The first one was a loan shark operating out of a laundromat in the Garment District — the kind of arrangement that worked because the laundromat's actual function provided both cover and cash flow, and because the people who owed money to the man who owned it were not the kind of people who went to the police. Ethan had picked up the name three days ago from a conversation he'd overheard at a distance that would have made the speakers assume privacy, and had spent the intervening time cross-referencing it against other things he'd been collecting.
The operation had a particular character that he'd come to recognize — the ecosystem of fear that a certain kind of person built around themselves, carefully maintained, the same twenty blocks breathing at a slightly lower capacity than they would have otherwise. It was invisible from the outside and completely obvious once you knew what to look for.
He went in through the roof access at eleven-fifteen, came out at eleven-forty, and left forty thousand dollars lighter in the sense that the building was now down that amount, and he was up it.
The second job was cleaner. A man who moved certain shipments through a warehouse near the waterfront, the kind of shipments whose contents he'd x-rayed on a previous pass and whose nature had removed any ambiguity about whether he qualified. Twenty minutes. He was in the hotel at one in the morning, the hiking backpack approximately thicker than it had been that morning, his overall financial situation continuing to trend in a direction that would eventually require him to have an actual bank account.
He'd think about that later.
---
The hotel ceiling was the kind of surface that invited contemplation.
He was lying on the bed with his shoes off and his arms behind his head, looking at it, and his mind was doing two things simultaneously in the way it had developed since his powers came in — the foreground running one track while the background ran another, both with reasonable clarity.
The background was processing the evening's operational details in the methodical way he'd developed for this: who, what, acquired intelligence, any exposure risk, and necessary follow-up. Routine.
The foreground was doing something significantly less composed.
He had been in Xavier's mansion.
He had sat across from Charles Xavier and had a conversation about telepathy.
He had punched Wolverine through eight trees, and Wolverine had walked back and said he was fine and was glad they weren't enemies.
He stared at the ceiling.
He'd been in the Marvel universe for longer than a month. He had Superman's powers and was apparently immune to telepathy and had just established what seemed to be a functional ongoing connection to the X-Men, and in about four weeks, he was going to prevent the assassination of Howard Stark, which would have cascading effects on—
He stopped that thread. One thing at a time.
He thought about Mystique instead, which was a more manageable subject.
There was something in the afternoon's interactions that kept returning to him — not any single moment but the quality of her attention, the watchfulness that wasn't quite wariness and wasn't quite calculation, the way she'd sat in that chair like someone who had been in enough dangerous rooms to know exactly what to do in one and was deciding, on an ongoing basis, whether this counted. The question she hadn't asked when he'd told her she could be comfortable.
She'd been alive a long time. He knew enough about Mystique from the canon to know that long time was doing significant work in that sentence, and that the accumulation of that time had produced someone whose surface and interior were professionally disconnected, and that it took something specific to get past that.
He thought about whether he could get her to be herself around him. Not perform it, not demonstrate it for an audience — just be it.
I want to know who she actually is, he thought, examining the thought with the mild surprise of someone who hadn't known they'd decided something until they heard themselves think it.
Well. That was that, then.
He'd ask her tomorrow. The worst outcome was no, and no was survivable.
He fell asleep thinking about it.
---
Bleecker Street in the morning had the specific quality of Manhattan streets that had decided to look like something else. He'd overflown it twice now and walked it once, and each time the building at 177A had the same quality — present, substantial, architecturally distinctive in a way that your eye slid off if you weren't specifically looking for it. He was almost certain that the effect was deliberate and not structural, the product of something that wasn't architecture.
He stood on the opposite side of the street for about forty-five seconds and confirmed that yes, it was there, yes, it was exactly where it was supposed to be, and yes, the sensation of looking at it directly had the faint quality of something that was aware of being looked at.
He filed it and moved on.
Tomorrow, then.
Breakfast was a diner on Ninth Avenue where the eggs were exceptional, and the coffee was honest, and where nobody asked questions about the large young man eating alone at a corner table and reading a newspaper. He was reading about the Soviet dissolution, which was happening in real-time around him and which he knew the endpoint of, and which was still strange to watch unfold as current events rather than history.
