The mansion in the morning had its school-day energy — the corridors purposeful, the kitchen already occupied, the particular organized noise of a place that had a schedule and was following it.
Rogue's door was closed with the present quality of someone inside and awake. He knocked.
"Come in," she said through the door.
She was sitting at her desk with a book — not reading it exactly, more holding it, in the specific posture of someone who had been thinking rather than reading and was using the book as a surface for their thoughts. She looked up when he came in, her expression unchanged since the race day, a slight openness added, the managed quality a fraction lower.
"Another day?" he said. "If you're up for it."
"Where?" she said.
"New York," he said. "Walking around, food, maybe a movie if we find something worth watching."
She considered this for approximately three seconds. "Yeah," she said, with the Southern directness that didn't waste time on the performance of deciding when the decision was already made. "That sounds real good."
"Enjoyed yesterday," he said. "Genuinely."
She looked at him with the evaluating quality she used on things she wanted to make sure were true before accepting them. Then she nodded once. "Me too," she said. "Give me five minutes."
---
The flight down to the city had the ease of the second time — she took his hand without the threshold quality of the first occasion, just naturally, and they went up, and the December sky received them.
"Still incredible," she said, at altitude, looking south toward where the city was assembling itself on the horizon.
"Every time," he agreed.
"Does it get ordinary for you?" she asked. "The flying."
He thought about this honestly. "The mechanics do," he said. "The actual sensation of movement, the navigation, that becomes automatic. But looking down—" he paused "—no. That doesn't become ordinary."
"Good," she said, with the specificity of someone who would find it a small tragedy if it had.
They flew south with the city coming up to meet them, and the December air was doing its cold, clear thing, and she held his hand and looked at the landscape with the attention of someone storing it for later.
---
Central Park in December had the particular quality of a place that had stopped being used and had become itself — the summer crowds gone, the paths belonging to the people who actually needed them rather than the ones who came because it was the thing to do. The trees in their winter architecture, the bare branches doing something structural and honest against the grey sky.
They walked without a particular direction, which was the right way to walk in a park when the day had no agenda.
Rogue had opinions about things.
This was something he'd noticed at the race and was seeing more of now — the specific confidence of someone who had thought carefully about a wide range of subjects and had arrived at actual positions on them. She talked about the park's design with the knowledge of someone who had read about it, the Olmsted principles, and how they held up or didn't in practice. She had things to say about the Bethesda Fountain that were specific and interesting. When they passed a man playing jazz guitar near the path junction, she stopped for a full minute and listened with the complete attention she gave things she actually liked before moving on.
"Do you play anything?" he asked.
"Tried guitar once," she said. A pause, practical rather than self-pitying. "I sing sometimes. When I'm alone."
"Good?"
"Don't know," she said. "Nobody's heard it." She said it with the matter-of-fact quality of someone reporting a fact rather than a complaint. "What about you?"
"Nothing," he said. "Not yet."
"Not yet," she repeated, catching the specificity of it. "You're planning to learn something?"
"Eventually," he said. "I have time."
She glanced at him sideways with the expression of someone who had noted the way he said certain things and was filing it. He'd been conscious of this — she was observant in the particular way of someone who had learned to read situations carefully, and she caught things.
They got hot dogs from a vendor near the south exit who had the philosophical bearing of a man who had been selling hot dogs in this park for many years and had come to terms with it. The hot dogs were, in the specific way of New York hot dogs consumed outdoors in December, excellent.
"This is perfect food," Rogue said, with the authority of someone delivering a verdict.
"It's context-dependent," he said.
"No," she said. "Objectively."
He didn't argue this.
---
The shopping streets had the December energy of the holiday season getting into gear — the decorations that had been up since before Thanksgiving were already part of the visual landscape, the shops with their window displays, and the particular busy quality of people who had lists.
They weren't shopping exactly. More moving through it, the city as an environment to exist in rather than a destination to reach. She stopped in front of a record shop, and he followed her in, and she moved through the racks with the ease of someone who knew what she was looking for and where to find it.
She pulled out an album — country, a name he recognized from the general landscape of the genre — and looked at the cover with the expression of someone encountering something they'd been looking for.
"Good?" he said.
"Hadn't been able to find this one," she said. "The store near the mansion doesn't carry much country." She looked at it for another moment. "Bobby makes fun of me for my music taste."
"Bobby Drake's opinion on music is not something I'd weigh heavily," Ethan said.
She laughed. The real kind — the one with her whole face in it, the Mississippi in the sound of it. She bought the album and tucked it under her arm, and they went back out into the December streets.
