The room that Charles Xavier used for staff meetings had the quality of a space that had been arranged for serious thought — bookshelves floor to ceiling, a desk that was large without being ostentatious, several chairs arranged in the informal semicircle of people who met regularly enough to have stopped pretending the arrangement was temporary. The afternoon light came through tall windows in the pale, angled way of November in the northeast, lying across the carpet in long rectangles that would have been pleasant under different circumstances.
Xavier had called them in quietly, the way he did when something required attention without requiring alarm. The distinction was one the people in this room had learned to read — there was a come to my office that meant administrative, and a come to my office that meant something unusual had presented itself at the edges of what they knew.
This was the second kind.
They arranged themselves in the room with the unconscious efficiency of people who had been a team long enough that positioning was automatic. Hank McCoy took the chair nearest the window, the one that gave him the best sightline to the grounds. Scott Summers stood near the door with the posture of someone who was technically relaxed and actually ready. Jean Grey was beside Xavier's desk, and the quality of her attention was inward — the focused, slightly distant expression of someone listening to something others couldn't hear.
Raven Darkhölme sat in the chair nearest the fireplace in her preferred public configuration — the blonde woman whose face she'd borrowed so long ago it sometimes felt like her own, though everyone in this room knew otherwise. She had her legs crossed and her hands folded, and the expression of someone who had survived too much to be easily alarmed but was nonetheless paying close attention.
Bobby Drake was by the bookshelf, young enough still that he defaulted to watchful rather than active, reading the room before committing to a response.
And Logan was near the door on the opposite side from Scott, which was either a coincidence or the two of them unconsciously bracketing the exit, the tactical instinct that operated below the level of deliberate thought. He had his arms crossed and his weight forward in the specific stance of someone whose body had already made a preliminary decision about the next few minutes and was waiting for permission to act on it.
"Thank you for coming quickly," Xavier said. He was behind his desk, which he rarely used as a barrier in these conversations — he'd moved his chair to the side of it, which was his way of including himself in the room rather than presiding over it. "Something has come to my attention in the last few minutes that I thought warranted a collective conversation."
"The flyer," Logan said.
Xavier looked at him. "You felt something?"
"Heard something. About twelve minutes ago. Displacement — something moving through the air fast, coming in from the south. Then it stopped about fifty meters from the front gate." A pause. "Whatever it is, it's not subtle."
"No," Xavier agreed. "It isn't." He folded his hands on the edge of the desk. "I became aware of this individual when they entered Westchester County approximately five minutes ago. Moving through the air at what I estimated to be in excess of a hundred and fifty miles per hour."
The room processed this.
"Flying," Scott said.
"Yes."
"Mutant?"
"That," Xavier said, "is one of the first interesting questions." He paused in the way of someone choosing precision over speed. "I've been attempting to read this individual since I became aware of them. I'm not able to."
The room became a different kind of quiet.
"Jean," he said.
Jean Grey's expression had already shifted into the focused inwardness. She was quiet for a moment that felt longer than it was. "I can't either," she said. "It's not a block — not the way a block feels. It's more like—" She paused, searching for the right description. "Like trying to read a room through very thick glass. The presence is there, but the content isn't accessible." Another pause. "I can get surface emotion, barely. But nothing deeper."
"How strong is the surface emotion?" Xavier asked.
"That's the other interesting thing," Jean said. "I'll get to that."
"The more pressing question," Hank said from his chair by the window — his voice carrying the precise, slightly formal quality that it always had when he was moving from social mode to analytical, "is capability. Flying is one thing. Flying at that speed suggests either a significant mutation or something else entirely. Is there any reading on physical capacity?"
Xavier looked at Jean.
"I was already looking," she said. Her expression had moved further into the focused distance. A moment. Two. "I'm reading his physiology rather than his mind, which is — it's unusual. I shouldn't be able to do this at this range without a better mental connection, but the physical signature is so—" She stopped.
"Jean," Scott said.
"His body," she said carefully, as if the words needed to be arranged before being released, "is not operating on normal human parameters. At all." A pause. "The cellular density is extraordinary. The musculature is—" Another pause. "I'm reading a body that could, if my interpretation is correct, lift this building."
The room was very quiet.
"The other thing," Jean continued, and now her voice had the quality of someone reporting something they were not fully sure they believed, "is that he's absorbing solar energy. Actively. Like a battery. The sunlight that's hitting him right now is being converted into something — some kind of physical resource that's being stored and used." She opened her eyes fully. "I've never read anything like it. It's not a mutant signature. It's something different in kind."
Logan uncrossed his arms.
Xavier processed this with the stillness of someone whose analytical capacity operated best when the external expression was minimal. "All right," he said. "He is not, on the basis of current information, presenting as an adversary. He has not attempted to breach the perimeter. He has been standing at the gate for approximately—" he checked the time "—four minutes, apparently deciding something."
"Or waiting for us to decide something," Raven said. It was the first thing she'd said in the meeting, offered with the dry precision of someone who had spent considerable time thinking about how dangerous people approached situations.
"That's also possible," Xavier allowed. "Either way—" he looked around the room, the look that meant I'm telling you what I've concluded and I want you to understand the reasoning, "—we proceed carefully and without aggression unless he gives us a reason. He is a potential Juggernaut-level physical threat if Jean's read is accurate, and I see no reason to doubt it. But threat and intention are different categories." A pause. "And he hasn't rung the intercom yet, which suggests some ambivalence about being here, which is not what I'd expect from someone who came here to cause problems."
