly. "When I didn't fully understand my own power. When I didn't know the Phoenix existed inside me, let alone how to wield it. In that timeline, Essex was a threat that took years and allies and sacrifice to finally deal with." Her chin lifted. The flatness in her voice gave way to something that wasn't quite contempt but lived in the same neighborhood. "In this timeline, he's an annoyance. A cockroach with delusions of grandeur."
"Ara." Akeno's violet eyes glittered with interest. "A cockroach who sends armed operatives to spy on you at a university campus."
"I eliminated them to send a message," Jean continued. "Essex needs to understand that the rules have changed. And anyone he sends after me, or after the people I love, will burn." She tilted her head, and a strange expression crossed her face. Softer. Curious. Almost gentle. "But before I go send that message more emphatically..." Jean's lips curved into a knowing smile that made Akeno's stomach flip. "I should mention that I can sense you have quite a lot on your mind tonight, Akeno. Quite a lot."
The emphasis on those last two words was unmistakable.
She can hear my thoughts. Of course she can hear my thoughts. She's one of the most powerful telepaths alive and I've been standing here broadcasting my feelings about Blake like a radio tower.
The blush that seized Akeno's face was catastrophic. Her composure, her careful smile, her practiced "ara ara" persona, all of it crumbled like wet paper.
"I... that's... you..." Akeno stammered, which was something Akeno Himejima did not do.
"Akeno." Jean's voice was soft. Patient. The voice of someone who had carried her own impossible feelings across an entire timeline and understood what it meant to love someone in a way the world might not approve of. "I'm not judging you. I promise."
Akeno swallowed. "It's—complicated," she managed, which was the understatement of the week.
"Love usually is," Jean said simply.
A silence stretched between them. Not uncomfortable, exactly, but heavy. Full of things acknowledged but not yet spoken aloud.
Then Jean glanced at the bodies one more time, and her expression shifted back to something practical. "I read their minds before I killed them," she said. "Essex has more operatives in the city. A staging base in a warehouse across town. Communications equipment, surveillance data, files on me and potentially on—others." Her green eyes met Akeno's violet ones. "I was planning to go pay them a visit. Burn the warehouse, destroy the data, and make absolutely certain that Nathaniel Essex understands what happens to people who point cameras at my family."
Akeno's breath steadied. The blush began to recede. And somewhere beneath the confusion and the shame and the longing, something else stirred. Something darker and far more comfortable.
Her sadistic side.
"Jean-san," Akeno said, silky and warm and laced with an edge that would have made smart people run. Her violet eyes brightened, a crackle of holy lightning dancing briefly across her pupils. "Are you asking me if I'd like to come along and help you destroy a warehouse full of men who were maybe spying on my precious little brother?"
Jean smiled. "I'm asking if you'd like to blow off some steam."
Akeno's grin was slow and wide. "Ara ara. That sounds like a wonderful bonding experience, Jean-san," Akeno purred. "You know, I've been meaning to spend more time with the other women in my otouto's life. We're practically family, after all. And what better way to bond than a little shared massacre or two?"
Jean's smile widened. The fire returned to her hair, just at the tips, curling upward like candle flames. "I was hoping you'd say that."
Otouto... your women are all crazy. Every single one of them.
Including me…
XXX