Morning came through the window with a clear, January light. The snow on the grounds reflected the early light back into the sky with winter's specific brightness—beautiful, but slightly exhausting.
Raven was already mostly awake when Ethan surfaced, which was her pattern — her mind alert before her body showed it, her face still peaceful but her eyes quietly open and thoughtful.
"I've been thinking about something," she said, without preamble.
"Okay," he said.
"Rogue," she said. "This room."
He looked at her. "What about it?"
"Would Rogue be comfortable here, too?" Raven said, her tone careful. "Not just occasionally. Regularly."
The question sat in the room for a moment while he considered it honestly.
"Only if she actually wants that," he said. "Not because we decided it was a good idea and presented it to her. She'd have to want it herself."
"Obviously," Raven said. "Which is why we ask rather than assume."
"Then yes," he said. "If she's okay with it, I'm okay with it."
Raven nodded—she was ready to implement the decision she'd reached. "After breakfast," she said.
---
Rogue was in the kitchen with coffee and her guitar. She set the guitar aside easily as they entered, no longer self-conscious. The gloves were on the counter. She looked between them, evaluating the room.
"You've got a thing to ask me," she said.
"You could just let us ask it," Ethan said.
"Go ahead then," she said.
Raven looked at her with a steady, open expression — her version of warmth, eyes softening as she spoke. "We were thinking you might want to stay in the room with us. Not just sometimes."
Rogue was quiet for a moment, holding her coffee with both hands. Her expression moved through phases—checking for performance, finding none, then looking for the real thing and finding it.
"Yeah?" she said.
"If you want to," Ethan said. "No pressure in any direction."
She looked at her coffee. Then at them. Her face grew slightly open, as if she received something good but wasn't sure whether to let it show.
"Yeah," she said. "Okay. Tonight."
"Tonight," Raven confirmed.
Rogue picked up her guitar again, shoulders relaxing with the easy air of someone who had received good news and felt genuinely at ease. "Now go away," she said with a playful smirk. "I'm playing."
---
The day felt uneventful, and for the most part, it was. They walked the morning snow—together sometimes, separate at others—in the natural rhythm of comfortable people. Raven worked on the sling ring for an hour in the back garden, getting close, then nothing, but not quite the result. The pressure for direction felt sharper, the potential more visible. Ethan spent two hours in the thermosphere. He returned warmer, cellular absorption doing its usual work.
The worry that had been at the edge of his awareness since yesterday hadn't gone away.
She jinxed it, said the part of his thinking that he'd started treating as reliable.
Probably, said the rest of him.
The afternoon passed quietly. Dinner was the warm, easy event it had become. Afterward, the three settled in the sitting room and talked until evening's natural end.
Rogue brought her guitar.
Rogue played something quiet and intricate. Raven read. Ethan watched the snow outside and thought about how quickly 'normal' had changed in two months.
The worry was getting smaller.
Maybe not tonight, he thought.
The mental message arrived at nine forty-seven.
It wasn't words exactly—just a directed sense. Xavier's telepathic message had his unique mental signature. The content was simple: Cerebro. Now. All available X-Men.
Rogue looked up from her guitar. Raven closed her book.
"Cerebro," Rogue said.
"Major," Raven said. "He only uses the broad call for major."
Ethan looked at the window. I told her, said the relevant part of his thinking. I told her exactly this would happen.
"Can Ethan come?" Rogue asked.
Raven was already standing. "I'll confirm it," she said, and there was a brief moment of something inward — the surface emotion read that Jean had described, the brush against awareness. Then: "Yes. Come."
---
The sub-level corridor felt purposeful, people converging on a point. Logan was already there, either by proximity or speed. Scott and Jean arrived together, moving with practiced synchronicity. Bobby had the alertness of someone who took the call seriously. Storm came from the upper levels, her bearing steady from constant competence.
The Cerebro chamber was as expected: a vast sphere with a bridge and an interface that amplified Xavier's reach across the planet. Ethan had never visited before and looked on with suitable awe.
Xavier was already at the interface, the helmet in place. He completed whatever he was doing and removed it with the specific motion of someone returning from very far away.
He looked at the assembled group with the expression that appeared when the news required handling carefully but couldn't be handled slowly.
"There's a mutant awakening," Xavier said. "Somewhere in the Cairo region. The signal is—" he paused, rare for him, "—extraordinary. I've never sensed anything like this. The power level is off any scale I know."
Oh, thought Ethan. Come on. Really.
He kept his face, the expression of someone receiving new information rather than someone whose internal monologue had just used several words that weren't appropriate for the company.
"Do we know anything else?" Scott asked.
"The awakening is recent," Xavier said. "Hours, perhaps. The signal is layered in an unprecedented way. It's as if several abilities activate at once." He paused. "We need to understand what we're dealing with first."
Discussion covered practical questions—logistics, response, and what 'dealing with' meant operationally. Ethan listened with part of his mind while the rest tracked the branches of what he suspected.
Cairo. Powerful mutant awakening. Layered abilities. Off any scale.
It could be, he thought. Or it could be something adjacent. This world doesn't map perfectly.
The key variable was Magneto. In another version—the Days of Future Past story—Apocalypse's awakening involved Magneto in Poland, a wife, a daughter, and the deaths that shaped the tragedy. But this world wasn't quite that. Storm and Jean were both here as adults. The timeline ran differently.
If he has a daughter but not a son, that means it won't be the Scarlet Witch, probably. If the wife and daughter are at risk, that's still the same tragedy. And what the tragedy produces—
He needed to check.
He turned to Raven, who was watching him with the specific attention she gave to his expressions when something was happening behind them.