"Or he's patient," Scott said.
"Also possible," Xavier said.
The intercom on his desk buzzed.
Everyone in the room registered this simultaneously, the specific quality of a predicted thing arriving exactly when predicted. Xavier looked at the small panel on his desk — the camera feed showing the gate, the figure at it. Young. Tall. A hiking backpack. Looking directly at the camera with an expression that the resolution of the camera couldn't fully capture, but that Jean, who was still gently reading what surface emotion she could access, could.
"He's excited," she said. "More than that — he's—" A small pause that contained something close to surprise. "Charles, he's trying not to show it, but the surface emotion is close to joy. Not aggressive excitement. The kind of excitement that comes from—" She searched for the word. "Recognition. Like seeing something he loves."
Xavier considered this for a moment. Then he reached for the intercom and pressed the response button.
"Yes?"
---
The voice that came through the speaker was warm and clear, with a quality Ethan registered immediately and spent approximately two seconds internally processing before he managed to focus on the actual content of what was being said.
Patrick Stewart's voice. Or not exactly — the same resonance, the same measured precision, the same quality of a voice that had arrived at its particular authority through intelligence rather than volume. But with something else underneath it, something warmer than the careful neutrality of the professor-in-the-movies version. An actual person, with the texture of a real human voice, doing something other than performing for an audience.
Charles Xavier, in the flesh. Or in the intercom, which was close enough.
The nostalgia hit him with a force he hadn't anticipated. Not for the films exactly — for what the films had represented, the specific emotional real estate that a certain kind of story occupied when you encountered it at the right age. The idea of it. A man who built a school and filled it with people the world had decided were problems and told them they were people instead.
He composed himself in approximately one and a half seconds, which was the new normal for internal processing speed.
"Hey," he said. "Just wanted to have a meeting with you guys, if that's okay. I can come back later if this isn't a good time."
A pause on the other end that had the quality of a pause that contained a room full of people rather than just one.
"Please come ahead," Xavier's voice said. And there was something in it — a slight current of something that might have been amusement or might have been careful professional neutrality — that suggested the invitation was genuine.
The gate buzzed and swung inward.
---
The driveway was longer than it looked from the road — the gravel curving gently through the grounds in a way designed to give the arrival time to appreciate the approach before reaching the house, which was an architectural choice that said something about the person who had made it. He walked at a normal pace, hands out of his pockets, the hiking backpack sitting naturally on his shoulders, and took in the grounds with the genuine appreciation of someone who liked the look of a well-kept estate in its November skeleton.
He could see them coming out of the front entrance before he was halfway up the drive.
The enhanced vision gave him the full picture at this distance with the clarity that still occasionally surprised him — not surprising in the sense of jarring, but in the sense of a capability that kept demonstrating its own completeness. He had time to look at each of them and feel the internal reaction before his expression was required to do anything diplomatic.
Charles Xavier, in a wheelchair, which he'd expected, came through the front door with the ease of someone who had made peace with his mobility situation so completely that the wheelchair had become simply the medium through which he moved through the world. Older than the film version — more lined, the hair thinner, but with the same quality of focused intelligence in the eyes that was the most important feature of the face.
Behind him: Hank McCoy, which meant Beast, currently in what Ethan understood was his human-presenting form rather than the blue version — a large man with the specific physical presence of someone whose actual configuration was larger and stranger than what was currently visible.
Scott Summers, with the distinctive visor. Of course. The visor was less sleek than the film versions, more functional-looking, the technology of it apparent rather than concealed. He stood with the careful posture of someone who had trained so extensively that readiness was his default state.
Jean Grey beside Scott, her hair catching the November light in the way that the films had always been slightly too dramatic about — the reality was quieter and somehow better for it. She was looking at him with an expression that he read as professional assessment and something else that he couldn't immediately categorize.
Bobby Drake, young, in his early twenties, with the loose-limbed ease of someone whose power was all about flow and who had let that quality migrate into how he moved through the world.
And Logan.
Logan was exactly what he'd expected and still managed to exceed expectations. The height was right — not tall, the compact solidity of someone who was more mass than height — and the posture was exactly right, the arms-crossed, weight-forward configuration of someone who had been in enough dangerous situations that the preliminary assessment was always running in the background, always ready to translate into action. No claws, not yet, just the regular-shaped hands that concealed them, and the eyes of someone who had been alive long enough that almost nothing surprised him, and he was therefore more curious about Ethan than threatened.
And at the edge of the group, slightly separated from the others: a blonde woman whose bearing had the particular quality of someone who was used to choosing how they were perceived and had made a decision about it. Mystique, he was almost certain. The specific stillness.
He reached the end of the drive where the gravel widened into the forecourt in front of the main entrance, and the group of them were there, and the November air was cold and still, and he was standing in front of the X-Men with too many dollars in his backpack and Superman's powers in his cells and the internal emotional state of a person trying very hard to be normal about something that was not normal.
He looked at them.
Charles Xavier was watching him with the thoughtful attention of a man accustomed to encountering the extraordinary and finding its appropriate category.
Logan's head tilted very slightly, the motion of someone recalibrating an estimate.
Jean Grey's expression had shifted into something that was almost — not quite, but almost — wonder.
Ethan opened his mouth.
"Hello there," he said.