He left a good tip and headed north.
---
The Xaviers' mansion intercom was answered on the second buzz, which suggested either that someone was near the gate or that the response protocol had been updated to reflect his status as a known quantity.
"It's Ethan," he said.
The gate opened.
The first person he encountered on the way to the main entrance was Scott Summers, who was coming around the corner of the house with the purposeful quality of a man who had things to do and had scheduled them. He had the visor on, the posture of someone who had been responsible for things for a long time, and the expression — or the part of his expression that was visible — of someone who had processed the previous day's debrief and arrived at a functional position.
"Hey," Ethan said. "Is Mystique around?"
Scott looked at him with the expression that might have been several things behind the visor. "Back garden," he said, and then continued around the corner.
The back garden in November was the bones of what it would be in spring — the flowerbeds dormant, the trees stripped, the lawn the particular grey-green of grass that had decided to wait things out. Mystique was near the far end of it, in the blonde form she'd worn yesterday, and she spotted him before he was halfway across the grass.
"You're back," she said. Not quite a question, not quite a statement — the phrasing of someone who was choosing not to indicate what they thought about it before knowing more.
"Couldn't wait," Ethan said.
Something in her expression moved. "You have a question," she said, recalling yesterday's conversation.
"I do." He stopped a reasonable distance away — close enough for conversation, far enough to not be crowding. "I'd like to take you on a date."
The silence that followed had a very specific quality.
Mystique looked at him with the complete stillness of someone whose professional instincts had been interrupted by something they hadn't expected and were running an assessment before responding. A dozen things moved through her expression in about two seconds, and Ethan let it happen without filling the silence.
She was, he registered with the calm of someone noting information, not finding the idea objectionable. There was something in the assessment that wasn't pure calculation — something that was its own kind of surprise at itself.
"A date," she said.
"A hike," he said. "Somewhere with good elevation. The day after tomorrow, if you're free, as I'm busy tomorrow, I know a couple of routes upstate that are supposed to be good in late fall."
Another beat. "You're asking me on a hike."
"Good weather expected Thursday," he said. "I checked."
Her expression did something that he was fairly certain was almost a smile, caught before it fully arrived. "I'm free Thursday," she said.
Something in his chest did a brief, undignified thing. "Good," he said.
"You mentioned you have something tomorrow," she said, with the particular attention of someone whose curiosity had been engaged despite them not necessarily wanting it to be.
"I do."
"What is it?"
He considered. "I found the magical stronghold of New York yesterday," he said. "Was planning to go check it out."
Mystique looked at him with the expression of someone calibrating whether this was a joke. "Magic," she said.
"Almost certainly real," he said. "I've been operating on that assumption for a while. There's a building on Bleecker Street that I'm about ninety-nine percent sure is a nexus point for some kind of organized mystical practice."
A pause. "You're serious."
"Completely."
She was quiet for a moment, the expression of someone running a calculation that had just changed shape. "Can I come?"
Ethan blinked. He hadn't expected that. The unguarded version of his response, which surfaced before the composed version could replace it, was obviously, yes, immediately, of course. He let about twenty percent of that through his expression and held the rest back. "I'd be delighted," he said.
Something in her expression acknowledged this without commenting on it.
"Tomorrow at ten," he said. "Bleecker Street. I'll meet you at the corner of Bleecker and Barrow."
"I'll be there," she said.
---
Logan was in the garage.
This appeared to be where Logan went to think, work with his hands, and be left alone in the specific way that was actually acceptable company if you didn't make a fuss about it. The motorcycle he was working on was a mid-eighties Harley in a state of disassembly that suggested either a repair project or the documentation of a grievance.
He looked up when Ethan came in. The look had the quality it had acquired after yesterday — not wariness, not the combat assessment from the front gate, but the recalibrated attention of someone who had updated their model.
"Quick question," Ethan said.
"Usually means it's not."
"Would you be willing to test something against my skin?"
Logan looked at him. "Your durability."
"I know knives don't do anything. I'm operating on the assumption that bullets are the same, but I haven't tested it, and I prefer data to assumptions." He paused. "I thought if anything could give me useful information, your claws would."