---
The cinema was on the west side, the marquee visible from half a block away with the particular optimism of a place that still believed in the physical gathering of people to watch things together.
They stopped in front of the listings.
"Horror," Rogue said, immediately, with the confidence of someone who had already decided.
"Nothing horror this week," he said, scanning the listings.
She looked. He was right. She made a face that was specifically the face of someone who wanted a horror movie and was being denied one by circumstances outside her control.
He looked further down the listings and stopped.
Hook — the new Spielberg, just released. He looked at it and thought briefly about Peter Pan and about a boy in Queens who would one day have a very different relationship with the concept of flying, and felt the small surreal quality of existing in a world where these things were just movies and were also, in ways he understood differently than anyone else in the cinema, something more.
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
"That one," he said.
"Science fiction?" she said, looking at the listing with interest.
"Star Trek," he said. "Sixth one. Do you know it?"
"I know Star Trek," she said. "I've watched the show." She paused. "Have you seen the others? The previous films?"
"I've seen—" he paused, thinking about what he could accurately claim to have seen in a life that had technically happened elsewhere, "Star Wars," he said. "That's about where my film education in this genre ends."
She turned and looked at him with the full force of her attention, which was considerable. "You have seen exactly one science fiction film."
"One franchise," he said.
"One franchise," she said, with the specific disbelief of someone encountering a gap in a person's knowledge that they find both surprising and personally significant. "And it happened to be Star Wars."
"Is that wrong?"
"That's not wrong, that's just—" she stopped. "How. How have you only seen Star Wars?"
"My life has been unconventional," he said, which was accurate in every available sense.
She looked at him for a moment longer with the expression of someone reassessing a situation. "Okay," she said. "We're watching this one. And then—" she pointed at him with the specific directness of someone establishing a commitment "—we're watching every science fiction film worth watching. Starting from the beginning."
"All of them?"
"The good ones," she said. "Which is still a lot." She paused. "Star Trek from the beginning. Alien. Blade Runner. 2001." She was already counting on her fingers. "This is going to take a while."
"I have time," he said, and meant it in more ways than one.
---
The cinema was maybe a third full — a decent turnout for a Tuesday afternoon in December. They found seats with a good sightline and the appropriate distance from the front, and Rogue settled in with the focused anticipation of someone who actually watched films rather than sat in their general vicinity.
The film was excellent.
He'd known the broad outlines — the peace negotiations, the conspiracy, the specific quality of a story that was using science fiction to talk about the end of the Cold War with the directness that the genre made possible. Watching it in 1991, with the actual Cold War having just ended, with the events the film was speaking to still fresh in the world outside the cinema, it had a different texture than it would have had at any other time.
Rogue was completely still during the film.
Not the passive stillness of someone who had checked out, but the active stillness of someone who was fully in it — the kind of attention that good storytelling earned. She laughed at the right moments and went quiet at the right moments, and when the film hit the notes it was trying to hit, her response was present and unmanaged.
Afterward, standing outside the cinema in the December air with the specific feeling of having just seen something good:
"Klingons," she said, by way of opening, with the satisfaction of someone who had been waiting to talk about it.
"The best antagonists-becoming-allies arc in the franchise," he said, which was a position he was confident in.
"Kirk's line at the end," she said. "About letting go of the past."
"The whole film is that line," he said. "Dressed up in a conspiracy plot."
"The best science fiction is always about something else," she said. "That's the thing that—" she paused, searching for the word "—that's the thing that makes it matter. It's not about space. Space is just where the conversation is happening."
He looked at her.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing," he said. "Just — you said that exactly right."
She looked slightly self-conscious for a moment, which was not her usual register. "I think about this stuff," she said. "When I'm alone. What stories are actually about, underneath."
"You should say it more," he said. "Not just when you're alone."
She didn't respond to this directly, which was her way of receiving something without the vulnerability of acknowledging she'd received it.
"Dinner," she said. "I'm starving."
---
The Italian place was on the lower west side, the kind of restaurant that had found its register and hadn't revised it — the menu was considered a selection rather than an exhaustive one, the room warm and unhurried, the smell of garlic and something slow-cooked doing the work of welcome before anyone said a word.
He ordered with the specificity of someone who had opinions about pasta and was implementing them. She ordered with the decision-speed of someone who read menus quickly and trusted their instincts.
The conversation over dinner had the quality of the whole day condensed — the easy range of it, the back-and-forth of two people who had found each other's company straightforwardly good and were in no hurry to wrap it up.
He thought about it at some point in the middle of the pasta — the honest internal assessment of someone who had decided to know where he stood.
