He woke up nervous.
This was new. He'd woken up in this world thirty-nine times before today and had felt many things on those mornings — purposeful, focused, tired, quietly satisfied after a night's work, occasionally thoughtful in the specific way of someone processing something they hadn't finished processing. He'd woken up thinking about Howard Stark's deadline and thinking about the Benedetto family and thinking about power development and financial infrastructure and the long list of things that needed doing.
He had not, until this morning, woken up nervous.
He lay on the bed for a moment and examined the feeling with the honest attention he tried to give things that were actually happening. It was nerves in the specific register of someone who had something good and was aware that having something good meant there was something good to lose. Not fear exactly. Moreover, the particular alertness of someone who had come to care about how something went.
He pushed through it the way he pushed through things, which was by getting up and getting ready.
He took more care with his appearance than usual and noticed that he was taking more care and didn't stop taking more care. Clean clothes, the good jacket, his hair in the state he'd settled on as the best available configuration. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror for a moment with the expression of someone doing a final assessment.
Okay, he thought.
Go, said the rest of him.
He went.
---
The mansion from the air had the comfortable familiarity it had acquired over the past ten days — the roofline, the grounds, the geometry of a place he was learning the way you learned places that mattered. He came down over the east wing and found her immediately.
She was in the back garden. Of course, she was — she'd told him she was always there in the mornings. She was standing near the far hedge with the self-contained quality that was her default outdoor mode, and she was in the blonde form, and she looked up when he cleared the roofline because, of course, she heard him coming.
He landed a few feet away.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey," she said. The corner of her mouth rose slightly.
"Ready?"
"Yes," she said.
He picked her up and went north, and the mansion shrank below them, and the morning was clear and cold and entirely good.
---
She suggested the park first.
Central Park in late November had the specific beauty of a place that had stopped performing and was just being what it was — the trees stripped to their winter forms, the paths quieter than they'd be in any other season, the particular quality of a large open space in a dense city doing the work it was designed to do. They walked without any specific destination, the conversation finding its rhythm the way it always did, which was quickly and without effort.
He'd been nervous in the hotel room. He was not nervous now. This was the pattern he'd noticed across the past week and a half — the anticipation carried its own static, and then she was actually there, and the static resolved into the easy, comfortable frequency that their company had developed.
"You know what I want today?" she said.
"What?"
"Nothing remarkable," she said. "Just a day."
He looked at her.
"We've been to Nepal," she said. "We've hiked a mountain. You painted my portrait. We've sparred in the grounds of a mansion for people with extraordinary abilities." She paused. "I want to go to the park and have lunch somewhere and do nothing that requires explanation."
"I can do that," he said.
"I know you can," she said. "That's why I'm suggesting it."
---
They did exactly that.
The park in the morning, walking without purpose along the paths that wound through the Ramble and up to the reservoir, the city audible around the edges but not intrusive, the space doing its work. She told him things about previous decades spent in this city that were specific and particular — not the history of herself but the history of places, the way the neighborhood had changed since she'd first known it, the specific restaurant on the Upper West Side that had existed since the forties.
They went to a restaurant for lunch.
It was the kind of place that had decided its menu in approximately 1955 and hadn't revised it since, which was not a criticism — some decisions didn't need revision. The booths were red vinyl, and the lighting was warm, and the food was honest in the way of things that had been made the same way for forty years and had no reason to apologize for it.
He ordered the kind of food that his caloric requirements made sensible and watched her eat with the comfortable ease of someone who had decided, for today, to be a person having lunch.
He thought: She looks good like this.
He thought this approximately every twenty minutes in her company, regardless of the context, and had stopped being surprised by it.
They talked about everything and nothing in the specific way of people for whom conversation had stopped being a bridge between silences and started being its own thing — the easy range of it, moving between her observations about the city and his questions about the history of it and the back-and-forth of two people who were interested in each other's thinking.
After lunch, they walked again. A bookshop on Amsterdam Avenue that she'd mentioned in passing and that turned out to be the kind of bookshop that had made peace with its organizational system and invited you to find things by browsing rather than looking. They spent forty minutes in it. He found three things worth buying. She found two, and he bought them before she could, and received a look that was more amused than annoyed.
