The flight back to Westchester had the quality of something that didn't need to be anything other than what it was — the two of them in the morning air, the city below giving way to the suburbs and then the lower Hudson Valley, her in the blonde form with the wind doing nothing to either of them thanks to the aura.
They didn't talk much. They didn't need to.
He landed at the front door this time rather than the back — the small distinction of arriving at the entrance rather than circling around, which felt like the right thing without requiring analysis. She stepped down, and he set her down, and they stood at the door of the mansion with the quality of a morning that had been extraordinary pretending, badly, to be ordinary.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
He kissed her goodbye with the ease of something that had already stopped being new and had become simply how this went, and she kissed him back with the specific quality of someone who had decided this was fine and was finding it more than fine, and then she stepped back toward the door.
"Later," she said.
"Later," he agreed.
He went up. He turned south. He let himself be eighteen years old about the whole thing for the duration of the flight home, which was the appropriate duration, and then he landed and went inside and got on with his day.
---
The mansion's front hall had its usual morning quality — the building doing what it did, the particular occupied hum of a place that contained people going about their various purposes.
Raven made it four steps inside before the ambush.
It was not subtle. Storm appeared from the sitting room with the specific quality of someone who had been waiting rather than happening to be there. Jean materialized from the direction of the kitchen. Rogue was on the stairs, which was the most strategically comprehensive position and suggested planning.
"Good morning," Storm said, with warmth that contained a question.
Raven looked at the three of them.
"It went well," she said.
"We can tell," Jean said.
"How well?" Rogue asked from the stairs.
Raven looked at them for a moment with the expression of someone deciding how much to offer, and landed on more than her usual default because the usual default no longer seemed to apply the way it used to.
"We had a perfect day," she said. "The park. Lunch. A bookshop. Just a day. An ordinary day that was completely extraordinary because of the company." She paused. "And then we went back to the hotel."
The three of them waited.
"He has," Raven said, with the precise delivery of someone selecting their words carefully, "an absolutely unreasonable amount of stamina."
Storm made a sound. Jean closed her eyes briefly with the expression of someone receiving information they'd theoretically expected and were finding more significant than anticipated.
Rogue, from the stairs, said: "If you ever need help with—" and then stopped. A beat of absolute silence. "That was a joke," she said.
Nobody in the room believed this.
Including Rogue, who seemed to understand immediately from the quality of the silence that the room had correctly classified the statement, because she stood up from the stairs with the brisk efficiency of someone who needed to be somewhere else urgently and was going there now.
"I'll be — I have to—" she gestured vaguely at the upper floor and went up the stairs at a pace that was not quite a run and was not quite a run.
The three remaining women watched her go.
Storm looked at Jean. Jean looked at Raven.
"That," Storm said carefully, "was not entirely a joke."
"No," Raven said. "It wasn't."
A pause in the sitting room was a time for thinking rather than being uncomfortable.
"She found someone she can touch," Jean said, with the gentle accuracy of someone who had been in proximity to Rogue's situation for years and understood its weight. "And that person is now—"
"With me," Raven said. "Yes." She looked at the stairs where Rogue had disappeared. "I know."
"Are you—" Storm started.
"I'm not upset," Raven said. "She's not doing anything wrong. She's not pursuing anything." She paused. "She found out she can be touched by someone who knew about her mutation and still didn't flinch. And then found out that person exists in the world and is — what he is — and is already taken." She looked at the window. "If I were in her position, I'd probably feel the same thing."
"That's very measured of you," Jean said.
"I've been alive for a long time," Raven said. "I understand what it means to feel the absence of something and then find the only version of it that exists is unavailable." She was quiet for a moment. "It's not her fault. It's not his fault. It simply is."
"What will you do?" Storm asked.
"Talk to her," Raven said. "When she's sorted herself out enough to have the conversation."
She left them in the sitting room and went looking.
---
She found Rogue in the woods behind the east grounds — a place that Rogue had been using since she arrived as the particular kind of private that required not just being alone in a room but being alone in a space large enough to breathe in. She was sitting on a fallen log with her gloved hands in her lap, looking at the ground, and she looked up when Raven's footsteps reached her with the expression of someone who had known this was coming and had spent the last twenty minutes preparing for it with limited success.
"I know," Rogue said, preemptively.
"What do you know?" Raven asked and sat down on the log beside her.
"That it was inappropriate to say that." She was looking at the ground again. "That you're together. That I have no right to—"
"Anna," Raven said.
Rogue stopped.