"I think I know what this is," he said, quietly, stepping slightly aside from the group. Rogue moved with him, which was simply what she did. "Before I can help with Cairo, I need to check something out first. Something that might prevent a much bigger problem."
Raven looked at him. "Where?"
"Poland," he said.
Her expression moved through the assessment quickly. "Magneto," she said.
"Possibly," he said. "I'm not certain enough to explain more. But if I'm right, there's something to stop before Cairo gets worse."
She held his gaze for a moment — eyes intent and steady, the look of someone who trusted him deeply and was consciously choosing faith over demanding explanations.
"Go," she said.
"Be careful," Rogue said, with the directness of someone saying the practical thing.
"Come back," Raven said, which was what she always said, and which meant what it always meant.
He nodded once.
He went through the mansion, into the January sky, and turned east. He climbed, pushing his speed toward a rising ceiling.
Poland was approximately 4,500 miles from Westchester.
At his current top speed, he estimated thirty-something minutes.
The Atlantic stretched below as he crossed into the ocean corridor, vast and dark. It was indifferent to what happened in Cairo, Poland, or New York. He flew east, thinking of a man with a family in Poland and the singular tragedy that repeated when no one intervened.
He was going to intervene.
That was the whole point of being here.
He pushed faster, the January night rushing past, the stars bright and cold above the Atlantic, and thought: not this time.
Side Story
The Stark Conversation
The Long Island house had the quality of old money applied to practical taste — not ostentatious, but thoroughly comfortable, the kind of home that had been lived in rather than displayed. The study where Howard Stark did his thinking had accumulated decades of evidence across its shelves and surfaces, patents and photographs, and the particular organized chaos of a mind that worked on multiple things simultaneously.
Maria Stark sat in the chair across from his desk, with the posture of a woman who had been patient for three days and was nearing the end of her patience. Howard stood at the window, looking out at the January grounds. Between them, in the third chair that had been pulled in from the sitting room, Tony Stark sat with the expression he'd been wearing since the conversation started — the twenty-one-year-old version of skepticism, which was to say full-body and unmanaged.
"I'm saying we should consider it seriously," Howard said, to the window.
"You're saying we should move," Tony said. "Because of one guy. One guy you met on a highway."
"One guy who prevented two separate people from being killed on that highway," Howard said, turning around. "Including your mother. Including me."
"Dad—"
"Tony." Maria's voice had the specific quality she used when she wanted both of them to stop. They both stopped. She looked at her son with the calm of someone who had seen the thing and was trying to convey what seeing it had been like. "I was in the car. I saw what happened."
"I know, Mom, but—"
"You didn't see it," she said. "So I need you to understand that what I'm about to say is not something I'm uncertain about. I'm certain." She paused. "The man on the motorcycle — he had a weapon aimed at your father's car. And Ethan—" she used the name with the ease of someone who had been thinking about this person for three days "—intercepted it. With his hand. In midair."
Tony looked at her.
"And then," she continued, "he melted a rock with his eyes. And froze a tree. While hovering eighteen inches off the ground."
A silence in the study.
"With his eyes," Tony said.
"Beams," Maria said. "Heat. The rock was just — gone. The surface of it."
"And you saw this."
"I was standing six feet away," she said. "Your father was standing four feet away."
Tony looked at Howard. "And your conclusion from this is that we should move to Westchester."
"My conclusion," Howard said, with the measured precision of someone who had been an engineer for thirty years and did not reach conclusions carelessly, "is that the man told us something specific. He said that if we were within range of his hearing, he would know if anything came for us again. He told us this after demonstrating capabilities that I cannot currently explain through any framework I have available." He paused. "And he was right about the threat on the highway, which intelligence services with considerably more resources than one individual had apparently failed to anticipate."
"So you trust him," Tony said.
"I trust what I observed," Howard said. "Which is that he was there, he knew it was coming, he stopped it, and he warned us the threat wasn't finished." He sat down behind his desk. "The Winter Soldier — which is what he called whoever was on that motorcycle — is an asset that certain people will not simply retire because one operation failed."
Tony was quiet for a moment, the skepticism doing something more complicated. "The Winter Soldier," he said.
"That's what he called him."
"And SHIELD — where were they in all of this?"
"Present after the fact," Howard said, with the flatness of someone who had opinions about this they weren't going to elaborate on in this particular conversation.
Another silence. Tony looked at his mother, who looked back with the expression of someone who had already decided and was waiting for him to catch up.
"I want to meet him," Tony said.
"That's not—"
"Dad." Tony leaned forward with the specific energy of someone who had inherited his father's inability to leave interesting problems alone and had never tried to fight it. "You're telling me there's a man in Westchester who can shoot heat beams from his eyes and fly and stop what sounds like an assassination attempt with his bare hands. And your plan is to move near him for protection, which — fine, okay, I actually think that's not crazy given what you've described." He paused. "But I want to meet him. I want to see it."
"He's not a demonstration," Howard said.
"He demonstrated plenty for you," Tony said.
"That was context-specific—"
"Howard," Maria said.
Howard looked at her.
"He has a point," she said, simply.
Howard looked at his desk. At the window. At his son's expression, which had the specific quality of someone who was going to pursue this regardless, and would prefer to do it with permission, but had other options.
"If we make the move," Howard said finally, "and if circumstances allow for an introduction, we'll see."
"That's a yes," Tony said.
"That's a we'll see," Howard said.
"In your vocabulary, those are the same thing," Tony said.
Maria Stark looked at the ceiling with the expression of a woman who had been living with two versions of the same person for twenty-one years and had developed equanimity about it.
"We're moving," she said, which ended the discussion.