The afternoon moved with the particular quality of time passing well — the kind of day that felt longer than it was in the best possible sense, as if the contentment of it had made the hours more substantial.
They talked about watching a film. A cinema on the west side was showing something they both determined was adequate. They walked toward it and then, somewhere on the third block, by unspoken and simultaneous agreement, walked past it.
The hotel was ahead. The day had run its course, and both of them knew it, and neither of them said anything about it, just kept walking in the direction they were walking.
---
The hotel room had the quality it always had — the portrait on the wall, the large window with its view of the city, the familiar space that had become more familiar over the past weeks. He'd tidied it with slightly more care than usual this morning and was glad he had.
Raven stood near the window, looking at the city for a moment.
"Today was good," she said.
"Today was perfect," he said. "Ordinary and perfect."
She turned from the window and looked at him with the expression that was one of his favorites — the one that had decided something.
"I've been thinking," she said, "about what Ororo said." She paused. "That I just have to be myself." Another pause, and in her voice the specific quality of someone making an observation that had taken some arriving at. "I realized I have been. This whole time. With you, since the beginning." She looked at him directly. "It's remarkably easy to be myself with you."
"Same," he said. "The other direction."
"You've never been yourself with anyone else," she said, and there was something in her voice that wasn't teasing — more the warmth of someone who understood what that meant.
"No," he said. "You're the first."
She held his gaze for a moment.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"Yes."
"Your natural form," he said. "For tonight. I'd like—" he paused "—if you're comfortable."
She didn't say anything. She shifted — the easy breath of it, the blue form assembling itself in the hotel room light, the red hair, the yellow eyes that saw the world in a way only she could.
She looked at him with the expression that had been on her face on the mountain trail when she'd asked so? and he'd forgotten how to speak for a moment.
He hadn't forgotten how to speak this time. But he was quiet for a moment with the fullness of the quiet, looking at her in his hotel room, and she looked back.
Then she crossed the room.
---
Morning.
The light came through the window at the angle of early November, the specific quality of it that he'd been waking up to for weeks, and he lay still for a moment with the particular feeling of a morning that was different from the ones before it.
He felt, in the simplest available terms, extraordinary.
Not the physical feeling — though that too, the well-rested specific quality of his body at its current development, the solar energy that had been accumulating for weeks, humming at its steady baseline. Something beyond that. The feeling of having arrived somewhere that he hadn't known he was traveling toward and finding it was exactly where he'd wanted to be.
He looked at the ceiling.
He thought about the day yesterday — the park and the lunch and the bookshop and the walk and the conversation that had been going on for ten days now without ever running out of things in it. He thought about her saying it's remarkably easy to be myself with you. He thought about the portrait in a mansion in Westchester.
He turned his head.
She was there, which was still slightly surreal in the specific way of things that were real but hadn't been real yet yesterday morning. Her eyes were open. She was looking at the ceiling with the expression of someone who was thinking something and hadn't decided whether to say it.
He waited.
She turned her head.
"You," she said, with the tone of someone delivering a verdict after careful consideration, "have an absolutely unreasonable amount of stamina."
He felt something move through him that resolved into a laugh — genuine, unguarded, the kind that happened when something was actually funny rather than the polite version.
"Sorry," he said.
"You're not," she said.
"No," he agreed.
She looked at the ceiling again, and he looked at the ceiling again, and the morning light did what it did, and outside the city was starting its day, and neither of them moved, and the quiet was the fullest kind of quiet.
He thought: I couldn't have imagined this.
He thought: dozens of days ago, I woke up in a Boston alley and found a newspaper and had no idea what was going to happen.
He thought: Good.
Beside him, Raven was thinking that she had been alive for a very long time and had spent most of that time becoming very good at not needing things, and that this had seemed, until relatively recently, like an achievement.
She was revising this assessment.
She looked at the ceiling with the expression of someone arriving somewhere they hadn't expected and finding it was exactly right.
She felt, in the specific warmth of the morning, completely content.
Perfect, she thought.
Just that. Just the word and what it meant, and the ceiling and the light and the sound of the city and him beside her.
Perfect.