"I'm not upset with you," Raven said. "I'm not here to give you a lecture." She paused. "You found out you can touch someone. And that someone is — Ethan." She said his name with the straightforward clarity of someone naming an actual thing. "Given everything, it would be strange if you felt nothing about that."
Rogue was quiet.
"I wanted you to know," Raven said, "that I don't mind the feeling itself. The feeling is understandable. What matters is what you do with it." She paused. "And you're not doing anything with it. You said something without thinking, and then you told the truth, which is that it was complicated, and then you left to sort yourself out. That's fine. That's honest."
"It doesn't feel fine," Rogue said quietly.
"No," Raven agreed. "I know."
A pause in the woods. A bird somewhere, the bare branches doing something in a light wind, the specific quality of a conversation between two people who had a long shared history and knew how to sit in silence together.
"I'll talk to him," Raven said. "About you. Not about the feeling — that's yours, and I won't give it to him without your permission. But about the contact. About whether there's more that can be done for you." She paused. "He's already been talking to Hank. He's taking it seriously."
Rogue looked at her. "You don't have to—"
"I want to," Raven said. "Whatever you're feeling about him in one direction, he's still — he cares about people. He showed you that in that room and then went and spent twenty minutes with Hank on the same day. That's who he is." She paused. "I'm going to keep talking to him about your situation because it's the right thing to do and because you matter to me."
Rogue looked at the ground for a moment.
"Thank you," she said.
"Don't thank me," Raven said. "Just come back inside. It's cold."
Rogue made the sound that was her version of a laugh when she wasn't fully ready to laugh yet. She stood up. They walked back through the woods together with the easy quiet of people who had said the important things and were done with them.
---
Ethan was somewhere over New Jersey when his phone buzzed.
He held the Motorola with the aerial dexterity he'd developed for in-flight phone management and looked at the screen.
Coulson.
First target. Domestic terrorist. Located in a woodland area approximately 40 miles west-northwest of Manhattan. Underground position. Standard surveillance has been unable to locate. Your particular capabilities are the relevant asset here. Confirmed planning: multiple bombing targets, New York metro area, timeline within two weeks. Compensation: $75,000. Your call.
He read it once and put the phone away and thought about it for the duration of the flight back to the hotel, which was not a long time and didn't require much of it.
Yes, he texted back from the hotel room.
Tonight.
---
He ate, rested for a few hours, and went out at eleven.
The first two — because the cartel dismantlement was ongoing, and the work didn't pause because he had other things in the evening. Two distribution figures from the cocaine supply chain he'd been working through since Red Hook, both confirmed, both concluded with the clean efficiency that the work had become. The cash went in the backpack. The intelligence went into his memory.
Then he went west.
Forty miles at full speed took him just over thirteen minutes, the darkness of the New Jersey and then New York woodland opening below him, the suburbs thinning into genuine forest. He dropped to a lower altitude and engaged the X-ray at full range.
The ground was stone and soil and root systems and, twenty-seven minutes into the search, something else.
A constructed space. Underground, reinforced, the specific geometry of something built deliberately rather than naturally. He refined the scan, moving slowly over the area, building the picture. One figure. The materials around him were visible in their various configurations — he could see the storage, could see the components, could see the documentation of targets and timelines with the clarity of his vision, reading paper through eight feet of soil and reinforced walls.
The targets were real. The timeline was accurate. The man below had been planning this for months.
He came down.
The entrance was a hatch covered with layered natural camouflage — well-made, genuinely invisible to any search that relied on line-of-sight. He lifted it with the ease of something that was simply a small obstacle and went down.
The man had enough time to register that something had gone wrong before it was over.
The interrogation was thorough. He confirmed everything the scan had suggested and added operational detail — the network that had supported him, the funding sources, the contacts who had known about the plan and had chosen to let it proceed. He memorized all of it with the complete recall that had long since become his most operationally valuable capability.
He thought about the targets. The places in the city that had been on the man's list. The people who moved through those places every day, who had no idea they'd been on a list.
He finished the job.
He came back up through the hatch and stood in the forest for a moment in the cold night air.
He took out the Motorola.
Done.
He put the phone away and went up, the forest below him shrinking to its natural smallness, the lights of the metro area visible to the east, the city going about its business unaware of the particular thing it had been unaware of tonight.
He flew back toward Manhattan with the specific feeling that came after these operations — not satisfaction, more the quiet of something resolved, a thing that had been pointed at the world and had been redirected.
He thought about Raven.
He thought about waking up this morning and the ceiling and the light and the completely simple, perfect quality of it.
He thought: today was a good day.
The city came up to meet him.
Tomorrow, said the relevant part of his thinking, warm and certain.
I know, said the rest of him. I know.