The logic was sound, and Logan appeared to agree with it, because he stood up from the workbench with the mild grunt of someone whose joints had opinions and held out one hand, claws extending with the sound that Ethan was apparently going to find arresting every time he heard it, regardless of how many times it happened.
"Where?" Logan said.
"Forearm."
Logan ran the claw across the outside of his forearm with the casual precision of someone who had excellent fine motor control of something that was permanently attached to them. The pressure of it was perceptible — a sensation, the definite fact of contact — and then nothing else. No give. The skin didn't part.
They both looked at it.
"Huh," Logan said.
"Again, harder," Ethan said.
Logan added pressure. More than a casual graze — the focused, deliberate force of someone who was actually trying. For a moment, nothing, and then — a resistance, a yielding, the skin finally parting under what had to be a significant concentrated effort, a shallow line that welled and then stopped welling almost immediately as Ethan watched it close.
He looked at it.
"Interesting," he said.
"Interesting," Logan repeated, with the tone of someone who found the word insufficient.
"So, significant concentrated force with an adamantium edge can get through," Ethan said, processing. "Which is good to know. And which means that in a practical context—"
"You'd have to be trying to let it happen," Logan said flatly. "If you're moving, if you're not standing still holding your arm out being cooperative—"
"It's academic," Ethan agreed. He looked at the closed line on his forearm, which had finished healing with an efficiency that wasn't instant but was very fast. "Good to have the data."
He thought about the trajectory he'd been tracking — the weekly increments, the daily solar absorption, the consistent upward movement in everything he could measure. At the current rate of change, in three or four weeks, he wasn't certain even this would work.
"Probably won't be a factor much longer anyway," he said.
Logan looked at him. "What does that mean?"
"The powers keep growing," Ethan said. "The durability's on the same curve as everything else. In a few weeks, I'd estimate the adamantium probably won't penetrate either."
A long pause.
"That's just not fair," Logan said.
Ethan grinned. He couldn't help it. "Appreciate the assist," he said. "See you Thursday, probably."
"Don't thank me, I just stabbed you."
"You did me a favor, there's a difference."
Logan made the sound that might have been a laugh and turned back to the motorcycle.
---
The school, Ethan noticed on his way out, was still quiet. The absence of students had a different quality today — yesterday it had been explained by the field trip, and today it was just the building waiting to be full, the classrooms visible through windows with the calm of spaces that were expected to be used soon.
He'd caught snippets through the walls on his way across the grounds — a conversation that involved names he was fairly certain about, the distinctive particular presence he associated with certain individuals from the canon.
Storm. He'd heard someone address someone else by a name that rhymed with an alias. Rogue. A voice with an accent that was distinctive, and the mention of something relating to touch, and then another voice saying something in response that carried the warmth of someone who was choosing their words carefully around a subject that had edges.
Tomorrow or the day after, probably. When the school was running.
He lifted off from the back lawn at a modest altitude and banked south toward Manhattan.
---
The flight back was twenty minutes at a moderate pace, the city growing ahead of him in the late afternoon light, the river a dark line on his left, and the skyline doing what the skyline did.
He let himself think about the next two days.
Tomorrow: Bleecker Street. Mystique. An almost certainly significant building that was definitely there and definitely not ordinary, and whose inhabitant or inhabitants were either going to be aware of his approach or were going to become very suddenly aware of it.
He'd brought Mystique into that without entirely meaning to, which on reflection he didn't mind. There was something clarifying about it — the version of tomorrow where he went alone and the version where she was there had different textures, and the second one seemed better in ways he could approximately describe and didn't particularly need to analyze further.
Thursday: A hike. Upstate. Actual date. Good elevation and late fall color, and the specific context of two people walking somewhere together with no agenda except that one.
He caught a thermal rising off a building in Midtown and used it, spiraling up briefly into cleaner air, the city lay out below him in the last of the afternoon light.
Not a date tomorrow, he reminded himself. Actual date Thursday.
He was smiling during the descent toward the hotel. He didn't try to stop it.