He liked her. Genuinely, specifically, in the way that was not about the mutation or the contact or any external factor. She was headstrong and direct and knew things and thought carefully about more things than she let on, and she was funny when she stopped managing the funny, and she watched films with her whole self.
If the previous six weeks had been different — if a certain back garden in Westchester hadn't been the first place he'd landed on arrival — he thought he probably would have been here sooner. The honesty of that was something he sat with rather than deflected.
The complication was that the previous six weeks had been what they had been, and he was not someone who did things halfway, and Raven was — Raven was something he could not reduce to a simple calculation.
He thought about what Raven had said. Go with the flow. See if you fit together.
He was beginning to understand, with the specificity of someone for whom abstract concepts became concrete gradually, what she had been thinking about.
---
The flight back was the best version of itself — the city below them transitioning to the suburbs to the valley, the December stars doing something impressive above the cloud layer they'd climbed through, Westchester coming up ahead with the particular clarity of high altitude in cold, dry air.
"Carry me this time," she said.
He'd offered it. He lifted her with the ease of something that required no effort, the aura extending around her as it always did, and she settled into it with the very different quality of being carried versus holding hands — the full enclosure of it, the specific way the aura felt from inside rather than at the edge.
"This is different," she said, looking up at the stars.
"Good different?" he asked.
"Very," she said.
They flew north, and the mansion came up, and he descended toward the grounds, and she held on until the grass was below them and there was no more flight to be in.
"Tomorrow?" she said.
"Tomorrow," he agreed.
Her expression did the thing it had been doing across two days — the slight openness of someone who was deciding, incrementally, that the available evidence supported trust.
She went inside.
---
Raven's room had the lamp at low, which meant she'd been awake and reading, which meant she'd been tracking the time.
She looked up when he came in with the expression of someone who had a question ready but was willing to let him start.
He told her. The park and the hot dogs, the record shop, the film, and the conversation about what science fiction was actually for. The dinner, the things Rogue had said when she stopped managing them.
"You can see it," Raven said. Not a question.
"Yes," he said. "I can see it." He paused. "The conflict is—"
"Easing," she said.
He looked at her. "Some," he said.
"It eases more," she said, with the quiet certainty of someone who had already been where he was going and was reporting conditions from ahead. "The more normal it feels, the less it feels like conflict." She paused. "It doesn't stop being complicated. It just stops being distressing."
"You speak from experience," he said.
"I've had many kinds of experience," she said. "This specific kind, no. But the general shape of it — holding two things that both matter — that I know."
He sat on the edge of the bed.
"How was your day?" he said.
She set the book down, and the shift in her bearing was the one that happened when she was going to talk about the work — the specific energy of someone who had been in sustained focus on something worthwhile and was ready to share the results.
"Bobby's freezing powers are copyable," she said. "I understood the mechanism — molecular deceleration, the cold as a consequence rather than the cause, which is exactly what you theorized. Once I understood it that way, the shift happened in about forty minutes." She paused. "Jean's telepathy is still resistant. I can feel where it should be, and I can't reach it. Hank thinks it might require a change in neural architecture that my mutation can do, but that I haven't figured out how to consciously direct yet."
"You'll get there," he said.
"Yes," she said, with the confidence of someone who had been getting there steadily and trusted the trajectory. She looked at him with the expression that preceded something she'd been thinking about. "I had another thought today."
"What kind of thought?"
"About size," she said.
He looked at her.
"I can change height when I transform into specific people," she said, with the analytical precision she brought to this kind of thing. "Shorter, taller — the copy includes the height. But I've never tried to control the scale independently. Outside of copying someone." She paused. "If the transformation is fundamental enough to change cellular structure and biological function, there's no theoretical reason why scaling couldn't be deliberate."
"Have you tried it?" he said.
"Not yet," she said. "I was waiting—" she paused "—I'm not sure why I was waiting, actually."
She closed her eyes for a moment, the concentrated inward focus he'd come to recognize as her doing something at the level her mutation operated at. Then she was smaller — not dramatically, just clearly reduced, the proportions exact, a version of herself at perhaps four feet. The blue form, the red hair, everything precise.
He looked at her.
She grew. Past her normal height, past his, continuing — the room suddenly feeling different, her head near the ceiling, the scale of her fundamentally altered while everything else remained exactly itself.
"This is doing things to me," he said, which came out more honest than strategic.
She looked down at him from her considerable new height with the expression of someone who had just discovered a capability and was immediately interested in all the implications, including the ones that were making his thought processes somewhat disorganized.
She said nothing.
She smiled.
You can imagine the rest.